Free Republic

Former CIA Director R. James Woolsey tells NewsMax in an exclusive interview that terrorists could strike the American homeland — possibly with a weapon of mass destruction — this summer or early fall. He also warns that if Iran fails to comply with international efforts to stop its nuclear weapons program, the U.S. will have no other option than to bomb it. "I think the threat of a serious attack in the next few months is very real," Woolsey said. A terrorist strike with a dirty bomb or with biological weapons was "a real possibility." Woolsey's comments echo those of...

-Excerpt- "I believe that the Vilayat Faqih in Iran is a theocratic totalitarian movement for which destruction of Israel and the United States is not a policy but its very essence. It defines itself in that way. Saying that is should change its policy with respect to destroying Israel and the United States is like trying to persuade Hitler away from anti-Semitism. It was his essence and it is the essence of the Iranian Vilayat Faqih. I believe that the nuclear weapons program of Iran is an important part of this and as Bernard said the recent up tick in...

James Woolsey, former Director of the CIA, told IsraelNationalRadio's Alex Traiman that a Palestinian state should wait "many decades" until they stop teaching their children to hate and murder. Traiman asked about Woolsey's choice of terminology in calling the present conflict between the West and Islam as World War Four. Woolsey explained that shortly after 9/11, "I saw an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal by Eliot Cohen of Johns Hopkins University where he wrote that the Cold War was World War III, and that the war against what I call Islamist totalitarianism is World War IV... We have a...

AN OPEN LETTER TO PRESIDENT BUSH Hon. George W. Bush The White House Washington, D.C. 20500 Dear Mr. President: You have just received the report of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group (ISG) with its 79 recommendations for policy changes, force redeployments and other course corrections with respect to the conflict in Iraq. We believe you have responded properly in welcoming this product -- but reserving judgment as to whether you will accept its suggestions. This is especially important because of the argument being made in some quarters that, in light of the unanimity exhibited by the distinguished Republican and Democratic...

War Stories Investigates: The Jihad Sunday, October 15, 2006 at 8 p.m./11 p.m. ET Hosted by Oliver North The word is everywhere, but what does it mean? Jihad — holy war or struggle — now threatens innocent people of every faith. Al Qaeda may now be at the top of the terror ladder, but the roots of this global war are deep in history. Tune in this weekend as Oliver North explores what every person should know about jihad. In proven "War Stories" tradition, this episode brings historical context to today's events. As you will see, the jihad being...

Weekend Talk Show *Preview* for 7/8 and 7/9/06 (not the live thread)The main message is the Sunday Shows and message 1 will be the Saturday Shows,  then I'll post the ping list.  I've changed the format as a test this week and put the links to articles and background on the guests in with their listing in the shows.  It struck me that it might have been getting less helpful to have to jump back and forth.  Let me know which format works better.ABC This Week (George Stephanopoulos) Meme: Bush is all wrong about (Korea/Iraq/Immigration) and even Republicans think soNo...

The following speech was given as part of Restoration Weekend 2006, at the Arizona Biltmore in Phoenix, Feb. 23-26, 2006 -- The Editors. I’m honored to be invited but, to tell you the truth, since I was a Washington lawyer for 22 years and then I was with the CIA during the Clinton administration, I’m pretty well honored to be invited into any polite company for any purposes whatsoever. I was not the originator of the phrase “World War IV.” As far as I know, that was my friend Elliot Cohen in Wall Street Journal op-ed immediately after 9/11. I...

The main message is the Sunday Shows.  Message 1 will be the Saturday Shows and message 2 will be the show guest links post.  Then I'll post the ping list.ABC This Week (George Stephanopoulos) Meme: It's the oil companies faultOK, if it's not the oil companies, then it's the incompetent Bush administration foreign policiesGeorge Clooney is a serious and important voice on the international stage (can you say "presidential material?") Topics: Oil, Iraq and foreign policy Turmoil overseas is pinching American pocketbooks at the gas pumps. On Sunday, I'll speak with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to ask how the...

