The emergence of LibertyForum.org constitutes one of the most-startling success stories on the Internet. Founder/owner "John Deere" agreed to give this, his first-ever interview on the subject of his creation.

A seemingly insignificant detail about Arnold Schwarzenegger’s service in the Austrian army, the fact that his father (ostensibly nothing but a small town police chief) was able to pull strings in a number of ways is noteworthy. Anyone even remotely familiar with military protocol would understand that Schwarzenegger’s father under normal circumstances would never have been able to prevail on the Austrian army to change its regulations in such dramatic fashion just for his son. “Besides, according to Arnold, Gustav had smoothed the path for his younger son by using his influence to have him stationed at a camp near Graz. He had also pulled strings so that Arnold, characteristically impressed by the size and power of tanks, could be a tank driver. Arnold claims that, thanks to Gustav’s influence, the Austrian Army made an exception to the required tank driver’s minimum age, lowering it from twenty-one to eighteen, thus enabling him to fulfill his ambition.” (Arnold: The Unauthorized Biography; p. 34.)

Perhaps even more striking is Schwarzenegger’s contention that he forgot to engage the brake after parking a tank, that it rolled into the river as a result, and that he was not disciplined for his negligence! Talk to a military veteran about this. Ask their opinion. . . . "Once he ‘parked’ a tank but forgot to put the brake on. The tank rolled into the river. According to Arnold, there were no consequences.” (Idem.)

Reminiscent of George W. Bush’s AWOL stint from the Texas Air National Guard (performed with impunity due to his father’s status), Schwarzenegger, too, was able to skip out from the Austrian army in order to compete in a contest. “He knew exactly what he wanted. And he had taken great risks to obtain it. For despite being the product of Gustav’s school of obedience and discipline, Arnold, as he would many times in his career, had gambled. To compete in Stuttgart he had gone AWOL.” (Ibid.; p. 35.)

Investigating the transformation of John Walker Lindh from a typical American teenager into the most infamous turncoat of our day, former UPI White House correspondent Mark Kukis traces the influences that played a part in Lindh's metamorphosis, from his California childhood to his capture in Mazar-i-Sharif....

Mark Kukis: I did not speak to Lindh. The Justice Department has imposed a gag order on him, and it remains unclear whether it will be lifted before he's finished serving out his time (17 years if he get time off for good behavior). Lindh has had a chance to speak out only twice since he was found, once in his initial interview with CNN -- which led to him being taken into military custody -- and once again when he was sentenced in court in the final hearing of his case. Lindh addressed the question of terrorist allegiance in court, where he insisted that he meant only to join the Taliban, not al-Qaeda. And he said he was unclear about the interwoven nature of the relationship between Osama bin Laden and the Taliban while he was in Afghanistan......

Mark Kukis: I began research for the book in Pakistan about the time [Daniel] Pearl was killed. A Kashmiri militant group, Harkat ul Mujahedin, was thought to be involved in Pearl's death. Lindh had trained with militants from this group before joining the Taliban, and part of my research involved tracking down and talking to the fighters from Harkat ul Mujahedin who knew Lindh. It took me about two months to find them, during which I spent a lot of time in madressas asking around about Lindh and Harkat ul Mujahedin....

Mark Kukis: I think Lindh is important to look at because he shows how complex the conflicts America now faces are. It's not too much of a stretch in logic to see Lindh as a result of the U.S. support of the 1980s war in Afghanistan against the Soviet invasion. The culture of militancy that Lindh absorbed began, largely, there with much U.S. help and grew in strange ways through the 1990s....

