Free Republic

The No. 2 officer at the military command in charge of all U.S. nuclear war-fighting forces is suspected in a case involving counterfeit gambling chips at a western Iowa casino and has been suspended from his duties, officials said.Navy Vice Adm. Tim Giardina has not been arrested or charged, Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation special agent David Dales said Saturday. The state investigation is ongoing.Giardina, deputy commander at U.S. Strategic Command, was suspended on Sept. 3 and is under investigation by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, a Strategic Command spokeswoman said.The highly unusual action against a high-ranking officer at Strategic...

Former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad denounced “acts of terror and terrorism” on Sunday, seemingly in response to the assassination attempt on former U.S. President Donald Trump in Pennsylvania on Saturday evening, although Ahmadinejad did not refer to Trump by name in his message. “Acts of terror and terrorism, both state and non-state, are among the most heinous anti-human actions, the depth of whose evil, words cannot fully express. Humanity is suffering such severe pains all over the world,” Ahmadinejad said on Twitter, where he has over 144,000 followers, although his account has been largely inactive for about two years. Ahmadinejad...

Genocidal Islamic Fascist Republic of Iran - threatening annihilation at least since 1991.COLUMN ONE: Hezbollah: The Latin Connection : Bombings in Argentina and Panama prompt concern over the radical group's growing presence in the region. Experts say lax security and porous borders create a prime base for terrorists, by Tracy Wilkinson, Times Staff Writer, Los Angeles Times, August 04, 1994. The embassy's cultural affairs officer, Imam Mohsen Rabbani, rose. "Israel," he intoned in accented Spanish, "must disappear from the face of the Earth." He and a dozen speakers who followed quoted Iran's late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and called for unity...

A United States Agency of International Development (USAID) official as well as three corporate executives have pleaded guilty in a decades-long bribery scheme connected to over $550 million in contracts. According to a press release from the Department of Justice, four men pleaded guilty to the charges of being part of the bribery scheme. The USAID official in the case was Roderick Watson, 57, of Maryland, who was a contracting officer and pleaded guilty to bribery of a public official. Walter Barnes, 46, of Maryland; Darryl Britt, 64, of Florida; and Paul Young, 62, of Maryland all pleaded guilty to...

LONDON — Boris Berezovsky, the exiled Russian oligarch and long-time opponent of the Kremlin, died at his home in Britain on Saturday aged 67 in unexplained circumstances, officials said. British police launched a full investigation into the death at the mansion in the well-heeled commuter town of Ascot, near London, saying it was "currently being treated as unexplained". Berezovsky's lawyer Alexander Dobrovinsky told Russian television the tycoon had committed suicide after suffering from weeks of depression over his huge debts, although another friend strongly denied this. Berezovsky was one of handful of businessmen who made a fortune out of the...

Deep state whistleblower Edward Snowden may be getting a new lease on life. The famous fugitive, who has been living in Russia since 2013 after leaking classified National Security Agency documents showing the US was engaged in a massive surveillance program, has been a cause célèbre among left-wing and free speech activists, but has received a chillier reception from Republicans. But Snowden has some powerful allies in President-elect Trump’s cabinet, insiders told The Post. Trump’s pick for director of national intelligence, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, co-sponsored a resolution in September 2020 calling on the United States to drop all charges against...

Donald Trump took a lot of heat for implying that George W. Bush was responsible for failing to prevent 9/11. (He didn't say it outright, saying merely that it happened on Bush's watch, but I think it was clearly implied.) He said that our porous immigration system was partially responsible for the attacks. And as it turns out, Jeb Bush agrees: ....a review Jeb Bush’s 2013 book Immigration Wars reveals that Jeb Bush himself agreed with Trump’s argument and admitted that our “leaky” immigration policy was responsible for the attack. Bush wrote: In addition to the Mexican drug cartels, the...

Last week, Newsweek’s Jeff Stein ran a sensationalist story detailing alleged Israeli spy activities in the United States. Stein, citing dubious sources, claimed that Israeli spies attempted to monitor Al Gore’s bathroom activities (an image too frightening to imagine) while drugs and women are routinely employed by Zionist spies to entice U.S. officials into handing over information of value. The sources for these and other absurd allegations contained in the article were mainly anonymous with one notable exception, an obscure ex-intelligence character and former CIA employee named Paul Pillar. One look at Pillar’s past articles, publications and speeches puts the...

Israeli officials have been holding talks in Jordan with Syrian opposition officials “in advance of a possible Israeli-U.S. operation in Syria to protect the Golan Heights,” Western intelligence sources reported Tuesday, Jan. 1. There was no further information about this operation or how rebel commanders were involved in military plans “to protect the Golan Heights.” Altogether, the goings-on on the Israeli and Jordanian borders with Syria are in deep hush. But European intelligence sources, some of them French and Russian, reveal nightly clashes taking place between US, Jordanian, Israeli special forces and Syrian rebels, on the one hand, and Syrian...

A top financial backer of left-wing causes in the US has been accused of sexually harassing a female employee, pushing for “threesomes” with her and her future husband while they worked at his California winery — and then retaliating against them for calling out his “lewd” conduct. Swiss billionaire Hansjorg Wyss exposed himself, “brazenly groped,” and made other unwanted sexual advances toward Madison Busby before forcing her to resign her job, according to a jaw-dropping lawsuit filed April 25 in San Luis Obispo County Superior Court. ... Wyss, a resident of Teton County, Wyo., purchased the property in 2000 and...

