Free Republic

Link only

One of the most repellent aspects of the 2016 presidential election has been a phenomenon that has its home in leftwing tactics but that has now emerged on the Right in addition to the Left. More precisely, it has revolved around the adoption by precincts of the #NeverTrump Right of tactics usually associated with the Left. The main feature of that tactic deploys a twofold effort at character assassination. The first step is the transformation of political disagreement into a species of heresy. The second step involves the thundering repudiation of the newly minted heretics, who are to be...

  Dual Loyalty and the “Israel Lobby”Gabriel Schoenfeld In late August, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) hosted an event in Washington, D.C. entitled “The Israel Lobby and the U.S. Response to the War in Lebanon.” It featured two political scientists, John J. Mearsheimer, a professor at the University of Chicago, and Stephen M. Walt, a professor at Harvard and former academic dean of the university’s Kennedy School of Government. Back in March, the two men, both of whom are identified with the “realist” school in foreign policy, had stirred an intense controversy with an article in the London Review...

On December 16th 2005, Eric Lichtblau and James Risen published a column in the New York Times entitled “Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts," revealing the highly classified information that: “Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials.” On June 23,2006 the same authors in the same newspaper wrote a column with a slightly less explosive title “Bank Data Is Sifted by...

New York Times reporter James Risen is facing prison if he doesn’t reveal sources that gave him highly classified information on U.S. intelligence in Iran. Gabriel Schoenfeld says no reporter is above the law.

Freeman of Arabia   [Mark Steyn] Re Charles Freeman, a truly dreadful appointment, I wrote seven years ago in the British Spectator, in a piece headlined "Down With Saudi Arabia: It's time to destroy the Arab kingdom" (ah, happy days!): By now, the 'Saudis Are Our Friends' op-ed may even have its own category in the Pulitzers. Usually this piece turns up after the Saudis have done something not terribly friendly - refused to let Washington use the US bases in Saudi Arabia, or even to meet with Tony Blair. Then the apparently vast phalanx of former US ambassadors to...

The State Department has designated Fatah al-Islam, a self-declared al-Qaeda affiliate of Sunni Muslim extremists based in northern Lebanon, a “terrorist” group. Back in March, the investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, writing in the New Yorker, explained that this outfit, consisting of a relatively small number of fighters but heavily armed, was actually a creature of the United States. In line with a reorientation of U.S. policy to bolster Sunni Muslims in the growing contest with the Shiites of Hizballah and its controlling hands in Iran, the U.S. had covertly joined with Saudi Arabia to support the terrorists of Fatah al-Islam.

Are reporters above the law? Should they be? We have lately been running laps around this block in connection with the 2005 leak of the NSA terrorist surveillance program and the 2003 exposure of Valerie Plame’s CIA status. The first of these two episodes did not land any reporters into trouble, but a federal grand jury is still hearing evidence in the case and there was movement in the case last month. The second led to Judith Miller of the New York Times being put in the slammer by a court. There she remained for 85 days, until she disgorged...

On the television program, the Gong Show, any of the three judges could sound a large gong if one of the acts being rehearsed by amateur performers was particularly poor. At this past Thursday’s Democratic presidential debate, sponsored by the gay rights group Human Rights Campaign, New Mexico governor Bill Richardson was asked a simple question: “Do you think homosexuality is a choice, or is it biological?” His answer: “It’s a choice!” Wrong answer! No one sounded a gong, but given the ensuing raised eyebrows, the ensuing criticism, the ensuing Richardson campaign “clarification,” and the ensuing Richardson excuse—“jet lag”—one should...

What is the best way for terrorists to wreak havoc in the United States? That was the question posed, and answered, yesterday on the New York Times website by Steven D. Levitt, the University of Chicago professor of economics and author of the best-selling book, Freakonomics. Levitt’s advice to al Qaeda, based upon the economic principle of generating the greatest quantity of harm with the least possible input of resources, would be to learn from the Washington D.C snipers of 2002. He suggests arming "20 terrorists with rifles and cars, and arrang[ing] to have them begin shooting randomly at pre-set...

Three-and-a-half inches of rain fell here yesterday, causing immense chaos and raising once again the question of whether the city is prepared for the possibility of something worse, like six inches of rain, not to mention a major terrorist attack. One of the critical issues raised by yesterday’s episode is the way information is distributed in a crisis. As I noted after a steam pipe burst in Manhattan on June 18, New Yorkers were left in the dark about the nature of the blast whose plume was visible for miles. The news media did not get on the story for...

