Free Republic

ANTONY SUTTON: A GIANT DEPARTS NOT A REAL HUMAN BEING By: Alan Stang Even many well-informed people today don’t know who Tony Sutton was. That invisibility was a function of his integrity. At his death a couple of days ago, he would have been world famous had he not told the truth. I once accused Tony of being a vacuum cleaner, not a real human being. For instance, readers of Western Technology & Soviet Economic Development, his massive three-volume study of Soviet military capability, know it nailed down the fact that the Red Army was made here in the United...

June 21, 2002 Ridge Questioned Sharply About Plans for Security DepartmentBy DAVID FIRESTONE ASHINGTON, June 20 — Tom Ridge, the White House domestic security director, was sharply questioned today by members of Congress who were skeptical about a core function of the proposed Department of Homeland Security: its ability to receive accurate intelligence about terrorist threats. Several lawmakers said the Bush administration's plan for sharing intelligence could lead to the same turf battles and rivalries that kept the existing agencies from predicting the Sept. 11 attacks. The plan, released on Tuesday, requires the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central...

ASHINGTON, June 19 — The National Security Agency intercepted two cryptic communications on the day before the Sept. 11 attacks that referred to a major event scheduled for the next day, but analysts at the secret eavesdropping agency did not read the messages until Sept. 12, American intelligence officials said today. One of the conversations intercepted by the agency on Sept. 10 said that "the big match" is scheduled for tomorrow, referring to Sept. 11. A second message called the next day "zero hour." Agency analysts did not process, translate and review the intercepted Arabic communications until the day...

Word has come that some folks have begun to question my conservative credentials. That's easy to understand. There are quite a few blockheads in America today who falsely wear the label "conservative." Some blockheads equate being a conservative with ardent support of any war, no matter how unconstitutional, unnecessary and unjust the war might be. A true conservative supports the Constitution and does not support anybody or anything that violates it. Some people have said there is a resemblance between America today and the Weimar Republic, which eventually produced Adolf Hitler. I think there is some truth to that comparison....

Recent economic reports indicate that the recovery is struggling to move forward. The main barriers are high consumer indebtedness and mediocre corporate earnings. Consequently, neither consumer demand nor business investment is driving the recovery. Interest rates are low, but Federal Reserve easing has not provided the usual stimulus to spending and equity prices. Part of the problem is the reverse wealth effect from the drop in equity values. The wealth effect from the long bull market made consumers comfortable with more debt, which they used to finance second homes and high living. When the market dropped, much wealth disappeared, but...

<p>GRANTS PASS, Ore. -- Faced with legal and political obstacles, managers of the Klamath Basin national wildlife refuges have given up trying to move commercial farming off land that was once marsh used by Pacific Flyway waterfowl.</p> <p>"The laws the way they are and the politics the way they are, farming is going to be part of our life," said Phil Norton, manager of the national wildlife refuges straddling the Oregon-California border. "We are trying to work with the local community."</p>

eco - logicon - line 6/15/2002. Socialazzi and the Three E's By John Loeffler France's petit mal de politique regarding Jean-Marie Le Pen, once again forced to the surface Europe's century-long struggle between communism and fascism along with its inability to recognize them as two sides of the same coin, and totally antithetical to a free society. Indeed Europe outside of the United Kingdom has always had a problem understanding the core concepts of freedom. France alone rocketed through five different governments in the same time the U.S. has had only one. Right now the entire continent is proceeding at...

ASHINGTON, June 15 — A group of midlevel operatives has assumed a more prominent role in Al Qaeda and is working in tandem with Middle Eastern extremists across the Islamic world, senior government officials say. They say the alliance, which extends from North Africa to Southeast Asia, now poses the most serious terrorist threat facing the United States. This newly constituted alliance of terrorists, though loosely knit, is as fully capable of planning and carrying out potent attacks on American targets as the more centralized network once led by Osama bin Laden, the officials said. Classified investigations of the Qaeda...

eco - logicon - line Saturday, June 15, 2002 Commentary West Virginia Officials Have Turned Their Backs On Property Owners Along The New River Parkway By Tom DeWeese T he Mayor of Hinton, West Virginia, Cleo Mathews, in an opinion editorial on May 7, 2002, accused me of being an outside agitator spreading "misinformation" against the New River Parkway. Since then, a barrage of letters with a similar theme have been published. Yes, I am from Warrenton, Virginia, and that makes me an easy target for attack. But the truth is the misinformation is coming from Mayor Mathews and the...

