Free Republic

"American Majority" CEO Ned Ryun responds to the latest comments from former CIA Director John Brennan about the connection between Trump and Russia on FNC's "Ingraham Angle." NED RYUN: It's pretty rich coming from them. The intelligence community spent the last nine years sowing misinformation and trying to disrupt our representative democracy and our national elections in 2016 and 2020 that Trump is somehow going to take the IC to unprecedented political levels. You know, the real rub in all of this, Laura, was the fact that Trump tried to bring transparency and accountability in his first term and efforts...

With the recent revelations that the FBI paid an informant who inserted himself into Denver racial justice protests in 2020 and encouraged protesters to commit crimes, COINTELPRO is back in the spotlight. So is the Church Committee, the group of senators who investigated that FBI program, now that Representative Jim Jordan has compared it to his own committee looking into how President Joe Biden treats Republicans. The FBI's Counterintelligence Program — COINTELPRO — ran from 1956 to 1971 and targeted advocacy groups associated with political and social movements that the FBI viewed as a threat to American stability. The goal...

Russia-Gate and CIA ties to Ukrainian death squads, along with killer drone program and worldwide surveillance apparatus, necessitates new investigations of U.S. intelligence agencies modeled after the Church Committee hearings of 1975.

The Biden administration is vacating a decades-old decision to revoke the security clearance of World War II-era scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer, who is known today as the “father of the atomic bomb.” In a written statement first shared with The Hill, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said the 1954 decision barring Oppenheimer’s clearance went through a “flawed process” and noted that there was evidence of bias. “In 1954, the Atomic Energy Commission revoked Dr. Oppenheimer’s security clearance through a flawed process that violated the Commission’s own regulations. As time has passed, more evidence has come to light of the bias and...

“Conspiracy theorists … feeding the American public misinformation” is a familiar attack line for anyone raising free-speech concerns over the FBI’s role in social media censorship. What is different is that this attack came from the country’s largest law enforcement agency, the FBI — and, since the FBI has made combatting “disinformation” a major focus of its work, the labeling of its critics is particularly menacing. Fifty years ago, the Watergate scandal provoked a series of events that transformed not only the presidency but federal agencies like the FBI. Americans demanded answers about the involvement of the FBI and other...

In the annals of the 40-year sting to end the Deep State, Robert Trump was the FBI informant at the heart of foiling the BCCI money laundering bank plot to smuggle weapons to Iraq by Hillary Clinton in a dodgy deal via Italian bank BNL. “Bank of Crooks and Criminals International” was the seventh largest private bank in the world, with assets of $20 billion in the late 1980s, whose spectacular demise in 1991 left the Deep State as exposed to public scrutiny as it is about to become today with the unraveling of the FISA court crimes. But lost...

In 2008, the Bush administration, along with the “six powers,” was negotiating with Iran concerning that country’s nuclear arms program. The Bush administration’s objective was to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. On July 20, 2008, the New York Times headlined: “Nuclear Talks With Iran End in a Deadlock.” What caused the talks to founder? The Times explained: Iran responded with a written document that failed to address the main issue: international demands that it stop enriching uranium. And Iranian diplomats reiterated before the talks that they considered the issue nonnegotiable. The Iranians held firm to their position, perhaps because...

National security insiders are trying to claim treason for the fact that President Donald Trump’s transition team discussed potentially setting up a phone call with the Russian ambassador to the United States.Trump and Russian president Vladimir Putin have met publicly on several occasions, and Russia maintains an active embassy in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of Washington, D.C.The Hill reported: Former national security adviser Michael Flynn spoke with a “senior official” in President Trump’s transition team at the Mar-a-Lago resort to discuss what he should communicate to the Russian ambassador in a highly-scrutinized series of phone calls in December of 2016,...

"I think if Frank Church were here to talk about it, he would agree that SSCI and HPSCI have fallen short of their hopes. He hoped there would be regular scrutiny of intelligence programs. It's turned out that that's been an up and down proposition. Sometimes, after media reports on scandal or failure, [we get vigorous oversight]. Sometimes it's quite lax

A CIA secret weapon used for assassination shoots a small poison dart to cause a heart attack, as explained in Congressional testimony in the video. The dart from this secret CIA weapon can penetrate clothing and leave nothing but a tiny red dot on the skin. On penetration of the deadly dart, the individual targeted for assassination may feel as if bitten by a mosquito, or they may not feel anything at all. The poisonous dart completely disintegrates upon entering the target. The lethal poison then rapidly enters the bloodstream causing a heart attack. Once the damage is done, the...

