Free Republic

The Boston Marathon Bombing, where three people were killed and 264 wounded, many with legs or feet blown off, continues to be a big media story, but we are still waiting for answers to many questions. How did our government miss so many clues that the Tsarnaev brothers were a deadly danger to Americans? They came into the United States as visitors from Kazakhstan, where many ethnic Chechens live without persecution and then cooked up a claim to be refugees, which was a fraud. After a few years, the father returned to Dagestan, Russia, where he now lives safely. Once...

....The 2012 debate season began with a lay-up,a Mitt Romney victory that shattered every record in the history of snap polling. Style. Crispness of answers. Eye contact. Their candidate had every advantage that the focus groups crave.Then came Joe Biden. Imagine you’re a liberal,and think of all the lines you wanted Barack Obama to use against Mitt Romney....Did Biden forget any of them? Or did he pull a San Diego Fourth of July fireworks display and spray them all at once?..........An hour after the debate ended,the [RNC] released a super-cut of every Biden laugh,claiming that he was “laughing at the...

Intelligence analysts are sifting through phone numbers and email addresses found at Osama bin Laden’s compound to determine potential links to Pakistani government and military officials while U.S. officials and analysts raise concerns about the safety of Pakistan’s nuclear materials. According to three U.S. intelligence officials, the race is on to identify what President Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, has called bin Laden’s “support system” inside Pakistan. These sources sought anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to reporters. “My concern now is that we cannot exclude the possibility that officers in the Pakistani military and the intelligence...

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL * WORLD NEWS * MARCH 17, 2011 Upheaval in Mideast Sets Back Terror War By JULIAN E. BARNES and ADAM ENTOUS WASHINGTON—The U.S. has lost track of many former Guantanamo detainees who had been sent home to the Middle East and North Africa, a sign that unrest in the region is disrupting critical terror-fighting relationships America has built up since the Sept. 11 attacks, U.S. officials say. The flow of information from Libya, Yemen and other governments in the region about the whereabouts and activities of the former Guantanamo detainees, along with other Islamists released from...

Chinese President Hu Jintao had an embarrassing moment in mid-January when his military flight-tested a new tactical aircraft during a visit by U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates. Several features of the plane looked remarkably similar to America’s top-of-the-line F-22 fighter, and yet somehow leaders of the People’s Liberation Army air force managed to not mention to Hu that the test was happening. So the Chinese leader ended up learning about it from Gates. The episode suggested that although Hu is formally in charge of the Chinese military, he doesn’t know what it is doing much of the time

U.S. intelligence apparently failed to figure out how quickly the Chinese were developing their newest fifth generation J-20 stealth fighter, which U.S. government analysts now say was based on critical U.S. stealth technology transfers that happened while Bill Clinton was president, according to a report from Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin. Vice Adm. David Dorsett, director of naval intelligence, said that officials were aware of the development of the J-20, which is supposed to be comparable to the U.S. F-22 stealth fighter, but "the speed at which (the Chinese) are making progress, we underestimated." The U.S. has halted production of the...

After reading Jeffrey Goldberg’s lengthy article in The Atlantic about Israeli calculations on whether to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities, I’m left with an observation and a judgment. First, the observation. We’re being ushered into an unusual conversation here. Months before the destruction of the reactor outside Baghdad in 1981, PLO headquarters in Tunis in 1985, the “uncompleted military facility” in northeastern Syria in 2007, or the arms convoy from Iran in the hills of northern Sudan in early 2009, there were no magazine features full of Defense Ministry types discoursing about timelines on a not-for-attribution basis. What’s more, if the...

US intelligence services and other countries in the Far East are closely monitoring the grand naval drills being conducted by the Russian Navy. “The naval phase of Russia's Vostok-2010 (Orient-2010) military exercises has drawn increased attention from the intelligence services of the United States and Asia-Pacific countries,” a senior Russian Navy source was quoted as saying by RIA Novosti. On June 29, Russia launched the biggest ever post-Soviet war games in the eastern part of the country involving 20,000 troops, up to 70 combat aircraft and 30 warships, including North Fleet's nuclear powered guided missile cruiser ‘Pyotr Veliky’ (Peter-the-Great), world's...

On one August day last year, some US ground troops were preparing to move out down a certain dangerous road in Afghanistan. SrA. Andres Morales of the Air Force had a related mission. As it happened, his mission grew and grew. At first, Morales was tasked to supply intelligence information about three specific points of interest along that Afghan road route. Morales, an analyst in DGS-2, USAF’s Distributed Common Ground System (DCGS) node at Beale AFB, Calif., provided the information within minutes. It was based on a blend of imagery and electronic communications signals captured by the sensors on surveillance...

A senior U.S. military intelligence official confirmed that China will be capable of deploying an advanced fifth generation fighter comparable to the U.S. F-22 within eight years, years ahead of previous Pentagon assessments. “We're anticipating China to have a fifth-generation fighter ... operational right around 2018," said Wayne Ulman of the National Air and Space Intelligence Center. He made the comments before the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission on May 20. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, in defending his decision to end production of the F-22, stated last year that China "is projected to have no fifth-generation aircraft by...

