Free Republic

Donald Trump sought Sunday to walk back his statements during Saturday night's Republican debate that former President George W. Bush bore responsibility for the Sept. 11 terror attack. "I am not blaming him," Trump said on CBS' "Face the Nation" Sunday. Trump continued to imply Bush erred, however. "The CIA said there was a lot of information that something like that was going to happen," he said. The attacks killed just under 3,000 Americans. During Saturday night's debate, Trump told former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush: "The World Trade Center came down during your brother's reign, remember that." "How did he...

In the upcoming Racine Fourth of July parade, Wisconsin firefighter Matt Gorniak wants to enter his parade float honoring firefighters and cops killed on Sept. 11, 2001. One problem — Gorniak has availed himself of a little-used contract provision that allows him to opt out of membership in the firefighters’ union. Thus, the union has set out to punish him for his transgression, voting to boycott his float. According to Dan Bice of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: The same float — a re-enactment of the famous photo of three firefighters raising the American flag amid the rubble of the World...

Cynthia McKinney apparently is so confident she will regain her old 4th District seat in Congress that she has been shopping for office space and meeting with constituents. On Tuesday, she plans to celebrate her victory at the Omega Psi Phi Fraternity World Center in south DeKalb County. Her opponent, Catherine Davis, will spend that evening watching the vote count at the DeKalb County Republican Party office on Covington Highway. In the waning days of the campaign, both still were seeking the support of district residents who did not take part in advance voting this week. Davis, a human resources...

John Kerry’s intelligence-committee service isn’t something to brag about. Not long after the vaunted 9/11 Commission released its final report on July 22, Democratic presidential hopeful John Kerry fully endorsed its findings and began deriding President Bush for not doing the same. Since then, the exigencies of governing have forced Bush to wrestle with the complexities of intelligence reform — which, the commissioners themselves have conceded, are extensive. Kerry, meanwhile, has gotten a free ride. That ought to stop now. If, as Kerry the candidate claims, the commission got it right, that is a devastating indictment of Kerry the senator...

................ Titled "Bin Laden determined to strike in US," the briefing told Bush that the FBI was conducting "approximately 70 full field investigations throughout the US that it considers Bin Laden-related," and that the CIA and FBI were investigating a tip that Osama bin Laden's supporters were planning attacks in the United States. The memo also said the FBI had detected "patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks." The document, a little more than a page long, summarized a series of indicators that bin Laden, Al Qaeda's leader, was trying...

For several years, the media have criticized the intelligence community for being too reliant on "national technical means." It is often said that they have given up recruiting human sources, substituting intelligence data collected by satellites. The massive intelligence failure of September 11th has been attributed in part to a lack of human intelligence from inside Al Qaeda or the Taliban. For example, the U.S. is said to have had no sources inside the mosques and Muslim schools in Europe, where the 9/11 terrorists were recruited. On April 11, a prominent aerospace executive gave an alarming evaluation of the performance...