This morning the New York Sun has a new report on the so-called "Saddam Tapes." The article, entitled "Furor Erupts Over Recordings of Saddam," reports that two former CIA directors, James Woolsey and John Deutch, have resigned from something called the Intelligence Summit, run by a former federal prosecutor named John Loftus. The Intelligence Summit is scheduled to release the Saddam tapes tomorrow. Loftus has been a moving force behind the appearance of the tapes; last week, the Sun reported that the House Intelligence Committee was studying the tapes, which "were provided to [the] committee by a former federal prosecutor,...

Two former CIA directors have resigned from the board of the organization planning tomorrow to make public secret recordings of Saddam Hussein and his advisers. In the last week both John Deutch and James Woolsey abruptly left their positions at Intelligence Summit, according to its president, John Loftus, who said their departure is part of a campaign by the directorate of national intelligence to punish him for releasing the recordings.

Posted: January 7, 2006 1:00 a.m. Eastern © 2006 WorldNetDaily.com WASHINGTON – A former intelligence analyst currently working as a civilian contractor will unveil publicly what he believes to be recordings of Saddam Hussein's office meetings discussing his program of developing weapons of mass destruction at an International Intelligence Summit in the nation's capital next month. The highly confidential audio was overlooked when it was found in a warehouse along with many other untranslated Iraqi intelligence files, according to the contractor. The recordings are very significant because they may contain audio of Saddam's secret intentions regarding weapons of mass destruction,...

Early in November, hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee examined hate literature being distributed in American mosques. This material had been translated and published earlier this year by Freedom House's Center for Religious Freedom. (I was chairman of Freedom House at the time and wrote the book's foreword.) The hearings examined these Saudi publications in the context of assessing Chairman Arlen Specter's proposed Saudi Arabia Accountability Act. In addition to the material presented at the hearings, the underlying role of Saudi Arabia's state religion, generally referred to in the West as Wahhabism, deserves expanded attention for a variety of reasons....

GIBSON: A Republican congressman is blasting the CIA, accusing the agency of gross incompetence, saying it dropped the ball on everything from the hunt for Usama to Iran's nuclear weapons programs. Representative Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania is the vice chairman of the House Homeland Security and Armed Services Committees. He makes his charges in a new book. The congressman says the top tier of the CIA, entire top tier of the CIA, should be fired. That is a suggestion that is not sitting all that well in Langley. Joining us now to talk about it, the former Director of the...

WASHINGTON – Former CIA chief James Woolsey affirms the work of a special commission investigating the threat of a nuclear-bomb generated electromagnetic pulse attack on the U.S. by rogue states or terrorists and is urging the country to take steps necessary to protect against the potentially devastating consequences. In testimony before the House International Terrorism and Non-Proliferation Subcommittee, chaired by Ed Royce, R-Calif., Woolsey, director of the CIA from 1993 through 1995, referred to the nuclear EMP threat, characterized in intelligence circles, he said, as "a SCUD in a bucket." "That is a simple ballistic missile from a stockpile somewhere...

The US is turning on old friends in Europe, writes John Laughland. Before he denounced the "prevailing influence" of the US in the "anti-constitutional coup" that overthrew him, President Askar Akayev of Kyrgyzstan used an interesting phrase to attack those who were stirring up trouble in the drug-ridden Ferghana Valley. A criminal "third force", linked to the drug mafia, was struggling to gain power. Originally a label for covert operatives shoring up apartheid in South Africa before it was adopted by the US-backed "pro-democracy" movement in Iran in November 2001, the third force is also the title of a book...

The "Fifth Column" is a term that refers to those individuals and organizations that, though they are nominally American, want the United States to lose the War on Terror - the war that Norman Podhoretz and James Woolsey have called "World War IV." The term "Fifth Column" was coined by a Spanish Civil War General named Emilio Mola. As four columns of his troops advanced on Madrid, he stated confidently that, within the city, he also had a "fifth column"of supporters - those who were aiding, from the inside, his military campaign against the government. Dictionaries generally define a fifth...

