Free Republic

The Rules of War Can't Protect Al Qaeda By RUTH WEDGWOOD NEW HAVEN — It makes no sense to win a trial but lose the war. With this in mind, a majority of the American public favors giving President Bush the option to use military tribunals against the Qaeda terror network. The tribunals are designed to permit a "full and fair trial" of war crimes without compromising our ability to track the network's future plans. Al Qaeda's skill at countersurveillance has made plain the need to protect sensitive intelligence sources at trial. But some international-law scholars suggest that President Bush's ...

Mainstream America is finally getting to know the billionaire brothers backing the libertarian movement, thanks to a pair of dueling profiles in New York and The New Yorker. Now that we've heard about their charitable giving, David's 240-foot mega-yacht and role as patrons of the Tea Party movement, it's time to ask a more serious question: How libertarian are they? The short answer...not very.Charles and David Koch, the secretive billionaire brothers who own Koch Industries, the largest private oil company in America, have spent millions bankrolling free-market think tanks and pro-business politicians in order, as David Koch has put it,...

(WBBM) -- Could it be the voice of E.T.? NASA scientists are puzzling over an abrupt change in what they're hearing from Voyager 2, the space probe launched more than 30 years ago. It's traveled more than 8 billion miles toward the edge of the solar system. Chief scientist Ed Stone says Voyager has suddenly begun sending back data NASA computers can't decipher. Here's what it sounds like CLICK HERE Scientists think it's a simple glitch in the computer. UFO buffs are hoping it could be a signal from life on planets far away. NASA will keep listening. Voyager was...

Well, back in the summer of 1977, flyover country was pissed. The nation they loved was being run into the ground by the jet-setters. Skyrocketing inflation. Rampant unemployment. Plummeting GDP. Crushing misery index. Multiple oil crises. Vanishing trade surpluses. A wretched President. Ordinary people were scared and angry, looking for — what’s the word? — oh yeah, “change.” Spare or otherwise.

Note: The following text is a quote: Former State Department Official and Wife Arrested for Serving as Illegal Agents of Cuba for Nearly 30 Years Couple Allegedly Conspired to Provide Classified Information to Cuban Government A former State Department official and his wife have been arrested on charges of serving as illegal agents of the Cuban government for nearly 30 years and conspiring to provide classified U.S. information to the Cuban government. The arrests were announced today by David Kris, Assistant Attorney General for National Security; Channing D. Phillips, Acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia; Joseph Persichini, Jr.,...

James Carafano: Why 1978 was a very bad year By: James Carafano Examiner Columnist October 26, 2009 He followed an unpopular president. He received a strong election mandate. He changed the tone in Washington. He said that Human Rights mattered. That America's image in the world had to be remade. He would receive a Nobel Peace Prize. As the end of his presidency's first year drew near, the future looked bright. He had brought change -- change that mattered. It was 1977. The next year was very bad. In 1978, President Jimmy Carter negotiated the Camp David Accords, formalizing peace...

Prisoner Abuse: Self-flagellation over alleged human rights violations is not a foreign policy, but a recipe for long-term disaster. Some who now complain about Guantanamo had a key hand in making it necessary. Newsweek's retraction of its story on the alleged flushing of pages from the Quran down a Guantanamo commode has not dissuaded critics convinced that Guantanamo is, as Amnesty International put it, a modern-day "gulag." One of those who believe the human rights of prisoners at Guantanamo are being violated is former President Carter. Speaking in September 2003, two short years after 9-11, he opined as to how...

...[W]e're reprising the harrowing 1977 grand jury testimony of the 13-year-old California girl with whom the director had sex after plying her with Champagne and a Quaalude at the Los Angeles home of Jack Nicholson. Polanski, now 74, fled the U.S. for Europe before he could be sentenced for the sex crime and remains a fugitive from justice. In graphic testimony, Samantha Gailey described the illicit encounter with Polanski, which began with her posing naked in a Jacuzzi for him as he purportedly snapped photos for French Vogue. From there, Polanski approached her in a bedroom of Nicholson's Mulholland Drive...

The Subprime home mortgage collapse...a Primer. It's ALL about the CRA of 1977 Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) of 1977 - This required banks to offer credit throughout their entire market area for “underserved” populations and small businesses. The CRA gave incentives to help low income borrowers become “home owners”. Liberals call this group “low income borrowers”. Conservatives call them a RISK!The CRA was passed by the Carter administration. In 1995 the Clinton administration authorized subprime loans under the CRA. Democrats added these provisions for the securitization of subprime loans and then ENFORCED the lending to high risk individuals. By 2000,...

NEW YORK — The head of the United Nations General Assembly signalled Friday a breakthrough is imminent in talks to resolve the political crisis in Honduras. Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann spoke in New York as thousands of supporters of Honduras’s ousted president, Manuel Zelaya, held rallies in the Central American country. “I have a feeling that we are moving in that direction rather quickly,” the former Nicaraguan revolutionary, who is also a Catholic priest, told a news conference at the UN. Insiders suggested that a timetable had been laid out in which Zelaya, a rich landowner whose leftist policies led him...

