Free Republic

Russia's richest woman sues Forbes magazine MOSCOW, Feb 14 (Reuters) - Russia's richest woman, who is also the wife of Moscow's mayor, is suing the Russian edition of Forbes magazine for defamation over a story detailing her business interests, her company said on Wednesday. A spokesman for Yelena Baturina's Inteko firm said it had filed a suit against the magazine and its editor in Russian courts seeking compensation totalling 213,000 roubles ($8,100). "The article published in the December edition of Forbes magazine contains information which is not true," said Inteko spokesman Gennady Terebkov. That information included "the incorrect reproduction of...

Ahmad Chalabi is in possession of "miles" of documents with the potential to expose politicians, corporations and the United Nations as having connived in a system of kickbacks and false pricing worth billions of pounds. That may have been enough to provoke yesterday's American raid. So explosive are the contents of the files that their publication would cause serious problems for US allies and friendly states around the globe. Late last year and several months before Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority became involved, Mr Chalabi had amassed enough information concerning corruption in the oil-for-food scandal to realise that he was...

WASHINGTON - Al-Qaida has identified a would-be 20th hijacker for the Sept. 11 attacks as a Saudi operative who was killed in a 2004 shootout with his country's security forces. In a statement accompanying a new video, the terrorist network's propaganda arm identified Fawaz al-Nashimi, also known as Turki bin Fuheid al-Muteiry, as the operative who would have rounded out a team that ultimately took over United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed into a Pennsylvania field before reaching its intended target. A 54-minute video featuring al-Nashimi was obtained Tuesday by IntelCenter, a U.S. government contractor based in Virginia. U.S counterterrorism...

Yesterday on Fox News, my father claims he caught a headline on the scroll that said a boat had been boarded off Panama under suspicion of carrying WMDs.

While I was heartened to hear that USAF Senior Airman Ahmad Al Halabi, like Army Chaplain (Capt) James Yee before him, had been cleared of charges of espionage and treason, I am nevertheless still deeply disturbed by the lack of media attention given this case. Granted, the allegations made a huge splash when they first surfaced in the fall of 2003, fueled to a white hot frenzy by prosecutorial whisperings of possible death sentences. At that time, the government was happy to have us believe that the tentacled reach of Al Qaeda extended all the way to the ranks of...

In 1995, former Iranian president Ali Hashemi Rafsanjani made a little-noticed trip to the neighboring country of Georgia. He spent several hours in Tbilisi, the capital, and then instead of returning to Iran, he made a secret side trip to the breakaway region of Adjara to visit President Aslan Abashidze. The purpose of the detour was not to visit the balmy, palm-treed tourist sea port resort of Batumi on the Black Sea. His purpose was more sinister. The Iranian president was looking for black market sources of chemicals to enrich uranium for building a nuclear bomb. He found a willing...

TERROR REPORT SLAMS CIA The CIA failed to pass on warnings to the FBI about two of the terrorists who went on to become September 11 hijackers, it has been claimed. An FBI agent who was working with the CIA more than a year before the attacks on New York and Washington said he wanted to warn FBI bosses about al Qaeda suspects Khalid Al-Midhar and Nawaq Alhamzi. They had been spotted at a gathering of terror suspects in Malaysia and were understood to be headed to America, it was reported. US officials told ABC News the agent was denied...

U.S. military forces have discovered a smuggling ring moving copious quantities of explosives and weapons from Iraq to terrorist training camps constructed by the Saddam Hussein regime inside Syria prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF). The Pentagon also announced that the structure bombed by U.S. warplanes last week, described by many major media outlets as a wedding celebration at a private ranching operation, was actually a "dormitory-like" facility used as a "safe house" to facilitate the clandestine movement of foreign terrorists into Iraq from Syria. According to Pentagon officials, small arms, explosives, and bomb making materials are being removed from...

The following are excerpts from the televised confessions of Muayed Al-Nasseri, who commanded Saddam Hussein's "Army of Muhammad" throughout 2004. The confessions were aired by an Iraqi TV channel that operates from the UAE, Al-Fayhaa TV, and were monitored and translated by the MEMRI TV Project. The following are excerpts; to view the clip, visit http://memritv.org/Search.asp?ACT=S9&P1=492: [1] 'The Army of Muhammad was Founded by Saddam Hussein After the Fall of the Regime' Interrogator: "What is your name?" Muayed Al-Nasseri: "Colonel Muayed Yassin 'Aziz 'Abd Al-Razaq Al-Nasseri, commander of the Army of Muhammad, one of the resistance factions in Iraq. The...

June 23, 2006: The revelation that Coalition forces have discovered about 500 shells containing chemical weapons (mostly sarin nerve gas and mustard gas) since 2003, most of which are pre-1991 Gulf War vintage, leads to the question as to why the U.S. waited so long to reveal this. The U.S. government has taken a beating for supposed failures to find weapons of mass destruction in the press, and from political opponents. There have been some discoveries that have made the news, most notably an incident in May, 2004, when terrorists used a 155-millimeter shell loaded with sarin in an IED....