Wesley Clark the other day blamed the Bush administration for the intelligence failures leading to the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States. And Hillary Clinton said, darkly, that the administration's refusal to hand over documents to a 9/11 commission "unnecessarily raises suspicions that it has something to hide." Meanwhile, Condi Rice in a speech last week pointed to the failure to take terrorism seriously during the 1990s — in other words, she pointed to Clinton administration failures. The war over the war on terror has just begun. In this battle, it's useful to stick to specifics. Let's take,...

The Central Intelligence Agency might be the last place in Washington you'd expect political correctness to have taken root. But as Gabriel Schoenfeld demonstrates in a disturbing new article, "What Became of the CIA," in the March issue of Commentary magazine, the agency has turned into "a government bureaucracy like any other, its managers and employees preoccupied with endless reams of restrictive regulations and simultaneously caught up in many of the newfangled pathologies of the American workplace," including affirmative action programs. Is it possible that in its zeal to promote more women and minorities, the CIA compromised its own mission?...

“While organized crime is not a new phenomenon today, some governments find their authority besieged at home and their foreign policy interests imperiled abroad. Drug trafficking, links between drug traffickers and terrorists, smuggling of illegal aliens, massive financial and bank fraud, arms smuggling, potential involvement in the theft and sale of nuclear material, political intimidation, and corruption all constitute a poisonous brew—a mixture potentially as deadly as what we faced during the cold war.”--R. James Woolsey, Former Director of Central Intelligence and Transnational Threats Initiative Steering Committee Member. From what I’ve recently discovered, that “poisonous brew” is being served to...

Whatever the overall effects of the recent intelligence reorganization, the new director of national intelligence (DNI) should at least be able to bring about one important improvement -- coordinating foreign and domestic intelligence.Such coordination was not really even being attempted before 9/11 because domestic intelligence, for all practical purposes, did not exist. The FBI was the only institution that had ever actually been in the business, e.g. with its very effective long-term penetration of the American Communist Party. But discredited in the mid-1970s by the revelation of excesses, including spying on Martin Luther King Jr., the Bureau had essentially been...

(The following is a speech given by James Woolsey at Restoration Weekend 2004. Frontpage will be posting more transcripts of other keynote speakers in the coming issues – The Editors)Introduction by General Thomas McInerney: Jim Woolsey is a great American and a Democrat. Last year there were two great Americans here; the other was Zell Miller. These men are Americans before they are politicians. They care about this great nation before they work an agenda. And I’ve had the opportunity to work with Jim on a number of things. We all know that he was Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. He’ll tell...

Russian President Vladimir Putin ate crow today for his decision to support a Ukrainian candidate opposed by millions of opposition demonstrators. This isn't his first major political mistake in the region. It is becoming something of a habit. Russian President Vladimir Putin could wind up paying a heavy political price for his meddling in the Ukrainian elections. After the Ukranian election, Russian President Vladimir Putin was one of the first world leaders to demonstratively congratulate Ukrainian prime minister and presidential candidate Viktor Yanukovich. At the Russia-European Union summit in the Netherlands last week, Putin expressed his solidarity with the disputed...

Former CIA Director James Woolsey said Thursday that it would be wrong for an upcoming report by the Senate Intelligence Committee to blame the CIA for the 9/11 attacks in the wake of Director George Tenet's resignation. "I think if the Senate committee comes out with a report that says Tenet or the CIA was principally responsible for 9/11, it will just be wrong," Tenet told CNN's "Paula Zahn Now." Woolsey contended that while the CIA can be faulted for not telling the FBI that two of the 9/11 hijackers had entered the country after attending an al Qaida...

