Free Republic

The war on terror, that campaign without end launched 14 years ago by George Bush, is tying itself up in ever more grotesque contortions. On Monday the trial in London of a Swedish man, Bherlin Gildo, accused of terrorism in Syria, collapsed after it became clear British intelligence had been arming the same rebel groups the defendant was charged with supporting. The prosecution abandoned the case, apparently to avoid embarrassing the intelligence services. The defence argued that going ahead with the trial would have been an “affront to justice” when there was plenty of evidence the British state was itself...

Woodrow Wilson. Here's Why. If you wanted to identify, with confidence, the very worst president in American history, how would you go about it? One approach would be to consult the various academic polls on presidential rankings that have been conducted from time to time since Harvard’s Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. pioneered this particular survey scholarship in 1948. Bad idea. Most of those surveys identify Warren G. Harding of Ohio as the worst ever. This is ridiculous. Harding presided over very robust economic times. Not only that, but he inherited a devastating economic recession when he was elected in 1920...

Günter Grass, the German novelist, social critic and Nobel Prize winner whom many called his country’s moral conscience but who stunned Europe when he revealed in 2006 that he had been a member of the Waffen-SS during World War II, died on Monday in the northern German city of Lübeck, which had been his home for decades. He was 87. His longtime publisher, Gerhard Steidl, told reporters that he learned late Sunday that Mr. Grass had been hospitalized after falling seriously ill very quickly. The cause of death was not announced.

The Army made her feel “like a joke” — but they couldn’t keep her silent. Chelsea Manning — formerly known as Bradley E. Manning — the ex-Army intelligence analyst sentenced to 35 years for leaking a treasure trove of secret documents to WikiLeaks, has given her first public interview with the press from military prison in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Speaking through the mail to Cosmopolitan magazine, Manning opened up about her recent experience behind bars and her lifelong desire to live as a woman. “I don’t know how [this struggle] shaped my life and who I am, but it’s absolutely...

On Monday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “The Last Word,” former Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean took aim at Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), who took the lead on a letter to the leadership to Iran that warns the regime that any nuclear deal made with the Obama administration and not approved by the Congress faces the risk of not being honored by future administrations.

Diane Nash, a leader and strategist of the student wing of the 1960s civil rights movement, refused to march in Selma on Saturday because former President George W. Bush also attended the event, which celebrated the 50th anniversary of the famous nonviolent protest.

Linky only.

In 2008 then Senator Obama called President Bush “unpatriotic” for adding trillions to the national debt. Bush added about four trillion to the debt in eight years after the 9-11 attacks and mortgage crisis. Barack Obama then added the same amount of debt in less than three years. Via Flopping Aces:

Back in december, I posted that everyone's favorite Baathist flunkie / child molester Scott Ritter was released from Jail (and is gainfully employed courtesy of the Huffington Post), but it seems that Scott hasn't fulfilled the requirements of his sentence. He has to register as a sex offender but I dont see his entry in New York's database, or Pennsylvania's (where the crime took place). http://www.pameganslaw.state.pa.us/ http://www.criminaljustice.ny.gov/nsor/ I know the first time Ritter got caught proposition a child in the internet was back in 2001 but the prosecutor let him off with an Adjournment in Contemplation of Dismissal and sealed...

In recent weeks, I have heard former Associated Press reporter Ron Fournier on Fox News twice asserting, quite offhandedly, that President George W. Bush “lied us into war in Iraq.” I found this shocking. I took a leave of absence from the bench in 2004-05 to serve as co-chairman of the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction—a bipartisan body, sometimes referred to as the Robb-Silberman Commission. It was directed in 2004 to evaluate the intelligence community’s determination that Saddam Hussein possessed WMD—I am, therefore, keenly aware of both the intelligence provided to...