Ever since the CIA was established in 1947, the annual amount of money spent on intelligence has been treated as a closely guarded secret. In recent years, a small army of liberal advocacy groups has been calling for disclosure. Their cause gained momentum when the 9/11 Commission threw its weight behind it. Just this past week, Congress passed a law, which President Bush has already signed, that would compel such disclosure. But the House of Representatives is now busy undoing its own work, and the final outcome is far from clear. Bush, for his part, signed the bill under duress....

Dana Priest is a national-security correspondent for the Washington Post. Her professional success depends in large part on her ability to ferret out secrets from the U.S. intelligence and defense bureaucracy and from knowledgeable officials on Capitol Hill. Sources within government, acting in violation of the laws governing secrecy, regularly provide her with classified information in exchange for her promise not to disclose their identity, even if this means she must defy a court order and possibly go to jail. This year, Priest won a major journalism award for a November 2005 article bringing to light the highly classified fact...

Is it possible that the New York Times could still be indicted for revealing the existence of the NSA’s Terrorist Surveillance Program in a December 2005 front-page story? Shortly after the revelation appeared, a federal grand jury was empaneled to investigate the leak. A range of government officials, including Jane Harmon, then the ranking Democrat of the House Intelligence Committee, pointed to the severe damage that the Times story did to our efforts to intercept al-Qaeda communications and thwart a second September 11. Shortly thereafter, President Bush called the newspaper’s conduct “shameful.” I agreed with these assessments. In fact, I...

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, two doves posing as hawks, are fighting a phony war. Who is winning? Obama, on the defensive on account of his muddled idea last week of meeting foreign dictators without preconditions, precipitated the latest skirmish by calling for the possible use of U.S. troops to clean out terrorist enclaves in Waziristan. But then, in response to a question, he ruled out use of the most powerful weapon in the American arsenal.

The last I heard of Lawrence Summers, he was performing somersaults as president of Harvard, trying to ingratiate himself with the faculty he had offended by, among other things, frankly discussing some ideas–taboo in academia–about the linkages between sex and success. The somersaults were to no avail. Summers’s tenure as president came to an abrupt end last year and he returned to his post teaching economics as the Charles W. Eliot university professor. This was Harvard’s loss and our gain, for whatever one made of his ridiculous efforts to back away from his own thoughtful if provocative words, he is...

I took apart a New York Times op-ed by Nicholas Thompson yesterday, which had tried to tell us what the American statesman, George F. Kennan, were he still alive, would have said about counterterrorism. Thompson has written back, complimenting my remarks as “very smart and complicated” and “much better than some of the other comments I’ve been getting.” But he does take issue with much of what I said, including my contention that he was being dishonest. In the face of his very gracious note, I gladly retract that last charge. But what I do leave standing is my assertion...

How worried should we be about Iran and its raging president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? Can developments on Mars or in other locations in outer-space help us ward off the danger? This is not a facetious question. It is quite clear that the ayatollahs are determined to acquire nuclear weapons. In the face of this challenge, and assuming that diplomacy fails to stop them, we are likely to have two non-exclusive options: strike at their nuclear facilities or build defensive systems like the Airborne Laser. But from time to time, it helps to step back from the intricate problems connected with either...

“Did George Kennan know the best way to fight terror?” is the question asked by a New York Times op-ed today. My question in return is: why is so much that appears on the op-ed page of our leading newspaper so fatuous? In 1947, writes Nicholas Thompson, the author of a forthcoming book about Kennan, the late American strategist published his famous article in Foreign Affairs under the byline of X, setting forth the strategy of containment. The Soviet challenge, as Kennan understood it, Thompson explains, was political and not military, and it required a political not a military response:...

As always in the realm of national security, we do not know what we do not know. But one thing we do know–perhaps not to a certainty, but to a high degree of probability–is that next year, or in the next few years at most, unless it is stopped by diplomacy or force, Iran will develop a nuclear weapon. We also know, or should know, that if we permit this catastrophe to happen, we will urgently need defensive weapons to protect ourselves and our allies. But are programs to develop such weapons on track, or are they being held back...