Free Republic

Michael Flynn, former chief of staff for President Donald Trump and ex-U.S. intelligence chief, revealed in 2016 that laptops seized from jihadists were filled with as much as 80 percent pornography, alongside videos of beheadings and other gruesome footage. CIA Director Mike Pompeo said that the “documents retrieved from the 2011 Navy Seal raid that killed Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden would be released in ‘weeks’—with the exception of one particular part of the haul, his pornography stash.” The Newsweek article below indicates that “while these documents are considered operational, his porn collection is not, and will likely remain classified.”...

The voice is that of a soft-spoken 28-year-old, but the message is vintage Osama bin Laden, giving orders to kill. When the audio recording began turning up on jihadist websites two weeks ago, it was as if the dead terrorist was channeling himself through his favorite son. “Prepare diligently to inflict crippling losses on those who have disbelieved,” Hamza bin Laden, scion of the Sept. 11, 2001, mastermind, says in a thin baritone that eerily echoes his father. “Follow in the footsteps of martyrdom-seekers before you.” The recording, first aired May 13, is one in a string of recent pronouncements...

Obama’s national security advisor is a liar -- and possibly a felon.Former President Obama’s National Security Advisor Susan Rice asked for the names of Trump transition officials to be unmasked and made public in raw intelligence files, according to media reports, a move apparently carried out to harm the incoming Trump administration. As recently as March 22, Rice denied knowing anything about the intelligence reports. In an appearance on “PBS Newshour,” she said pretty definitely, “I know nothing about this.” The new news reports paint Rice as a liar. The evidence we know about in the Trump-Russia saga so far...

The Department of Defense and the Office of Military Commissions will allocate seats for news media aboard military chartered aircraft for travel from Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland to Naval Station Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to cover military commission pre-trial proceedings scheduled for United States v. Khalid Shaikh Mohammad et. al., Jan. 25 - Feb. 3, 2017. Travel originates at Andrews AFB, Maryland on Monday, Jan. 23, 2017; return flight from Guantanamo to Andrews AFB, Saturday, Feb. 4, 2017. Due to a limited number of seats aboard the flight and limited accommodations at Guantanamo Bay, selection is not guaranteed. However, there...

For years, many Republicans and conservatives have charged that President Barack Obama was shielding embarrassing intelligence and policy details about Iran in order to support the nuclear deal reached last year. With Donald Trump's upset victory, the party of Lincoln will have an opportunity to declassify and disclose this information. While no decisions have been made, two early picks to Trump's cabinet suggest this is going to happen. Let's start with retired general Michael Flynn, the next president's choice to be national security adviser. Flynn served for two years as Obama's director of the Defense Intelligence Agency from 2012 to...

British spies will be cleared in a number of cases of alleged complicity in the torture of detainees abroad, the BBC understands. Scotland Yard and the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) are to issue a joint statement on Thursday. It follows an investigation into the conduct of officers from MI5 and MI6. Although it is expected that no charges will be brought in some cases it is understood the statement will contain other significant information. The BBC's home affairs correspondent, Danny Shaw says the fact that the statement has been prepared by the DPP, together with Scotland Yard, is highly...

Trinity College Dublin is to remove the bible from its crest, it has been there since 1592. They will also change the color scheme on the ancient crest to avoid a clash with Ryanair’s corporate image. The world famous college is set to be rebranded as ‘Trinity College, the University of Dublin’ in a strategic plan to be launched next year. The Irish Times reports that it is not only the name that will change at the university, home to the Book of Kells. Religious symbolism has also been removed from the college’s ancient crest at a cost of almost...

Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein said in an interview published Sunday that she would not have ordered the assassination of Osama bin Laden. Marking the 15th anniversary of September 11 terror attacks, Stein instead told the Des Moines Register that she would have tried to bring the terror leader to trial in accordance with international law.

The day before the terror attacks on September 11, 2001, former President Bill Clinton told a group of businessmen in Australia that he "could have killed" the man behind those attacks, Osama bin Laden, in 1998, but he decided against launching a strike out of concern for civilian casualties. It's a startling and tragic bit of irony that remained hidden until Wednesday, when Michael Kroger, the former head of the Liberal Party in Australia, released the audio during an interview on Sky News. Mr. Clinton knew he was being recorded, but the audio was never released because Kroger said he'd...

In his stunning 2003 book Dereliction of Duty, Air Force Lt. Col. Robert “Buzz” Patterson, a presidential aide and carrier of the “nuclear football,” describes President Clinton’s gross irresponsibility toward national security. Patterson tells how, in the fall of 1998, the watch officer in the White House Situation Room notified the president’s national security adviser, Sandy Berger, that they had located bin Laden and had “a two-hour window to strike.” Here is Patterson’s chilling account: On Sept. 13, 1996, “Pilots were in the cockpits, waiting to launch, targets were identified, everything was in place, all [Berger] needed was the go-ahead.”...

