Free Republic

A few weeks ago, the US Central Command announced that an air raid had killed an ISIS chemical weapon expert in Mosul. The ISIS operative, Iraqi engineer Mahmoud al-Sabawi, used to work at Saddam Hussein’s chemical weapons program before he joined al-Qaeda in Iraq after the 2003 US led invasion. The idea that ISIS terrorists have access to chemical weapons brings back images of the genocide inflicted on the Kurds by Saddam Hussein in the late 1980’s. The Halabja Massacre killed up to 5,000 and injured between 7,000 and 10,000 more. If ISIS jihadists have a stash of chemical weapons,...

Islamic State blows up Church of Immaculate Virgin FEBRUARY 6, 2015 9:42 AM BY RAYMOND IBRAHIM] According to Rudaw, an Iraqi news agency, on February 2, security sources from the Ninevah police district said that the Islamic State blew up the Church of the Immaculate Virgin—one of the largest and oldest Chaldean churches in the ancient section of Mosul. The security source said: “The organization finished wiring the church with explosives this morning and detonated it, leaving widespread destruction in the church and neighboring buildings.” Prior to this, the old church — which stood on the foundation of what was...

Is Iran’s Lebanese client losing its grip? Last week Hezbollah buried one of its princes, Jihad Mughniyeh, the 22-year-old son of the late Imad Mughniyeh, a legendary Hezbollah commander implicated in such infamous operations as the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut. The assassination of the elder Mughniyeh in Damascus in 2008, typically attributed to Israel, is regarded as one of the organization’s most traumatic blows. However, some in the Shiite community here say that Israel’s January 18 strike on a three-car convoy in the Golan Heights near the Syrian town of Quneitra—which killed the younger Mughniyeh...

Global PUBLIC debt ~$58 TRILLION. Not included: unfunded liabilities. Anyone Qs how this ends? http://t.co/KMWvO8nVVx pic.twitter.com/7XQBYXfI2d — Peter Spina (@goldseek) January 29, 2015 -- The Global Slowdown Is Making Asia's Debt Mountain Even Worse - slides from Morgan Stanley http://t.co/U5LNGZcjcX pic.twitter.com/5OBLMb7XnD — Mike Bird (@Birdyword) January 27, 2015 The Global Slowdown Is Making Asia's Debt Mountain Even Worse Morgan Stanley just came out with a fresh chartbook looking through Asia's debt situation again. It's safe to say that it's still looking grim. While all eyes are on Europe, falling inflation (and the threat of full-blown deflation) are major hazards in...

Over the coming months, I believe we could see an economic meltdown at least six times the size of the 2007 subprime mortgage meltdown... The next financial collapse, already on our radar screen, will not come from hedge funds or home mortgages. It will come from junk bonds, especially energy-related and emerging-market corporate debt. The Financial Times recently estimated that the total amount of energy-related corporate debt issued from 2009-2014 for exploration and development is over $5 trillion. Meanwhile, the Bank for International Settlements recently estimated that the total amount of emerging-market dollar-denominated corporate debt is over $9 trillion. Energy-sector...

ALEXANDRIA, Va. — After losing a seven-year legal battle, James Risen, a reporter for The New York Times, reluctantly took the witness stand in federal court here on Monday, but refused to answer any questions that could help the Justice Department identify his confidential sources. Mr. Risen said he would not say anything to help prosecutors bolster their case against Jeffrey A. Sterling, a former C.I.A. officer who is set to go on trial soon on charges of providing classified information to Mr. Risen for his 2006 book, “State of War.” The Justice Department first subpoenaed Mr. Risen to testify...

Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama was quick to blame the bankruptcy of Wall Street giant Lehman Brothers on Republicans’ “failed philosophy”. Obama’s September 15 comments were repeated throughout the media--yet reporters have not noted Obama’s glaring conflict of interest—the Lehman debt owed to a bank owned by the financier who loaned millions of dollars to Tony Rezko.

A former Los Angeles cop who had allegedly warned he would target law enforcement in retribution for being fired is now suspected of shooting three officers early Thursday, killing one, The shootings -- which come a day after Irvine, California, police named Christopher Jordan Dorner as the suspect in a double slaying there Sunday be on the lookout for the onetime officer and Navy lieutenant. The manhunt stretched from Los Angeles to San Diego He worked for the LAPD from 2005 until 2008. Multiple law enforcement agencies linked Dorner, 33, to the shooting of two Riverside police officers in...

Meet the woman JPMorgan Chase paid one of the largest fines in American history to keep from talking By Matt Taibbi | November 6, 2014 "It was like watching an old lady get mugged on the street," she says. "I thought, 'I can't sit by any longer.'" Fleischmann is the central witness in one of the biggest cases of white-collar crime in American history, possessing secrets that JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon late last year paid $9 billion (not $13 billion as regularly reported – more on that later) to keep the public from hearing. Back in 2006, as a...

