Free Republic

On August 17, Vivek Ramaswamy was interviewed by Tucker Carlson. At the very beginning, Ramaswamy spoke candidly about 9/11: “I didn’t suggest it. I explicitly said that the government absolutely lied to us. The 9/11 Commission lied. The FBI lied to us.”After dropping that bombshell, Ramaswamy went on to describe a scenario that he says “doesn’t make much sense on the face of it.” He explained how a 42-year-old Saudi Arabian graduate student went to Los Angeles International Airport and, while there, met up with two Saudi nationals who went on to hijack a plane on 9/11, which they then...

LIKE MANY GREAT SPY STORIES, this one begins with a brief, mundane scene whose significance only becomes apparent later on. Around lunchtime on February 1, 2000, a man dropped a piece of paper near a table in a Middle Eastern restaurant outside Los Angeles and paused long enough to strike up a conversation with two Arabic-speaking men dining nearby. It would take FBI agents nearly 20 years to understand the full meaning of that small event. The man who dropped the piece of paper was Omar al-Bayoumi, a Saudi intelligence asset, recently declassified FBI documents show. And the two Arabic-speaking...

In a small windowless cell lit by a single light bulb, Louai al-Sakka sits isolated from the world and fellow inmates for 24 hours a day. His concrete box is in the bowels of Kandira, a high-security F-type prison 60 miles east of Istanbul, which was built to house Turkey's most dangerous criminals. The prison has been criticised by human right groups such as Amnesty International. The guards control everything, including the cell's light switch. Sakka's only visitor is Osman Karahan, a lawyer who shares his fervent support for militant Islamic jihad. Since being convicted as an Al-Qaeda bomb plotter...

The FBI, complying with President Biden’s recent executive order, made public late Saturday night a previously classified April 4, 2016 “review and analysis” report about Operation Encore, the bureau’s highly sensitive investigation of possible Saudi complicity in the 9/11 terrorist attack.The 16-page report is nevertheless heavily redacted in ways that will likely disappoint members of the 9/11 Families who have pushed to learn more about Encore since its existence was first disclosed in December 2016 in documents released to Florida Bulldog amid Freedom of Information Act litigation.For example, the names of many persons who were interviewed by FBI agents during...

Shortly after Islamists attacked America on 9/11, then-Senator Joe Biden demanded that the United States should send a taxpayer-funded, "no strings attached" gift of $200 million to the Islamic Republic of Iran, a bombshell report has revealed. In the weeks following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Biden reportedly said that "this would be a good time" to hand over a huge chunk of tax dollars to the Iranian regime while America was in mourning.

The American-born Jihadist cleric Anwar Awlaki likely played an important support role in the September 11 attacks nearly ten years ago, according to a new book that examines the threat of home-grown terrorism. The book, “The Next Wave,” by Fox News national security reporter, Catherine Herridge, reveals new documents that find Mr. Awlaki was nearly arrested after the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon for providing false information on his passport application. Today Mr. Awlaki is one of the leaders of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Mr. Awlaki is also the only known American citizen on a...

At the top-of-the-hour newsbreak it was reported a "material witness" being held since Sept related to the 9/11 attacks has gone missing. His lawyer has reported he has no information on the whereabouts of his client. The client has not been seen since last Wednesday morning when he appeared in NY to give testimony. He was told then, apparently, that he faced charges back in San Diego for falsifying information on his application for asylum. The suspect is a student at San Diego State University.

The FBI has blocked two of its veteran counterterrorism agents from going public with accusations that the CIA deliberately withheld crucial intelligence before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. FBI Special Agents Mark Rossini and Douglas Miller have asked for permission to appear in an upcoming public television documentary, scheduled to air in January, on pre-9/11 rivalries between the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency. The program is a spin-off from The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America, by acclaimed investigative reporter James Bamford, due out in a matter of days. The FBI denied Rossini...

COEUR D'ALENE, Idaho -- A University of Idaho graduate student who is under investigation for suspected terrorism ties obtained unauthorized access to a campus lab containing radioactive material, court documents allege. Sami Omar Al-Hussayen, a Saudi national working on his computer science doctoral degree, quietly moved his student office from the Computer Science Department into the school's engineering isotope lab, apparently without his adviser's knowledge, according to the documents. "The investigation of Sami Al-Hussayen has, from its outset, been focused on suspected material support to terrorism, particularly to Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda network," FBI agent Michael Gnecknow said in the...

Detention transformed doctor into man of peace Saudi carries no bitterness home as he ends San Antonio stay 05/25/2002 By DAVID McLEMORE / The Dallas Morning News SAN ANTONIO - Dr. Al-Badr Al-Hazmi sits easily on the carpeted floor of the mosque. He speaks with a soft intensity, the words spilling out as he describes the day his life was turned upside down. Stony-faced FBI agents whisked him from his San Antonio home a day after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. He was flown to New York and secreted in a detention cell for nearly two weeks. Like hundreds...