Did anyone see Medea Benjamin on O'Reilly tonight? She of course blamed GWB for the Jordanian pilot's execution. She said we never should have gone into Iraq in the first place. Then she said our interventionist policies in Egypt and Libya cause ISIS to act the way they do. I wanted to smack BOR for not pointing out it was OBAMA and his ARAB SPRING interventions that funded and otherwise supported the uprisings in Egypt and Libya.

Michael Moore defended a statement he made on Sunday that "snipers aren't heroes" by refuting the interpretation that he was weighing in on the debate surrounding Clint Eastwood's "American Sniper." "My dad always said, 'Snipers are cowards. They don't believe in a fair fight. Like someone coming up from behind you and coldcocking you. Just isn't right. It's cowardly to shoot a person in the back,'" Moore wrote on Facebook late Sunday with a link to tweets. "But Deadline Hollwood and the Hollywood Reporter turned that into stories about how I don't like Clint Eastwood's new film, 'American Sniper.' I...

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...

Scott Ritter, the former United Nations weapons inspector who was arrested and imprisoned for unlawful contact with a minor, has returned to Bethlehem. Ritter was paroled from state prison in Pennsylvania in September. A call to his home wasn't returned on Thursday. A vocal critic of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Ritter has resumed his trenchant writing on U.S. policy in the Middle East: He has authored at least three online articles for Huffington Post since October, including one warning that the creation of a U.S.-backed "Free Syrian Army" represents a "figment of American creative thinking."

It is difficult to compare presidents outside of a narrow context of time. It is like trying to compare baseball players, like Ruth and Aaron, or football players, like Johnny Unitas and Peyton Manning. For athletes, the games they play were different then; and for presidents, not only the country, but the world is different. There is no way of knowing how a president today would have fared when faced with the prospect of the First or Second World War, or how they would have handled the advent of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. These are answers we...

Liberal novelist Stephen King regrets asserting that if you don't learn how to read, you'll end up in "the Army, Iraq." The comment, widely seen as a shot at the military, was first publicized six years ago on NewsBusters. In an interview with the Huffington Post, King was asked if he stood by the remarks. The author lamented, "No. That was just a case of misspeaking and also having one of those brain cramps that you realize that you're no longer living in the world that you grew up in...If I could take one remark back, that would be the...

In the spring of 2006, midway through George W. Bush’s second presidential term, Princeton historian Sean Wilentz published a piece in Rolling Stone that posed a provocative question: Was Bush the worst president ever? He said the best-case scenario for Bush was "colossal historical disgrace’’ and added: "Many historians are now wondering whether Bush, in fact, will be remembered as the very worst president in all of American history." The Wilentz assessment was probably a bit premature. It is difficult to judge any president’s historical standing while he still sits in the Oval Office, when political passions of the day...

Tuesday on NewsmaxTV's "The Steve Malzberg Show," anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan said in 2005 Nancy Pelosi and top Democrat leaders in the House and Senate said to her face that if she helped them get elected they would end the wars completely, but now they have stopped supporting her even in light of President Barack Obama's escalation of drone attacks. Sheehan said the left anti war movement is being ignored by the democrats because they are "reverse racists" who are supporting Obama only because he is an African-American.

While speaking out on the House floor yesterday against the House GOP lawsuit against President Obama, Texas Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee said the move is a “veil for impeachment.” Jackson Lee also took the opportunity to point out that “We [Democrats] did not seek an impeachment of President Bush” when he was in office. Really? Not only did some Democrats seek an impeachment of President Bush, but Rep. Jackson Lee co-sponsored the bill? Classic!

Remember back in April, 2007, when then-CIA director George Tenet appeared on 60 Minutes, angrily telling the program host, "we don't torture people"? Remember a few months later, in October, President George W. Bush saying, "this government does not torture people"? We knew then it was not true because we had already seen the photos of Iraqis tortured at Abu Ghraib prison four years earlier. Still the US administration denied that torture was torture, preferring to call it "enhanced interrogation" and claiming that it had disrupted so many terrorist plots. Of course, we later found out that the CIA...