Voter fraud still totally not an issue. How many non-citizens participate in U.S. elections? More than 14 percent of non-citizens in both the 2008 and 2010 samples indicated that they were registered to vote. Furthermore, some of these non-citizens voted. Our best guess, based upon extrapolations from the portion of the sample with a verified vote, is that 6.4 percent of non-citizens voted in 2008 and 2.2 percent of non-citizens voted in 2010.Because non-citizens tended to favor Democrats (Obama won more than 80 percent of the votes of non-citizens in the 2008 CCES sample), we find that this participation was...

In early 2008, candidate Obama told the San Francisco Chronicle that "under my plan ... electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket." Obama was referring to his plan to cap greenhouse-gas emissions, which would, among other things, effectively choke off coal as an energy source. He was just as fond of high gasoline prices, telling CNBC in June 2008 — as gas prices shot up to $4 a gallon — that he "would have preferred a gradual adjustment." Six years later, and Obama has succeeded.

For a long time before I became a reporter, I never paid attention to bylines — the announcement of who wrote a given article. That all changed for me one day when I was sitting at Jimmy T’s Diner in Washington, D.C., reading a hate-filled “fashion” column that was nothing more than the projection of angry liberal political views. It was so awful that I wanted to know who wrote it. The author, Robin Givhan, of course went on to win a Pulitzer. I’m part of a profession that rewards liberal political views above most all else. Along similar...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)Nicolle Wallace told her new co-hosts on “The View” Monday that her relationship with Sarah Palin was “irreparably damaged” following the infamous Katie Couric interviews during the 2008 presidential campaign. Wallace, a senior advisers and representatives of Sen. John McCain and the former Alaska governor’s campaign, revealed Monday that her relationship with Palin “erupted and exploded” in the aftermath of the interview, in which Palin claims she was set up “for failure.” “Our relationship really erupted and exploded, and was irreparably damaged after the Katie Couric interview, in which she had thought I had set her up for failure,” said...

<p>America is suddenly angry at the laxity, incompetence, and polarizing politics of the Obama administration, the bad optics of the president putting about in his bright golf clothes while the world burns. Certainly, no recent president has failed on so many fronts — honesty, transparency, truthfulness, the economy, foreign policy, the duties of the commander-in-chief, executive responsibilities, and spiritual leadership.</p>

All five terror suspects the Obama administration exchanged for the release of Sgt. Bowe Berghdahl on Saturday were deemed in a 2008 Pentagon dossier to be ‘high risk’ for launching attacks on American interests if released.

Meghan McCain was sharply critical of Karl Rove during an interview with Larry King, going so far as to say she hates him and that he needs to apologize to her family. The daughter of the 2008 Republican presidential nominee showed no love for the political commentator and said he is no longer a relevant political figure, according to a transcript of the interview from Ora.TV’s “PoliticKING with Larry King” that will air on Thursday night. “I hate Karl Rove and I think he still needs to apologize to my family, which he has not done, for things that happened...

Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin isn't to blame for the GOP's loss in the 2008 presidential election, Meghan McCain, daughter of 2008 Republican presidential nominee John McCain, says. McCain told talk show host Larry King in an interview for his PoltiKING show that not even the Son of God could have saved her dad's campaign. 'I think my father could have had Jesus Christ as his running mate and it wouldn't have mattered in '07. I truly believe that,' she said. McCain wrote in her 2010 book Dirty Sexy Politics that Palin added 'drama, stress, complications, panic and loads of...

Original Title:Hillary, the Fighter: Hillary Clinton Fought Secret Service Agent to Fly Into Blizzard During her campaign for president in 2008, then-Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton was involved in a profanity-laced argument with one of her Secret Service agents, according to Glenn Thrush a reporter for THE POLITICO. Thrush witnessed Clinton being cursed at by an agent in an argument over her demand to fly the campaign plane, a Boeing 737, into a roiling Wisconsin blizzard. “I remember watching a usually stoic Secret Service agent cursing Clinton on the tarmac in Milwaukee when she ordered the campaign’s rattletrap 737 to fly...

The Chinese “received a message from the Russians” back in 2008 suggesting a pact to sell Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac securities on the market, which would have nudged down the price of the debt of Fannie and Freddie and also maximized the chaos on Wall Street, a former U.S. official told BBC. It confirms a report that TheBlaze TV’s For the Record first aired back in September 2013.

Michigan woman dead for six years found only after money runs out For six years the bills were paid, the grass was cut and no one noticed the body of the dead woman sitting in the back seat of a car in a garage of a residential Pontiac, Michigan neighborhood. Her mummified body was finally found this week by someone dispatched to check on the property that fell into foreclosure after the money ran out of her account and the mortgage payments stopped, police said on Friday. "It is kind of the perfect storm for a mysterious set of circumstance...