Free Republic

"American Majority" CEO Ned Ryun responds to the latest comments from former CIA Director John Brennan about the connection between Trump and Russia on FNC's "Ingraham Angle." NED RYUN: It's pretty rich coming from them. The intelligence community spent the last nine years sowing misinformation and trying to disrupt our representative democracy and our national elections in 2016 and 2020 that Trump is somehow going to take the IC to unprecedented political levels. You know, the real rub in all of this, Laura, was the fact that Trump tried to bring transparency and accountability in his first term and efforts...

What Does the Asch Conformity Experiment Tell Us about Francis, the 2020 Election, and the Covid-19 Atrocities? While it has always been the case that fallen human beings are prone to both lying and believing lies, many of us have observed a remarkable increase in the propensity of seemingly intelligent people to believe preposterous lies in recent years. In many instances, those of us who have refused to believe those lies have been ostracized by family members, colleagues, and those we had considered friends. How, we must ask, do these otherwise normal people not only believe these preposterous lies but...

The Biden administration is vacating a decades-old decision to revoke the security clearance of World War II-era scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer, who is known today as the “father of the atomic bomb.” In a written statement first shared with The Hill, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said the 1954 decision barring Oppenheimer’s clearance went through a “flawed process” and noted that there was evidence of bias. “In 1954, the Atomic Energy Commission revoked Dr. Oppenheimer’s security clearance through a flawed process that violated the Commission’s own regulations. As time has passed, more evidence has come to light of the bias and...

Could President Joe Biden, so closely associated with the state of Delaware, instead have started his political career in Idaho? Sure, if you ask Joe Biden about it. On Monday, the president visited Idaho for a roundtable where he was briefed on the wildfires in the state by officials with the National Interagency Fire Center, according to Fox News. During the briefing, Biden said his “first job offer” came from Idaho-based lumber company Boise Cascade — something he said he discussed with the late Democratic Sen. Frank Church, arguably the most famous politician in the state’s history. “I used to...

The CIA should be abolished. After a trial run of 67 years, the agency has proven a sorcerer’s apprentice. The director and his subordinates have became insufferably arrogant Platonic Guardians hiding behind secrecy in the belief that the rest of us are too stupid or naive to judge what risks to accept to preserve liberty and the rule of law. The CIA has made Americans less safe. Its incorrigible anti-democratic ethos was epitomized by legendary chief of counterintelligence James J. Angleton. He voiced contempt for the Church Committee’s investigation of chronic agency abuses, i.e., the “Family Jewels.” As reported in...

Once a Constitutional Republic famed for its pragmatism, the United States has lately become a country notorious for its inconstancy, no longer recognizing that actions have finite and foreseeable consequences. In this space, for example, I recently argued that the release of the “torture report” by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence came perilously close to the constitutional definition of treason by “giving Aid and Comfort” to America’s enemies. Admittedly, that was a tough assessment. But barely a week after the report’s release, the Huffington Post published an article linking those revelations with their most immediate effects on our allies....

Idaho's Democrat Senator Frank Church[i] was one of my heroes when I was in high school. Church wrote a letter of recommendation for me to Harvard and offered to nominate me to an appointment to any of the U.S. military academies. In the summer of 1971, he took me to lunch in the dining room of the United States Senate, where, for the first time in my life, I tasted French onion soup[ii]. He asked me if I would like to serve as an intern in his office in Washington, D.C. when I graduated from high school. (It was an...

The tendency of Democrats to try to destroy the CIA is nothing new. On December 23, 1975 a wonderful man and classical scholar named Richard Welch, who was a year ahead of me in high school, and who was the Harvard-educated CIA station chief in Athens, Greece, was shot to death on his front steps shortly after being outed by Senator Kennedy and Senator Church (of the Church Committee). Here we go again with another war on the CIA by liberal Democrats.

Last weekend, in a now famous interview with Chris Wallace, former President Clinton lied and spun about his non-record fighting terrorism. This weekend we saw a parade of Democrats crying “foul” when their record is exposed. Let’s again look at the facts.

The difference between Universalists and Unitarians (the old joke has it) is that Universalists believe that God is too good to damn them, whereas Unitarians believe that they’re too good to be damned. I am a Universalist. For all my many failings, the day I wake up dead I won’t be in a cattle car on the fast train to Satan’s fiery pit. Nor will you. And neither will Old Scratch himself. If he actually exists, the devil too will be saved. In the good news of universalism, God is a loving God who will not rest until the entire...

One of the most difficult concepts to deal with in this CIA leak affair is the notion that CIA is full of Libs. Libs that would undermine this Administration. Most of us have, long ago, understood this existed in the State Department. But the CIA? We know the history of the war on US intellegence services by Libs. Sen. Frank Church's Committee in the mid 70's eviscerated much of the agency. When I was in college (60's and 70's)they would run around yelling "CIA off campus." My first inkling this was not as it seemed was listening and then viewing...

The White House has ordered U.S. intelligence agencies to produce a worldwide study of Moslem religious movements in the wake of the Islamic revolt that helped drive the shah of Iran from his country this week, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was told yesterday. Administration officials disclosed at a closed-door committee hearing that Zbigniew Brzezinski, the president's national security adviser, ordered the study. These officials emphasized that the existence of the request was considered highly sensitive by the administration, because of the growing political impact of Moslem fundamentalism in many areas of the world. The Carter administration is being charged...

"If we can identify a target anywhere on Earth, we can destroy it." That's how Stephen Younger, director of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), assesses the combination of U.S. intelligence and military capabilities. Intelligence enabled the U.S. military to fight and win Persian Gulf War II as no force in world history ever could have. Yet military intelligence experts say the United States can do better - much better. The United States has the best intelligence collection, processing and communications technology in the world. But our intelligence institutions suffer severely from what some insiders call second-rate leadership, third-rate intellect...