Free Republic

A group of Taliban sustained casualties as they were busy manufacturing an improvised explosive device, roadside bomb, in a mosque in North of Afghanistan. The 209th Shaheen Corps in a statement said the incident took place in a mosque in Chahabar Bolak district of Balkh. The statement further added that a group of 8 Taliban IED experts were busy manufacturing a bomb inside a mosque in Sikandar Khel Village. The premature explosion caused by IED killed four Taliban militants and wounded at least four others, the 209th Shaheen Corps added in its statement. According to Shaheen Corps, the explosion killed...

French MP Meir Habib called his country’s hosting a Paris “peace conference” next month to which neither Israel nor the Palestinian Authority were invited to be a “disgrace.” “This conference is a disgrace. It isn’t a peace conference. It’s an international disgrace. President Obama failed a thousand percent in everything he did in the Middle East. He left 400,000 people to die in Syria, and all of their murderers will go free. Now a few days before the end of his term, he wants to go to this conference to force Israel back to the ’67 borders, the ‘Auschwitz borders,’”...

A call earlier this week from the leader of the Jewish community in Marseilles for Jews to stop wearing kippot in public caused a fierce uproar in France, with scores of Frenchman putting on the ritual head covering in a demonstration of solidarity with Jews French parliamentarians Meir Habib and Claude Goasguen joined the demonstration on Wednesday, proudly adorning kippot at the National Assembly as a show of solidarity after a brutal anti-Semitic stabbing attack in Marseilles on Monday. The move was very unusual given France's principle of "secularism" and its prohibition against wearing religious articles in official or state...

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has lifted the visa ban on the European theoretician of radical Islam and virtuoso Jew-baiter, Tariq Ramadan, allowing him to take up a position similar to that he was offered at Notre Dame University, but which was filled because of his unavailability. At the same time, a U.S. entry prohibition against a South African leftist, Adam Habib of Johannesburg University, was voided. The decision to admit Tariq Ramadan is profoundly wrong. Adam Habib is an innocuous figure. Tariq Ramadan is not. Ramadan was first barred from the U.S. in 2004 ... the denial of...

A prominent Muslim scholar banned from the United States for six years returned Wednesday for visits to four cities... "In the name of your fear or mistrust of Muslim-majority countries, you may end up betraying your own values," Tariq Ramadan ... Ramadan said he was happy to be in the U.S. ...to speak on a panel Thursday at The Cooper Union college. "My name has been cleared," he said. The 47-year-old professor at Oxford University in England was permitted to return to the United States after Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton in January signed orders enabling re-entry for him...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has lifted a U.S. ban on a planned visit by a leading European Muslim critic of the Iraq war, in a move rights groups hailed as a victory for civil liberties. Clinton signed orders which ended the ban on Professor Tariq Ramadan of Oxford University, who was barred due to alleged terrorism ties which he denies, State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said on Wednesday.

The al Qaeda figure believed to be organizing a new terror attack against the United States is dead, a senior U.S. official tells ABCNews.com. The al Qaeda figure believed to be organizing a new terror attack against the United States is dead,... The al Qaeda figure believed to be organizing a new terror attack against the United States is dead, a senior U.S. official tells ABCNews.com. The official says the U.S. now has evidence that Khalid Habib was killed in an unmanned air strike two weeks ago in the South Waziristan region of Pakistan. Until now, there had been no...

TO HIS family and friends, Mamdouh Habib was a devoted father and husband. But to others, the calm suburban veneer disguised an angry and often violent man whose actions were fuelled by his religious fanaticism. Seemingly a helpful supporter at his son's soccer matches, Habib also had a nasty streak which landed him with an AVO against former colleagues and a court order to destroy firearms and ammunition in his home. Nine days after the September 11 attack in New York, his home was raided by the nation's chief spy watchdog ASIO. Today, the fate of the man named as...

A SYDNEY man allegedly telephoned the suspected leader of al-Qa'ida in Spain – Abu Dahdah – seeking help to move a "brother" and his family throughout Europe. The allegation about former Qantas baggage handler Bilal Khazal – made in documents tendered in Mr Dahdah's terrorism trial – contradicts claims by him that he had never spoken to the alleged terror chief, or even knew who he was. As more details of a network of alleged terror supporters in Australia emerged yesterday, it has been claimed a second Australian named in the Spanish court documents, Melbourne cleric Sheikh Mohammed Omran, was...

FORMER Guantanamo Bay detainee Mamdouh Habib has been stabbed near his Sydney home. Mr Habib was walking home with his wife Maha at Guildford in the early hours of yesterday morning when he was bashed on the head from behind and stabbed in the stomach, Channel 7 reported tonight. Mr Habib, who was not seriously injured, believed he had been targeted. Lifting his top to show a 6cm cut over his stomach, Mr Habib said he thought a man had come at him from the front with a knife. "He tried to stab me so many times and he keep...

Nobles: Gen. Richard B. Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who retired this week after 40 years of service. As an engineering student at Kansas State University, Gen. Myers enrolled in the Air Force Reserve Officer Training Corps program, because, as he says, "Vietnam was heating up, and I had no problem with serving. I just wanted to have some control over how I did it." He was commissioned in 1965 and soon sent to Vietnam, where he flew F-4s. But the future four-star general didn't expect to stay in the military. As chairman, Gen. Myers has been...