.AHMED CHALABI: The Janos Kadar of Iraqby B. RamanThe indications till now are that having occupied Iraq, the US plans to instal Ahmed Chalabi, allegedly a long-time collaborator initially of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and presently of the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) of the Pentagon, as the head of the interim Iraqi authority, which would provide an Iraqi facade to the US military rule of Iraq.2. Chalabi, a non-practising Shia and reportedly  a close friend of the late Shah of Iran, the former Crown Prince Hassan of Jordan and Col. Oliver North of the Reagan Administration, whose name...

During the second world war the distinguished American judge Learned Hand defined the spirit of liberty to a group of new US citizens as the spirit "that is not too sure that it is right". Nowhere is Justice Hand's point more relevant than to those who assess intelligence for national leaders. Intelligence requires a constant questioning of assumptions, and a continual willingness to re-examine them as new secrets come to light. Intelligence is in no small part the serial testing of hypotheses. One must continually make judgments about what the evidence indicates, but also be prepared to say: "What I...

September 5, 2001, Wednesday TYPE: COMMITTEE HEARING LENGTH: 30153 words COMMITTEE: SENATE FOREIGN RELATIONS COMMITTEE HEADLINE: U.S. SENATOR JOSEPH BIDEN (D-DE) HOLDS HEARING ON THE THREAT OF BIOTERRORISM *** Excerpt follows: (HELMS = Senator Jesse Helms, WOOLSEY = Former CIA Director James Woolsey) HELMS: Mr. Woolsey, let me ask you something. Now, the January 2001, this year's National Intelligence Council Report on biological warfare threats, it said that there are 25 -- let me see how many biological warfare states with missile warheads -- in Iraq alone. And they are unaccounted for, that is to say, the 25 missiles. Now,...

NEVER FORGET ...Former CIA Director JAMES WOOLSEY was just on the FoX News Channel's 'On the Record' Show with GRETTA VanSUSTREN. 2 outstanding quotes re 911 Commission Hearings: "Understanding the Past is a piece of understanding the Future" "CLARKE does not listen to others once he locks onto a single point of view. Case in point would be the case for state-sponsored terrorism that CIA Director TENANT laid out before the 911 Commission today that CLARKE disagreed with" ...WOOLSEY = A man on a mission for CLARITY. ...CLARKE = A man on a mission for CONFUSION. NEVER FORGET

DOBBS: ... My next guest served as director of the CIA for two years during president Clinton's first term. James Woolsey joins us now from our Washington bureau. It's good to have you here. The fact is that there seems to be plenty of blame placed on both the Clinton administration and the Bush administration. Are you surprised that it's being so even-handed, this commission? JAMES WOOLSEY, FMR. CIA DIRECTOR: Well, I'm glad if that's the approach, because they really do need to look at the whole picture. I think that one very important issue here, Lou is whether there...

The 3rd terrorist: Mideast tie to OKC bombing Investigative reporter provides convincing evidence of Islamic plot Posted: February 12, 20041:00 a.m. Eastern © 2004 WorldNetDaily.com Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols were not the lone conspirators in the Oklahoma City bombing but were part of a greater scheme involving Islamic terrorists and at least one provable link to Iraq, according to a new release by WND Books. Backed by stunning evidence, author Jayna Davis explains in detail the complete, and so far untold, story behind the failed investigation in The Third Terrorist: The Middle Eastern Connection to the Oklahoma City Bombing." The investigative...

<p>So which is it: Are America's spies a gaggle of fools for believing that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction? Or is the Bush administration a gang of knaves for lying us into a war?</p> <p>Take the spies-as-fools allegation first.</p>

This is the continuation of fmr. CIA Director R. James Woolsey's speech at the 2003 Restoration Weekend. Click Here for Part One.Unidentified Speaker:  You made the comment of the stress between security and liberty, and it seems to me one of the elements of that is for whom. The liberty, as long as we provide the same liberties for U.S. citizens on our territory as we do for non-citizens, we are then subjecting ourselves to a security issue that is appropriate for both citizens and non-citizens. As a consequence, we're going to lose, relatively speaking, liberties of citizenship in order to make...

