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A CIA-operated drone strike on a suspected militant hideout last weekend killed one of FBI's most-wanted terrorists who had been involved in 1986 hijacking of an U.S. airline, a senior Pakistani offical said. Jamal Saeed Abdul Rahim, a Jordanian of Palestinian origin who had a bounty of $5 million on his head, was killed in the strike in North Waziristan on Sunday, along with another Jordanian who was identified as Mahmoud Zaydan, the official said. Mr. Rahim was released from a Pakistani prison a few years ago after a conviction for his role in the Sept. 5, 1986, hijacking of...

BAGHDAD — On April 18, American and British officials from a secretive unit called the Force Strategic Engagement Cell flew to Jordan to try to persuade one of Saddam Hussein’s top generals — the commander of the final defense of Baghdad in 2003 — to return home to resume efforts to make peace with the new Iraq. But the Iraqi commander, Lt. Gen. Raad Majid al-Hamdani, rebuffed them. After a year of halting talks mediated by the Americans, he said, he concluded that Iraq’s leader, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, simply was not interested in reconciliation. The American appeal —...

December 29, 2008 Note: The following text is a quote: http://www.usdoj.gov/opa/pr/2008/December/08-nsd-1151.html Former Maryland Man Charged with Conspiracy to Act as an Iraqi Agent Defendant Allegedly Worked for the Government of Iraq and Assisted the Iraqi Intelligence Service WASHINGTON – A criminal complaint was filed today charging Mouyad Mahmoud Darwish, age 47, formerly of Maryland, with conspiring to act as an agent of a foreign government, specifically, as an agent of Iraq, announced United States Attorney for the District of Maryland Rod J. Rosenstein and Patrick Rowan, Assistant Attorney General for National Security. Darwish is a Canadian citizen born in Iraq....

December 22, 2008 Note: The following text is a quote: Maryland Man Pleads Guilty to Conspiracy to Act as an Iraqi Agent Defendant Shredded Documents and Lied to FBI Agents WASHINGTON—Saubhe Jassim Al-Dellemy, age 67, an Iraqi national living in Maryland, pleaded guilty today to conspiracy to act as an agent of a foreign government, specifically, as an agent of Iraq, announced Patrick Rowan, Assistant Attorney General for National Security and U.S. Attorney for the District of Maryland Rod J. Rosenstein. “Since coalition forces invaded Iraq in 2003, the Justice Department has charged at least a dozen people who served...

For Iraqi Kurdish mathematics teacher Mohammed Aziz, two wrongs can make a right. After decades of forced exile by the Baath party of Saddam Hussein, he is back with a vengeance. Aziz was just four years old in 1975 when his family was evicted from Bawaplawi village, near the northern city of Khanaqin, and Arab settlers grabbed their home. Now schoolteacher Aziz is back and has done to the Arabs what they did to him. "Our homes were taken over by the Arabs without paying us any compensation," Aziz, 37, said at the modest single-storey brick house which he has...

..."sources said the gunmen have started to regress considerably and the security forces [have] control over vast areas of the province [of] Basra except for some pockets, which are now being besieged from all directions."

Saddam Hussein's handwritten praise to God will be dropped from the Iraqi flag and the symbolism behind its three green stars will be changed, according to a bill presented to parliament on Saturday.The Iraqi flag still bears the ousted dictator's handwritten Allahu Akhbar" (God is Greater) while the three stars officially symbolise unity, freedom and socialism -- the slogan of Saddam's Baath party.Under the new flag law, given its first reading by parliament on Saturday, the praise to God will be printed -- in yellow -- in the Kufi form of Arabic script while the stars will now represent peace,...

Those who claim that the surge strategy in Iraq has paid no dividends because it hasn't met Congressional benchmarks may wish to skip to the next post. The Iraqi National Assembly has passed one of the two most critical benchmarks that the American government had pressed for Baghdad to adopt, the de-Baathification reform that will allow Sunnis to once again enter government jobs: Iraq's parliament adopted legislation Saturday on the reinstatement of former Baath party supporters to government jobs, a benchmark sought by the United States as a key step toward national reconciliation. The voting was carried out by a...

Iraq's top Shi'ite, Sunni and Kurdish political leaders reached consensus on some U.S. benchmarks on Sunday that are seen as crucial to healing the deep rifts in the country, Iraqi officials said. Three Iraqi officials said the leaders had signed an agreement that would ease curbs on former members of Saddam Hussein's Baath party joining the civil service and military. Two of the officials also said consensus had been reached on holding provincial elections and releasing many detainees held without charge across the country.

Earlier today, the Italian news service AKI reported that the presumed leader of the largest insurgency in Iraq will start cooperating with the Iraqi government. Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, one of the highest-ranking members of Saddam Hussein's government, reportedly pledged to work with Iraqi and American forces to fight al-Qaeda in Iraq: The leader of Iraq's banned Baath party, Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, has decided to join efforts by the Iraqi authorities to fight al-Qaeda, one of the party's former top officials, Abu Wisam al-Jashaami, told pan-Arab daily Al Hayat. "AlDouri has decided to sever ties with al-Qaeda and sign up to...

