Free Republic

Executive Summary The Iranian nuclear deal is a full capitulation to Iran’s terrorist mastermind Mullahs, and the latest in a series of betrayals of the American people and allies by the Obama administration. At the highest level of the administration, Barack Obama’s Senior Advisor, the Iranian-born Valerie Jarrett, prioritized rapprochement with the terror state. Throughout the process and negotiations, she had the backing of billionaire investor (and Obama-backer) George Soros, and his multi-headed network of tax-exempt foundations. Their efforts were driven by deep-rooted anti-Semitism and personal greed. Meanwhile, since the mid-1990s, a small but very connected Iranian lobby (funded, in...

Do you remember Lewis "Scooter" Libby? In 2003, the Department of Justice appointed a special counsel to investigate allegations that Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, unlawfully disclosed the covert status of CIA operative Valerie Plame. Yet Plame may not have been a covert undercover agent, based on the formal government definition of that role. And even if she were, it was widely known at the time that Secretary of State Colin Powell's subordinate, Richard Armitage, had most likely disclosed her status earlier. In other words, Libby was in an Orwellian position of being accused of a crime...

Cyber warfare has gone nuclear. So says Valerie Plame, the former covert CIA agent who spent her intelligence career working against the spread of weapons of mass destruction. Now she’s taking on a new task: helping government agencies and companies stem the relentless flood of hacker attacks. “There’s a huge impact on national security and intelligence,” says Plame, who this spring became an adviser to cybersecurity startup Global Data Sentinel. “The new normal is going to be more and more of these hacks, whether it’s Target or Home Depot or the Office of Personnel Management or Jennifer Lawrence’s nude photos.”...

David Petraeus saw his career come to an end for mishandling classified information. Sandy Berger was punished for mishandling classified information. Scooter Libby got it worst of all. And he did virtually nothing. Remember Scooter Libby? Libby was the Bush aide who went to prison for having a bad memory. He was hunted down and persecuted by Peter Fitzgerald who was looking for the scalp of the person who allegedly leaked the name of Valerie Plame. Libby went to prison and he wasn't even the leaker. Richard Armitrage was. Jennifer Rubin: Right Turn readers know my view that former vice...

Updated March 27 to include responses from the FBI and the State Department. Emails disclosed by a hacker show a close family friend was funneling intelligence about the crisis in Libya directly to the Secretary of State’s private account starting before the Benghazi attack. Starting weeks before Islamic militants attacked the U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya, longtime Clinton family confidante Sidney Blumenthal supplied intelligence to then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gathered by a secret network that included a former CIA clandestine service officer, according to hacked emails from Blumenthal’s account. The emails, which were posted on the internet...

Many Helped Iraq Evade U.N. Sanctions On Weapons By Craig Whitlock and Glenn Frankel Washington Post Foreign Service Friday, October 8, 2004; Page A01 BERLIN, Oct. 7 -- As part of its stealth effort to evade U.N. sanctions and rebuild its military, the Iraqi government under President Saddam Hussein found that it had no shortage of people around the world who were willing to help. Among them: a French arms dealer known only as "Mr. Claude," who made a surreptitious visit to Iraq four years ago to provide technical expertise and training. Mr. Claude worked for Lura, a French company...

Jeb Bush: wannabe Arab killer and torturer. That was the portrait of the prospective Republican presidential candidate that Joe Wilson, husband of former CIA employee Valerie Plame, has painted. Appearing on Chris Hayes's MSNBC show this evening, Wilson claimed that the "conclusion you come to," looking at his foreign policy advisers, is that Jeb's plan is "to kill all Arabs we find on the streets," and if we can't kill them, "to torture them." View the video here.

The CIA'S war against the Bush administration is one of the great untold stories of the past three years. It is, perhaps, the agency's most successful covert action of recent times. The CIA has used its budget to fund criticism of the administration by former Democratic officeholders. The agency allowed an employee, Michael Scheuer, to publish and promote a book containing classified information, as long as, in Scheuer's words, "the book was being used to bash the president." However, the agency's preferred weapon has been the leak. In one leak after another, generally to the New York Times or the...

Liz Cheney said Sunday that some of the stories in print about her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, were "fantasies" cooked up by some of his old Bush administration rivals. Responding to a question about Dick Cheney's role in pushing for aggressive interrogations, Liz Cheney pointed to Lawrence Wilkerson, the chief of staff to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, for spreading inaccurate information about her father. Wilkerson "has made a cottage industry of fantasies about the vice president," she said on ABC's "This Week." "It's important to look at the source" of media reports, Cheney said. "Nobody talking about...

