Free Republic

I really feel like slamming some of the chickens**t American Jews who regularly comment - both on this blog and on Twitter and Facebook - that Jonathan Pollard should rot in jail because what he did was so terrible they're afraid of being accused of having 'dual loyalties' if they actually question Pollard's life sentence. Much of the infamous Cap Weinberger memo (that Pollard's lawyers were never allowed to see) has been declassified, and it shows that much of the US government argument for keeping Pollard imprisoned is based on lies and mischaracterizes what Weinberger (an anti-Semite in his...

Geneva - Islamic State militants are selling abducted Iraqi children at markets as sex slaves, and killing other youth, including by crucifixion or burying them alive, a United Nations watchdog said on Wednesday. Iraqi boys aged under 18 are increasingly being used by the militant group as suicide bombers, bomb makers, informants or human shields to protect facilities against US-led air strikes, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child said. "We are really deeply concerned at torture and murder of those children, especially those belonging to minorities, but not only from minorities," committee expert Renate Winter told a...

That’s the revelation made by California Congressman Devin Nunes, who sits on the House Ways And Means Committee on Hugh Hewitt’s Show Wednesday night. Here’s the key part of that transcript: HH: The idea that this might be a Geithner-Axelrod plan, and by that, the sort of intimation, Henry II style, will no one rid me of this turbulent priest, will no one rid me of these turbulent Tea Parties, that might have just been a hint, a shift of an eyebrow, a change in the tone of voice. That’s going to take a long time to get to. I...

At a conference of the Annual Strategic Data Project (SDP) last year, Common Core "architect" and current president of the “non-profit” College Board, David Coleman, praised the collection of student data via the Common Core State Standards initiative.  Furthermore, he welcomed to that effort members of Barack Obama’s re-election campaign who, Coleman said, would be reaching out, as they did for the campaign, to the “low-hanging fruit,” or low-income and Latino students.In the video below, recorded last May by the Harvard Center for Education Policy Research CEPR, Coleman gave his audience several important pieces of information. First, Coleman admitted, as former...

It’s all a grand charade — the matinee show put on by the Theater of Science was merely being used for the Grand Extravaganza called the Theater of Politics.Wikileaks, not surprisingly, turned up some not-so-diplomatic and not-so-scientific goings-on in the political race to steer power and dollars.From The Guardian The US diplomatic cables reveal how the US seeks dirt on nations opposed to its approach to tackling global warming; how financial and other aid is used by countries to gain political backing; how distrust, broken promises and creative accounting dog negotiations; and how the US mounted a secret global diplomatic...

It's a battle between privacy advocates and police. Two bills regarding the controversial license plate readers, also known as LPR's, received a hearing at the State Capitol Thursday afternoon. "The scanning and storage capabilities of these systems have increased exponentially since they were first implemented," testified Teresa Nelson of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), an opponent of storing this data collected by law enforcement. "As this technology improves and costs go down we're going to see LPR systems reach a point where they're deployed on every street corner and capable of scanning every vehicle." Republican Senator Branden Petersen, R-Andover,...

Not Every Leak Is Fit to Print Why have federal prosecutors subpoenaed a New York Times reporter?by Gabriel Schoenfeld 02/18/2008, Volume 013, Issue 22 Investigations of national-security leaks in Washington are not all that rare. But until Judith Miller of the New York Times was sent to jail for 85 days by a special prosecutor digging into the Valerie Plame imbroglio, investigations of such leaks in which journalists are subpoenaed were about as common as unicorns wandering the National Mall. We now have another such unicorn. On January 24, a federal grand jury in Alexandria issued a subpoena to...

The documents kept by the Iraqi Intelligence Service were meticulous in detail and sweeping in scope. In some, Iraqi intelligence officers in the United States are directed to use informers to track the "criminal'' actions of one current and one former Chicago area resident, both Assyrian Christians from Iraq who founded an anti-Saddam Hussein political party. Another accuses the group of being influenced by "imperialists'' and "Zionists.'' Others include the exact dates of the group's meetings and conventions in Chicago and elsewhere, the names of the people who ran the events, those in attendance and what statements were made. Trips...

CHICAGO: A judge denied bail to a man accused of spying on Iraqi opposition groups for Saddam Hussein, saying he had "hitched his star to the murderer and torturer of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis”. Khaled Abdel-Latif Dumeisi, 61, held his head in his hands on Thursday as federal magistrate judge Edward A Bobrick accused him of spying for "the maniacal, perverted, homicidal mass murderer and torturer of women and children." The community newspaper publisher is accused of spying on Iraqi opposition leaders in this country on behalf of Saddam's intelligence service while failing to register as an agent of...

Disclosure of classified info complicates trial of alleged Iraqi agent Prosecutors say a page of grand jury testimony should never have been turned over to the defense. CHICAGO (AP) -- A community newspaper publisher accused of spying on Iraqi opposition groups in the United States for Saddam Hussein's intelligence service wants the charges thrown out because federal prosecutors mistakenly disclosed classified information. Khaled Abdel-Latif Dumeisi, of Oak Lawn, is scheduled to go to trial Monday on federal charges of perjury and failing to register as a foreign agent. But lawyers for Dumeisi, 61, filed court papers this month detailing efforts...

