Free Republic

Former President Barack Obama’s former top spy has provided the first public confirmation that the FBI possessed and studied the discredited anti-Trump dossier that made unverified criminal charges against the president’s campaign associates and others. CIA director John O. Brennan appeared Tuesday before the House Intelligence Committee. “I know that there were efforts made by the bureau to try to understand whether or not any of the information in that was valid,” Mr. Brennan said of the 35-page document compiled by ex-British spy Christopher Steele and paid for by Democratic-tied Fusion GPS in Washington. Mr. Gowdy asked Mr. Brennan: “Do...

Over 6,000 individuals registered to vote in New Hampshire on Election Day Nov. 8 using out-of-state driver’s licenses — and since then the vast majority have neither obtained an in-state license nor registered a motor vehicle. Speaker of the New Hampshire House Shawn Jasper, a Republican, issued the findings on Thursday based on inquiries he made to the Department of State, which oversees elections, and the Department of Safety. Since election days, Republicans have charged that a significant number of non-resident Democrats, principally from Massachusetts, flowed into New Hampshire to vote illegally, tilting close elections to their party. Mr. Jasper’s...

While the mainstream news media hunts for evidence of Trump-Russia collusion, the public record shows that Democrats have willfully used Moscow disinformation to influence the presidential election against Donald Trump and attack his administration.The disinformation came in the form of a Russian-fed dossier written by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele. It contains a series of unverified criminal charges against Mr. Trump’s campaign aides, such as coordinating Moscow’s hacking of Democratic Party computers.Some Democrats have widely circulated the discredited information. Mr. Steele was paid by the Democrat-funded opposition research firm Fusion GPS with money from a Hillary Clinton backer. Fusion...

A key congressional supporter of Donald Trump says the president-elect’s defense secretary should move quickly to reverse a number of social engineering policies adopted in the Obama years that “have cut down on the warrior mentality.”Rep. Duncan Hunter, California Republican, told The Washington Times that the armed forces need a counterrevolution. It should reverse at least three policies: women in the infantry, open transgender troops and the near-banishment of the word “man” from Navy and Marine Corps titles.

A Navy officer has spent eight months in the brig as a captive of U.S. counterintelligence agents, but to hear officials tell the spy tale, they know few details about what he provided to China’s communist regime or Taiwan’s government. To be sure, Lt. Cmdr. Edward Chieh-Liang Lin knows a lot about the Navy’s spying on China. He was a naval flight officer for long-distance patrol aircraft that suck up communications as well as track and take reconnaissance photographs and video of Beijing’s aggressive military operations in the South China Sea and elsewhere. “Someone like Cmdr. Lin would have detailed...

The American Psychological Association has taken the extraordinary step of retracting an in-house journal article that asserted the rate of rape and other sexual trauma among military men was as much as 15 times higher than the Pentagon’s own survey. In a press released posted Sunday night, the APA said outside scholars had examined the study, "Preliminary Data Suggest Rates of Male Sexual Trauma May be Higher than Previously Reported," and determined that the method for randomly selecting and surveying male combat veterans was flawed. "Although the article went through our standard peer-review process, other scholars have since examined the...

A married Army general on Tuesday introduced his spouse at a Pentagon event that featured lots of top brass, including Defense Secretary Ashton Carter as the keynote speaker. What made this seemingly routine introduction noteworthy is that Brig. Gen. Randy S. Taylor introduced his husband, Lucas. “My husband Lucas is sitting up front here,” Gen. Taylor said of the man in the same row as Mr. Carter, Army Secretary John McHugh and other senior officials. He said Lucas has subjugated his own career to support the general’s frequent moves over an 18-year relationship.

An independent panel appointed by the Pentagon and Congress said Thursday that President Obama’s strategy for sizing the armed services is too weak for today’s global threats. The National Defense Panel called on the president to dump a major section of his 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) and write a broader strategy that requires the military to fight on multiple fronts at once. It also said the shrinking U.S. armed forces, which are being downsized to fit that strategy and budget cuts, is a “serious strategic misstep on the part of the United States.” The forces’ numbers spelled out in...

The official line from the White House, the State Department, and the Pentagon about the US response to the attack on our consulate in Benghazi has been that we didn’t have time to send in troops to fight the terrorists that were killing Americans. A new report from Washington Times reporter Rowan Scarborough undermines that argument, and once again raises the question about the lack of response. Two American commandos have received medals for fighting in Benghazi after volunteering to accompany five security contractors from Tripoli, and Scarborough wonders why the US didn’t mobilize other forces at the same time:

The Obama national security team that wants to go to war with Syria and demonizes President Bashar Assad is the same group that, as senators, urged reaching out to the dictator.As a bloc on the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, President Obama, Secretary of State John F. Kerry, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Vice President Joseph R. Biden all opposed the George W. Bush administration’s playing tough with Mr. Assad. None grew closer to Mr. Assad and promoted him in Washington more than Mr. Kerry.“President Assad has been very generous with me in terms of the discussions we have had,”...

