Free Republic

Paul Pillar Speaks, Again The latest CIA attack on the Bush administration is nothing new. by Stephen F. Hayes 02/10/2006 4:15:00 PM IN A BREATHLESS front-page, above-the-fold article in today's Washington Post, Walter Pincus reports that a former senior CIA official named Paul Pillar accuses the Bush administration of "misusing" intelligence to take the country to war in Iraq. According to the Post account, Pillar uses a forthcoming article in Foreign Affairs to claim that the Bush administration "politicized" the intelligence on Iraq. Bush administration policymakers did this subtly, Pillar says, by repeatedly asking the CIA questions about Iraq, its...

WASHINGTON - A giant laser being built to simulate the explosion of a hydrogen bomb is facing funding cuts in the Senate that supporters say could kill the project after $2.8 billion has been spent on it.

Sudan's peace talks have taken a major step forward with an agreement between the government and the main rebel group to share oil resources. The deal, reached in Kenya, paves the way for a comprehensive peace accord. At the moment, the government controls all the country's oil revenues, but the SPLA rebels have demanded a share. A final peace settlement is expected to be reached soon to end 20 years of civil war in Sudan that have left about two million people dead. Fighting over percentages Vice President Ali Osman Taha and Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) leader John Garang...

KHARTOUM: The United States has agreed to lift its sanctions on Sudan and remove the country from its list of nations sponsoring terrorism, independent Al Rai Al Aam daily reported Saturday. Reporting from New York, the newspaper quoted Foreign Minister Mustafa Ismail as saying “lifting the sanctions and taking the Sudan’s name from the list of terrorism have been agreed upon and what remains now is the timing of making those steps.” The agreement was reached after meetings Ismail held with several US officials, including Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Walter Kansteiner, the newspaper reported. On Friday, the...

Jihadists from around the world are being welcomed -- with open arms -- in Sudan. Khartoum has once again become Grand Central Station for radical Islamist terror. This past January an international conference of over 66 Islamist groups was held in Sudan. The conference was announced in December by one of Osama Bin Laden¹s biggest supporters, the head of the dominant jihadist faction in the Pakistan Parliament. Terrorism in Sudan is nothing new. Long before Osama bin Laden was made a guest of honor, Carlos the Jackal took up residence in his villa in Sudan. Following September 11th there was...

LIVERMORE, Calif. -- The National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory recently produced 10,400 Joules or 10.4 kiloJoules (kJ) of ultraviolet laser light in a single laser beamline, setting a world record for laser performance.In recent weeks NIF laser scientists also have used the first four NIF beamlines to set records for infrared and green single beam laser energies with 21 kJ and 11 kJ of energy delivered, respectively. NIF researchers focused this light into a special diagnostic system designed to provide precise measurements of laser beam quality and performance at these different frequencies. The NIF laser system...

Military forces led by Sudan's militant Islamist regime burned to death a Christian pastor and his family in a massacre of 59 unarmed villagers, a relief group working in the area reported. The simultaneous attack on 10 villages in Eastern Upper Nile took place as Secretary of State Colin Powell met with Sudanese Foreign Minister Mustafa Osman Ismail to discuss Sudan's removal from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism.

Saddam Hussein's regime was linked to an African Islamist terrorist group, according to intelligence papers seen by The Telegraph. The documents provide the first hard evidence of ties between Iraq and religious terrorism. Secret dossiers detailing the group's discussions with the Iraqi Intelligence Service were found in the spies' Baghdad headquarters, among the detritus of shredding. The papers show how Iraq's charge d'affaires in Nairobi, Fallah Hassan Al Rubdie, was in discussion with the Allied Democratic Forces, a Ugandan guerrilla group with ties to other anti-western Islamist organisations. While the United States has long argued that Saddam's regime was aiding...