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Before he was alleged to have become a spy for Saddam Hussein's regime, Muthanna Al-Hanooti's charity work and political activism provided him with access to the highest echelons of government. Newsletters collected by the Investigative Project on Terrorism, some published now for the first time, show Al-Hanooti photographed with dignitaries ranging from First Lady Hillary Clinton in 1996 and Vice President Al Gore along with significant members of Congress. That may explain why Iraqi intelligence agents had confidence that Al-Hanooti would be able to persuade Congress to lift economic sanctions against Iraq. A federal indictment unsealed Wednesday accuses him of...

Venezuela’s Tarek El-Aissami The Americas Report | Oct 03, 2008  By Nicole Ferrand [...] Mr. El - Aissami is a Venezuelan national of Syrian descent who, before becoming Minster of Interior and Justice, occupied the position of Deputy Interior Minister for Public Security. His father, Carlos Aissami, is the head of the Venezuelan branch of the Iraqi Baath political party. Before the invasion of Iraq, he held a press conference in which he described himself as a Taliban and called Osama Bin Laden, "the great Mujahedeen, Sheik Osama bin Laden." Tarek's great-uncle Shibli el-Aissami was a prominent ideologist and...

New media accounts — including coverage by NRO’s Patrick Brennan — confirm what I repeatedly have written since the depths of Operation Iraqi Freedom: The late dictator Saddam Hussein did have weapons of mass death, and the United States of America was correct to invade Iraq, find these toxins, and destroy them. Also vital: padlocking this Baathist general store for militant-Islamic terrorism. As I explained on July 17, 2006: While the liberal press gently sleeps, evidence continues to mount that Hussein had WMDs, though perhaps not in quantities that would bulge warehouses. “Since 2003 Coalition forces have recovered approximately...

WASHINGTON, D.C. - The Kremlin-backed Russia Today news network has rolled out a provocative ad campaign that takes a sharp poke at U.S. media and the U.S. decision to invade Iraq in 2003. The pitch is aimed at convincing Americans of the merits of Russia Today - or RT - as an alternate news source to U.S. networks. Featuring a stylized image of former U.S Secretary of State Colin Powell at the United Nations, one ad reads: "This is what happens when there is no second opinion. Iraq War: No WMDs. 141, 802 civilian deaths." The campaign includes two other...

[MercoPress.com] VENEZUELA : Mysterious outbreak of hemorrhagic fever syndrome in Venezuela kills ten "An outbreak of a mysterious hemorrhagic fever syndrome in the Venezuelan state of Aragua and the country’s capital Caracas has left ten people dead in the last three weeks." Similar to Ebola, this syndrome causes patients to experience high fever, skin rashes and bleeding. It has been described as an aggressive disease that leads to a fatal deterioration of health within 72 hours. Doctors have urged government authorities to declare a state of emergency in Aragua state; however they have received resistance from a surprising source. The...

What if the American invasion of Iraq had nothing to do with weapons of mass destruction? What if whatever weapons of mass destruction Saddam Hussein once had were sold to him in the 1980s by American arms dealers with the express permission of the U.S. government? What if he no longer had them when the U.S. invaded? What if the principal reason for invading Iraq was to depose Hussein because he tried to kill President George H.W. Bush, whose son ordered the invasion? What if another reason for the invasion of Iraq was to enable western-allied governments to control or...

Obama is currently meeting privately with his cabinet to discuss the news from Iraq that ISIS has discovered scores of Weapons of Mass Destruction that Saddam Hussein had hidden before the start of the US Invasion in 2003 : reports Political Ears. Buried in various spider holes and underground bunkers, the WMD stores were found in areas east, west, south and north around Tikrit and Baghdad. The existence of the WMD stores, unknown since 2003, have now become known. Now, known unknowns include ISIS’ specific plans for the WMDs.....

Last update - 16:23 03/09/2005 U.S. judge allows terror lawsuits against Arab Bank to proceed By The Associated Press NEW YORK - A U.S. judge upheld three lawsuits Friday accusing the Jordan-based Arab Bank of promoting Palestinian suicide attacks by funneling Saudi money to bombers' families. U.S. District Judge Nina Gershon denied six of eight counts in Arab Bank's March motion to dismiss the litigation, allowing bombing survivors and victims' families to move forward with their lawsuits seeking hundreds of millions of dollars in damages. The lawsuits claim that Arab Bank aided terrorism by acting as the administrator of an...

Ten years in the making, a landmark terrorism-related case is set to go to trial this week in New York. It has unearthed shocking documentation of the formalized network in which Mideast charities solicited funds to reward the families of Hamas suicide bombers. Interest in the lawsuit is heightened given the current violent outbreak between Israel and the Palestinians. The plaintiffs are 300 U.S. nationals who were victims in 24 terrorist attacks between 2000 and 2005 while in Israel. Many were vacationing. They were caught in the crossfire during the “second intifada,” or Palestinian uprising.

NEW YORK (AP) — American victims of suicide bombings in the Middle East have gone to federal court to demand that a Jordan-based bank be held liable for the bloodshed. A trial in the lawsuit against Arab Bank is set to begin with opening arguments on Thursday in Brooklyn. Lawyers for the victims hope to convince a jury that the bank helped Hamas finance a "death and dismemberment benefit plan" for martyrs. The case will unfold after a lengthy legal battle over what evidence jurors will see and amid a backdrop of renewed hostilities between Israelis and Palestinians. The plaintiffs...

