Free Republic

The State Department official who issued visas to many of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorists is still employed by the federal government, according to J. Michael Springmann, the author of Visas for al-Qaeda: CIA Handouts That Rocked the World. Springmann, former head of the visa section at the U.S. Consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, told PJM that Shayna Steinger approved 11 of the visas granted to the 19 9/11 hijackers. Fifteen received their visas at the Jeddah consulate. Page 7 of the 9/11 Commission report states that “one consular officer issued visas to 11 of the 19 hijackers.” Those visas...

A Turkish court on Thursday charged a Syrian national suspected of plotting to slam speedboats packed with explosives into cruise ships loaded with Israeli tourists, lawyers and police said. According to The AP, defense lawyer Ilhami Sayan said the suspect, identified in the Turkish media as Lu'ai Sakra, was charged with membership in an "illegal organization." He was arrested earlier this month. Police said Sakra was linked to al-Qaeda. "I have no regrets," Sakra shouted to journalists as he was led into the courthouse. "I was going to attack Israeli ships. If they come, my friends will attack them." "I...

Barack Obama released Osama Bin Laden’s bodyguard this week from Gitmo. Abdul Rahman Shalabi was trained as the 20th hijacker in the 9-11 attacks. 20th hijacker shalabi Obama released Shalabi to Saudi Arabia this week. Shalabi was released from Gitmo on September 21, 2015. Investor’s Business Daily reported, via Pamela Geller: “ How much does President Obama still want the Guantanamo Bay terrorist prison shuttered? He just released the man trained to be the 20th hijacker for the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. In May, 2008, Rear Adm. David M. Thomas, then-commander of the Joint Task Force at Guantanamo Bay, sent...

Political Correctness: The only thing more revolting than building a mosque next to the World Trade Center would be honoring the mosque that helped the 9/11 hijackers. Yet that's just what Virginia has done. Outrageously, the Virginia state legislature has passed a Democrat-sponsored resolution "commending" the notorious 9/11 mosque — Dar al-Hijrah Islamic Center — "as an expression of the General Assembly's admiration for the" center. The Saudi Embassy-funded, Muslim Brotherhood-owned mosque is universally known by federal and local law enforcement — and even the media — as a turnstile for terrorists. Fort Hood shooter Maj. Nidal Hasan once worshipped...

The background: On April 21, 2001, the CIA's liaison officer at the U.S. Embassy in Prague was briefed by the Czech counterintelligence service (known by its Czech acronym, BIS) about an extraordinary development in a spy case that concerned both the United States and the Czech Republic. The subject of the briefing was Ahmad Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, the consul at Iraq's embassy in Prague. .... So when al-Ani replaced Salim at the Iraq Embassy in Prague in 1999, both the United States and the Czech Republic wanted him closely watched in case he had a similar assignment. The BIS...

INTELLIGENCE agents from Prague to Swansea are uncovering a trail of clues that point to President Saddam Hussein of Iraq having a hand in al-Qaeda’s terrorist missions. Iraqi ministers have spent the week protesting Baghdad’s innocence to the United Nations, but will not say why some of its diplomats who met Mohammed Atta, one of the suspected September 11 hijackers, disappeared from their European posts after that date. Nor will Baghdad explain why Saddam’s agents were spotted at various times this year with Atta in Germany, Spain, Italy and the Czech Republic. Many in the Pentagon are sure Saddam ...

September 6, 2004 -- WASHINGTON — The long knives are out for Democrat John Kerry's campaign manager, Mary Beth Cahill, as infighting rages while his slumping campaign struggles to come back against President Bush. "You'd think they could find a man to throw overboard one of these days," zinged Republican strategist Mary Matalin, a former aide to Vice President Dick Cheney on NBC's "Meet the Press." She said Democrats blamed 1988 loser Michael Dukakis' stumbles on campaign manager Susan Estrich and Al Gore's 2000 fumbles on campaign chief Donna Brazile, and "now they're trying to blame poor Mary Beth Cahill"...

An imprisoned man known as the "20th hijacker" in the 9/11 terror attacks is asking a South Florida federal judge for a transfer to the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The request is part of a rambling, handwritten letter filed Wednesday in Miami federal court by Zacarias Moussaoui. He is serving a life prison sentence after pleading guilty in 2005 to conspiring with the Sept. 11 hijackers to kill Americans.

Mauritanian national Mohamedou Ould Slahi has been held at Guantanamo for 12 years now without trial and despite a dearth of evidence. A diary he kept of his torture is now being published around the world. […] He was accused of having been acquainted with the perpetrators of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and of having provided them with support and sending them to Afghanistan to receive training. He has also been accused of involvement in the Millennium Plot, the foiled terrorist attack targeting the Los Angeles International Airport. At least that’s the claim made by Ahmed Ressam, the...

On September 25, the 23rd Arab-American Candidates’ Night Dinner was held in Virginia, attended by 46 Democrats and Republicans seeking office, with former governor and current Democratic Senate candidate, Tim Kaine, as a major speaker. The dinner honored a top Muslim Brotherhood official affiliated with Hamas named Jamal Barzinji, an inconvenient and overlooked fact for Kaine’s campaign team. Tim Kaine was the governor of Virginia from 2006 to 2010 and then was the chairman of the Democratic National Committee. He was on the short-list to become President Obama’s running mate. He is now running for Senate and will likely face...

