Free Republic

Finally, some good may come from the Valerie Plame kerfuffle -- if President Bush and Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez have the stones to do what's right. A grave crime was exposed Dec. 16th when New York Times reporters James Risen and Eric Lichtblau published a story revealing President Bush authorized the National Security Agency to listen in on conversations between al Qaida suspects abroad and people in the United States without first obtaining a warrant. "We're seeing clearly now that (President) Bush thought 9/11 gave him license to act like a dictator," wrote Newsweek's Jonathan Alter. But the scandal was...

A California man has been charged with taking illegal kickbacks to act as a plaintiff in dozens of corporate class-action lawsuits filed by Milberg Weiss, a move that brings a three-year federal probe to the door of one of the leading U.S. securities law firms. The indictment handed down by a federal grand jury in Los Angeles on Thursday comes as prosecutors try to make a case that Milberg Weiss improperly paid plaintiffs to file lawsuits against publicly traded companies. A spokeswoman for the law firm said on Friday that Milberg Weiss had been subpoenaed in connection with the investigation...

The following is a very interesting article that was published by the Sunday Times yesterday. The truth at last. 'Forgers' of key Iraq war contract named Michael Smith TWO employees of the Niger embassy in Rome were responsible for the forgery of a notorious set of documents used to help justify the Iraq war, an official investigation has allegedly found. According to Nato sources, the investigation has evidence that Niger’s consul and its ambassador’s personal assistant faked a contract to show Saddam Hussein had bought uranium ore from the impoverished west African country. The documents, which emerged in 2002, were...

"Sixteen years ago, a colleague of mine on the staff of Senator Hatch discovered that Democrat staff of the Senate Judiciary Committee had negligently placed their documents on our shared server without protections. I admit that we exploited this to learn simple things about their plans to attack Bush judicial nominees at the behest of the left wing interest groups. I also did pursuant to my duty under the Code of Ethics for Government Service. The documents also revealed unlawful and unethical conduct by Senators. I reported this unethical conduct to the Senate Ethics Committee but never heard back. Among...

The indictment of a former Florida professor on charges of being a Palestinian terrorist has cast a very different light on some past punditry. After flying to Tampa to interview him, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote last year that the University of South Florida's attempt to fire Sami Al-Arian shed light on "what kind of universities we desire, how much dissent we dare tolerate and how we treat minorities in times of national stress." He noted that the proceedings began after "Bill O'Reilly invited Mr. Al-Arian on his Fox News show and virtually accused him of being a...

Embattled Justice Department official Bruce Ohr had contact in 2016 with then-colleague Andrew Weissmann, who is now a top Robert Mueller deputy, as well as other senior FBI officials about the controversial anti-Trump dossier and the individuals behind it, two sources close to the matter told Fox News. The sources said Ohr's outreach about the dossier – as well as its author, ex-British spy Christopher Steele; the opposition research firm behind it, Glenn Simpson’s Fusion GPS; and his wife Nellie Ohr's work for Fusion – occurred before and after the FBI fired Steele as a source over his media contacts....

"We called the White House and they acted swiftly on the Friday event, which has since been postponed," said a staff member for Republican Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who complained that the event would have openly undermined President Donald Trump’s agenda on Cuba."The event in question has been postponed," a State Department official confirmed."This (event) was designed to embarrass the president and Pompeo—somebody needs to be held to account," one source said. "The fact that State Department officials were advancing a program that is so slanted and completely at odds with the president's directive on Cuba, I am concerned what...

Gina Haspel refused to say Wednesday during her confirmation hearing to be CIA director if she oversaw the waterboarding of terrorism suspect Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri in 2002. Haspel reportedly became chief of base at a CIA black site in Thailand in October of that year. Nashiri arrived in November and was waterboarded at least three times before being transferred in December to a different facility, according to a Senate Intelligence Committee report. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., who was influential in drafting an intelligence committee report partially released in 2014, asked Haspel to give a "yes or no" answer to whether...

LONDON (Reuters) - Britain discussed supporting the United States to bring about a change of government in Iraq eight months before the March 2003 invasion, Tony Blair said on Sunday. But the prime minister, facing an election on Thursday in which the divisive war could cost him votes, denied suggestions his government took an early decision to topple Saddam Hussein. His comments came in response to a leaked memo in a newspaper that said Blair and President Bush were determined to oust Iraq's former leader as early as July 2002. "I actually talked about regime change if it wasn't possible...

DAMASCUS, Syria — First of two parts A Syrian trading company with close ties to the ruling regime smuggled weapons and military hardware to Saddam Hussein between 2000 and 2003, helping Syria become the main channel for illicit arms transfers to Iraq despite a stringent U.N. embargo, documents recovered in Iraq show. The private company, called SES International Corp., is headed by a cousin of Syria's autocratic leader, Bashar Assad, and is controlled by other members of the president's Baath Party and Alawite clan. Syria's government assisted SES in importing at least one shipment destined for Iraq's military, the Iraqi...

