Free Republic

The White House is considering a strike against militants responsible for the death of U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three others — if and when it can track down the perpetrators, The Associated Press reported. The AP, citing current and former administration officials, reports that the Obama administration is weighing whether the short-term payoff of retribution against al Qaeda for the Sept. 11 attack in Libya is worth the trade-off of potentially elevating the group's stature. There is also concern about alienating governments that could help fight terror in the region, according to the AP. The United States has put...

I don’t get it. Why would the Foreign Policy President, who supported the revolutions in Libya and Egypt, not want to talk about that? I thought he likes talking about foreign policy. Weeks before the presidential election, President Barack Obama’s administration faces mounting opposition from within the ranks of U.S. intelligence agencies over what career officers say is a “cover up” of intelligence information about terrorism in North Africa.Intelligence held back from senior officials and the public includes numerous classified reports revealing clear Iranian support for jihadists throughout the tumultuous North Africa and Middle East region, as well as notably...

Last Updated: Fri Oct 05, 2012 07:26 am (KSA) 04:26 am (GMT) Film ‘Stolen’ exposes modern-day slavery in Polisario camps Friday, 05 October 2012 The film, Stolen, the story of a Sahrawi girl called Fatim Sellami, herself a slave, who was reunited with her mother after 35 years of separation with the help of the United Nations. (Image grab from film Stolen By KHADIJA FATHI AGADIR / MOROCCO A controversial documentary film that exposes slavery in the Western Sahara camps controlled by the Polisario front has been screened in Morocco’s coastal resort city of Agadir. The film, directed by Violeta...

Small teams of special operations forces arrived at American embassies throughout North Africa in the months before militants launched the fiery attack that killed the U.S. ambassador in Libya. The soldiers' mission: Set up a network that could quickly strike a terrorist target or rescue a hostage. But the teams had yet to do much counterterrorism work in Libya, though the White House signed off a year ago on the plan to build the new military task force in the region and the advance teams had been there for six months, according to three U.S. counterterror officials and a former...

Dennis Ross, President Barack Obama’s key Middle East advisor, said Thursday he would resign from his post, AFP reported. Ross, a veteran U.S. peace negotiator, said in a statement that he had made a promise to his wife to return to private life after two years in the administration and had outstayed that promise by a year. He added that he was returning to private life with “mixed feelings.” “It has been an honor to work in the Obama Administration and to serve this president, particularly during a period of unprecedented change in the broader Middle East,” Ross said. “Obviously,...

Al-Qaida assassins after GadhafiIntelligence suggests Libyan dictator's sudden cooperation due to holy war Posted: December 24, 20035:00 p.m. Eastern © 2003 WorldNetDaily.com Canadian intelligence suggests al-Qaida-backed militants in Libya want to assassinate Col. Moammar Gadhafi, possibly shedding light on the dictator's sudden efforts to cozy up to the West. Libyan President Col. Moammar Gadhafi (Courtesy: Sky News) Citing a Canadian Security Intelligence Service, or CSIS, report, The National Post reports the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, or LIFG, is waging holy war against Gadhafi in an effort to establish an Islamic state in Libya. "In order to achieve their goals, the LIFG has...

BENGHAZI, Libya, Sept 22 (Reuters) - An Islamist militia was driven out of the city of Benghazi early on Saturday in a surge of anger against the armed groups that control large parts of Libya more than a year after the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi. A spokesman for Ansar al-Sharia, which some U.S. and Libya officials blame for the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi last week in which the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans were killed, said it had evacuated its bases "to preserve security in the city". In a dramatic sign of Libya's fragility, after sweeping...

The military commander of Tripoli, a key figure in the revolution that overthrew Muammar Gaddafi, called on other militias to pull their weapons out of Tripoli, accusing them of terrorizing the city's population. The remarks by Abdulhakim Belhadj, whose Tripoli Military Council claims a mandate from Libya's new rulers, follow rising concern about potential conflict among armed groups that converged on Tripoli to overthrow Muammar Gaddafi and have stayed on to demand stakes in a future government. They also follow the announcement a day earlier of another group that it would collect weapons and provide security in the name of...

Reuters) - U.S. authorities are investigating possible collusion between militants who launched a deadly attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya and locally hired Libyan personnel guarding the facility, three U.S. officials said. So far there is no proof that the attackers, who killed U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other U.S. officials, were helped by Libyan security personnel hired by the consulate. One official said the Obama administration was playing down this possibility.However, all the officials said that the question of whether the attackers had inside help or advice was a serious issue in the U.S. investigation into...

TEL AVIV – A staunch denier of the Holocaust who long served as the deputy of late PLO leader Yasser Arafat served on the committee that invented the military doctrine used by President Obama as the main justification for U.S. and international airstrikes against Libya. As WND first reported, billionaire philanthropist George Soros is a primary funder and key proponent of the Global Centre for Responsibility to Protect, the world's leading organization pushing the military doctrine. Several of the doctrine's main founders sit on multiple boards with Soros. The doctrine and its founders, as WND reported, have been deeply tied...