The el Tawheed mosque has been contorversial for years already. Younger people are being strenghtened in their hate against Dutch people, and are being stimulated to use violence in the war against unbelievers. In his sermons imam El Shershaby says that Jews control the media and weapons-industry, and together with the Christans they want to destroy islam. From the mosque flyers were handed out were Jews, Christians and unbelievers are called 'fuel for the fires of hell'. The mosque also sells books in which is printed that homosexuals should be thrown off high buildings, 'with their heads down'. The Dutch...

A former CIA officer was arrested on Thursday on charges of illegally disclosing national defense information about Iran to a New York Times reporter who wrote a book. The U.S. Justice Department said Jeffrey Sterling, 43, was charged with six counts of unauthorized disclosure of national defense information and one count of unlawfully keeping national defense information, mail fraud, unauthorized conveyance of government property and obstructing justice.

At least three eyewitnesses spotted al Qaeda hijackers casing the security checkpoints at Boston’s Logan Airport months before the 9/11 attacks. They saw something and said something — but were ignored, newly unveiled court papers reveal. One of the witnesses, an American Airlines official, actually confronted hijacking ringleader Mohamed Atta after watching him videotape and test a security checkpoint in May 2001 — four months before he boarded the American Airlines flight that crashed into the World Trade Center. The witness alerted security, but authorities never questioned the belligerent Egyptian national or flagged him as a threat.

Mohammed Zammar, the al Qaeda operative responsible for recruiting the suicide-hijack pilots for the 9/11 attacks, has reportedly been freed inside Syria. Zammar's freedom was reported by Zaid Benjamin, the Washington correspondent for Radio Sawa, on his Twitter feed on Mar. 2. Writing for Al-Monitor, John Rosenthal cited multiple sources confirming Zammar's freedom in an account published on Mar. 10. Zammar was captured in Morocco in late 2001. Unlike most of the 9/11 co-conspirators who were captured, however, Zammar was not transferred to US custody. Instead, he was sent to Syria, where he was imprisoned by Bashar al Assad's regime....

Families of the victims of the Sept. 11 attacks today celebrated a federal court's ruling that allows relatives of people who died in the 9/11 terror attacks to sue Saudi Arabia. Most of the hijackers who attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001 were from Saudi Arabia, and the complaint states that much of the funding for the al-Qaeda terrorists came from Saudi Arabia. An attempt to Saudi Arabia in 2002 was blocked by a federal court ruling that said the kingdom had sovereign immunity. That ruling was reversed Thursday by a three-judge federal panel.… The ruling...

Anwar al-Aulaqi and 9/11 Hijackers (Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today that it received documents on March 4, 2013 from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) that raise new questions about close ties between Anwar al Aulaqi, the U.S.-born terrorist assassinated by a U.S. drone in Yemen on September 30, 2011, and Nawaf al Hazmi and Khalid al Mihdhar, two of the five hijackers who attacked the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. In the documents the FBI describes al Aulaqi as “The Spiritual Leader of the Hijackers.” Judicial Watch received the documents in response to a June, 2012, Freedom...

At the mid-March 2012 congressional hearings on the "Iran-Hezb'allah Threat to the Homeland," chaired by Representative Peter King, top officials from the DEA, the FBI, and the New York City Police Department, as well as senior scholars addressed the alarming capability and motivation of this Axis of Jihad to strike inside the U.S. Critical and timely, this was the latest in a series of hearings that Rep. King, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, has held to focus attention on the deadly threat to America's national security from the forces of Islamic jihad and sharia. There was an unmentioned...

When Jihad Came to America by Andrew C. McCarthy On May 2 and 3, 1990, the U.S. embassy in Cairo alerted its counterpart in Khartoum that Egypt’s “leading radical,” Omar Abdel Rahman, was on his way to Sudan. Warning that his ultimate plan might be to seek exile in the United States, the Cairo embassy asked its colleagues to pass along any information they might learn about his activities on Sudanese soil. What did U.S. officials already know about Abdel Rahman in 1990? As the 9/11 Commission would later determine, they knew that he had been arrested repeatedly in Egypt...

In 2007 – 2008, conservatives were apoplectic as they watched the mainstream media completely ignore Barack Obama's radical religion and pastor. They also ignored revelations that Rev. Jeremiah Wright posted the writings of a Hamas leader in his church's newsletter. If Mitt Romney is the Republican nominee for president, the opposite will be true. That same mainstream media will do an about face when it comes to vetting Romney's religion...

For every action, there is an opposite and equal reaction. As states continue to crack down on things like voter ID while others continue to seek ways to enforce immigration laws, near all states are now also trying to protect their most coveted form of ID-- the driver license. Initially responding to the controversial federal secure driver license law, REAL ID, states have learned by implementing the REAL ID Act they have curbed the identity theft and fraud used extensively by the illegal alien population and criminals. Janice Kephart, Director of National Security Policy at the Center for Immigration Studies...