U.S. Links Charity to Chechen RebelsBy Nabi Abdullaev Staff Writer The head of a U.S.-based Islamic charity who is suspected of having ties to Osama bin Laden is in jail facing a grand jury investigation after the FBI showed he had lied about his support for Chechen rebels. Federal officials accused Enaam Arnaout, a Syrian-born U.S. citizen, and his Benevolence International Foundation of perjury last month for claiming they did not provide support to "people or organizations known to engage in violence, terrorist activities or military operations of any nature." Arnaout, 39, was arrested April 30. He had been under...

Barack Obama’s pick for “regulatory czar,” Harvard Law School Professor Cass Sunstein, may be the incoming president’s most popular appointment so far. Judging from his resume -- best-selling author, “pre-eminent legal scholar of our time,” and an endorsement from The Wall Street Journal -- we can almost understand why. Almost. Because as we’re telling the media today, there’s one troubling portion of the new Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) Administrator’s C.V. that has seems to have flown under everyone’s radar: Cass Sunstein is a radical animal rights activist. Don’t believe us? Sunstein has made no secret of his...

After the release of the Iraq Survey Group's Duelfer report, the headlines blazed "No WMD Found." ...This reflects the notion that Iraq was only a threat if it had military munitions filled with WMD. The claim "Iraq was not an imminent threat" was also expounded by pundits that seemingly crawled out of the woodwork as well as those opposed to President Bush. But have these individuals read carefully the report...? While no facilities were found producing chemical or biological agents on a large scale, many clandestine laboratories operating under the Iraqi Intelligence Services were found to be engaged in small-scale...

Democratic California Rep. Maxine Waters attended a Nation of Islam convention where the hate group’s leader, Louis Farrakhan, defended Palestinian suicide bombers. The convention, which took place in California in 2002, is just the latest tie to emerge between Democrats and the Nation of Islam, a black nationalist group known for being viciously anti-Semitic.

On January 3, 2018, select DHS employees received notification letters that they may have been impacted by a privacy incident related to the DHS Office of Inspector General (OIG) Case Management System. The privacy incident did not stem from a cyber-attack by external actors, and the evidence indicates that affected individual’s personal information was not the primary target of the unauthorized unauthorized transfer of data. [SNIP] On May 10, 2017, as part of an ongoing criminal investigation being conducted by DHS OIG and the U.S. Attorney’s Office, DHS OIG discovered an unauthorized copy of its investigative case management system in...

Sen. Al Franken has announced he will resign his seat in the coming weeks. But this isn't the first time Minnesotans have witnessed a shift in that particular seat.  Some political experts even call it cursed. "This is a troubled seat," said David Schultz, a political expert at Hamline University. Schultz said to better understand why, you have to go back more than 40 years.   "It all started in 1976 when then-Senator Walter Mondale resigns to become Vice President of the United States," he said. "It creates a vacancy. Gov. Wendy Anderson wants to become Senator, (so) he resigns as...

In the duel between North and South Korea, the question now is who will pull the trigger first? The answer may be neither, but don't count on it. The dueling now focuses on two quite different flashpoints. The first is the West or Yellow Sea, where North Korea has vowed to open fire against any South Korean vessel intruding in its waters. One issue there is how to define which waters are North Korean. The North refuses to recognize the Northern Limit Line, set by the United Nations Command after the Korean War (1950-1953) and challenged by North Korea in...

Seoul's defence minister on Sunday vowed retaliation over the sinking of a South Korean warship which killed 46 sailors near the disputed sea border with North Korea last month. "Those responsible for killing our soldiers must pay the price," Defence Minister Kim Tae-Young told a KBS television programme aired nationwide on Sunday. "Retaliation -- in whatever form it is -- must be done." It echoed South Korean Navy chief Admiral Kim Sung-Chan's reprisal pledge during Thursday's mass funeral for the sailors, attended by President Lee Myung-Bak. South Korea has not openly blamed its communist neighbour for the blast which tore...

Hatfill's lawyers alleged that the three officials who leaked investigative details to the news media were Roscoe C. Howard Jr., who from 2001 to 2004 served as U.S. attorney for District of Columbia; Daniel S. Seikaly, who served as Howard's criminal division chief; and Edwin Cogswell, who formerly served as a spokesman for the FBI. .... U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton ordered the lawyers for the government and for Hatfill to seek "mediation" over the next two months. The prospects of a mediated settlement notwithstanding, Walton said he expected a trial could begin in December. Hatfill's lawyers, Grannis and...

Hodgkinson had a history of violence that did not rise to the level to prohibit him from legally owning a firearm. He was the foster father of at least two girls. The first, Wanda Ashley Stock, 17, committed suicide in 1996 by pouring gasoline on herself and setting herself on fire after a few months of living with the Hodgkinsons, the Belleville News-Democrat reports. The Hodgkinsons gave an interview to the paper after her suicide, calling her a “very practical, level-headed girl.”