Free Republic

Johnny Michael Spann 1969-2001 Never Forgive, Never Forget... RIP

Many of his foreign fighters come from Afghanistan -- men like Murad, who is now being held in Aleppo as a prisoner-of-war... All he had wanted was an Iranian residence permit, he says... he found himself fighting as a mercenary in the Syrian civil war on the side of the Bashar Assad regime... When a violent explosion caused the house he was in to collapse, he found himself thinking about his daughters, he says. "I screamed and thought I was suffocating. And then, everything around me was quiet." Men arrived and pulled Murad, who was still screaming, out of the...

This video is a moving tribute to honor an outstanding young Marine Officer by his father, Dr. Bill Kristoff. At the age of 61, Dr. Bill Kristoff of Truckee, CA joined the U.S. Navy Medical Corps in order to honor the memory of his oldest son by serving as a surgeon in Afghanistan to treat wounded Marines. While doing some further research on this amazing family, I found this: The outdoor activities were a joy shared by Nathan, his father, and his younger brother, Austin, 24, who joined the Marines shortly before Nathan died.The family kept word of Nathan's death...

Streamed live on May 20, 2015 WOW, watch author Don Brown blow the lid off of the official government report about the tragic shoot down of SEAL TEAM SIX helicopter, Code Name - Extortion 17. On August 6, 2011—three months after members of Navy SEAL Team Six killed Osama Bin Laden—Taliban forces took down a United States helicopter, call sign "Extortion 17." The attack killed the Air National Guard crew, seven unidentified members of the Afghan military, and seventeen members of Navy SEAL Team Six—warrior brothers from the same Team that had killed Osama Bin Laden just ninety days prior....

Russian PM Dmitry Medvedev has revoked a decree that allowed delivery of NATO military equipment to Afghanistan through Russian territory. According to the official document, signed by Medvedev and published on Monday, all previous decisions on NATO cargo transit to Afghanistan have now been revoked. This includes an act allowing delivery of military hardware and equipment via rail, motor vehicles, or through Russian airspace. The Russian Foreign Ministry has been ordered to inform all the countries involved.

John W. Gaissert, the police chief of Commerce, Georgia, near the MOA camp in Franklin County, is a retired Navy commander who has spent a career in law enforcement, working directly on military and civilian counter-terrorism issues. Gaissert was a security consultant for the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta and also testified in 2010 to a U.S. House Subcommittee on Intelligence. He believes it would be a mistake to dismiss Jamaat Fuqra and Muslims of America as merely pietistic Muslims trying to live in peace out in the countryside. “Their spiritual mentor is Sheikh Gilani and his concept is to...

The Russian government’s instruction on military cargo transits through the country to Afghanistan has expired, according to a document on the government’s website on administrative information published on Monday. Black Hawk Helicopters coming in to land at firebase in Afghanistan © Flickr/ chuck holton/ U.S. Army Photo International Forces in Afghanistan Failed to Unroot Terrorism - Moscow On July 6, 2009, Moscow and Washington signed the Military Transit Agreement on regular transit of US military equipment and personnel to Afghanistan over Russian territory. Under the agreement, US military transport aircraft could make at least 4,500 flights per year to Afghanistan...

Saudi Arabia will join the nuclear club by buying “off the shelf” atomic weapons from Pakistan, US officials told a London newspaper.

Dianne Feinstein of California arguably used to be the CIA's best friend on the Democratic side of the Senate. I think it's fair to say that San Francisco voters were not enthusiastic about her pro-intelligence posture during the George W. Bush presidency. One thing DiFi has going for her, though, is that it's hard even for critics to not crack a smile at her famously idiosyncratic stubborn streak. She's old-school. She makes up her mind and digs in deep. And then something else sticks in her craw. As Senate Select Committee on Intelligence chairwoman during President Barack Obama's first six...

What Pakistan Knew About the Bin Laden Raid Husain Haqqani With a litany of unproved claims, veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has revived discussion about the circumstances in which al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was discovered and killed in May 2011 in the Pakistani garrison city of Abbottabad. Some of Hersh’s assertions in a 10,000-word London Review of Books article border on fantasy. He claims that bin Laden lived under the protection of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), was given up for reward money by one of the agency’s officers, and was eventually eliminated in a U.S. raid covertly backed...

Russia has deployed hundreds of troops for drills in Central Asia with its ex-Soviet allies in a show of force as anxiety grows over a surge in fighting in neighbouring Afghanistan. Around 2,500 personnel from the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO) are taking part in joint exercises due to run to Wednesday in Tajikistan. The move is seen as re-enforcing Moscow's role as the main guarantor of the fragile region's security after US troops leave Afghanistan. The Russian deployment of about 500 troops for the drills started last week, bolstered by soldiers from Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Armenia and Belarus....