"Between 6,000 and 10,000 Muslims, the majority of them Arabs, went and fought against the Soviet troops in Afghanistan, with Saudi Arabia funding them, the ISI training and motivating them and the CIA and other Western intelligence agencies equipping them.....
A number of new pan-Islamic organisations of Wahabi-Deobandi-Ahle Hadith orientation sprang up in Pakistani soil and these were given the leadership role by the US for leading the mercenary brigade to battle. The most important amongst them were the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HUM), the Harkat-ul-Jihad-Al-Islami (HUJI) and the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET)....
The HUM, which produced some of the best fighters of the Afghan war, was favoured by the CIA and got the lion's share of the Stinger missiles, explosives and other equipment....
the CIA asked the ISI to divert part of the dregs of the HUM and the HUJI to Bosnia to assist the Muslims there in their fight against the Serbs. The transfer to Bosnia was funded by the Saudi Intelligence, the arms and ammunition were given by the Iranian Intelligence and the leadership and motivation were provided by serving and retired officers of the ISI and the Turkish intelligence. Omar Sheikh, who masterminded the kidnapping of Daniel Pearl of the "Wall Street Journal", had his jihadi inoculation in Bosnia just as bin Laden had his in Afghanistan. From Bosnia, they were diverted to Kosovo by the CIA ....."

"NEW DELHI: While the Pakistani Inter Services Public Relations claimed that former ISI director-general Lt-Gen Mahmud Ahmad sought retirement after being superseded on Monday, the truth is more shocking.
Top sources confirmed here on Tuesday, that the general lost his job because of the "evidence" India produced to show his links to one of the suicide bombers that wrecked the World Trade Centre. The US authorities sought his removal after confirming the fact that $100,000 were wired to WTC hijacker Mohammed Atta from Pakistan by Ahmad Umar Sheikh at the instance of Gen Mahumd...."

MANASSAS, Va. (AP) - Lawyers for sniper suspect John Allen Muhammad are trying to have eyewitness testimony barred from his capital murder trial next month, claiming the identifications were tainted by intense media attention and other factors.

In court papers made public Friday, Peter Greenspun and Jonathan Shapiro wrote that the recollections of eyewitnesses are tainted by continued public viewing of photographs of Muhammad and accused accomplice Lee Boyd Malvo, and by pressure on witnesses to be helpful to the investigation.

Some witnesses identified Muhammad and Malvo after being shown mug shots of the suspects, rather than being asked to pick them out of a photo spread or from a multi-person lineup, the lawyers claim. They have asked a judge to bar all eyewitness testimony identifying either Muhammad or Malvo at Muhammad's trial. The request is set for a Sept. 23 hearing.......

Muhammad, 42, is scheduled to go on trial next month in the death of Dean H. Meyers, who was killed Oct. 9 at a gas station outside Manassas. His trial has been moved to Virginia Beach amid concerns he can't get a fair trial in northern Virginia......

The suspects have been charged in 13 shootings, including 10 deaths, over a three-week span in October in Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, D.C. They are also suspected in shootings in Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, Arizona and Washington state.

[October 27, 2002] "served in the 1991 Gulf War. The former sergeant is believed to have spent time at a paramilitary training camp in Marion, Alabama, known as Ground Zero USA.
It specialises in urban warfare, martial arts and marksmanship and is a regular meeting place for US Islamic militants.
During his military service Muhammad was stationed at Fort Lewis, Washington state, home to 21,000 troops including the sniper-trained 1st Special Forces Group whose motto is One Shot, One Kill.
US military officials insisted Muhammad - a slim, 6ft 1in tall man who keeps his hair cropped - only received regular combat training and was not a member of the elite squad. But he did win the M-16 Marksmanship Expert Badge.""

"[Nov. 25, 2001] "The training and dispatching of mujahedeen, or holy warriors, has been a primary activity of bin Laden-sponsored camps in Afghanistan and Sudan since the early 1990s. The idea was borrowed from a U.S. program in the 1980s to train Muslim fighters to battle Soviet troops that occupied Afghanistan.
In radical mosques throughout the world, bin Laden loyalists have encouraged young Muslim men to take up the fight in places like Bosnia, Chechnya, Albania, Kosovo and Kashmir. Thousands have done so, either after training first in Afghanistan or going straight to the front......
Still others with Bosnian war experience are suspected of attacks in the Middle East. One of those is London cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri, who is wanted on kidnapping and terrorism charges in Yemen. He commanded a unit of foreign soldiers during the war........."