The Kurdish Halabja Centre CHAK has submitted new and possibly incriminating evidence in the appeal case against Dutch businessman Frans van Anraat. The documents were reportedly supplied by the Iraqi tribunal that sentenced former dictator Saddam Hussein to death. In December last year, Frans van Anraat was sentenced to 15 years in jail. The court in The Hague found him guilty of supplying materials for chemical weapons to the Saddam Hussein regime in the 1980s. He was acquitted of complicity in genocide because he reportedly did not know that Saddam Hussein intended to use poison gas on the Iraqi population....

The mainstream press steadfastly refuses to delve into Barack Obama’s radicalism, his Leftist revolutionary collaboration with self-identified communists from Frank Marshall Davis to Bill Ayers. The McCain campaign, moreover, has contributed mightily to the whitewash by ineptly seizing on the issue’s least important aspect: Obama’s abject dishonesty about the depth of his relationships with committed Leftists — e.g., the portrayal of Ayers as just “a guy who lives in my neighborhood.” (Petrified of being smeared as a racist, McCain has never mentioned Davis, whom Obama identifies only as “Frank” in his memoir. And, of course, utterance of Jeremiah Wright’s name...

Subversives for Obama Friday, 26th September 2008 There are two American election campaigns currently running. The first, in the mainstream media, accepts Barack Obama at face value, no questions asked, while it viciously turns over Sarah Palin and her family whom it subjects to lies, smears and character assassination. The second, being conducted in the blogosphere and (with one or two notable exceptions such as the Wall Street Journal) not alluded to at all by the mainstream media, is the site of verbal warfare between Camp Obama and bloggers who are practising journalism as it used to be practised –...

The small scar above Marion Barry's heart has had three decades to fade, but it's still noticeable -- evidence that some things don't disappear with time. For 39 hours in March 1977 -- before the word "terrorism" entered our daily vocabulary -- 12 gunmen paralyzed the District in a three-point siege. The group of Hanafi Muslims held about 150 people hostage in three buildings, and before they surrendered, a young reporter was killed and dozens were injured, including D.C. Council member Barry. A shotgun pellet pierced his chest, right above his heart, nearly killing him. -snip- The 12 gunmen had...

Former President Jimmy Carter, who publicly rebuked President Bush's warrantless eavesdropping program this week during the funeral of Coretta Scott King and at a campaign event, used similar surveillance against suspected spies. "Under the Bush administration, there's been a disgraceful and illegal decision -- we're not going to the let the judges or the Congress or anyone else know that we're spying on the American people," Mr. Carter said Monday in Nevada when his son Jack announced his Senate campaign. "And no one knows how many innocent Americans have had their privacy violated under this secret act," he said. The...

Despite former President Jimmy Carter's pointed jabs at the Bush administration over the NSA surveillance program this past week, it turns out that Carter has more familiarity with warrantless eavesdropping than he let on. Today's Washington Times reports that Carter and his Attorney General authorized warrantless electronic surveillance on two suspected espionage agents, one of whom was an American citizen: Former President Jimmy Carter, who publicly rebuked President Bush's warrantless eavesdropping program this week during the funeral of Coretta Scott King and at a campaign event, used similar surveillance against suspected spies. "Under the Bush administration, there's been a disgraceful...

Former President Jimmy Carter, who publicly rebuked President Bush's warrantless eavesdropping program this week during the funeral of Coretta Scott King and at a campaign event, used similar surveillance against suspected spies. "Under the Bush administration, there's been a disgraceful and illegal decision -- we're not going to the let the judges or the Congress or anyone else know that we're spying on the American people," Mr. Carter said Monday in Nevada when his son Jack announced his Senate campaign. "And no one knows how many innocent Americans have had their privacy violated under this secret act," he said. The...

What do Islamist terrorists want? The answer should be obvious, but it is not.A generation ago, terrorists did make clear their wishes. Upon hijacking three airliners in September 1970, for example, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine demanded, with success, the release of Arab terrorists imprisoned in Britain, Switzerland, and West Germany. Upon attacking the B'nai B'rith headquarters and two other Washington, D.C. buildings in 1977, a Hanafi Muslim group demanded the canceling of a feature movie, Mohammad, Messenger of God," $750 (as reimbursement for a fine), the turning over of the five men who had massacred the...

AP: U.S. Foresaw Terror Threats in 1970s 1 hour, 7 minutes ago U.S. Government - AP By FRANK BASS and RANDY HERSCHAFT, Associated Press Writers WASHINGTON - Nearly three decades before the Sept. 11 attacks, a high-level government panel developed plans to protect the nation against terrorist acts ranging from radiological "dirty bombs" to airline missile attacks, according to declassified documents obtained by The Associated Press. AP Photo "Unless governments take basic precautions, we will continue to stand at the edge of an awful abyss," Robert Kupperman, chief scientist for the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, wrote in a 1977...

In an earlier posting, I laid out my thesis that Kerry is hiding the fact that the USN court martialed him or took some action against him terminating his service under other than honorable conditions and that he was pardoned in 1977 by Jimmy Carter under Proclamation 4483. The facts are that Kerry served with distinction in Viet Nam in 1968 and 1969. There may be some quibbling about his self-promotion and whether he truly deserved the awards he received, but there is no question that his record for those months is one that any naval officer would proud of....