The CIA should be abolished. After a trial run of 67 years, the agency has proven a sorcerer’s apprentice. The director and his subordinates have became insufferably arrogant Platonic Guardians hiding behind secrecy in the belief that the rest of us are too stupid or naive to judge what risks to accept to preserve liberty and the rule of law. The CIA has made Americans less safe. Its incorrigible anti-democratic ethos was epitomized by legendary chief of counterintelligence James J. Angleton. He voiced contempt for the Church Committee’s investigation of chronic agency abuses, i.e., the “Family Jewels.” As reported in...

Once a Constitutional Republic famed for its pragmatism, the United States has lately become a country notorious for its inconstancy, no longer recognizing that actions have finite and foreseeable consequences. In this space, for example, I recently argued that the release of the “torture report” by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence came perilously close to the constitutional definition of treason by “giving Aid and Comfort” to America’s enemies. Admittedly, that was a tough assessment. But barely a week after the report’s release, the Huffington Post published an article linking those revelations with their most immediate effects on our allies....

Sen. Patrick Leahy says the American people are at risk of being controlled by their government due to the expansive surveillance powers of the National Security Agency. Speaking on “Fox News Sunday,” the Vermont Democrat and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee told host Chris Wallace that the nation’s lawmakers must act to return control of the government to the people.

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel August 18, 2002 Pg. 5 Despite Son's Pleas, Scientist's Death Remains A Cold War Mystery Given LSD, he died in a fall from hotel room; government later promised to tell all, but didn't By Frederic N. Tulsky, Knight Ridder News Service San Jose, Calif. -- The death in 1953 of a government scientist, Frank Olson, in a fall from a New York hotel window is one of the most notorious cases in CIA history. Only in 1975 did Olson's family learn that the CIA had slipped LSD into his drink, days before his death. President Ford apologized...

Idaho's Democrat Senator Frank Church[i] was one of my heroes when I was in high school. Church wrote a letter of recommendation for me to Harvard and offered to nominate me to an appointment to any of the U.S. military academies. In the summer of 1971, he took me to lunch in the dining room of the United States Senate, where, for the first time in my life, I tasted French onion soup[ii]. He asked me if I would like to serve as an intern in his office in Washington, D.C. when I graduated from high school. (It was an...

<p>WASHINGTON -- The White House announced yesterday that its inquiry into intelligence failures would include Libya, North Korea, and Iran in addition to Iraq, sparking quick criticism that the panel will be a long-delayed and watered-down examination of the intelligence that the Bush administration cited to justify the war in Iraq.</p>

NEW YORK - "The Path to 9/11" will break your heart. It will leave you unnerved, even more than before. And angrier than ever. A five-hour miniseries that dramatizes a decade's worth of events leading up to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, this film is plenty gripping. It doesn't forgo artistry for polemics.Even so, it drives home, step by step, a message any viewer can understand: The people in charge of keeping you safe failed the nation monumentally. Systemically. Shamefully. And continue to, five years after what should have been a terribly sufficient wake-up call.Then "The Path to 9/11"...

Bill Clinton denies it now, but he once admitted he passed up an opportunity to extradite Osama bin Laden.And NewsMax has the former President making the claim on audiotape. [You can listen to the tape yourself -- Click HereClinton's comments and his actions relating to American efforts to capture bin Laden have taken on renewed interest because of claims made in a new ABC movie, the "Path to 9/11," that suggests Clinton dropped the ball during his presidency. Clinton has also angrily denied claims the Monica Lewinsky scandal drew his attention away from dealing with national security matters like...

September 10, 2006 -- Bill Clinton's camp yesterday demanded that ABC can its controversial film "The Path to 9/11," due to air tonight - and in a scathing new letter accused the network of exploiting the tragedy for ratings. Clinton's wrath comes amid new revelations that the Toronto set of the fictionalized flick was plagued by actors' concerns that the script was playing fast and loose with the truth, sources told The Post. Clinton's lawyer, Douglas Band, and the CEO of his foundation, Bruce Lindsey, penned the fuming missive to ABC bigwig Bob Iger. It was dated Friday but released...

The sordid tale now making the rounds in the "mainstream" press of a rogue Pentagon intelligence operation has all the elements of an urban legend: heavy breathing, a secret basement office "down by the ramp" and government officials who form a hidden alliance based on long-ago ties to an obscure but influential university guru. Only the work of a few good men with the courage to face up to this "cabal" - and a few crusader-journalists to help them - can make the demons scatter and scare the dark ones into the light. Or so the story goes on those...