Four branches of the military have begun sending training material to 2.2 million active and reserve troops as a prelude to opening the ranks to gays, with instructions on, for example, what to do if an officer sees two male Marines kissing in a shopping mall. Key themes are that sexual orientation will no longer be a bar to service, that all service members must respect each other, and that the partners of gay troops will not receive the benefits of heterosexual spouses. “We are going to make [gay ban] repeal training expeditiously,” said Maj. Joel Harper, an Air Force...

American combat troops will get sensitivity training directly on the battlefield about the military’s new policy on gays instead of waiting until they return to home base in the United States, the senior enlisted man in Afghanistan said Thursday. The Pentagon is launching an extensive force-wide program to ease the process of integrating open homosexuals into the ranks, including into close-knit fighting units. Army Command Sgt. Maj. Marvin Hill, the top enlisted man in Afghanistan where 100,000 U.S. troops are deployed, said that the sessions on respecting gays’ rights will go right down to the forward operating bases, where troops...

President Obama's pledge to lift the military's ban on openly gay service members this year seems at best headed for extremely close votes in the House and Senate, according to Congress watchers. The president's proposal needs 218 votes in the House. A bill to repeal the policy known as "don't ask, don't tell" has fewer than 190 co-sponsors. What's more, a number of Democrats representing conservative districts, led by House Armed Services Committee Chairman Ike Skelton of Missouri, are set to buck the president and vote against repeal. In the Senate, senators who support the ban could filibuster the 2011...

When a small team of Navy SEALs set out to capture one of Iraq's most-wanted terrorists in September, they never dreamed it would go so smoothly. After all, Ahmed Hashim Abed, the suspected mastermind of a 2004 atrocity against U.S. contractors in Fallujah, was holed up in a safe house in Anbar province. Intelligence reports, which identified his location, said he kept a revolver under his pillow.

The military is throwing the book at three terrorist-hunting Navy SEALs who captured one of the most wanted in Iraq. It seems one of the commandos may have punched Ahmed Hashim Abed, who intelligence reports said planned the bloody ambush of four Blackwater USA security guards in Fallujah, Iraq, five years ago. Instead of plaudits, three SEALs face court-martial in January. And conservatives are expressing outrage to HUMAN EVENTS. Abed, whom the U.S. command designated "Objective Amber," was nabbed in darkness Sept. 3 by a platoon of commandos from SEAL Team 10, based in Norfolk. The next few hours proved...

Navy SEALs have secretly captured one of the most wanted terrorists in Iraq — the alleged mastermind of the murder and mutilation of four Blackwater USA security guards in Fallujah in 2004. And three of the SEALs who captured him are now facing criminal charges, sources told FoxNews.com.

Navy SEALs have secretly captured one of the most wanted terrorists in Iraq — the alleged mastermind of the murder and mutilation of four Blackwater USA security guards in Fallujah in 2004. And for their trouble, three of the SEALs, members of the Navy's elite commando unit, are now facing criminal charges, sources told FoxNews.com. The three have refused non-judicial punishment — called an admiral's mast — and requested a trial by court-martial. Ahmed Hashim Abed, whom the military code-named "Objective Amber," told investigators he was punched by his captors — and he had the bloody lip to prove it....

The White House is becoming increasingly irked at its most important general -- Stanley McChrystal, the four-star running President Obama's war in Afghanistan. Obama dispatched McChrystal to Afghanistan in June to defeat the Taliban under a White House strategy adopted in March and with 21,000 extra troops.

The CIA's harsh interrogation techniques saved countless American lives by forcing al Qaeda chieftains to disclose a string of sophisticated terror plots to infiltrate the United States with cold-blooded killers. That fact is established in two documents released Monday by the Justice Department, hours after they released the CIA Inspector General report which Attorney General Holder has used as a basis to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the CIA interrogators. The successes produced by the so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” are disclosed in two declassified CIA reports -- the same ones demanded to be released by former Vice President Dick...

Taliban terrorists know where some of Pakistan's nuclear weapons are stored based on information from allies inside the country's national security forces. A military source tells HUMAN EVENTS the Taliban and al Qaeda operatives in Pakistan's western frontier have ties to elements of the Pakistan army and Inter-Services Intelligence. The ISI helped put the Taliban in power in Afghanistan in 1996s. Its agents have helped it carry out attacks, including the bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul. It is through these contacts that the Taliban and its extremist allies know the locations of some nuclear warheads. Pakistan is believed...