Free Republic

When chief of staff Andrew Card knelt down and told George Bush “America is under attack” 15 years ago Sunday, the words he whispered in the president’s ear in a Florida classroom launched what was supposed to be a planned, orderly response to a national emergency. But what followed instead was chaos, a breakdown in communication and protocol that risked international conflict and could have made Sept. 11, 2001, a still bigger tragedy. There were live nukes on the tarmac at U.S. airbases, a failed communications system, and a security protocol for the president and his potential successors — the...

A veteran news reporter has quit NBC, accusing the network of pushing anti-Trump, pro-war propaganda. William M. Arkin accused the new outlet of having an "infatuation" with the "Trump circus," claiming it leads to journalists ignoring real stories as they push to turn Americans against their president. Arkin, a seasoned national security reporter, made the revelations in a biting farewell message to his colleagues.

The U.S. citizen killed by a missile launched from a pilotless drone aircraft over Yemen was the ringleader of an alleged terrorist sleeper cell in Lackawanna, N.Y., administration officials said yesterday. Kamal Derwish, one of two unindicted co-conspirators in the Lackawanna case, died along with the intended target of the attack, senior al Qaeda leader Abu Ali al-Harithi, who is accused of masterminding the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole in which 17 sailors died. These two men and four others were traveling in a car outside the Yemeni capital of Sanaa when they were hit by a Hellfire...

The Posse Comitatus Act holds that federal military personnel may not be used to enforce domestic policies within the United States. The National Guard is an exception to that rule and then only if the state’s governor or the D.C. Mayor requests it. Nevertheless, there are indications that the Pentagon worked with the Department of Justice and the FBI in the lead-up to President Trump’s January 6 rally that ended with Antifa activists and other agitators enticing people into the Capitol. That’s a big no-no, if true. Julie Kelly, who has been following the events of January 6 with the...

WASHINGTON -- The chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Rep. Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich, told NewsMax that he believes the recent leaks over the CIA's secret prisons and the NSA's terrorist surveillance program were "politically driven," and that the leakers "ought to be prosecuted." "What we are seeing is a systematic breakdown in the intelligence community when it comes to leaking highly classified intelligence information," he stated. If intelligence officers have concerns about a particular program, they have various legal avenues to make those concerns known, he said. "First, there's an inspector general," he noted. "Then there's a...

'Post' Editor Hits 'Criminalization' of Leaks to Media Len Downie Published: April 22, 2006 10:45 AM ET WASHINGTON The CIA fired a top intelligence analyst who admitted leaking classified information that led to a Pulitzer Prize-winning story about a network of secret CIA prisons, government officials say. The officer was a senior analyst nearing retirement, Mary McCarthy, The Associated Press learned. Reached Friday evening at home, her husband had no comment. The Post's Dana Priest won a Pulitzer Prize this week for her reporting on a covert prison system set up by the CIA after Sept. 11, 2001, that at...

As most of you have read or seen by now, a journalist and NBC/MSNBC media consultant named William “Bill” Arkin has created quite a stir by viciously insulting American soldiers in Iraq. He wrote at his Washington Post blog, “Early Warning: William M. Arkin on National and Homeland Security” column (1/30/07), that “… this NBC (Nightly News) report is just an ugly reminder of the price we pay for a mercenary - oops sorry, volunteer force that thinks it is doing the dirty work” re Iraq. The “report,” according to Arkin, featured “a number of soldiers (who) expressed frustration with...

With two Pulitzer Prizes to her name, Dana Priest is one of the Washington Post’s most celebrated reporters. Until Monday, when the Post published the first installment of a bombshell series on post-9/11 intelligence industrial complex, national security blogger William Arkin was hardly known to the paper’s readers. But from a media perspective, Arkin’s role as co-author of the series might be the more important. It marks the first time one of the Post’s bloggers – lately the cause of controversy because they sometimes blur opinion and reporting — has had a byline in one of the paper’s big, investigative...

I don’t get it. I just don’t get it. How can a newspaper or a journalist get away with revealing to the world top secret, classified information that could be harmful to our operatives and our national security? I’ve been waiting on word for the last several days for the Washington Post to be brought up on treasonous charges. In the current political climate in America, who needs foreign enemies when you have outlets like the Washington Post to destroy your country from within? Josh Rogin, a writer for the Foreign Policy Magazine writes: “The State Department is bracing for...

On Friday, the CIA busted one of its own and charged him — or her — with leaking classified information. While this guy or gal goes to jail, over at The Washington Post, reporter Dana Priest is still admiring the brand new Pulitzer Prize sitting on her mantle, for writing about what this very leaker told her: the secret prison story. It was last November when Priest published a story in The Washington Post that the U.S. was maintaining a secret array of prisons where American intelligence could interrogate Al Qaeda-types who had been captured on the field of battle...

