Free Republic

KABUL – Small pockets of Taliban foot soldiers ready to switch sides are waiting for the Afghan government to roll out a nationwide program to lure them off the battlefield and make peace with their leaders. The plan won't be completed until after this month's peace assembly in Kabul, but according to a 36-page draft, it would attract low- to midlevel fighters with promises of jobs, literacy and vocational training plus development aid for their villages. Reaching out to top Taliban leaders would be done through political channels, perhaps by striking them off the U.N. sanctions list or granting a...

Qari Hussain Mehsud from Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan accepts the responsibility of recent Attack on USA with Great Pride and Utmost Bravery http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxgTdkoM0Bw

Image by Cool Text: Logo and Button Generator

Two Taliban ‘commanders’ among 20 killed SNIPPET: "MINGORA/KOHAT: Two Taliban ‘commanders’ were among 20 militants killed in clashes and air strikes in Swat and Orakzai Agency on Thursday. In Swat, 13 insurgents were killed in clashes with security forces on Thursday. According to Swat media centre, security personnel came under fire when they raided a Taliban hideout in Sigram area of Koza Bandai. During an exchange of fire, 10 militants and one soldier were killed. Detained militant commander Mohammad Naseem alias Abu Faraj was with the troops and he was also killed in the clash. Abu Faraj, a close aide...

SNIPPET: "Search at Grundy County plant called part of ongoing probe" SNIPPET: "But a source said the owner of the plant, which processes lamb and goat, was taken into custody at his home in Chicago. Documents and records were taken from the plant and from a Chicago travel agency on West Devon Avenue, also owned by the same person, the source said."

SNIPPET: "According to a report prepared by Pakistani police (the Crime Investigation Department), the AHF has funded approximately USD 15 million to Jihadi groups in Pakistan for carrying out terror attacks. These funds mostly went to the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) which is responsible for numerous suicide strikes in the last couple of years and also blamed for the assassination of Benezir Bhutto." SNIPPET: "Till 2004, the United States had designated at least thirteen AHF branch offices operating in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Pakistan, in many African countries and in the United States. But in 2008, the US Treasury Department has designated...

KHAR, Aug 19: Maulvi Faqir Muhammad, a senior leader of the outlawed Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, claimed on Wednesday to have taken over the leadership of the militant organisation on a ‘temporary basis’.He told the BBC Urdu Service he was now acting chief of the TTP, replacing Baitullah Mehsud for ‘short time’ because he was ‘sick’.Maulvi Faqir told the BBC that Muslim Khan had been appointed TTP’s spokesman in place of Maulvi Omar. Muslim Khan is the spokesman of the Taliban in Swat.Maulvi Faqir said that Baitullah was ‘alive but sick’. He has gone underground.

ISLAMABAD (AFP) – Pakistan on Tuesday condemned the Taliban's killing of a Polish engineer as "absolutely barbaric", after Warsaw blamed his death on Islamabad's "apathy" towards tackling extremism. Piotr Stanczak, who was abducted in late September in volatile northwest Pakistan, was beheaded at the weekend by his Taliban captors, who then released a graphic video of the execution to several media outlets. Warsaw has confirmed the authenticity of the video and vowed to find Stanczak's killers, who are believed to come from Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), Pakistan's umbrella Taliban organisation which has links to Al-Qaeda. "Officially the ministry of interior has...

A WHISTLEBLOWER has made a series of extraordinary claims about how corrupt government officials allowed Pakistan and other states to steal nuclear weapons secrets. Sibel Edmonds, a 37-year-old former Turkish language translator for the FBI, listened into hundreds of sensitive intercepted conversations while based at the agency's Washington field office. She approached The Sunday Times last month after reading about an Al-Qaeda terrorist who had revealed his role in training some of the 9/11 hijackers while he was in Turkey. Edmonds described how foreign intelligence agents had enlisted the support of US officials to acquire a network of moles in...

Andrew Sullivan says the man who heckled Rummy was Not some crazed lefty. The man who demanded that Rumsfeld answer the questions we all want to have answered turns out to be the man who gave former president George H. W. Bush his daily intelligence briefing. And he was right in the exchange; and Rummy was factually wrong. Yep: Rumsfeld lied. Quelle surprise. No not some crazed lefty. The man was Ray McGovern, who Sweetness and Light noticed was part of Daniel Ellsberg's Truth Telling Project. Here's the relevant blog entry from the Belmont archives: Sweetness and Light has...

Newly hired as a translator of Turkish and Farsi (the language spoken in Iran), Sibel Edmonds was sitting at her desk in FBI headquarters in Washington on Sep. 20, 2001, retranslating a communications intercept headquarters had received some time before from an agent in Phoenix. The intercept contained references to skyscrapers and to U.S. immigration procedures, clues to the intentions of the 9/11 hijackers, clues overlooked by the person who first translated the document. Edmonds raced to her supervisor and asked to speak on a secure line to the agent who had obtained the intercept, to tell him of the...

UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL The Department of Justice has abandoned its argument that charges made by a fired FBI translator are secret, paving the way for a court case involving charges of incompetence, poor security and possible espionage in the translation unit of the bureau's Washington field office. At issue are accusations by Sibel Edmonds, a contract translator for the FBI hired in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks. Mrs. Edmonds, fluent in Turkish and in the Farsi language spoken in Iran, reported that many of those hired to work in the unit barely could speak English; that they...

The Justice Department has backed away from a court battle over its authority to classify and restrict the discussion of information it has already released, handing a local advocacy group a victory by granting it explicit permission to publish letters written by two senators that contain the contested information. The case was considered a potential test of limits to the government's power to restrict access to information in the public domain on national security grounds. Former attorney general John D. Ashcroft had strongly defended the practice in this case by likening it to putting "spilt milk" back in a jar...

WASHINGTON -- A federal appeals court turned aside efforts to open to the public closed-door arguments Thursday in the case of a fired FBI contractor who alleged there were security breaches and misconduct at the bureau. Sibel Edmonds is seeking to revive her lawsuit against the government. It was thrown out of U.S. District Court when the Bush administration invoked the state secrets privilege, which allows the government to withhold information to safeguard national security. Edmonds says she was dismissed from her job as a wiretap translator because she told superiors she suspected a co-worker was leaking information to targets...