Free Republic

Early in the pandemic, I had been furiously writing articles about lockdowns. My phone rang with a call from a man named Dr. Rajeev Venkayya. He is the head of a vaccine company but introduced himself as former head of pandemic policy for the Gates Foundation. Now I was listening. I did not know it then, but I’ve since learned from Michael Lewis’s (mostly terrible) book The Premonition that Venkayya was, in fact, the founding father of lockdowns. While working for George W. Bush’s White House in 2005, he headed a bioterrorism study group. From his perch of influence –...

A power failure knocked out the security system at a federal germ lab in Fort Collins for 13 hours Monday and disabled freezers housing thousands of vials of plague and other potential bioweapons. A backup generator kicked on when the power failed. But an electrical short prevented the backup power from being routed through the building, said Colorado State University spokesman Brad Bohlander. As a result, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention laboratory was without power for 13 hours, beginning at 3:07 p.m. Monday, Bohlander said. CSU owns the building and leases it to the government.No germ collections were...

What do these people have in common?: George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, William J. Casey, Dick Cheney, Tom Delay, Raymond Donovan, William Frist, Lewis Libby, Robert McFarlane, Oliver North, John M. Poindexter, Karl Rove, Kenneth Tomlinson, Caspar Weinberger. Answer: they are all conservative Republicans who have been accused by the liberal press and/or prosecuted for criminal acts under pressures brought by liberal politicians. All of them have been persecuted by the threat of legal action or by actual indictments for political reasons. None have been found guilty although some have had to go through the expense of an appeal...

LOS ANGELES – The FBI knew about Chi Mak's retirement plans, what his dining room looked like and what he allegedly took home from work. The 66-year-old engineer for a Southern California defense contractor and his 57-year-old brother, Tai Mak, were under surveillance for months. Agents tapped the Maks' phones, planted listening devices in their cars, sifted through their trash and installed a closed-circuit camera above Chi Mak's dining-room table. Investigators suspected Chi Mak was taking restricted documents about naval technology from his job at Anaheim-based defense contractor Power Paragon and passing them to his brother, who was going to...

Judge's Report Shows Cheney Aide Is Accused Of Broad Deception The special prosecutor in the CIA leak case alleged that Vice President Cheney's former chief of staff was engaged in a broader web of deception than was previously known and repeatedly lied to conceal that he had been a key source for reporters about undercover operative Valerie Plame, according to court records released yesterday. The records also show that by August 2004, early in his investigation of the disclosure of Plame's identity, Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald had concluded that he did not have much of a case against I....

Former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein manipulated the United Nations oil-for-food program so that his regime received $1.8 billion in illicit payments, a U.N.-backed independent report said Thursday. The investigation, led by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, said kickbacks came from some 66 member states and illicit surcharges came from 40 member states. The report also said Marc Rich & Co. financed 4 million barrels of oil under a 9.5-million-barrel contract awarded to the European Oil and Trading Co. (EOTC), a French-based shell company. "Surcharges were imposed on the oil," the report said, and "Marc Rich & Co. directed BNP...

UNITED NATIONS - A former Russian top spy says his agents helped the Russian government steal nearly $500 million from the U.N.'s oil-for-food program in Iraq before the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003. Sergei Tretyakov, who defected to the United States in 2000 as a double agent, says he oversaw an operation that helped Saddam's regime manipulate the price of Iraqi oil sold under the program — and allow Russia to skim profits. Tretyakov, former deputy head of intelligence at Russia's U.N. mission from 1995 to 2000, names some names, but sticks mainly to code names. Among the spies...

After doing some research on Jason Leopold’s previous work, I came away with a (well-founded) suspicion that the Wilsons and Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) were sourcing a good deal of his work and using him as a mouthpiece. I discovered that this flock of people, the Wilsonistas, suddenly started writing less about the Plame investigation after Libby’s indictment. However, Jason Leopold started writing almost exclusively about the Plame investigation at about the same time, in October. Instead of VIPS writing articles in Truthout and elsewhere about the imminent indictment of Rove, Cheney, Hadley and that Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald...

ROME (Reuters) - The Italian government denied on Wednesday reports that its secret services passed fake documents to the United States to help bolster claims about Baghdad's pre-war nuclear ambitions. Italian newspaper La Repubblica has been running daily articles since Monday alleging that Sismi intelligence officials helped pass-off forged documents that accused Iraq of trying to buy 500 tons of "yellowcake" uranium from Niger. Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's office said in a statement the government and Sismi had no "direct or indirect role in the fabrication and the transmission of the 'fake dossier on Niger uranium."' La Repubblica accuses Sismi,...

Some public- and private-sector medical professionals were impressed with what they saw during an Oct. 19 visit to observe detainee operations at U.S. Naval Base Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the Defense Department's senior medical official said here Oct. 26. The group's impressions will be used to update departmental policy guidance related to the handling of detainees captured in the global war against terrorism, Dr. William Winkenwerder Jr., assistant secretary of defense for health affairs, said in an interview with American Forces Press Service. After their daytrip to Guantanamo, the group returned to Washington and met with Winkenwerder that evening at Andrews...

