Free Republic

Duncan Hunter decided, months after other campaigns started making pushes in Iowa, that he should do the same. From a press release we received today: Get Ready Iowans…Here Comes Duncan(Des Moines, Iowa)…Duncan Hunter’s Presidential campaign has officially begun in Iowa with the announcement of a statewide director during his campaign swing through in Iowa this weekend (July 21-23) with a myriad of personal appearances at the state’s various county fairs. He will also be hosting a personal “Donuts with Duncan” early morning gathering in Sioux City, and then will be attending the services at two of the city’s churches.Patrick R....

The publication of Hubris is filled with irony for David Corn, Washington editor of the left-wing Nation magazine. He was present at the creation of the Valerie Plame "scandal," which the enemies of George W. Bush hoped could bring down a president. Nobody was more responsible for bloating this episode. Yet Corn is coauthor of a book that has had the effect of killing the story. Thanks to Corn's intrepid coauthor, Newsweek investigative reporter Michael Isikoff, Hubris definitively revealed then-Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage as my source that Joseph Wilson's wife, Valerie, worked for the CIA and suggested her...

The long-expected announcement on April 21 that retired Air Force Brigadier General Simon “Pete” Worden would be replacing the popular and respected Scott Hubbard as director of NASA’s Ames Research Center in San Jose, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley, is good news for the space agency and for its exploration initiative. Worden is an innovator and a risk-taker whose record shows that he can accomplish difficult goals without depending on massive funding. In 1991, when the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (SDIO) decided to go ahead with developing a flight demonstration vehicle for a single stage to orbit (SSTO)...

EDWARDS AFB - The old saying "birds of a feather flock together" can now be applied to a couple of small uninhabited aerial vehicles, or UAVs, flown at Edwards Air Force Base using principles derived from studies of fish and bird motions. Engineers and technicians from NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, and Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards recently conducted flight tests over a "virtual" forest fire to evaluate new flight-control software that will allow UAVs the ability to autonomously react to obstacles as they fly pre-programmed missions. The tests were conducted via a remote, to investigate cooperative flight...

I'll get the C-SPAN link in a moment.

I have always been a huge fan of the novels of John LeCarre especially the George Smiley ones. I've also been in awe of Sir Alec Guinness's performance in the BBC productions of the various novels. The performances were so good that LeCarre himself was quoted as saying that he could no longer write about George Smiley because after the productions were released "Smiley no longer belongs to me, he belongs to Alec". And yes, I'm aware of the leftists slant of both LeCarre (who seemed to go off the deep end during the 2003 war) and also of the...

Recently a number of former CIA officers received an invitation from the Spy Museum in Washington to attend a luncheon for former KGB Col. Victor Cherkashin. The event, as the invitation said, would afford "a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to dine and dish with an extraordinary spymaster." In the heyday of the Cold War, such an offer, delivered with slightly more discretion, might have been the prelude to a KGB recruitment operation. Now it's merely the notice for a book party celebrating yet another memoir by a former KGB officer recounting how the KGB duped the CIA. In this case, there is...

"Wipe out Islam for world peace. The Koran demands your murder. Islam is terrorism.Such were the words of an anonymous act of vandalism in Campustown. The graffiti left members of the local Muslim community aghast."I was just completely shocked," said Basil Mahayni, senior in political science. "We rarely ever see anything like that."Members of the Muslim Student Association reported the vandalism after discovering it Aug. 20 on a picnic table at the corner of Chamberlain Street and Welch Avenue.Saleh Tamim, general secretary of the Muslim Student Association, was among the group that reported the incident. Tamim said he found the...

Arizona Sen. John McCain, who chairs the Senate Commerce, Transportation and Science Committee, will convene hearings Sept. 3 on the NASA space shuttle program and a controversial lease deal between the U.S. Air Force and Boeing. McCain said earlier this week his panel will look at a recently released federal report on the Columbia space shuttle crash and problems with the agency. The Republican said NASA's budget, priorities and major programs need to be looked at and pork barrel congressional appropriations to the space agency need to be curtailed. For example, McCain wants to look at whether NASA needs to...

As supporters of Jonathan Pollard prepare for a prayer rally on his behalf at the Western Wall on June 4, it appears that one of the most important questions surrounding his case has been answered. Former federal prosecutor John Loftus, in an article in the June issue of Moment Magazine, writes the following: "There is a good reason why neither Congress nor the American Jewish leadership supports the release of Jonathan Pollard from prison: They all were told a lie - a humongous Washington whopper of a lie. The lie was [that] Pollard had supposedly given Israel a list of...

<p>The world's largest and second-largest wind tunnels -- built and operated by NASA/Ames Research Center in Mountain View -- were closed Friday and could be mothballed forever, officials at the space agency told the Mercury News.</p> <p>Victims of budget cuts, fewer defense contracts and the rise of computer simulations, the two enormous wind tunnels served for nearly 60 years as the testing grounds for dozens of aircraft -- from fighter planes of the Korean War to helicopters to the space shuttle.</p>

Question: WAS ANGLETON RIGHT? What does it say about the state of US intelligence in the late nineteen-eighties and early ninety-nineties that two top counterintellgence officials-- Aldrich Ames in the CIA's anti-Soviet counterintelligence and Robert Phillip Hanssen in the FBI Soviet counterintelligence-- were moles for the Russian Intelligence Service? Under such circumstances, who controlled the recruitments the CIA and FBI were making during this period? ANSWER: James Jesus Angleton, the chief of the CIA's counterintelligence staff from in 1953 to 1974, principal concern was not with "moles" per se, but with the inherent vulnerability of intelligence services to systematic deception....