CAIRO, Egypt - A key insurgency leader in Iraq said the U.S. killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was a "great loss," but one that will strengthen the militants' determination, according to an audio tape broadcast Friday. The Al-Jazeera network said the voice on the tape was that of Abu Abdullah Rashid al-Baghdadi, the head of the Mujahedeen Shura Council, which groups five Iraqi insurgent organizations including al-Qaida in Iraq. But the authenticity of the tape couldn't immediately be verified. "This is a message to the enemies of God, the crusaders, the rejectionists and the renegades," the voice says, referring respectively...

The FBI “most wanted” mugshot shows a tough, swarthy figure, his hair in a jailbird crew-cut. The $10 million price on his head, meanwhile, suggests that whoever released him from US custody four years ago may now be regretting it. Taken during his years as a detainee at the US-run Camp Bucca in southern Iraq, this is the only known photograph of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the new leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq and Syria. But while he may lack the photogenic qualities of his hero, Osama bin Laden, he is fast becoming the new poster-boy for the global jihadist movement....

1) In 2011, President Barack Obama pronounced Iraq "self-reliant and democratic," and "a country in which people from different religious sects and ethnicities can resolve their differences peacefully through the democratic process." In 2010, Vice President Joe Biden called Iraq "one of the great achievements of this administration." Obama ignored pleas by top generals who advised against pulling out without leaving a residual force. 2) Nearly everybody assumed Saddam Hussein possessed stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. Of the newspaper editorials that opposed the war, not one challenged the assumption that Iraq possessed stockpiles of WMD. President George W. Bush...

Judge Rauf Rashid and Saddam Hussein Several Arab News websites are reporting the news. Al-Mesyroon reported (translated) There were reports of the execution of Iraqi judge, Raouf Abdel-Rahman, who sentenced Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to death, according to confirmed the pages on the social networking site, without official confirmation from the Iraqi government. The pages on social networking sites, including Page MP Jordanian Khalil Attieh on the site “Facebook” to “revolutionaries Iraqis arrested him and sentenced him to death in retaliation for the death of the martyr Saddam Hussein,” he said, adding that Rauf tried to escape from Baghdad after...

I know it’s a terrible thing to say, but sometimes I miss Saddam Hussein.

With all eyes firmly focused on what really matters (the oil refineries), The Telegraph reports that ISIS has over-run a Saddam Hussein-era chemical weapons (CW) complex. The al-Muhanna 'mega-facility', about 60 miles south of Baghdad, gives the jihadists access to disused stores of hundreds of tonnes of potentially deadly poisons including mustard gas and sarin. The US state department is 'concerned' but "do not believe that the complex contains CW materials of military value." However, as a former commander of Britain's chemical weapons regiment warned, "we have seen that ISIS has used chemicals in explosions in Iraq before and has...

Tragically, all we’ve fought for in Iraq, all that 4,500 American lives were shed to gain, is on the cusp, potentially, of vanishing. - Mitt Romney, “Ideas Summit,” 6/13/2014 All we fought for in Iraq. All we fought for in Iraq is on the cusp of vanishing. That’s what Mitt Romney says. We fought for. We fought for. We. Oh, so it’s we now, is it, Mitt? We. I must have missed you over there, but it was a busy place. We. The guy who helped set up “pro-draft” rallies and yet somehow managed to avoid service in Vietnam is...

An extremist Al Qaeda offshoot is far from the only anti-government group sewing chaos in Iraq.The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) wrested control of Mosul, Iraq's second largest city, from the Iraqi government last week. ISIS, which was actually kicked out of Al Qaeda's global network in February, was quick to claim that their success against an overwhelmingly larger force was proof of God's favor. In actuality, ISIS managed to achieve their blitz across Iraq by forming an unlikely coalition with upwards of 41 different armed Sunni groups throughout the country. Though ideologically diverse, the groups had all grown...

A public records request by Gun Rights Examiner to review 10,000 signatures opposing adoption of a “Stand Your Ground” bill (H.B. No. 203) -- reportedly submitted by the Ohio Black Legislative Council to Gov. John Kasich -- was answered when a compact disc containing the information arrived in Thursday’s mail. Two who definitely aren’t Buckeyes are “Saddam Hussein” and “Osama Bin Ladin,” which brings to mind the fiasco of Michael Bloomberg's “No More Names” tour reading off the names of the Boston bomber and other criminals “killed by guns.” It’s safe to assume here that someone was having some fun...

Was the Bush administration right all along? Could these indeed be the very same WMDs that intelligence agencies from around the world claimed were in Hussein’s possession which he then transferred over to Syria? The earliest account of Hussein having hidden his WMDs in Syria came in January of 2004. Nizar Nayouf, an award-winning Syrian journalist who was granted political asylum in France, said in a letter to Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf not only that he knew Iraq’s WMDs were being hidden inside Syria, but that he could pinpoint precisely where they were being kept. According to Nayouf’s witness, described...