December 29, 2008 Note: The following text is a quote: http://www.usdoj.gov/opa/pr/2008/December/08-nsd-1151.html Former Maryland Man Charged with Conspiracy to Act as an Iraqi Agent Defendant Allegedly Worked for the Government of Iraq and Assisted the Iraqi Intelligence Service WASHINGTON – A criminal complaint was filed today charging Mouyad Mahmoud Darwish, age 47, formerly of Maryland, with conspiring to act as an agent of a foreign government, specifically, as an agent of Iraq, announced United States Attorney for the District of Maryland Rod J. Rosenstein and Patrick Rowan, Assistant Attorney General for National Security. Darwish is a Canadian citizen born in Iraq....

A veteran State Department diplomat and longtime Pakistan expert is under federal investigation as part of a counterintelligence probe and has had her security clearances withdrawn, according to U.S. officials. The FBI searched the Northwest Washington home of Robin L. Raphel last month, and her State Department office was also examined and sealed, officials said. Raphel, a fixture in Washington’s diplomatic and think-tank circles, was placed on administrative leave last month, and her contract with the State Department was allowed to expire this week. Two U.S. officials described the investigation as a counterintelligence matter, which typically involves allegations of spying...

Thursday on Fox News Radio’s “John Gibson Show,” investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson explained she is suing the Department of Justice to get discovery, which she said hopefully will start with the names of the agents or third-party contractors sometimes hired for “certain dark projects,” who hacked her computer and planted a fiber optics cable at her house.

Former CBS News reporter sues Justice Department for $35 million alleging her family was put under surveillance while she covered Benghazi A former reporter with CBS News is suing the U.S. Department of Justice, alleging she was illegally spied on and digitally monitored. Sharyl Attkisson's lawsuit alleges that the illegal surveillance took place while she covered stories on Benghazi and the Fast and Furious gunwalking case and refers to three forensic exams conducted on computers. She is suing over alleged violations of the First and Fourth Amendments, and her husband and daughter are named as co-plaintiffs. Attorney General Eric Holder,...

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio feared police officers were spying on his conversations during his election campaign last year, it has emerged. In an early sign of his tension with the force, de Blasio's team was 'convinced' that members of his police detail were listening in on his private conversations inside his city-assigned car, a former de Blasio aide has told Politico. De Blasio would even step into the street to make sure he was out of their earshot, the aide added. The mayor's office has not yet responded to a request for comment on the claims.

Congress this week quietly passed a bill that may give unprecedented legal authority to the government's warrantless surveillance powers, despite a last-minute effort by Rep. Justin Amash to kill the bill. Amash staged an aggressive eleventh-hour rally Wednesday night to block passage of the Intelligence Authorization Act, which will fund intelligence agencies for the next fiscal year. The Michigan Republican sounded alarms over recently amended language in the package that he said will for the first time give congressional backing to a controversial Reagan-era decree granting broad surveillance authority to the president.

An army is attacking the United States. Its war is being waged without bullets or fanfare. Denied by its government, these soldiers operate in shadows and in silence. Yet, glimpses of their operations are seen on a daily basis—hackers and spies attacking and stealing from U.S. businesses and the U.S. government. Until now, a complete view of their operations and of the military department that gives them their orders remained hidden. Yet, China’s spy and cyberoperations all share one thing in common: they’re all orchestrated under the People’s Liberation Army General Staff Department (GSD), the Chinese military’s top-level department dedicated...

WASHINGTON -- Senate Republicans on Tuesday blocked a sweeping overhaul of the once-secret National Security Agency program that collects records of Americans' phone calls in bulk. Democrats and a handful of Republicans who supported the measure failed to secure the 60 votes they needed to take up the legislation. The vote was 58-42 for consideration. Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, worked hard to defeat the bill, which had the support of the Obama administration and a coalition of technology companies, including Apple, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo. "This is the worst possible time to be tying our hands behind our...

As fears grow over Iran secretly developing nuclear weapons, U.S. counterintelligence officials are keeping a close eye on scientists from Iran and other Muslim nations working at the U.S. nuclear weapons laboratories, WND has learned. The Energy Department recently revoked the security clearance of an Egyptian-born nuclear physicist because he was suspected of "conflicting allegiances." Last year, DOE and FBI agents began questioning Moniem El-Ganayni, who worked on the side as a Muslim prison chaplain.

WASHINGTON — In a rare public accounting of its mass surveillance program, the United States Postal Service reported that it approved nearly 50,000 requests last year from law enforcement agencies and its own internal inspection unit to secretly monitor the mail of Americans for use in criminal and national security investigations. The number of requests, contained in a 2014 audit of the surveillance program by the Postal Service’s inspector general, shows that the surveillance program is more extensive than previously disclosed and that oversight protecting Americans from potential abuses is lax. The audit, along with interviews and documents obtained by...