IENNA, May 21 — The United States has informed an international agency that oversees nuclear materials that it intends to move hundreds of tons of uranium from a sealed repository south of Baghdad to a more secure place outside Iraq, Western diplomats close to the agency say. But the organization, the International Atomic Energy Agency, has taken the position that the uranium is Iraqi property and that the agency cannot give permission to remove it, a diplomat said. The diplomat said that the United States was unlikely to be deterred by that position and that American officials had contacted the...

Inside Iraqi Corruption Charles R. Smith Tuesday, March 29, 2005 John A. Shaw is a curious example of Washington politics gone mad. Shaw is a veteran government employee who served inside the White House under Presidents Ford, Nixon and Reagan and was an associate deputy secretary in the Department of Commerce. In 2001, Shaw was appointed by Bush Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld to head the newly formed Office of International Technology Security. In this post, Shaw began the difficult task of reforming government controls over the export of sensitive technology to foreign countries. In 2003, Shaw began investigating allegations of...

Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen won't let go of the mystery: Just where did the Cuban government get up to $3.9 billion it funneled through a Swiss bank over seven years. Was Havana simply, as it claims, banking its income from tourism and remittances that Cubans abroad send to their relatives on the island? Or was dirty money involved? Ros-Lehtinen, the Cuban-born Florida Republican, wants to know, and she has been badgering officials of the United Bank of Switzerland (UBS) and the U.S. Federal Reserve for answers. ''That's an awful lot of money,'' Ros-Lehtinen told The Herald. According to the latest answers...

Major Update Below!As I posted yesterday, there was a disturbing blurb in a NY Times article that indicated Faisal Shahzad, the now infamous Times Square Bomber, was under surveillance as a potential terrorist during the Bush administration. George LaMonica, a 35-year-old computer consultant, said he bought his two-bedroom condominium in Norwalk, Conn., from Mr. Shahzad for $261,000 in May 2004. A few weeks after he moved in, Mr. LaMonica said, investigators from the national Joint Terrorism Task Force [JTTF] interviewed him, asking for details of the transaction and for information about Mr. Shahzad. It struck Mr. LaMonica as unusual, but...

Scientists stirred to ridicule ice age claims   19:00 15 April 04   NewScientist.com news service   Climate scientists have been stirred to ridicule claims in an upcoming Hollywood blockbuster that global warming could trigger a new ice age, a scenario also put forward in a controversial report to the US military.The $125-million epic, The Day After Tomorrow, opens worldwide in May. It will show Manhattan frozen solid after the warm ocean current known as the Gulf Stream shuts down.The movie's release will come soon after a report to the US Department of Defense (DoD) in February predicting that such a shutdown...

Federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald famously declared in the Valerie Plame affair that "there is a cloud over the vice president." Last week's release of an FBI interview summary of Dick Cheney's answers in the criminal investigation underscores why Fitzgerald felt that way. On 72 occasions, according to the 28-page FBI summary, Cheney equivocated to the FBI during his lengthy May 2004 interview, saying he could not be certain in his answers to questions about matters large and small in the Plame controversy. The Cheney interview reflects a team of prosecutors and FBI agents trying to find out whether the leaks...

GEORGETOWN, Guyana -- A Jamaican man collapsed and died on a nonstop flight from Guyana to New York on Tuesday, airline officials said. Rupert Cameron, 33, was pronounced dead when North American Airlines Flight 92 from Georgetown arrived at John F. Kennedy International Airport just before 2 p.m. EDT, said Jenny DeBarros, a spokeswoman for the Queens-based airline. Cameron had complained of feeling unwell and repeatedly asked for water. Several passengers, including a Guyanese doctor, administered CPR when he stopped breathing, DeBarros said. It was unclear when an autopsy would be performed. Authorities detained a Jamaican friend traveling with Cameron....

GEORGETOWN, Guyana (Reuters) -- An Iranian scholar who was abducted in Guyana last month in a case that baffled local police has been found dead with gunshot wounds to the head, police said on Wednesday. The body of Mohammad Hassan Ebrahimi, director of Guyana's International Islamic College for Advanced Studies, was discovered by local people late on Tuesday 45 miles (70 km) south of the capital, Georgetown. Ebrahimi, a well-known member of Guyana's Muslim community, was seized by two gunmen on April 2 in Georgetown as he left the college compound. Police spokesman John Sauers said the partly decomposed body...

Iran Sends Diplomatic Warning to US Over IraqIran said Sunday that it had sent a message of formal diplomatic warning to the United States about its actions in neighboring Iraq.'We have warned the Americans about Iraq,' Foriegn Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi told a weekly news conference.Asefi did not comment on the content of the warning, but officials and religious leaders in Shiite Muslim Iran have expressed outrage in recent weeks about the presence of US led forces in the holy Shiite cities of Najaf and Karbala. Asefi said that the diplomatic message was sent VIA the Swiss Embassy in...

Note: The following text is a quote: Swedish National Charged with Hacking and Theft of Trade Secrets Related to Alleged Computer Intrusions at NASA and Cisco Philip Gabriel Pettersson, aka "Stakkato," 21, a Swedish national, was indicted today on intrusion and trade secret theft charges. The five-count indictment includes one intrusion count and two trade secret misappropriation counts involving Cisco Systems Inc. (Cisco), of San Jose, Calif., which is a provider of computer network equipment and producer of Internet routers. According to the allegations in the indictment Pettersson intentionally committed an intrusion between May 12, 2004, and May 13, 2004,...