U.S. intelligence officials are expressing growing concerns that Pakistan is holding back valuable intelligence data obtained from captured No. 2 Taliban leader, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar. Mullah Baradar, who was captured in January, is the military deputy to Taliban leader Mullah Omar and he is considered the most important terrorist to be detained since Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was caught in 2003. Senior U.S. intelligence officials in the last week told The Washington Times that recent interrogation sessions with Mullah Baradar yielded very little actionable intelligence. Instead the sessions provided "atmospheric intelligence" that is of limited value, such as the history...

Al-Qaida operatives who have been detained for years in Iran have been making their way quietly in and out of the country, raising the prospect that Iran is loosening its grip on the terror group so it can replenish its ranks, former and current US intelligence officials said in a statements published Thursday. This shift could indicate that Iran is re-examining its murky relationship with al-Qaida at a time when the US is stepping up drone attacks in Pakistan and weakening the group's leadership. Any influx of manpower could hand al-Qaida a boost in morale and expertise and threaten to...

The U.S. military and intelligence community’s space launch manifest is ramping up to an unusually high pace to deploy several first-of-fleet spacecraft that will modernize the nation’s communications, missile warning, surveillance and navigation infrastructures. But uncertainties are clouding the outlook of the liquid- and solid-fueled booster industrial base following a White House decision to terminate NASA’s Constellation program. The Pentagon and National Reconnaissance Office (NRO)—which develops and operates intelligence satellites for the U.S.—are in the midst of several studies to help chart a path forward. In parallel, NASA, the Pentagon, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and Missile Defense Agency are...

The reported defection of an Iranian scientist to the United States has renewed speculation about a CIA plot to sabotage Iran's nuclear program through covert action. But it remains unclear whether Shahram Amiri, the young physics researcher who reportedly joined forces with the US spy agency, represents an intelligence coup for Washington or a minor setback for Tehran, former CIA officers said. ABC television reported that Amiri, who went missing without explanation in Saudi Arabia last year, had defected and resettled in the United States in cooperation with the Central Intelligence Agency. Amiri, in his thirties, worked at Tehran's Malek-Ashtar...

Iran has focused its intelligence efforts on the U.S. military presence in the Gulf. The U.S. intelligence community has determined that Iran was bolstering intelligence operations against the American military presence in Iraq and Gulf Cooperation Council states. The community said Teheran was also using its proxies to spy on American troops. "Iran is enhancing its focus on U.S. intelligence activities and relies on foreign intelligence partnerships to extend its capabilities," the intelligence community said in a report. The Teheran regime has been expanding intelligence operations through such proxies as Hamas, Hizbullah and Venezuela. The report, titled "Annual Threat Assessment,"...

Recently, U.S. UAVs made three attacks in one day in Pakistan’s tribal territories. The Hellfire missiles were hitting targets in North Waziristan, where Taliban and al Qaeda forces are taking shelter with Pushtun tribes that are, at best, neutral in the war between the Pakistani government and the Pakistani Taliban. One of the dead terrorists is believed to be a key leader, Hussein al-Yemeni. He was believed as the planner for the attack on a CIA base across the border last December, which killed seven CIA personnel. Pakistani and American intelligence is getting a lot more information out of North...

HE remembers the women sunbathing naked on the deck of a passing yacht. He remembers, too, the lurking menace of a Russian intelligence-gathering trawler, watching from afar as one of the most audacious American coups of the cold war unfolded on the ocean floor, 16,500ft beneath the Pacific surface. David Sharp recalls every detail of the 1974 mission known as Project Azorian, one of the most ambitious, expensive and politically volatile clandestine operations launched by the CIA. As one of the CIA’s agents in charge of recovering a sunken Soviet submarine and its cargo of nuclear-tipped missiles, Sharp spent 63...

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for the first time has revealed details about an ultra-secret Cold War-era project to raise a sunken Soviet submarine from the depths of the Pacific Ocean in 1974. The high-risk salvage operation, code-named ‘Project Azorian’, had been shrouded in secrecy for decades but the spy agency broke its silence in newly-declassified documents published yesterday by an independent watchdog, the National Security Archive. The documents, drawn from a 50-page article written for an in-house CIA journal, recount the daring bid approved by then-president Richard Nixon to raise the submarine using a specially-designed ship, the Glomar Explorer....

The proposed new charter for the nation’s spy satellite builder, the National Reconnaissance Office, is stuck in the Department of Defense’s general counsel’s office. The lawyers are apparently worried that the new charter may expand the agency’s powers into areas governed by the military services. Information on all this is extremely close hold but we have heard variations on this from two very well informed sources. One phrase in the statement of principles that guides the charter appears to be the issue: “overhead reconnaissance systems.” That is the key phrase in a document, called the statement of principles. It lays...

Within a year—give or take a few months—the shuttles will no longer be roaring through Florida skies. The program will shut down, the orbiters will go to museums, and pundits and bloggers will jump all over each other to pontificate on the meaning of the shuttle program. Most will declare it a mistake, some will call it a disaster. Eventually the historians will get to it, holding symposia and writing books about the program. Some of them will look at the shuttle’s early origins, when it was slated to be all things to all people: cheap, reliable, responsive. They will...