"U.S. investigators are concentrating on a possible U.S. Army connection between John Muhammad and former U.S. Army Sergeant Ali Mohammed. A former Egyptian Army officer, Ali Mohammed left the US Army Special Forces in 1989 after a three-year enlistment. He was arrested by U.S. authorities after the U.S. embassy bombings in East Africa and pleaded guilty to charges of aiding Osama bin Laden.
Ali Mohammed was the chief planner of the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam and, more interestingly, entered the United States under a covert CIA visa program. Ali Mohammed received an M-16 Expert Badge and a Secret clearance from the Army and was a special instructor at the JFK Special Operations Warfare School in Fort Bragg, North Carolina."

[Newsweek - Sept. 22 issue — How does Al-Jazeera keep getting scoops like last week’s Osama bin Laden video? Editors at the Qatar-based Arab TV network won’t say.....
The reporter, Tayssir Alouni, a native of Syria, gained brief fame two years ago when, as Al-Jazeera’s Kabul bureau chief, he got the first interview of bin Laden taking responsibility for 9/11. (Alouni says he scored the interview after being led, blindfolded, to a bin Laden hideaway.) But internal Spanish police documents obtained by NEWSWEEK show that Alouni, 48, has been under scrutiny since at least early 2000, when phone wiretaps revealed he was in “frequent and continuous” contact with Imad Eddin Barakat Yarkas, the suspected leader of Al Qaeda’s Spanish cell.........
some of the most damning evidence against Alouni, according to the police reports, is what happened when he returned to Spain from Afghanistan in July 2001. Alouni contends he was returning to visit his wife in Granada. The police reports say he very quickly had two visitors: Yarkas and Mahmoun Darkanzanli, a German-based businessman who Western intel officials have long believed was a key financier for the Hamburg cell that included 9/11 ringleader Muhammad Atta.

"According to German news weekly Der Spiegel, Deutschebank handled accounts for the bin Laden family worth $103 million British pounds (The London Guardian, 10-1-2001).
The New York Times (9-29-2001) added that FBI officials are "focusing more than ever on Germany," and in particular, an apartment used by Mohamed Atta -- considered the lead hijacker -- and Ramzi Muhammad Abdullah Bin Al Shibh, who also shared the apartment with other hijackers. Fox News and the Washington Post both reported on 1-2-2001 that Al Shibh wired $14,000 to Zacarias Moussaoui, now in U.S. custody and referred to as the "20th hijacker."
An American official said "It looks like it was organized in Germany... there is clear evidence of meetings between Mr. Atta, Mr. al-Shehhi, and Mr. Jarrah, three of the four suspected hijackers," according to the Times.
Mamoun Darkanzanli, a Syrian businessman whose bank accounts were frozen after the attacks, has been implicated by American officials as an associate of Osama bin Laden....U.S. officials say currently jailed terrorist and bin Laden's highest ranking associate in U.S. custody -- Mamdouh Mahmud Salim -- named Darkazanli as the co-signer of Salim's bank account at Deutschebank in Hamburg, also according to the Times......
Investigators also suspect that Darkazanli was supporting bin Laden's Al-Q'aeda network financially, using Deutschebank as his supporting entity for terrorism."

"It is established that only United and American stocks had this level of put buying before the attacks. No other airlines were affected. Many of the UAL puts are purchased through Deutschebank/AB Brown, a firm managed until 1998 by the current Executive Director of the CIA, A.B. "Buzzy" Krongard"

"The apartment was referred to by the men as Dar al Ansar, or "House of the Followers." Tellingly, this name was also given to the Peshawar office used by Osama Bin Laden as a safe house for fighters who were traveling to Afghanistan during the 1980’s to wage jihad against the Soviet Union."

"Before he was arrested in Germany in September 1998, [Mamdouh Mahmud Salim] traveled to Bosnia. The affidavit filed Tuesday says that papers found in eight BIF-affiliated offices in Bosnia indicate that Salim's 'visa and housing (there) were sponsored by the BIF.' The affidavit also alleges that papers found in Bosnia show 'Arnaout attesting that Salim was a director of the BIF.'"