Before Donald Trump was even elected president and throughout the entire period of his administration, the Leftist establishment that is entrenched in Washington officialdom and among the propaganda outlets that are known as the major news organizations inundated us with nonsense about how he had improperly colluded with Russia in order to gain the White House, and was still in Vladimir Putin’s pocket. There was, as is now well-known, nothing whatsoever to it; it was all a hoax designed to discredit Trump and destroy his presidency, although like the Japanese soldiers found hiding in the woods in the 1970s, not...

Dick Morris is spearheading a campaign to stop presumed Secretary of State John Kerry from tapping an “overt Castro sympathizer” to be in charge of U.S.-Cuban policy. Morris says one of Kerry’s closest confidants is Fulton Armstrong, who has served for years as his assistant for Cuban and Latin American relations on the Senate staff of the Foreign Policy Committee. … Morris said when John Bolton was up for Ambassador to Cuba, he said there was evidence Castro was amassing biological weapons for use against the U.S. and moved to declassify a report about it. “Fulton Armstrong opposed that and...

The Miami Herald is reporting Hugo Chávez early demise was recognized long before the rest of the world was privvy to the details of a late diagnosed and lethal cancer. With the help of Cuban brothers Fidel and Raúl, and Chávez' hand-picked successor Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelan presidential election was moved from December 2012 to October 2012, two months that the report says were crucial. In October Chávez could still stand before his supporters to applaud his re-election, but there was no certainty that he could do so in December. He returned to Cuba for a fourth round of cancer treatments in early...

Federal agents have arrested Utah oil magnate James Lael Jensen, his wife Kelly Anne Jensen, and two of their sons, Maxwell Sterling Jensen (aka “Max”) and Zachary Golden Jensen, in connection with a sprawling $300 MILLION smuggling and money laundering conspiracy tied to Mexican criminal organizations. Court records reveal that all four members of the Jensen family were arrested on Wednesday, April 23 — with sons Max and Zachary taken into custody in the Rio Grande Valley, while James and Kelly Jensen were apprehended at their 26,893-square-foot mansion in Sandy, Utah, reportedly worth over $9.1 million. The arrest was carried...

The well-loved Afrikaans author and academic Prof. Daan Wybenga, 69, has just been tortured to death in his house in Clarens, in the Free State. His body was found on Monday night in his home. Wybenga is the latest casualty in South Africa’s spate of sadistic black-on-white murders, fueled by racial animosity and years of communist propaganda. His body was so badly mutilated that his son, Mr. Wim Wybenga, 37, could only recognise him by his hands. According to him, the killers threw boiling water over his dad, hit him over the hand, tied up his hands and feet, and...

GARLAND, Texas (AP) — Investigators are looking into whether a Texas man was inspired by foreign terrorists when he killed a Lyft driver in a Dallas suburb and later opened fire in the police station of another suburb where officers fatally shot him. Police said Imran Ali Rasheed ordered a Lyft in his home city of Garland Sunday then fatally shot the driver, Isabella Lewis. Her stolen car was found a short time later outside the police station in the neighboring community of Plano, where Rasheed began shooting in the lobby before being shot by officers, police chiefs in both...

[Catholic Caucus] Pope says Church must ‘confront forms of paganism’ in secularismIn his meeting with his brother Jesuits in Belgium, Pope Francis call secularization a “complex phenomenon” and noted sometimes the Church must “confront forms of paganism.”Speaking to 150 Jesuits in Brussels on Sep. 28, the pontiff answered a question from a member living in Amsterdam, one of the most secularized cities in the world.In his reply, Francis noted he didn’t mean a paganism like the one in the ancient world.“We do not need a statue of a pagan god to talk about paganism: The very environment, the air we...

Now that Hugo Chávez is out of the picture, former U.S. Ambassador to Venezuela Otto Reich warns President Obama to tread carefully in dealing with the “evil, evil men” that are now running the South American nation. “These guys are so tricky and so evil, quite frankly,” Reich, tells Newsmax in an exclusive interview following the announcement of Chávez’ death on Tuesday. “The people in power in Venezuela today are evil.” … Reich added that Fidel Castro and his brother may be calling the shots in Venezuela. …

Latin American artists from throughout the hemisphere convened in Cúcuta, Colombia, Friday, on the border with Venezuela, for the Richard Branson-sponsored “Venezuela Aid Live” concert to demand dictator Nicolás Maduro allow international aid into the country. The long list of diverse artists — many who have been household names in Latin America for decades — did not shy away from making political statements in support of Venezuela’s legitimate president, Juan Guaidó, and demanding that Maduro step aside. Several artists indulged the audience in what has become a common back-and-forth chant at anti-socialist protests: “Maduro, ¡el coño de tu madre!” or...

According to a Nigerian website, in 2013 the United States threatened Nigeria with suspension of military assistance following suppression of Boko Haram after an attack by the Muslim jihadist group on a military outpost outside the city of Baga.  US Ambassador to Nigeria, Terrence P. McCulley reportedly called a meeting with Soros-funded Human Rights Watch and other members of the “human rights community in Nigeria.”   THEWILL gathered from a source at the meeting who opted to remain anonymous that the Ambassador called the meeting to feel the pulse of the human rights community over the violations of basic rights...