BEIRUT -- Al-Qaida's media arm has released an audio in which the purported son of the late al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden threatens revenge against the U.S. for assassinating his father.

Salim Hamdan was just sentenced to five and half years for chauffeuring Osama bin Laden through McDonald’s drive-thrus, or whatever the Afghani equivalent is, while he plotted the 9/11 attacks. Hamdan has been holed up in Guantanamo Bay for over five years without a trial, so he’s actually eligible for release in five months, although Bush & Co. have threatened to hold him indefinitely after he has served him time. The media has been all over the story because 1) Not every programming minute can be filled by the Olympics; and 2) It potentially sets a precedent for suspected terrorists...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States has brought conspiracy charges against a Yemeni man and a Sudanese man, both described as having close ties to al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden (news - web sites), making them the first Guantanamo Bay prisoners to face criminal charges, the Pentagon (news - web sites) said on Tuesday. The Defense Department said Ali Hamza Ahmed Sulayman al Bahlul of Yemen and Ibrahim Ahmed Mahmoud al Qosi of Sudan were charged with a single count each of conspiracy to commit war crimes and will be brought to trial before a military tribunal. Pentagon spokesman...

A FORMER NAVY SEAL who shot Osama bin Laden and wrote a bestselling book about the raid is now the subject of a widening federal criminal investigation into whether he used his position as an elite commando for personal profit while on active duty, according to two people familiar with the case. Matthew Bissonnette, the former SEAL and author of No Easy Day, a firsthand account of the 2011 bin Laden operation, had already been under investigation by both the Justice Department and the Navy for revealing classified information. The two people familiar with the probe said the current investigation,...

Weeks before President Obama ordered the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in May 2011, four administration lawyers hammered out rationales intended to overcome any legal obstacles — and made it all but inevitable that Navy SEALs would kill the fugitive Qaeda leader, not capture him. Stretching sparse precedents, the lawyers worked in intense secrecy. Fearing leaks, the White House would not let them consult aides or even the administration’s top lawyer, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. They did their own research, wrote memos on highly secure laptops and traded drafts hand-delivered by trusted couriers. Just days before the...

It’s not that the truth about bin Laden’s death is unknowable; it’s that we don’t know it. And we can’t necessarily console ourselves with the hope that we will have more answers any time soon; to this day, the final volume of the C.I.A.’s official history of the Bay of Pigs remains classified. We don’t know what happened more than a half-century ago, much less in 2011.

London, Dec 28. (PTI): Libyan leader Maommar Gadhafi, who recently abandoned his country's weapons of mass destruction programme, had armed al-Qaeda terror network with germ bombs, a report claimed today. Libyan intelligence chief Musa Kusa told British secret service agency Mi5 that tens of thousands of weapons had been produced at 10 secret sites in the country, the Sunday Express said. Kusa has named 500 al-Qaeda terrorists in Britain and the information he gave is being checked, it said. Libya was closer than Syria, Iran and Iraq to producing a nuclear bomb but last week Gadhafi surrendered his weapons of...

The history of Obama’s most important foreign-policy victory is still being written. Mark Bowden was watching a ballgame — the Phillies versus the Mets — on the night of May 1, 2011, when the network cut away to President Obama in the East Room of the White House. “Tonight,” the president said, ‘‘I can report to the American people and to the world that the United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of Al Qaeda and a terrorist who’s responsible for the murder of thousands of innocent men, women and children.’’ Five minutes or...

A former Pakistani defense minister appeared to confirm on Indian television on Tuesday that both his country's senior military and civilian leadership knew of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden's presence in their country at the time of his death in 2011. Bin Laden was killed after his compound in the environs of Islamabad was raided by U.S. Navy SEALs. [....] [T]his week, Chaudhry Ahmed Mukhtar, Pakistan's defense minister between 2008 and 2012, told Indian TV station CNN-IBN that they knew that bin Laden was in Pakistan. Here's an excerpt of CNN-IBN's journalist posing questions to Mukhtar: Question: Did this word...

Pakistan's leaders knew about Osama bin Laden's presence in the country before he was killed by US Navy SEALs four years ago, their former defence minister has said. Chaudhry Ahmad Mukhtar told CNN-IBN that Pakistan's top military and civilian leaders were aware bin Laden was living in Abbottabad. This included then-President Asif Ali Zardari, army chief Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the joint chiefs of staff and people in the intelligence agency. "The people who were part and parcel of the whole action like the President of Pakistan, the Armed Forces Chief, the Joint Chief of Staff and the agency people, they...