Bomb Scare At Tucson Grocery Store Jenny Rose KGUN9 News An explosive situation tied up the intersection of Prince and Campbell for hours after someone found a bomb at a grocery story. Jenny Rose has the latest. http://www.kgun9.com/NewsArticle/tabid/111...38/Default.aspx

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia (AP) — Malaysia has extended for two more years the imprisonment of a terror suspect linked to al-Qaeda's attempts to produce chemical and biological weapons, saying he has more information about terrorist operations. Yazid Sufaat, a U.S.-trained biochemist and former Malaysian army captain, was arrested in late 2001 as he returned home from Afghanistan, where officials say he was working on a biological and chemical weapons program for al-Qaeda that was ended by the U.S.-led war. Since then, he has been held without trial under Malaysia's Internal Security Act on accusations of being a member of Jemaah...

A report commissioned in mid-1999 by Rep. Curt Weldon (R) looks into possible Chinese front companies in the US seeking technology for the Chinese military. Dr. Eileen Preisser and Michael Maloof are commissioned to make the report. Dr. Preisser, who runs the Information Dominance Center at the US Army's Land Information Warfare Activity (LIWA) and will later become closely tied to Able Danger, uses LIWA's data mining capabilities to search unclassified information. According to Maloof, their results show Chinese front companies in the US posing as US corporations that acquire technology from US defense contractors. When the study is completed...

AHMED HIKMAT SHAKIR IS A shadowy figure who provided logistical assistance to one, maybe two, of the 9/11 hijackers. Years before, he had received a phone call from the Jersey City, New Jersey, safehouse of the plotters who would soon, in February 1993, park a truck bomb in the basement of the World Trade Center. The safehouse was the apartment of Musab Yasin, brother of Abdul Rahman Yasin, who scorched his own leg while mixing the chemicals for the 1993 bomb.When Shakir was arrested shortly after the 9/11 attacks, his "pocket litter," in the parlance of the investigators, included contact...

Many people have e-mailed asking for my opinion on the emerging Operation Able Danger story--in which army intelligence personnel were barred from notifying the FBI about Mohammed Atta. While I agree that the Pentagon lawyers who stopped the Able Danger operatives from notifying the FBI are culpable, and their behavior is an outrage, my take is different from most conservative commentators. I really don't think the FBI would have acted on the information. Instead, today, we'd be sweeping under the rug yet more ineptitude by the, unfortunately, "lead agency" in the War on Terror. Let's look at what the FBI...

SAN DIEGO (AP) - Two Sept. 11 hijackers "should have drawn some scrutiny from the FBI," when they lived openly in San Diego in 2000, the Justice Department's inspector general concluded in a report that chronicles the bureau's failures to connect the dots leading up to the attacks. The head of the San Diego FBI office took issue Thursday with the inspector general's report, saying it "greatly exaggerates" the possibility that local agents could have prevented the attacks. The 368-page review found that the FBI missed opportunities to learn about the al-Qaida operatives when they lived in the San Diego...

THE Bush administration revealed today that some of the September 11, 2001, hijackers booked their tickets on the internet using a computer in a college library in New Jersey. The disclosure by Ken Wainstein, US attorney for the District of Columbia in testimony to the House of Representatives subcommittee on crime, terrorism and homeland security, was intended to bolster the government's argument that Congress should renew a law allowing it to seize library and bookstore records. "Investigators tracing the activities of the hijackers determined that, on four occasions in August of 2001, individuals using internet accounts registered to Nawaf Al...

The links between Nick Berg and Zacarias Moussaoui, once described as the 20th hijacker of 9/11, opened now room for new speculations, if there are deeper ties between the OKC Bombing'95 and 9/11, than thought before. Apparently Berg knew also Moussaoui's roomates. One of them was Mujahid Menepta, who is connected to both 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the 1995 OKC bombing. But Menepta wasn't arrested in Summer 2001, when Moussaoui got caught. The FBI waited until after Sep11th.Why?Berg, Moussaoui and the OK bombing tieshttp://inn.globalfreepress.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=269 By Ewing20012004/5/24 On May 18th, 2004, according to Newsmax, Nick Berg's family insisted that...

SAN DIEGO -- A 34-year-old Saudi national believed to have ties with two of the deceased Sept. 11 hijackers was arrested Thursday in San Diego by agents with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Hasan Saddiq Faseh Alddin, a legal permanent resident of the United States, was taken into custody on immigration charges, resulting from two prior domestic violence convictions, according to Mike Unzueta, deputy special agent-in-charge for ICE investigations in San Diego.Alddin was picked up near his residence in Vista, according to ICE. The agency said the arrest stemmed from an exhaustive investigation by San Diego's Joint Terrorism Task Force....

Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar were not like the other hijackers. While it is true that the two Saudis were of a similar age and the same nationality as most of the other 9/11 conspirators, Alhazmi was 25 and Almihdhar was 26, they had much more worldly and militant backgrounds than the others, despite their young ages. In the mid-1990s both were in the Bosnia conflict, In the course of 1995 Al-Hamzi and Al-Mihdhar travelled to Bosnia to joint other Muslims in the war against the Serbs and then fought in Chechnya at various times between 1996 and 1998. A...