(Yeah, yeah, I know, Dana Priest is a female. But whoda thunk there are only images on the web of men with heads up their ass. Someone’s gonna have to get on that. That’s sexist!!!) Hear ye! Hear ye!Bush’s ‘War’ on Terror Comes to a Sudden End! Or at least so says the dangerously obtuse Dana Priest in yesterday’s Washington Post. That’s right, folks. Priest has declared: Ding-dong, the wicked witch is dead. George W. Bush is out of office, and so the “war” on genocidal jihadists that he and his neo-con cronies concocted, so that Dick Cheney can...

Army Spec. Jeans Cruz helped capture Saddam Hussein. When he came home to the Bronx, important people called him a war hero and promised to help him start a new life. The mayor of New York, officials of his parents' home town in Puerto Rico, the borough president and other local dignitaries honored him with plaques and silk parade sashes. They handed him their business cards and urged him to phone. But a "black shadow" had followed Cruz home from Iraq, he confided to an Army counselor. He was hounded by recurring images of how war really was for him:...

.. MD:.. I watched some of Tuesday's House testimony by former CIA analyst and head Bin Laden hunter Michael Scheuer on C-SPAN. *snip* .. he made a vitriolic attack on your work on the secret prisons story. His basic viewpoint could be summed up as "people are trying to kill Americans -- we have to kill those people and if innocents suffer along the way, tough." I did some Internet research and the guy seems to run with an odd mix of people -- including antiwar.com, a libertarian site that sees all war as a tool of state expansion. Yet...

Behind the door of Army Spec. Jeremy Duncan's room, part of the wall is torn and hangs in the air, weighted down with black mold. When the wounded combat engineer stands in his shower and looks up, he can see the bathtub on the floor above through a rotted hole. The entire building, constructed between the world wars, often smells like greasy carry-out. Signs of neglect are everywhere: mouse droppings, belly-up cockroaches, stained carpets, cheap mattresses. This is the world of Building 18, not the kind of place where Duncan expected to recover when he was evacuated to Walter Reed...

A lie detector test helps trip up a CIA employee who was a source for press reports about the agency's secret overseas prisons. Just days after a Washington Post reporter won a Pulitzer prize for a story about secret CIA prisons, the Agency's Director, Porter Goss, Thursday fired a spook who admitted having been one of the sources for the story. A Government official told TIME that the fired officer admitted to conversations with the press after irregularities were spotted in a lie detector test. Soon after, Goss moved quickly to fire the individual. Goss spokeswoman Jennifer Millerwise Dyck would...

The clandestine U.S. commandos whose job is to capture or kill Osama bin Laden have not received a credible lead in more than two years. Nothing from the vast U.S. intelligence world — no tips from informants, no snippets from electronic intercepts, no points on any satellite image — has led them anywhere near the al-Qaeda leader, according to U.S. and Pakistani officials. "The handful of assets we have have given us nothing close to real-time intelligence" that could have led to his capture, said one counterterrorism official, who said the trail, despite the most extensive manhunt in U.S. history,...

Goodfellow’s BedfellowsWho’s in Bed with the Washington PostBy Fedora Introduction I. A Radical Education: Boston University and Cambridge-Goddard II. Vietnam Roots: Indochina Resource Center A. Luce at International Voluntary Services B. Luce and Cornell’s Hanoi for Lunch Bunch C. Luce’s Tiger Cages and the Indochina Mobile Education Project D. Luce and Branfman: The COLIFAM Connection E. Luce, Branfman, Winter Soldier, and Project Air War F. The Indochina Resource Center: Branfman, Luce, and Goodfellow G. The IRC and the Indochina Peace Campaign: The Hayden-Fonda Link III. Post-Vietnam Transition: Campaign for a Democratic Foreign Policy and Coalition for a New Foreign and...

Weekend Talk Show *Preview* for 7/1 and 7/2/06 (not the live thread)The main message is the Sunday Shows.  Message 1 will be the Saturday Shows and message 2 will be the show guest links post.  Then I'll post the ping list.ABC This Week (George Stephanopoulos) Meme: Bush was wrong on all the issues McCain is right onThe Supreme's smack down the Bushies (who cares if it endangers the country, it's NEWS!!!) Topics: Hamdan, Immigration, and Iraq Guests Senator John McCain, Republican - Arizona He's BAAAAACKMcCain's back and Georgie's got himIt's such a tragedy that President Bush didn't listen to Saint...

Leslie Cauley, the USA Today reporter who last week “broke” the news that three major U.S. telecommunications companies were assisting the National Security Agency in building a database to more easily track any communications by potential terrorists, is listed as a donor to former House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt... A search found a listing for "writer and journalist" Leslie Cauley, indicating she gave $2,000 to Gephardt on June 30, 2003, when Gephardt was running for the Democratic presidential nomination. And that seems not to be her only tie to Democratic politics ... Cauley's link to a Democratic campaign seems likely...

A senior CIA official, meeting with Senate staff in a secure room of the Capitol last June, promised repeatedly that the agency did not violate or seek to violate an international treaty that bars cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment of detainees, during interrogations it conducted in the Middle East and elsewhere. But another CIA officer -- the agency's deputy inspector general, who for the previous year had been probing allegations of criminal mistreatment by the CIA and its contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan -- was startled to hear what she considered an outright falsehood, according to people familiar with her...