Free Republic

MPs used as live SAS targets The Dominion Post | Saturday, 9 June 2007 SAS commandos are using politicians and foreign dignitaries in live target practice to ensure the troops are ready for a terrorist strike on home soil. The super-realistic scenarios include firing bullets centimetres from the heads of "hostages", among them Prime Minister Helen Clark. The politicians have been placed beside terrorists, represented by dummies with balloons for heads. Bursting into the room, the soldiers shoot out the balloons. Defence Minister Phil Goff said he had done it three times. "First of all you think, 'I hope I...

The Secretary General of the UN has asked Sweden’s Prime Minister to send troops to Darfur as part of a future peace-keeping mission. After the meeting with Ban Ki Moon in New York on Monday, Fredrik Reinfeldt said neutral Sweden is considering whether it could create a unit with Norway to send to the Sudanese province. But he says they would need to see what the force would look like, what the security situation would be and who would be leading the mission. The Swedish Prime Minister is meeting American President George W. Bush in Washington Tuesday as he continues...

China sends more troops to N. Korea border WASHINGTON - China has dispatched thousands of additional soldiers to its border region with North Korea, prompting an alert among intelligence officials in South Korea and the United States, says a diplomatic source here. 'Based on the US satellite photos and South Korea's human intelligence, the two countries concluded that China has recently deployed 10,000 elite troops to the North Korean border,' the source in Washington was quoted by South Korea's JoongAng Ilbo as saying yesterday. Last Saturday, Japan's Sankei Shimbun newspaper also reported that China had sent 10,000 troops earlier this...

> The author of this letter is well known in the Canon City, Penrose, Pueblo area. He is an author of numerous books and a businessman in Florence, Colorado. He is a retired member of the "A-team" Green Berets. > > AN OPEN LETTER TO SEN. KERRY > > My wife had rotator cuff surgery earlier this year and the recovery is > terribly painful. Then she developed staph-epi infection, and they > had to cut the same scar open and operate on her again. Just thinking > about the pain and anxiety of facing that painful surgery a second...

The Republican Guard consists of three armoured divisions (Medina south of Baghdad, Hammurabi in the west, and al-Nida in the north-east). Before the war each was equipped with around 200-250 T-72 Russian tanks but possibly also scores of lesser T-62s. The Guard also has one mechanised division, the Adnan, which was in the north near Mosul, but large parts of it have moved south towards Baghdad. The Baghdad infantry division was located south-east of the capital near Kut. Yesterday, it was reported the Medina ceased to exist as an organised strike force. The same was said about the Baghdad division...

BERLIN, Germany: Mar 02 (PNS)- Germany has pulled out its elite KSK anti-terror forces from Afghanistan, the daily Bild cited German army circles as saying. The 100 elite anti-terror soldiers were withdrawn from Afghanistan last week, according to the paper. The KSK forces were already replaced by the German Airborne Brigade 31, based in the north German city of Oldenburg. The German defense ministry refused to comment on the report. The secretive elite KSK unit was deployed in Afghanistan in the winter of 2001 to assist American forces in hunting down alleged al-Qaeda terrorists.