ASHINGTON, June 13 — Top officials of the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. have quietly negotiated a cease-fire between the two agencies, which have been in a war of news leaks and finger-pointing about the intelligence failures leading to the Sept. 11 attacks, officials familiar with the talks said today.After a briefing of President Bush last week, Robert S. Mueller III, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and John E. McLaughlin, the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency, met outside the Oval Office, where Mr. Mueller asked for a truce and Mr. McLaughlin agreed, the officials said."The...

<p>The National Security Agency received information on September 10th that "something big" was coming, it was reported last night.</p> <p>But not until September 12 did the agency understand what the warning meant, CBS news said today.</p> <p>Meanwhile, the Immigration and Naturalization Service has told its agents to inspect baggage belonging to Yemeni citizens for large sums of money, thermos bottles and night-vision goggles, a government official said.</p>

While the White House proposes the mother of all bureaucracies as a cure-all, most pundits continue playing the blame game. That's how it goes when our intelligence community misses clues and Americans wind up in body bags. Remember the feeding frenzy that followed Pearl Harbor? FDR, the Washington brass and our Hawaiian commanders were cut into bite-sized pieces and barbecued over a red-hot fire. The same gotcha drill occurred when the Reds invaded South Korea in 1950 and during the '62 Cuban missile crisis, the '68 Tet offensive in Vietnam and in dozens of subsequent intell failures, from Beirut in...

<p>Last week in this space, I wrote about President Bush's remarkable June 2 speech at West Point, in which he laid out, in effect, a liberty doctrine according to which the United States will no longer be satisfied to stand as a symbol of freedom and the success that flows from it, but instead will seek to protect and promote liberty in all parts of the world as the "single . . . model of human progress."</p>

The fabled Clinton "war room," with its alert media reflexes and craftiness in unleashing quick ripostes to potentially damaging stories, had nothing on these spooks and G-men! When it comes down to it, bureaucrats know how to handle the press as well as the politicians, judging by the ugly media brawl that has broken out between the CIA and the FBI. Neither the agency nor the bureau has pulled any punches in respective bids to paint the other as the more egregious in missing clues that might have assisted in thwarting the attacks of Sept. 11. The G-men's preferred conduit...

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....

ASHINGTON, June 7— A re-examination of years of terrorist plots and attacks around the world, including the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, suggests that American intelligence agencies profoundly underestimated Al Qaeda's reach and aspirations for more than a decade as it grew from obscurity into a global terrorist threat, lawmakers and investigators said this week.As Congressional investigators look back far beyond the series of signals missed before the Sept. 11 attacks, they are seeking answers to many questions about Al Qaeda that law enforcement and intelligence agencies still cannot answer themselves, officials said.In particular, they said, Congressional investigators are trying...

<p>WASHINGTON (AP) The Bush administration's long-held assertion that it lacked the evidence to avert the terror attacks is giving way to a crucial question: What did the government know before Sept. 11? The administration's theme has been that it had no specific information and therefore could not stop the plotters.</p>

Article shows how the notion that the anthrax killer was a "home-grown" terrorist was concocted and spread by Marxist professor Barabara Hatch Rosenberg, who stole her theory from a TV series.

WASHINGTON, June 6 (UPI) -- U.S. investigators lifted "a great number" of fingerprints from abandoned al Qaida training camps, caves and other hideouts in Afghanistan, a senior law enforcement official told United Press International on Thursday. The prints from the unknown suspects have been added to a massive fingerprint database that will be used to screen incoming aliens, so that al Qaida militants who escaped U.S. forces in Afghanistan cannot bring their fight into the United States. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of al Qaida and Taliban fighters disappeared from Afghanistan as U.S. forces and the Northern Alliance resistance group advanced and...

WASHINGTON – Foul-ups by FBI officials here have become so common that even street agents are poking fun at their once-hallowed bureau, saying it now stands for "Famous But Incompetent." Yet, over the past five years, headquarters has showered top FBI officials with hundreds of thousands of dollars in prestigious rank awards – on top of annual performance bonuses. Alongside the parade of embarrassing FBI scandals, bungles and debacles – from Richard Jewell to Filegate to Robert Hanssen – a parade of Hoover Building bureaucrats picked up fat checks at black-tie honorary ceremonies hosted by the State Department. Special agents...