MOSCOW -- Two have fled the country. Another is in jail, his oil empire in ruins. Russian President Vladimir Putin has largely succeeded in his campaign pledge to make oligarchs -- the powerful tycoons who emerged in the chaos of post-Soviet Russia -- disappear "as a class." Now, most of the country's super-rich are either packing up or hunkering down and trying to stay on the government's good side. Except Mikhail Fridman. Using bare-knuckles business tactics, the 41-year-old built an $8 billion empire spanning oil, telecoms, banking and retail. Now, he's picking a fight with Leonid Reiman, Russia's telecommunications minister...

WASHINGTON - The independent counsel investigation that led to the conviction of a former Clinton administration housing chief could come back to haunt Sen. Hillary Clinton. The Daily News has learned that lawyers are fighting to suppress a potentially embarrassing final report from the probe that found Housing Secretary Henry Cisneros lied to the FBI about paying $250,000 in hush money to his ex-mistress. Cisneros paid a $10,000 fine after he was found guilty in 1999 and was later pardoned by Bill Clinton. And though neither Hillary Clinton nor her husband was targeted by independent counsel David Barrett, his 420-page...

Venezuela police scramble to squash pumpkin threat CARACAS, Venezuela (Reuters) - Venezuelan security services scrambled on Monday to tackle a new threat on the streets of Caracas: Halloween-style pumpkins carrying messages of rebellion against President Hugo Chavez. Local media showed heavily armed police and bomb experts surrounding one orange squash with a Halloween face and covered with stickers; others sprouted cables and wires making authorities wary they could be home-made explosives

Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi, the shadowy jihadist fighting in Iraq and Syria, and newly declared leader of a “caliphate” encompassing all Muslims, is increasingly seen as more powerful than Al Qaida’s chief. SNIP In October 2005, American forces said they believed they had killed “Abu Dua,” one of Baghdadi’s known aliases, in a strike on the Iraq-Syria border. But that appears to have been incorrect, as he took the reins of what was then known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) in May 2010 after two of its chiefs were killed in a US-Iraqi raid. SNIP

At least 25 high-ranking al Qaeda members — including three of Osama bin Laden's sons — are reportedly living free in Iran and beyond the grasp of the U.S. military, it was reported yesterday. "This is not incarceration or house arrest," a Western intelligence agent was quoted as saying by the German monthly Cicero. "They can move around as they please." Saad bin Laden, who is said to be his father's successor, has been reported to be living in Iran. The Cicero report claims two other sons — Mohammad and Othman — are also harbored there...

Khobar Towers June 23, 2006 The Wall Street Journal Louis J. Freeh Ten years ago this Sunday, acting under direct orders from senior Iranian government leaders, the Saudi Hezbollah detonated a 25,000-pound TNT bomb that killed 19 U.S. airmen in their dormitory at Khobar Towers in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. The blast wave destroyed Building 131 and grievously wounded hundreds of additional Air Force personnel. It also killed an unknown number of Saudi civilians in a nearby park. The 19 Americans murdered were members of the 4404th Wing, who were risking their lives to enforce the no-fly zone over southern Iraq....

State and federal authorities have three men in custody here in what investigators describe as a possible terrorist plot by an obscure Islamic group in California state prisons. FBI officials, who are overseeing the investigation, say they are not convinced that the three men posed a serious threat of violence on their own. But the bureau is continuing to investigate the possibility that they were part of a larger group planning to attack National Guard installations, synagogues and other locations in Southern California. The latest suspect to be arrested is Hamad Riaz Samana, 21, a Pakistani citizen who was taken...

LONDON (AFP) - Saddam Hussein's former right-hand man Ezzat Ibrahim al-Duri called for an escalation of the deadly insurgency in Iraq Ibrahim, who has been on the run since the US-led invasion of March 2003, urged "resistance movements and the Baath party to intensify the national campaign against the occupation", according to the letter published in the London-based Arabic newspaper Al-Qods Al-Arabi. US commanders suspect that Ibrahim, 63, has been the paymaster of many attacks on their troops during the insurgency that erupted after Saddam's downfall in April 2003. Ibrahim also warned against the "sectarian division of Iraq to the...

LONDON [MENL] -- Aides of deposed President Saddam Hussein, under the guise of Al Qaida fighters, have been leading the insurgency against the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq. Islamic sources said many of the Al Qaida-aligned cells that have appeared over the last two years stemmed from units in the Saddam military. The sources said Baathist operatives have adopted Islamic identities to exploit support among Muslims for Al Qaida. The Baathist strategy was formed during Saddam's rule, the sources said. They pointed to the "Return to Faith Campaign" directed by then-Iraqi Vice President Izzat Ibrahim Al Douri, which sought to curry...

War On Terror: As what the feds call "other than Mexicans" and MS-13 gang members stream across our border, just what is keeping the head of ISIS from keeping his promise, "I'll see you in New York"? We already know how ruthless the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is, so much so that media pundits such as Kirsten Powers, who should know better, insist that even al-Qaida is said to be distancing itself from the group. You know: the same al-Qaida that slit throats with box cutters and then turned passenger jets filled with fuel into cruise missiles...