Free Republic

Excerpt - Federal prosecutors have sent target letters to six Blackwater Worldwide security guards involved in a September shooting that left 17 Iraqi civilians dead, indicating a high likelihood the Justice Department will seek to indict at least some of the men, according to three sources close to the case. ~ snip ~

The CIA's search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has found no evidence that former president Saddam Hussein tried to transfer chemical or biological technology or weapons to terrorists, according to a military and intelligence expert. Anthony Cordesman, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, provided new details about the weapons search and Iraqi insurgency in a report released Friday. It was based on briefings over the past two weeks in Iraq from David Kay, the CIA representative who is directing the search for unconventional weapons in Iraq; L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. civil administrator...

Inside Iraqi Corruption Charles R. Smith Tuesday, March 29, 2005 John A. Shaw is a curious example of Washington politics gone mad. Shaw is a veteran government employee who served inside the White House under Presidents Ford, Nixon and Reagan and was an associate deputy secretary in the Department of Commerce. In 2001, Shaw was appointed by Bush Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld to head the newly formed Office of International Technology Security. In this post, Shaw began the difficult task of reforming government controls over the export of sensitive technology to foreign countries. In 2003, Shaw began investigating allegations of...

May 29, 2008 By Andrew Walden (Hawai'i Free Press) Nadhmi Auchi, seen here with the Governor of Illinois, Rob Blagojevich (middle) at a 2004 Chicago dinner in Auchi's honor arranged by Antonin Rezko (potentially, right)[1]. All three men have been convicted of corruption related charges (Auchi 2003, Rezko 2008, Blagojevich 2009).[2] “A British-Iraqi billionaire lent millions of dollars to Barack Obama's fundraiser (dual US-Syrian citizen Tony Rezko) just weeks before an imprudent land deal that has returned to haunt the presidential contender, an investigation by The Times discloses. The money transfer raises the question of whether funds from Nadhmi Auchi,...

    Shadow Warriors   By David ForsmarkFrontPageMagazine.com | Monday, February 04, 2008 Shadow Warriors: The Untold Story of Traitors, Saboteurs, and the Party of SurrenderBy Kenneth TimmermanCrown Forum, $25.95, 404 pp. At long last, the CIA and the State Department have targeted a government they have identified as an aggressive threat to world peace and largely countered its foreign policy through psy-ops, propaganda, selective leaks of intelligence and covert operations.And who was the target of this covert campaign? Are these operations aimed at the Islamofascists in Iran? How about Vladimir Putin and his increasingly fascist government in Russia?...

Arthur Bremer, who shot and paralyzed Alabama Gov. George Wallace in 1972, will be released from a Maryland prison this year. "It appears at this point in time that Arthur Bremer will be leaving the Maryland Division of Corrections sometime in late 2007," said Mark Vernarelli, director of public information for the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services. "He has served all of the sentence for which he can be held." Bremer, who turned 57 this week, is scheduled for release on Dec. 16 from the Maryland Correctional Institute-Hagerstown, said Rae Sheeley, a case management specialist at the...

Congressional inquiry probes former Bush official's handling of billions of dollars February 6, 2007— - Sparks flew on Capitol Hill Tuesday as a Democrat-led Congressional committee investigated the Bush administration's handling of billions of reconstruction money in Iraq. Ambassador L. Paul Bremer, the former Coalition Provisional Authority administrator responsible for rebuilding post-war Iraq, appeared for the first time before Congress to defend his record -- and pointed a finger at a lack of pre-war planning . Panel Investigates 'Waste, Fraud and Abuse' Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif, chairman of the House Government Reform & Oversight Committee summoned Bremer, citing a January...

Bremer quizzed over cash for Iraq Four years after the invasion, Iraq remains poor and chaotic The former head of the US-led civilian administration in Iraq has defended his decision to send billions of dollars in cash to Baghdad in 2003 and 2004.Paul Bremer told a Congressional committee investigating allegations of waste and fraud that he had done his best to kick-start Iraq's economy. The funds came from Iraqi oil revenue and previously frozen assets. Much of the money went missing and critics say there was no system to track how it was used. "Who in their right mind...

Dana Milbank is mad at Democrats for somehow letting Former Iraq Chief Paul Bremer off the hook today in the Washington Post’s ”Rusty Democrats Unable to Pin Anything on Bremer”. I guess to show he is a real meterosexual, Milbank starts his piece off with an observation on Bremer’s choice of footwear and draws the wild conclusion that it must say something about his mental state. Jerry Bremer wore black dress shoes instead of his trademark combat boots yesterday as he testified before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. But except for that concession, the former American viceroy of...

Jerry Bremer wore black dress shoes instead of his trademark combat boots yesterday as he testified before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. But except for that concession, the former American viceroy of Iraq had lost none of his swagger. His widely condemned move to disband the Iraqi military? "I stand by the decision." Billions of dollars potentially wasted on dubious contracts? "I did not have authority over the awarding of contracts." Incompetent personnel at the Coalition Provisional Authority? "My role in hiring was very limited." "On the whole," Bremer told the lawmakers, "I think that we made great...

