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Kuwait City, 5 Feb. (AKI) - The US air raid that killed al-Qaeda leader Abu Layth al-Libi in Pakistan is reported to have also killed three other leaders from the terrorist network. According to the Kuwaiti daily, al-Watan, two Kuwaitis and a Libyan also died in the missile attack conducted by a Predator aircraft on January 25 in Mir Ali, in North Waziristan on the border of Afghanistan. The daily said the attack was aimed at what was believed to have been an al-Qaeda summit meeting. Abu Obeida Tawari al-Obeidi and Abu Adel al-Kuwaiti were reportedly there with al-Libi.Abu Adel...

Since midsummer, the Senate Intelligence Committee has been attempting to solve the biggest mystery of the Iraq war: the disparity between the Bush Administration’s prewar assessment of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and what has actually been discovered. The committee is concentrating on the last ten years’ worth of reports by the C.I.A. Preliminary findings, one intelligence official told me, are disquieting. “The intelligence community made all kinds of errors and handled things sloppily,” he said. The problems range from a lack of quality control to different agencies’ reporting contradictory assessments at the same time. One finding, the official went...

New Iraqi defense minister Khaled al-Obeidi has delivered his first official speech, insisting that the Kurdistan Region must hand back terrorists that have been living in the KRI. Al-Obeidi is a Sunni, was approved as the new Iraqi defense minister along with Mohammed Salem al-Ghabban, a Shia, who was appointed interior minister. “The Kurdistan Region should hand back criminals who have been charged with terrorist acts to the federal government, so they can face justice,” said Al-Obeidi. “The Kurdistan Region security forces and Iraqi police should arrest all those criminals, as they are threats to the security and stability of...

I was watching TV this evening and started to flip cable channels when I saw a streaming on MSNBC on our forces finding castor beans. The following is a part of what their website said about it. NBC News’ Jim Miklaszewski that within just the past week, U.S. investigators had found two shipping containers filled with millions of much more recent documents relating to chemical and biological weapons. One of the documents, from 2001, was titled “Document burial and U.N. activities in Iraq,” the sources said. It gave detailed instructions on how to hide materials and deceive U.N. weapons inspectors,...

(Reuters) - U.S. officials in Libya have begun to look for recruits for a commando force which they plan to train to fight militants, a former commander of Libyan rebels who toppled Muammar Gaddafi said on Tuesday. There was no immediate U.S. comment. After a wave of anti-American violence in the Arab world in September during which the U.S. ambassador to Libya died in an Islamist militant attack, President Barack Obama took measures to improve the security of U.S. diplomatic installations in the region. A team of about 10 Americans from the embassy in Tripoli visited a paramilitary base in...

The sign out front said "Saddam Hussein's Nuclear Mastermind." Inside, Mahdi Obeidi, former head of Iraq's centrifuge program for uranium enrichment, told more than 200 people, including Department of Energy employees, that he wants to help stop one of humanity's greatest nightmares - global weapons of mass destruction. "We cannot afford one mistake," Obeidi said. "Everybody should be concerned." Obeidi, who emigrated to the United States in 2003, spoke on Wednesday morning at the Pollard Auditorium at Oak Ridge Associated Universities. His visit was sponsored by the Oak Ridge Office of Counterintelligence and funded by the U.S. State Department, according...

BERLIN, May 9 (Xinhua) -- Iraqi Defense Minister Abdel Qader Jassim Obeidi said here Wednesday that the security situation in his country was not as bad as it was often reported. There was terrorist activity in only four of Iraq's 18 provinces, Obeidi said after meeting his German counterpart Franz Josef Jung at a Berlin military base. Jung promised more German contribution to fighting violence in Iraq, adding Germany would train 350 Iraqi soldiers to vehicle maintenance this year and provide Iraq with 120 trucks and 30 ambulances. A decision had not been made on whether to train them in...

BAGHDAD, Iraq - One of Saddam Hussein’s main lawyers was shot to death Wednesday after he was abducted from his Baghdad home by men wearing police uniforms, the third killing of a member of the former leader’s defense team since the trial started some eight months ago. Khamis al-Obeidi, an Iraqi who represented Saddam and his half brother Barzan Ibrahim in their trial, was abducted from his house Wednesday morning, said Saddam’s top lawyer, Khalil al-Dulaimi. His body was found on a street near the Shiite slum of Sadr City, police Lt. Thaer Mahmoud said. Chief prosecutor Jaafar al-Moussawi confirmed...

ALARM - a lawyer of Saddam Hussein killed BAGHDAD - One of lawyers of Iraqi president deposed Saddam Hussein, Khamis Al-Obeidi, was killed by "terrorists", announced Wednesday public television Iraqia.

You have probably heard by now that the doctor who examined the bodies of the civilians in Haditha after the alleged Marine rampage said they were shot in the chest and head and from close range.You have probably also heard it reported that the death certificates of the deceased record that all the victims were shot. Here is an article which features the source for the quote and probably the author of the death certificates, from the terrorist supporters at Uruknet: An image taken from footage shot on November 19, 2005 shows bodies in a morgue after an incident in...