Baghdad, 22 August (AKI) - The leader of Iraq's banned Baath party, Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, has decided to join efforts by the Iraqi authorities to fight al-Qaeda, one of the party's former top officials, Abu Wisam al-Jashaami, told pan-Arab daily Al Hayat. "AlDouri has decided to sever ties with al-Qaeda and sign up to the programme of the national resistance, which includes routing Islamist terrorists and opening up dialogue with the Baghdad government and foreign forces," al-Jashaami said. Al-Douri has decided to deal directly with US forces in Iraq, according to al-Jashaami. He figures in the 55-card deck of "most...

Cindy Sheehan, Tom Hayden, and the Hate America Left meet with pro-Ba'athist members of the Iraqi parliament to discuss “peace.” TO FIND PEOPLE WHO HATE AMERICA AS MUCH AS THEY DO, the Fifth Column Left had to go halfway around the world to meet with Iraqi political leaders who call terrorism “honorable national resistance” and say foreign jihadists “are guaranteed Paradise” – and at least one of whom has ties to militia leader Muqtada al-Sadr. By the end of the trip, the American leftists would echo these sentiments. Somehow most of the media – occupied with interminable coverage of Hurricane...

Iraq's Baath Party, once the machine of Saddam Hussein's tyrannical rule and now a key player in the country's civil war, has been divided by an internal power struggle pitting one of Hussein's top aides against a former general, U.S. and Iraqi government officials say.

A collection of 9/11 tributes I’ll add to the list below, and if you have any you’d like to add to this (or any other sort of tribute/remembrance), please do so here. Either leave a comment with the link, or link to this post and send a trackback. 9/11: The 5th Year Anniversary Tribute Blood of Heroes September 11th, Uncensored From Brain Terminal: Crystal Morning: September 11th, 2001 From William Teach: 9/11 Plus 5 From Crusader: WTC Tribute More from YouTube: 911 tribute September 11th - Five Years Later: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 September 11th - Flash...

The government of Iraq is secretly holding a Baathist cabal of military officers it claims attempted a coup against Prime Minister al-Maliki. The plotters were rounded up July 5 with the help of American military authorities after the Iraqi government's security warning center sent word to Mr. Maliki, who was in Kuwait on his first official visit as head of state, two highly placed Iraqi sources said. The prime minister quickly canceled a scheduled trip to Amman, Jordan, and returned to Baghdad to attend to the matter. At the time, Mr. Maliki's staff told reporters that the prime minister was...

Party Session between the" Baath" and "Belarusian Communist" Parties Headed by al-Ahmar and Golubeva in Minsk Assertion on the cooperation development On 17. 5. 2006 Assistant Secretary General of the Baath Arab Socialist Party Abdullah al-Ahmar held party session with a delegation from the Belarusian Communist Party headed by the party's First Secretary Tatiana Golubeva joint relations between the two parties within the framework of the cooperation. Talks during the meeting dealt with cooperation ties between the two countries and with each party's role in developing the bilateral relations connecting Syria and Belarus. The two parties criticized polices followed by...

All of the region's concerned parties want to keep Damascus out of efforts to put pressure on Israel and Hezbullah. For a number of different reasons, the governments involved don't want the open battlefield to extend beyond the Lebanese border. Even when President Bush said a few days ago that Syria must pay a price, he never said the price would be a military one. In Jordan, Egypt and the Gulf, in spite of differences with the Syrian government and in spite of suspicions that the Syrians had a role in pushing Hezbollah to get involved with Israel, these governments...

Document ISGQ-2003-0044 ISGQ-2003-00044390 390 contains a November/27/2002 Top Secret and Urgent memo from the Baath Party Command in Fallujah and in relation to another letter from the office of the Presidential Secretariat (Saddam Hussein Personal Secretary) and it is addressed to all the People Commands in the Anbar Province (The Western Desert) asking them to watch for Americans or Zionists (Israelis) forces that can potentially bury prohibited materials, WMD, in the Anbar province so it will frame Iraq and find an excuse to punish Iraq according to the memo. The Anbar province which is the hot bed of the terrorists...

A major split may be imminent in the leadership of the Iraqi Baath Party. Most of its senior leaders mostly either dead or prisoners of Iraqi and Coalition forces. The balance of the party's leadership is in exile. Some are known to be in Syria and Egypt, and others possibly in Jordan and Lebanon, as well as outside the Middle East entirely. As a result, there is no centralized party leadership, which seems to have led to serious "debate" about the party, and its purposes, for the first time in decades. In origins, the Baath Party was a secular revolutionary...

Yaa, you repukes are not doing so well, huh? Imagine, you repukes control the presidency, both houses of Congress, and appointed 7 of the 9 Supreme Court justices. Yet the Supreme Court thre out sodomy laws in all 50 states and recognized the right of government to seize land for any reason. And you couldn't pass your Social Security changes could you? Sorry, that was your last shot. Come November, we're going to start seeing more Democratic faces in the House. It's the end for you guys. You guys are celebrating when Bush's numbers go *up* to 45%. Then Faux...