Free Republic

"Welcome to the world's interrelated four-month, four-nation election cycle" was the challenge posted here in October. So far, voters who support implanting freedom in the Middle East have won three in a row, electing President Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan, the American ally John Howard in Australia, and George Bush here. Now pessimists are trying desperately to call off the fourth election - the one scheduled for late January in Iraq to elect a 275-member national assembly that will write a constitution - lest they lose that vote, too. For one awful moment last week, it seemed the foot-draggers might succeed....

Thoughtful hair-splitter William Safire is giving up his political column at The New York Times after 31 years, saying it was time "to hang up his hatchet." Safire, 74, will write his final op-ed column on Jan. 24, the newspaper said yesterday. A Pulitzer Prize-winner and author of 25 books, Safire will continue to write his "On Language" column about syntax and semantics, which has appeared in the Sunday Times magazine since 1979 and spawned 15 of his books. [snip] Prior to the Times, Safire worked as a publicist and brought together President Nixon and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev...

William Safire, whose political commentary column has appeared on the Op-Ed Page of The New York Times for more than 30 years, is stepping down, The Times said today. The newspaper said in a statement that Mr. Safire would make his final appearance as an Op-Ed columnist on Jan. 24, 2005. "The New York Times without Bill Safire is all but unimaginable," Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publisher of The Times, said in the statement. "Bill's provocative and insightful commentary has held our readers captive since he first graced our Op-Ed Page in 1973. Reaching for his column became a critical...

William Safire will publish his final column as a New York Times Op-Ed columnist on January 24, 2005. Arthur Sulzberger Jr, publisher of The New York Times, said, "The New York Times without Bill Safire is all but unimaginable. Bill's provocative and insightful commentary has held our readers captive since he first graced our Op-Ed Page in 1973. Reaching for his column became a critical and enjoyable part of the day for our readers across the country and around the world. Whether you agreed with him or not was never the point. His writing is delightful, informed and engaging. So,...

WILLIAM SAFIRE LEAVING NYT; RETIRES COLUMN... DEVELOPING...

OP-ED COLUMNIST Washington — "I'm angry that we find the U.N. proactively interfering with our investigation," Senator Norm Coleman, chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, informed Lou Dobbs on CNN, "by telling certain folks not to cooperate with us." He repeated for emphasis his sharp response to Secretary General Kofi Annan's "interfering with our ability to get information we need" about the oil-for-food scandal. Judith Miller of The Times had revealed that the Minnesota Republican, joined by ranking Democrat Carl Levin, sent a letter noting Annan's four-month foot-dragging and that "the U.N. is hindering our efforts to obtain...

OP-ED COLUMNIST WASHINGTON — Good news is no news. That's why the most historic development of this news-drenched year has not been on front pages and hasn't led TV newscasts. Against all dire predictions and threats from terrorists, Afghanistan - breeding ground of Al Qaeda under the medieval rule of Taliban fundamentalists - has just held the first presidential election in its bloodstained history. The winner was Hamid Karzai, 46, a politician of the majority Pashtuns, who emerged with 55 percent of the eight million votes cast. The runner-up, Yunus Qanooni, received 1.2 million votes; after grumbling about a few...

OP-ED COLUMNIST The fundamental right of Americans, through our free press, to penetrate and criticize the workings of our government is under attack as never before. Three decades ago, not long after I left the Nixon administration to join The New York Times, I criticized the posturing of the special prosecutor Leon Jaworski - then the darling of the press corps. Al Haig, the White House chief of staff at the time, collared me at a party to pass along a message about Jaworski's triggering a grand-jury subpoena: "Leon says to tell you to get off his back or else."...

Washington — The Zarqawi terrorist network in Iraq has developed a powerful new weapon. It requires no munitions and no suicide zealots, runs no risk to terrorists of death or capture and provides cash to finance other operations. The weapon is publicized kidnapping. Pictures of helpless captives begging for their lives trigger worldwide coverage of tearful families begging for mercy. Films sometimes conclude with a sadistic Zarqawi slowly sawing off the heads of his victims. For the psychological warriors, it is a win-win tactic. If the ransom is paid by a private contractor, the extorted cash buys rockets and mortars....

Whoever, having devised any scheme or artifice to defraud transmits or causes to be transmitted by means of wire, radio or television communication in interstate or foreign commerce, any writings for the purpose of executing such scheme or artifice, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both. --- U.S. Criminal Code, Chapter 63, Section 1343. That was no mere "dirty trick"; it could be a violation of the U.S. criminal code. If the artifice had not been revealed by sharp-eyed bloggers, a national election could have been swung by a blatant falsehood. Who...