The following speech was given at the Center for the Study of Popular Culture's annual Restoration Weekend, Nov. 13-16, 2003. David Horowitz introduced Judy Black, who then introduces former CIA Director R. James Woolsey. The question-and-answer session is continued in Part Two.David Horowitz: This is the Eighth Annual Restoration Weekend. It hasn't always been the Restoration Weekend. It began as the Dark Ages Weekend, but Republicans couldn't handle the joke. And, actually, they were quite smart not to, which is one of the reasons we changed the title.  It's also -- began in year one of the revolution on New Year's 1994. The reason...

Former CIA director James Woolsey said over the weekend that there's no question Iraq and al Qaeda worked together to plan attacks against U.S. interests during the decade leading up to 9/11, saying the evidence of an operational relationship was "a slam dunk." Commenting on a memo issued by the Defense Department to the Senate Intelligence Committee and revealed by the Weekly Standard late Friday, Woolsey told CNN's "Late Edition," "Anybody who says there is no working relationship between al Qaeda and Iraqi intelligence going back to the early '90s, they can only say that if they're illiterate." "This is...

Ex-CIA director weighs in, suspect ship docks in Korea Warnings about the grave potential of maritime terror have increased since Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin first broke the story of the al-Qaida's 15-ship mystery armada. The latest caution comes from former CIA Director James Woolsey, who addressed a maritime security conference last week. He said the U.S. faces decades of war against terrorism and needs a "more resilient" transportation network to keep future attacks from having catastrophic impact on the order of Sept. 11. A system that moves goods and people is "very vulnerable to ... malevolent interference," terrorist acts against...

OK...Who was the wonderful FReeper gal who called C-Span during the Woolsey interview, earlier today? I just caught the end of the replay now, but it is a great interview as Woolsey is putting Canadian and British anti-war hacks in their place. The common theme from the "objective" audience was that Saddam was a secularist and would've had nothing to do with the Islamist. As Woolsey so eliquently pointed out, secular Baathists in Syria have financed and supported religious Islamists for years; not to mention that Iraqi Intelligence officers were training Islamists in "gas, poisons and explosive devices" for at...

We are presently fighting World War IV. So say a number of scholars and military experts, particularly former CIA director James Woolsey. He says the Cold War between the Western democracies and global Communism was actually World War III. The Korean and Vietnam wars were combat theaters in this larger conflict, which included guerrilla wars in Latin America and Africa, espionage and counterespionage, diplomatic and ideological warfare, all conducted in the shadow of a nuclear standoff. The current war on terrorism is also global in scale, with a multitude of fronts: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the Middle East; the Pakistan-India...

How to become CIA director Posted: September 9, 2003 1:00 a.m. Eastern © 2003 WorldNetDaily.com For years I've been wondering how someone as sensible as James Woolsey ever became Bill Clinton's CIA director. A new book, getting much acclaim on other points, "Why America Slept," by Gerald Posner, finally answers the question. Indeed, from Posner's account, it seems like it was a mistake. The story is fascinating for what it says about the Clinton administration's priorities and policies. Woolsey was a conservative Democrat, former Rhodes scholar and attorney who served as undersecretary of the Navy in the Carter administration. He...

NBC News Washington bureau chief Tim Russert is claiming that "no one" believes Iraq played a role in the 9/11 attacks - a contention that should come as quite a surprise to Manhattan U.S. District Judge Harold Baer. "No one will say there was a direct involvement of Saddam Hussein in Sept. 11," Russert told radio host Don Imus on Monday. "There's no direct link that can be substantiated." Instead, said the "Meet the Press" host, the Bush White House is misleading the American public by insinuating that ties between Saddam Hussein and 9/11 exist. "It is in the...

An overwhelming number of Americans now believe that Iraq played a significant role in the 9/11 attacks, according to a survey released Saturday. The finding shows that by and large the public has rejected attempts by the establishment press to discredit compelling evidence of a link between Saddam Hussein and the worst terrorist strike in U.S. history. The Washington Post poll found that nearly three-quarters of those surveyed - 69 percent - now believe that the 9/11 hijackers received some sort of guidance, direction or support from Iraq. "That impression, which exists despite the fact that the hijackers were...