Australia's top investigators claim Mamdouh Habib trained as a terrorist before the September 11 attacks. Former Guantanamo Bay detainee Mamdouh Habib trained as a terrorist in Pakistan before moving to Afghanistan to serve as a mercenary with al-Qaeda, Australia's top policeman has told a parliamentary inquiry. Australian Federal Police Commissioner Mick Keelty said Mr Habib received firearms training in Pakistan in the days before September 11, 2001 to prepare him for a border crossing into Afghanistan to join Osama bin Laden's terrorist organisation. Habib was arrested by Pakistani police inside Pakistan on October 5, 2001. "The investigators formed the view...

FREED terror suspect Mamdouh Habib says he made a series of false confessions while under US torture in Egypt. Breaking his silence last night, Mr Habib said he admitted to training September 11 hijackers. He also told interrogators he moved chemicals in Afghanistan for al-Qaida -- all lies made in the hope he would survive torture, Mr Habib said. "I have nothing true," he said. "Just, I make them happy. I want to save myself." Speaking in a paid interview with Channel 9's 60 Minutes, Mr Habib said he was tortured with electric shocks, beatings and sexual humiliation involving dogs....

Former Guantanamo Bay detainee Mamdouh Habib's claim that an Australian official stood by while he was being tortured in Pakistan was untrue, federal Attorney-General Philip Ruddock said today. In a paid interview with the Nine Network's 60 Minutes last night, Mr Habib claimed that shortly after he was arrested in 2001 an Australian official visited him at a military airport in Pakistan and watched as he was tortured. "In part, the information that he provided conflicts with information I have received from departmental officials," Mr Ruddock told Channel Nine. "The information suggests that it was an Australian official from the...

Prime Minister John Howard refused to rule out charges being laid against former Guantanamo Bay detainee Mamdouh Habib. The Sydney man was detained by the United States for more than three years as a suspected terrorist, but he was released without charge and arrived back in Sydney last month. "I indicated at the time that he was repatriated to Australia that he would continue to be of security interest," Mr Howard told 2GB radio. Asked if Mr Habib would be charged under Australian law, Mr Howard said: "I'm not foreshadowing that, but equally I am careful not to rule that...

The return of Mamdouh Habib was being delayed because of US authorities' demand that he be shackled on the flight to Australia, it was reported. Unnamed Australian diplomatic sources told the Washington Post newspaper US military officials were concerned that if Mr Habib, whose release without charge was announced on January 11, was not shackled he could not be prevented from leaving the plane during refuelling stops. The report said Australian authorities had declined to shackle Mr Habib, who had been held in detention for more than three years without charge on suspicion he knew about the September 11 terrorist...

Detainee Says U.S. Sent Him to Egypt Before Guantanamo U.S. authorities in late 2001 forcibly transferred an Australian citizen to Egypt, where, he alleges, he was tortured for six months before being flown to the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, according to court papers made public yesterday in a petition seeking to halt U.S. plans to return him to Egypt. Egyptian-born Mamdouh Habib, who was detained in Pakistan in October 2001 as a suspected al Qaeda trainer, alleges that while under Egyptian detention he was hung by his arms from hooks, repeatedly shocked, nearly drowned and brutally beaten,...

PAKISTANI-based terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba, which is alleged to have trained Australian terror suspects David Hicks and Mamdouh Habib, is extending its operational tentacles into Southeast Asia. A terrorism white paper released by Foreign Minister Alexander Downer yesterday examines the future of the terrorist threat to Australia. It says support for al-Qaeda regional offshoot Jemaah Islamiah is growing despite the arrest of more than 300 operatives in the wake of September 11 and the Bali bombing. Though Lashkar-e-Taiba was involved in providing training to Southeast Asian-based terrorist groups such as JI and the Philippines-based Abu Sayyaf in Pakistan and Kashmir, some...

Thursday, April 15, 2004 Pres. Reagan: No Palestinian State, No return to '67 borders, Pres. Reagan: No Palestinian State, No return to '67 borders, Undivided Jerusalem www.reagan.utexas.edu/resource/speeches/1982/90182d.htm Address to the Nation on United States Policy for Peace in the Middle East September 1, 1982 My fellow Americans: Today has been a day that should make us proud. It marked the end of the successful evacuation of PLO from Beirut, Lebanon. This peaceful step could never have been taken without the good offices of the United States and especially the truly heroic work of a great American diplomat, Ambassador Philip...

BAGHDAD - Among the Iraqis who have recovered bodies from shallow mass graves at the country's largest prison is the family of a retired general they say disappeared after meeting with UN weapons inspectors. "We came to this place because someone told us that he may be buried somewhere here," said Abu Haldoon, the brother-in-law of retired Air Force Gen. Engineer Ali Hussein Habib. Habib retired in 1991 after heading a team of military officers in developing Iraq's chemical weapons program, Haldoon said. In early February, UN experts searching for Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction interviewed the...