The 2016 presidential election is attracting an unusually large number of hopefuls. The Republicans will probably field more than a dozen candidates and the Democrats, as many as five. Presently, very few of these supposed contenders have a real chance of becoming president. Republicans Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina and Ted Cruz are long shots. On the Democratic side, that term applies to everyone but Hillary Rodham Clinton.. ~snip~ If you tell them in private, "You do not have a chance to be president," they will point to underdogs who won, such as Jimmy Carter or Ronald Reagan, or front-runners who...

Mullah Norullah Noori, Abdul Haq Wasiq, Mullah Mohammad Fazl, Khairullah Khairkhwa and Mohammend Nabi Omari, the five Taliban Commanders traded for Sgt. Bergdahl, will soon be released from their “confinement.” Admiral James T. “Ace” Lyons said there is “little doubt” that the terrorists will return to the battlefield in Afghanistan. These terrorists are set to be released on June 1st, one year to the day after they were traded for Sgt. Bergdahl. As part of the trade, the government of Qatar had promised to “restrict” the terrorists’ movements for one year. Now, they will be free. Free to go right...

President Obama lied to Americans about the role of Pakistan special forces in the raid which killed Osama Bin Laden so he could take credit for the mission, an expose published on Sunday has claimed. Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh has accused the the Commander-In-Chief of rushing to receive plaudits just hours after the Navy SEAL operation which killed the head of Al Qaeda and 9/11 mastermind four years ago.

R.J. Hillhouse, a former professor, Fulbright fellow and novelist whose writing on intelligence and military outsourcing has appeared in the Washington Post and New York Times, made the same main assertions in 2011 about the death of Osama bin Laden as Seymour Hersh’s new story in the London Review of Books — apparently based on different sources than those used by Hersh. Bin Laden was killed by Navy SEALs on May 2, 2011. Three months later, on August 7, Hillhouse posted a story on her blog “The Spy Who Billed Me” stating that (1) the U.S. did not learn about...

Much of Seymour Hersh’s extensive London Review of Books exposé of the attack that killed Osama bin Laden in 2011 merely reiterates what common sense had argued all along. Pakistani intelligence could not have been unaware that Osama bin Laden was hiding in Abbottabad. Pakistani intelligence could not have been kept entirely in the dark about the plot to kill Osama bin Laden. Despite all the public breast beating and name calling, US and Pakistan were very much working together. The “treasure trove” of materials recovered from the compound actually yielded little. There were no garbage bags filled with computers...

This weekend, a dozen Republican presidential hopefuls showed up at the South Carolina Freedom Summit. They were there to court primary voters who will winnow the presidential field next February. Judging from the speeches, it’s going to be an ugly race. What the candidates are selling, and primary voters are buying, is vituperation against people who don’t look, talk, or pray like the Republican base.............. [SNIP of stuff that sounds good to me - Santorum was on fire] ...............Mexicans, Muslims, gays, rats, roaches. Christian superiority, military contempt for the president, and gauntlets thrown down to queer-loving CEOs. It’s going to...

One of America’s most revered investigative journalists has questioned the veracity of one of the Obama administration’s proudest achievements — and the firestorm of criticism has been immediate and unforgiving, from the White House to the Pentagon to the CIA. The publication Sunday of a 10,000-word article questioning the official version of the 2011 raid that killed Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden might have received scant attention had it it not been penned by Seymour Hersh. The award-winning reporter, 78, who uncovered one of the worst war crimes by U.S. troops during the Vietnam War and disclosed the torture...

By Ben Kamisar - The former Navy SEAL who says he killed Osama bin Laden is slamming a new report that challenges the White House’s account of the mission, calling it “garbage.” “The story that I read, the part from [Seymour] Hersh, was full of lies,” Rob O’Neill said on Fox News's "Shepard Smith Reporting." “It took me a long time to read it because I had to put it down — I couldn’t read the nonsense.” Hersh on Sunday published in story in the London Review of Books that says Pakistani intelligence officers played a significant role in the...

Veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh is vigorously defending a controversial new story that claims the White House lied about crucial details of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.Hersh's story, published in the London Review of Books on May 10, alleges that the US government misled the public about many of the details surrounding the 2011 raid on bin Laden's compound in Abottabad, Pakistan.Relying largely on a single anonymous source, described only as a retired senior US intelligence official, Hersh claims that Pakistani intelligence officials were aware of and actively hiding bin Laden.He claims that the intelligence tip that led...