OP-ED COLUMNIST Whoever, having devised any scheme or artifice to defraud transmits or causes to be transmitted by means of wire, radio or television communication in interstate or foreign commerce, any writings for the purpose of executing such scheme or artifice, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both. " U.S. Criminal Code, Chapter 63, Section 1343. WASHINGTON — At the root of what is today treated as an embarrassing blunder by duped CBS journalists may turn out to be a felony by its faithless sources. Some person or persons conceived a scheme...

ashington Alert bloggers who knew the difference between the product of old typewriters and new word processors immediately suspected a hoax: the "documents" presented by CBS News suggesting preferential treatment in Lt. George W. Bush's National Guard service have all the earmarks of forgeries.The copies of copies of copies that formed the basis for the latest charges were supposedly typed by Guard officer Jerry Killian three decades ago and placed in his "personal" file. But it is the default typeface of Microsoft Word, highly unlikely to have been used by that Texas colonel, who died in 1984. His widow says...

ohn McCain's presence onstage was powerful, and his no-apologies message went to the heart of the matter in this campaign: The war against terror is being fought for a noble cause and the candidate most likely to persevere in it is George W. Bush. Speaking to a couple of us at his birthday party the night before, the most trusted man in America made clear that his unequivocal embrace of Bush was not mere "campaign oratory," in Wendell Willkie's phrase. He was certain that his former rival had the gumption to see it through, and could not be certain that...

The New GroupthinkBy WILLIAM SAFIREPublished: July 14, 2004 he salient news in the Senate Intelligence Committee report is this: all you have been hearing about "he lied to us" and "they cooked the books" is a lot of partisan nonsense. The 511-page Senate report concluded this: Nobody in the White House or the Pentagon pressured the C.I.A. to change an intelligence analysis to conform to the judgment that the world would be a safer place with the monstrous Saddam overthrown.Ah, second-guessers say, but what about "groupthink"? Before Gulf War I, the consensus held that Saddam was five to 10 years...

HARPERS FERRY, W.Va. — "Misadvised by a frustrated and panic-stricken attorney general, a president of the United States has just assumed what amounts to dictatorial power to jail or execute aliens." So wrote a purpling libertarian kook on Nov. 15, 2001, the day after President Bush issued an executive order cracking down on suspected terrorist captives. "At a time when even liberals are debating the ethics of torture of suspects," this soft-on-terror wimp went on, "weighing the distaste for barbarism against the need to save innocent lives — it's time for conservative iconoclasts and card-carrying hard-liners to stand up for...

Only two days ago, I wrote with all the confidence of a bigfoot pundit that French President Jacques Chirac, at the NATO summit in Istanbul, would find it in his political interest to paper over past differences with the U.S., Britain and most other European nations about overthrowing Saddam. So much for my certitude. Instead, Chirac stuck his thumb in the alliance's eye: he would not allow any troops under the NATO flag to help the newly sovereign Iraqis defeat the terrorists. Even the training of Iraqi police officers would have to take place outside that country; Chirac slyly suggested...

LONDON — At this week's NATO summit conference in Istanbul, it will be in the political interest of America's European adversaries — France's Jacques Chirac and Germany's Gerhard Schröder — to appear to cooperate with the coalition helping Iraq complete its liberation. At the same time, it is in the political interest of George W. Bush and Britain's Tony Blair to appear to be delighted with whatever safe and cheap aid that the Chirac-Schröder bloc allows NATO to offer instead of supplying alliance troops. In this way, the French and German leaders can tell their nations that no diplomatic cost...

June 23, 2004OP-ED COLUMNISTThe Great Cash CowBy WILLIAM SAFIRE his was the biggest cash cow in the history of the world," says one of the insiders familiar with the $10 billion U.N. oil-for-food scandal. "Everybody — traders, contractors, banks, inspectors — was milking it. It was supposed to buy food with the money from oil that the U.N. allowed Saddam to sell, but less than half went for that. Perfume, limos, a shipment of 1,500 Ping-Pong tables, for God's sake."Another whistle-blower, often on the "graveyard shift" of round-the-clock operations at the U.N.'s New York Office of the Iraq Program,...

WASHINGTON — "Panel Finds No Qaeda-Iraq Tie" went the Times headline. "Al Qaeda-Hussein Link Is Dismissed" front-paged The Washington Post. The A.P. led with the thrilling words "Bluntly contradicting the Bush Administration, the commission. . . ." This understandably caused my editorial-page colleagues to draw the conclusion that "there was never any evidence of a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda. . . ." All wrong. The basis for the hoo-ha was not a judgment of the panel of commissioners appointed to investigate the 9/11 attacks. As reporters noted below the headlines, it was an interim report of the commission's...

June 14, 2004OP-ED COLUMNISTTear Down This U.N. StonewallBy WILLIAM SAFIRE he secretary general of the U.N. tapped me on the shoulder at a recent luncheon and said, "May I have a word with you?"Because several columns of mine zapped the U.N. for its cover-up of the costliest financial rip-off in history — even calling it "Kofigate" — I braced myself for an icy rebuke. But Kofi Annan assured me, in his courteous way, that the committee he had appointed to look into the oil-for-food scandal, headed by former Fed chairman Paul Volcker, would do a thorough job.I respectfully asked if...