Lawrence Wilkerson is a contradictory figure. Wilkerson is a career military man, who served as chief of staff for Secretary of State Colin Powell; but he has also voiced reluctance to involve American forces in foreign conflicts, and slammed the Bush administration for its handling of the Iraq War. He is also a lifelong Republican who, far from just criticizing his party, has actually gone on the warpath against it at times. When Powell was attacked by conservatives in 2012 for endorsing Barack Obama for reelection — Mitt Romney surrogate John Sununu famously suggested that the endorsement was motivated by...

Judith Miller, the former New York Times reporter, has blown a big hole in the case against Lewis “Scooter” Libby, convicted of lying to avoid blame for outing a CIA agent. Miller was a key witness in Libby’s trial, but in her new book she has repudiated her testimony. Libby was “railroaded in his conviction” by Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald, she said in an interview on Fox News yesterday. In her book, The Story: A Reporter’s Journey, she writes that Fitzgerald cajoled her into testifying in 2007 that Libby had told her Valerie Plame, the wife of a critic...

A man was arrested in New York City's international airport with uranium destined for Iran hidden in the soles of his shoes, the US Justice Department said. Patrick Campbell, 33, who was arrested Wednesday as he arrived at the John F Kennedy airport from Paris, is accused of trying to act as an intermediary to sell Iran 1,000 tons of purified uranium, in violation of US law. The Sierra Leone-based Campbell had been under surveillance since May 2012, when he responded to an ad on the site Alibaba.com by someone looking to buy uranium 308, or yellow cake. The buyer...

While too much of the nation's attention is focused on Representative Anthony Weiner (D-New York) and his sex/lying scandal, President Barack Obama is at the White House welcoming one of the most corrupt leaders on earth. President Ali Bongo of the West Central African nation of Gabon is being touted by administration officials as an "important ally" while those who know his background say he is guilty of "grand theft nation".

Wilsongate: Motive, Means, and Opportunity The Buried Story Behind PlamegateBy Fedora Introduction Since Robert Novak mentioned Valerie Plame’s CIA background in July 2003, the media has focused on trying to trace the leak of Plame’s name to the White House, but has devoted less follow-up to another newsworthy angle in Novak’s original story. Novak wrote: The CIA's decision to send retired diplomat Joseph C. Wilson to Africa in February 2002 to investigate possible Iraqi purchases of uranium was made routinely at a low level without Director George Tenet's knowledge. . . Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife,...

CIA official's John Rizzo's revelations in new book, Company Man: Thirty Years of Controversy and Crisis in the CIA, establish beyond peradventure of doubt that the Plame case was a hoax, stirred up by her husband and Patrick Fitzgerald. See these excerpts from the book:

Ex-CIA Officer Indicted for Leaking Classified Info to New York Slimes Reporter Jeffrey Sterling, a former CIA officer, was indicted today for leaking classified information to New York Times reporter James Risen. The indictment shows that the federal government had access to their e-mail and phone contacts going back several years. Sterling served on the Iran desk of the CIA in the 1990s, and oversaw a classified program aimed at sabotaging the development of its nuclear programming. He left the CIA in 2000 and sued for racial discrimination (he is African American) in a case that went all the way...

VIENNA: The CIA, using a double-agent Russian scientist, may have handed a blueprint for a nuclear bomb to Iran. State of War by James Risen, the New York Times reporter who exposed the Bush administration's controversial domestic spying operation, claims the plans contained fatal flaws designed to derail Tehran's nuclear drive. But the deliberate errors were so rudimentary they would have been easily fixed by sophisticated Russian nuclear scientists, the book said. The operation, which took place during the Clinton administration in early 2000, was codenamed Operation Merlin and "may have been one of the most reckless operations in...

Remember when Valerie Plame was the poster girl for Bush and Cheney-haters? A desk jockey at the CIA with some flowing blonde hair claim to glamour (in terms of image exploitation, a Wendy Davis-like figure), Plame was supposedly endangered when her name was supposedly leaked by someone in the Bush administration, supposedly in retaliation for her husband Joe Wilson’s criticism of Iraq War policy.

On April 8, House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi headlined a Boston conference on ''media reform.'' She was joined by four other congressmen, a senator, two FCC commissioners, a Nobel laureate and numerous liberal journalists. The 2,500-person event was sponsored by a group called Free Press, one of more than 180 different media-related organizations that receives money from liberal billionaire George Soros. Soros, who first made a name for himself in investing and currency trading, now makes his name in politics and policy. Since the 2004 election, the controversial financier has used his influence and billions to push a laundry list...

The United States military is preparing to establish a drone base in northwest Africa so that it can increase surveillance missions on the local affiliate of Al Qaeda and other Islamist extremist groups that American and other Western officials say pose a growing menace to the region. For now, officials say they envision flying only unarmed surveillance drones from the base, though they have not ruled out conducting missile strikes at some point if the threat worsens. If the base is approved, the most likely location for it would be in Niger, a largely desert nation on the eastern border...