CIA Director James Woolsey was fighting other bureaucratic battles — instead of [Osama] bin Laden. The CIA was critically short of translators who spoke or read Arabic, Farsi, Pashto and the other languages of the great "terrorist belt." That belt begins on the dirty beaches of Somalia, arcs up the river valleys of Sudan and Egypt, across the desert flats of Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf states, over the dry plateaus of Syria and Iraq, past the wastes of Iran, through the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and ends in the cold steppes of Central Asia. In the...

<p>CIA Director James Woolsey was fighting other bureaucratic battles &#8212; instead of [Osama] bin Laden. The CIA was critically short of translators who spoke or read Arabic, Farsi, Pashto and the other languages of the great "terrorist belt." That belt begins on the dirty beaches of Somalia, arcs up the river valleys of Sudan and Egypt, across the desert flats of Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf states, over the dry plateaus of Syria and Iraq, past the wastes of Iran, through the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and ends in the cold steppes of Central Asia. In the world's most terror-prone region, the CIA was essentially blind, deaf, and dumb.</p>

The war liberated millions. But the post-war period proved difficult. Members of the former regime went underground and continued to fight, using terrorist tactics – even against their fellow countrymen. Those who had been freed lacked essential services, including food, clean water, jobs and housing. Opposition to the “occupation” persisted. The reconstruction progressed slowly. True democracy took years to establish. Nevertheless, most Americans today agree that President Lincoln was right to wage the Civil War. Eventually, a similar view will likely prevail regarding the U.S.-led war to liberate Iraq. The vast majority of Americans will understand that the war was...

Now that U.S. forces have reached Baghdad, let us put today's events in historical perspective. In a sense, as John Hopkins professor Eliot Cohen has noted, we have entered World War IV. More than a war against terrorism, this is a war to extend democracy to those parts of the Arab and Muslim world that threaten the liberal civilization we worked to build and defend throughout the 20th Century in World War I, World War II and the Cold War - World War III. I hope it will not be as long as the 40-plus years of World War III,...

The U.S. is already fighting World War IV, says former Central Intelligence Agency Director James Woolsey, and the enemies are the Shiite fanatics who rule Iran and control Hezbollah, the Islamo-fascists who rule Syria and previously controlled Iraq and the Wahhabi brand of Sunni Islamists who get their inspiration and funding from Saudi Arabia. In remarks published by Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin, Woolsey adds that while all three of these enemies hate each other and occasionally kill each other in wars and smaller skirmishes, they are fully capable of uniting against a common enemy and have – in this case,...

Former CIA Director JAMES WOOLSEY... who called it like it was about our Terrorist Enemy Iraq... Guests today on... NBC's 'MEET THE PRESS" FoX's 'FoX News Sunday' to clarify our continuing World War on Terrorism.

Now that U.S. forces are at the gates of Baghdad, let us put today's events in historical perspective. In a sense, as John Hopkins Prof. Eliot Cohen has noted, we have entered World War IV. More than a war against terrorism, this is a war to extend democracy to those parts of the Arab and Muslim world that threaten the liberal civilization we worked to build and defend throughout the 20th century in World War I, World War II and the Cold War -- World War III. I hope it will not be as long as the 40-plus years of...

World War IVBy R. James WoolseyFrontPageMagazine.com | November 22, 2002 Restoration Weekend November 16, 2002 Breakfast Featured Speaker: The Honorable James R. Woolsey, former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency Introduction: Congressman Bob Barr David Horowitz: This morning, I'm going to quickly turn the microphone over to Congressman Bob Barr, who was one of first of our Annie Taylor award recipients and has graciously come to many of our weekends. We're sorry that Congressman Barr who was one of the powerhouse conservatives in the Congress was redistricted out of his seat, but we know he's going on to a...