The Obama administration was caught by surprise by the ferocity of the Sept. 11 attack against the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, that killed the ambassador and three other Americans. Now it is bracing for another potential eruption of violent demonstrations in parts of the Muslim world after Friday's weekly prayers — traditionally a time of protest in the Middle East and North Africa... "The United States government had absolutely nothing to do with this video," [Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton] said before a meeting with the foreign minister of Morocco at the State Department. "We absolutely reject its...

TUNIS, Tunisia (AP) — Islamist and leftist students fought running battles at a Tunisian university Wednesday in the latest incident involving rising religious sentiment in the North African country. Competing demonstrations in the morning by hundreds of conservative students, known as Salafis, and leftist members of the national students' union erupted into violence when the former tore down the national flag flying at the university entrance.

After months of reassuring secularist critics, Islamist politicians in Tunisia and Egypt have begun to lay down markers about how Muslim their states should be -- and first signs show they want more religion than previously admitted. Islamist parties swept the first free elections in both countries in recent months after campaigns that stressed their readiness to work with the secularists they struggled with in the Arab Spring revolts against decades-long dictatorships. With political deadlines looming, the Tunisian coalition led by the reformist Islamist Ennahda party and the head of Egypt's influential Muslim Brotherhood both made statements this week revealing...

Tunisia’s western city of Sidi Bouzid is now dry... Chanting “al-Charab haram” (“alcohol is sin”), dozens of Salafists burst into Sidi Bouzid’s Horchani hotel on Monday, September 3. The throng of men quickly homed in on the hotel’s liquor stock, seizing bottles of alcohol and throwing them against the walls or smashing them on the floor. The incident comes around four months after the city’s Salafist community first launched a war against alcohol consumption, pressuring or intimidating several bars into shutting down. Those who tried to resist saw their businesses come under attack, much like the Horchani hotel. ... I...

Once Lush Sahara Dried Up Over Millennia, Study SaysJames Owen for National Geographic NewsMay 8, 2008 The grassy prehistoric Sahara turned into Earth's largest hot desert more slowly than previously thought, a new report says—and some say global warming may turn the desert green once again. The new research is based on deposits from a unique desert lake in remote northern Chad. Lake Yoa, sustained by prehistoric groundwater, has survived for millennia despite constant drought and searing heat. The body of water contains an unbroken climate record going back at least 6,000 years, said study lead author Stefan Kröpelin of...

Islamic SocialismFrom the CIA factbook: Following a 1969 military coup, Col. Muammar Abu Minyar al-QADHAFI began to espouse his own political system, the Third Universal Theory. The system was a combination of socialism and Islam derived in part from tribal practices and was supposed to be implemented by the Libyan people themselves in a unique form of "direct democracy.[1] The "Green Book" - Arabism, Islam & socialism, with Islam the main line Author John L. Esposito: Under Qaddafi three interrelated ideas were woven into Libya's ideological identity: Pan-Arabism, socialism, and Islam. Qaddafi's appeals to Islam were influenced by his...

CAIRO - In his first public speech addressing tens of thousands of mostly Islamist supporters, Egypt's president-elect Mohammed Morsi has vowed to free the blind sheik jailed in the U.S. for a plot to blow up New York City landmarks. Morsi, Egypt's first Islamist and civilian president-elect, promised Friday to work to free Omar Abdel-Rahman, the spiritual leader of men convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. He also promised to free detained Egyptian protesters facing military tribunals.

WWII fighter plane hailed the 'aviation equivalent of Tutankhamun's Tomb' found preserved in the Sahara A Second World War aeroplane that crash landed in the Sahara Desert before the British pilot walked to his death has been found almost perfectly preserved 70 years later. Most of its cockpit instruments are intact and it still had it guns and ammunition before they were seized by the Egyptian military. There are also signs of the makeshift camp the pilot made alongside the fuselage. No human remains have been found but it is thought the pilot may lie within a 20 mile radius...

Here is a straight forward map of the results that the Obama foreign policy has had in North Africa and the Middle East. BARACK OBAMA'S FOREIGN POLICY ON DISPLAY The so-called "Arab Spring" has been nothing more than the abject spread of fundamental, extreme Islamic Jihad in these regions, threatening US interests and allies. When there was a chance for true liberty and an end to militant islam during the protests and rebellion in Iran, Obama sat back and let them be slaughtered. When there was an opportunity to have islamic jihad and militancy spread further in Egypt, Libya, Tunesia,...

Beginning in June of 1940, the North African Campaign took place over the course of three years, as Axis and Allied forces pushed each other back and forth across the desert in a series of attacks and counterattacks. Libya had been an Italian colony for several decades and British forces had been in neighboring Egypt since 1882. When Italy declared war on the Allied Nations in 1940, the two armies began skirmishing almost immediately. An Italian invasion of Egypt in September of 1940 was followed by a December counterattack where British and Indian forces captured some 130,000 Italians. Hitler's response...