Excerpt - WASHINGTON, Feb 6 (Reuters) - The U.S. Federal Reserve sent record payouts of more than $4 billion in cash to Baghdad on giant pallets aboard military planes shortly before the United States gave control back to Iraqis, lawmakers said on Tuesday. The money, which had been held by the United States, came from Iraqi oil exports, surplus dollars from the U.N.-run oil-for-food program and frozen assets belonging to the ousted Saddam Hussein regime. Bills weighing a total of 363 tons were loaded onto military aircraft in the largest cash shipments ever made by the Federal Reserve, said Rep....

Greek police arrested three brothers, Savas Triandafyllos, 40, Christodoulos Triandafyllos, 44, and Vassilis Triandafyllos, 30, and charged them with being members of the Marxist-Leninist Revolutionary Organisation of November 17 terrorist group. The brothers are being charged with having participated in a number of terrorist inspired killings. The police have now made nine arrests, including the Xiros brothers. Savas Triandafyllos, reported to have Sudanese links, was seriously injured on 29 June when a bomb he was carrying exploded. On investigation, police found the fingerprints of Alexandros Giotopoulos, a 58-year-old academic, in flats containing bomb-making equipment. Giotopoulos denies all knowledge of the...

After the fall of Saddam Hussein's government in April 2003, the opportunity to participate in the U.S.-led effort to reconstruct Iraq attracted all manner of Americans -- restless professionals, Arabic-speaking academics, development specialists and war-zone adventurers. But before they could go to Baghdad, they had to get past Jim O'Beirne's office in the Pentagon. To pass muster with O'Beirne, a political appointee who screens prospective political appointees for Defense Department posts, applicants didn't need to be experts in the Middle East or in post-conflict reconstruction. What seemed most important was loyalty to the Bush administration. (snip) Interviews with scores of...

George Bush made his trip to Baghdad, he told the new prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, "to look you in the eye." Yet his surprise visit established more than a first-hand connection. It signposted the dramatic events of the past week, which bode well both for Iraq's future and for the broader war on terrorism. As he stood in the hall of one of Saddam's former palaces--quite literally in the eye of the storm--Mr. Bush implored the Iraqis to "seize the moment." There are now emerging indications that they are doing just that. Thanks to the efforts of the men...

by Mark Finkelstein April 13, 2006 As has been noted here before, the surest way for a Republican to get himself invited onto an MSM show and accorded respectful treatment is to be prepared to take shots at the Bush administration. The time-tested technique was on display on this morning's Today, as Newt Gingrich got the kind of kid-glove treatment he could have only dreamed of back in his Speaker days when the MSM was vilifying him as 'the Gingrich Who Stole Christmas'. At the top of the show, Matt Lauer teased Newt's appearance in these terms: "A prominent politican...

As the Bush administration's envoy for Iraqi politics, Zalmay Khalilzad had considerable experience dealing with Iraqi opponents of Saddam Hussein. Before the war, Mr. Khalilzad was the White House's point man in meetings with Iraqi exile leaders in London and Kurdistan. After the shooting started, he was a key figure at political gatherings in Baghdad and at Tallil air base to begin assembling a new Iraqi leadership. So when the White House prepared to announce the appointment of L. Paul Bremer III as the chief civilian administrator in Iraq in May 2003, Mr. Khalilzad had every expectation that he would...

THE persistence of the insurgency in Iraq has divided America in a way not seen since Vietnam. Now the blame game among the principals has begun. The former presidential envoy to Iraq, L. Paul Bremer III, has written in his new memoir that he informed President Bush that the military did not have "a strategy to win." Quite. The lesson the Pentagon should learn from Iraq is to avoid another L. Paul Bremer. This is less a reflection on Mr. Bremer, who accurately described himself as "the American viceroy" in Iraq and "the president's man," than on the position he...

NEW YORK -- The U.S. intelligence focus on Iraq's nonexistent weapons of mass destruction may have contributed to the Bush administration's failure to anticipate the insurgency that followed the U.S. invasion, former Iraq administrator L. Paul Bremer said Tuesday. "The fact that there would be some resistance was anticipated. What really caught us by surprise was its intensity," Bremer told a Manhattan audience, when questioned about why U.S. leaders mistakenly expected a friendlier reception in Iraq. "I suppose an argument would be that the intelligence resources were almost entirely devoted to WMD and not to this question of the insurgency,"...

Britain was 'weak-kneed' over arrest of Iraq cleric, says Bremer By Francis Harris in Washington (Filed: 10/01/2006) The British Government and Armed Forces were "weak kneed" and displayed "cold feet" over plans to arrest a radical Islamic cleric in Iraq, the former US administrator in Iraq claimed yesterday. Paul Bremer also turned his fire on organisations with a reputation for hawkishness, including the CIA, the US Marine Corps and the US chiefs of staff, who were berated for their timidity in refusing to arrest Moqtada al-Sadr, the firebrand Shia leader. His accusations came in a long-awaited memoir of his 13-month...

On August 8, an independent commission charged with investigating mismanagement and corruption at the United Nations oil-for-food programme, published a damning report. It accused the former head of that programme, Benon Sevan, of corruptly benefiting from kickbacks and of having $160,000 (Dh587,200) in unusual bank deposits. The commission also accused Alexander Yakovlev, an officer in the procurement department, of receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars from other UN contractors. The commission will publish its definitive findings in September. These are serious charges, which undermine the credibility of an international organisation shaken by the inhumanity of the sanction regime, and the...