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - U.S. and Iraqi troops launched a major offensive against insurgents in Baghdad's western Abu Ghraib district late Sunday, and aides to a radical anti-American Shiite cleric worked to defuse tensions caused by a recent spate of sectarian killings. Amid the violence, Iraq's government demanded that Syria do more to stop foreign fighters from crossing the porous border and a senior Iraqi Trade Ministry official was killed in an ongoing terror campaign that has killed more than 550 people in less than one month. Iraqi authorities also announced that Ghazi Hammud al-Obeidi, 65, one of the most-wanted...

Is it really true that Saddam Hussein had no "stockpiles" of weapons of mass destruction before the U.S. invaded in March 2003? Not exactly - at least not if one counts the 500 tons of uranium that the Iraqi dictator kept stored at his al Tuwaitha nuclear weapons development plant. The press hasn't made much of Saddam's 500-ton uranium stockpile, downplaying the story to such an extent that most Americans aren't even aware of it. But it's been reported - albeit in a by-the-way fashion - by the New York Times and a handful of other media outlets. And one...

<p>A key Iraqi scientist recently told the CIA that high-strength aluminum tubes bought by Baghdad weren't meant for nuclear bomb production, as President Bush suggested in his State of the Union address, two experts on Iraq's nuclear program say.</p> <p>Mahdi Shukur Obeidi, who headed a uranium-enrichment unit vital to Iraq's pre-1991 bomb plans, "also said that since '91 they hadn't resurrected a nuclear weapon program," according to ex-Iraq inspector David Albright, an American physicist who acted as go-between for Obeidi to talk to U.S. authorities a few weeks ago.</p>

WASHINGTON — On most days now, Mahdi Obeidi rides his new mountain bike, plays with his grandkids and works on getting a U.S. patent for technology he originally developed to build a nuclear bomb for Saddam Hussein. Obeidi, who headed Hussein's uranium enrichment program until it was shut down in 1991, is the only Iraqi weapons scientist that the CIA is known to have brought to the United States after the invasion last year. The CIA also flew eight of his family members here in August 2003 and secretly set them up in three adjoining apartments in a leafy Virginia...

Saddam, the bomb and me Mahdi Obeidi NYT Tuesday, September 28, 2004 Iraq's nuclear program While the final report from Charles Duelfer, the top American inspector of Iraq's covert weapons programs, won't be released for a few weeks, the portions that have already been made public touch on many of the experiences I had while working as the head of Saddam Hussein's nuclear centrifuge program. Now that I am living in the United States, I hope to answer some of the most important questions that remain. What was really going on in Iraq before the American invasion last year? Iraq's...

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR While the final report from Charles A. Duelfer, the top American inspector of Iraq's covert weapons programs, won't be released for a few weeks, the portions that have already been made public touch on many of the experiences I had while working as the head of Saddam Hussein's nuclear centrifuge program. Now that I am living in the United States, I hope to answer some of the most important questions that remain. What was really going in Iraq before the American invasion last year? Iraq's nuclear weapons program was on the threshold of success before the 1991 invasion...

September 26, 2004OP-ED CONTRIBUTORSaddam, the Bomb and MeBy MAHDI OBEIDI hile the final report from Charles A. Duelfer, the top American inspector of Iraq's covert weapons programs, won't be released for a few weeks, the portions that have already been made public touch on many of the experiences I had while working as the head of Saddam Hussein's nuclear centrifuge program. Now that I am living in the United States, I hope to answer some of the most important questions that remain. What was really going in Iraq before the American invasion last year? Iraq's nuclear weapons program was...

AN IRAQI scientist-turned-author says the most significant pieces of his country’s dormant nuclear programme were buried under a lotus tree in his backyard, untouched for more than a decade before the US-led invasion in 2003.But their existence, Dr Mahdi Obeidi writes in a new book, is evidence that the international community should remain vigilant as other countries try to replicate Iraq’s successes before the 1991 Gulf war to develop components necessary for a nuclear weapon. In The Bomb in my Garden, Dr Obeidi details Saddam’s quest for a nuclear bomb: "Although Saddam never had nuclear weapons at his disposal, the...

NAJAF, Iraq -- Militants loyal to firebrand cleric Muqtada al-Sadr said Saturday that they had handed over the keys to a revered Muslim shrine in the holy city of Najaf to top Shiite religious leaders, a move that marks a crucial step toward ending two weeks of fighting. The militants, however, remain in control of the Imam Ali Shrine while final details of the transfer are worked out, said al-Sadr aide Ahmed al-Shaibany. Al-Sadr's militia had moved their guns out the shrine on Friday, but the militiamen themselves stayed as negotiators tried to wrangle over getting the militants out of...

This past Sunday, James Carville mocked the discovery of buried uranium-enrichment equipment in the backyard of Shukur Ubaydi – a key leader of Iraq's drive to obtain nuclear weapons prior to the 1991 Gulf War. Carville derided the centrifuge parts as looking like "a carburetor some redneck would have in his garage." NBC's Russert did not challenge Carville on this astonishing display of partisanship dressed up as ignorance, but the statement revealed a great deal about Democratic strategy on the WMD debate that has already begun: Deny the relevance and importance of every piece of evidence, and assert that nothing...