Free Republic

TRIBUTE TO A SOLDIER: Bob is my friend. Some of you know Bob as a photographer; however, long before he picked up a camera Bob rode bulls in the 50s and early 60s. Bob is also a Navy veteran, a submarine sailor, the best of the best. Bob's son who I'll call Jr for now enlisted in the Army and was deployed during the first Gulf War in 1991. While dug in with his unit somewhere in Iraq they came under an Iraqi SCUD missile attack. The missiles landed close to Jr's position but unlike other missiles these had a...

On a late January afternoon, as press secretary Sean Spicer walked into the White House media briefing room, a tall, thin, bespectacled man poked his head in the doorway for a moment before turning around and heading back into the West Wing. Later that week, at another briefing, the man stayed longer, standing in the corner behind the podium, out of view of the array of television cameras. The reporters peppering Spicer with questions were unlikely to know it, but the wallflower watching over the proceedings happened to be the leading conservative intellectual to argue for the election of Donald...

Only a mainstream media thatÂ’s been blinded by hatred of Trump could be this disappointed their predictions of all-out war with Iran havenÂ’t come true. The last few days have been an ongoing spectacle of media bias and incompetence in the coverage of the Qassem Suleimani strike and its fallout.Mainstream outlets, suffering mightily from Trump derangement syndrome, practically rooted for a wider conflict with Iran in the hopes it might damage Trump, then evinced genuine disappointment when Iran backed down after half-heartedly lobbing a few short-range ballistic missiles in the direction of U.S. troops stationed in Iraq, which inflicted...

Former CIA operative and New Mexico congressional candidate Valerie Plame, who continues to draw criticism for retweeting an anti-Semitic article in 2017, says she has joined a Jewish congregation. Plame, in a recent interview with an Israeli journalist, said she is a member of Temple Beth Shalom in Santa Fe, where she has lived for several years. In videotaped portions of the interview now posted online, Plame said she became interested in her family history after having her twin boys in 2000 and discovered that her great-grandfather was a rabbi in Ukraine. “I’ve always been drawn to that aspect of...

After the surprise resignation of Secretary of Defense James Mattis last December, Democrats were quick to politicize the news, and have certainly been hoping ever since that Mattis would provide them with new information they could use to attack Donald Trump. He does have a memoir coming out, Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead, but it looks like it’s Barack Obama and Joe Biden who get the bulk of the criticism. Prior be being Secretary of Defense under Trump, Mattis served as commander of U.S. Central Command under Obama and Biden. Mattis had predicted that Iran would continue to provoke...

Media figures are lying about Tuesday's attacks on the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. Why? You can tell that the Obama administration’s legacy in the Middle East is in danger because the media, as the self-appointed janitors of that legacy, have gone into overdrive obfuscating the timing, context, and significance of this week’s attack on the United States embassy in Baghdad. Although President Donald Trump has gone a long way to dismantling Obama’s legacy in the region, much more remains to be done, including a halt to American taxpayer money that has been flowing into Iranian-controlled governments in Iraq and Lebanon.Earlier...

Three years gone, thousands of lives lost, tens of billions in debt-funded spending, and we’re right back where we started, with a permanent entanglement in the longest war in U.S. history. President Trump plans to pull about 4,000 U.S. troops from Afghanistan early in 2020, officials in his administration reported in mid-December, a partial withdrawal that would put American force levels in our longest war exactly where they were when Trump entered office. Three years gone, thousands of American and Afghan lives lost, tens of billions in debt-funded spending, and we’re right back where we started, with an apparently permanent...

Getting lucrative government contracts is easy – if you know the right people.  And in the case of former ambassador Joe Wilson, husband of former CIA officer Valerie Plame, it was Hillary Clinton who greased the skids so that government contracts could go to business associates and friends. Is this really in the job description of the secretary of state? Daily Caller: Wilson’s requests for help — on behalf of an American engineering contractor he consulted for called Symbion Power — is a recurring theme in each monthly Clinton email dump. The latest two batches of records are no different....

A former top aide to Colin Powell says his involvement in the former secretary of state's presentation to the United Nations on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction was "the lowest point" in his life. "I wish I had not been involved in it," says Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, a longtime Powell adviser who served as his chief of staff from 2002 through 2005. "I look back on it, and I still say it was the lowest point in my life." Wilkerson is one of several insiders interviewed for the CNN Presents documentary "Dead Wrong -- Inside an Intelligence Meltdown." The program,...

April 12, 2006 More deception from the Washington Post While the Washington Post frets about a U.S. military "propaganda campaign" against Zarqawi that consists of spreading true information reasonably calculated to save American lives, the Post conducts a propaganda campaign against the administration that's based on distortion. The latest instance is today's story on the Bush administration's statements that certain Iraqi trailers were biological laboratories. As Ed Morrissey shows, the Post's report is highly deceptive. While trumpeting the fact that a team of experts concluded after the invasion that, contrary to the administration's claim, the trailers were not bio labs,...

To read entire article click text: In a court hearing in San Diego, Kenneth Breen, an assistant United States attorney, said the adviser, Amr Ibrahim Elgindy, tried to sell $300,000 in stock on the afternoon of Sept. 10 and told his broker that the stock market would soon plunge. "Perhaps Mr. Elgindy had preknowledge of Sept. 11, and rather than report it he attempted to profit from it," Mr. Breen said. So, what did Mr. Elgindy, who was trying to sell $300k in stock, tell the financial world the day after 9-11?  Read it for yourself! Immediate release InsideTruth.com...

A CIA official who had a top role during the run-up to the Iraqi war charges the White House with ignoring intelligence that said there were no weapons of mass destruction or an active nuclear program in Iraq. The former highest ranking CIA officer in Europe, Tyler Drumheller, also says that while the intelligence community did give the White House some bad intelligence, it also gave the White House good intelligence — which the administration chose to ignore

Ex-CIA Accuse Bush of Manipulating Iraq Evidence Monday, March 17, 2003 WASHINGTON — Invoking the name of a Pentagon whistle-blower, a small group of retired, anti-war CIA officers are accusing the Bush administration of manipulating evidence against Iraq in order to push war while burying evidence that could show Iraq's compliance with U.N demands for disarmament. The 25-member group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, composed mostly of former CIA analysts along with a few operational agents, is urging employees inside the intelligence agency to break the law and leak any information they have that could show the Bush administration is engineering the...

Robyn Gritz spent 16 years at the FBI, where she investigated a series of major national security threats. But she says she got crosswise with her supervisors, who pushed her out and yanked her security clearance. For the first time, she's speaking out about her situation, warning about how the bureau treats women and the effects of a decade of fighting terrorism. --SNIP-- Retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who led the Defense Intelligence Agency, worked closely with Gritz to find terrorists overseas. He says it's a shame the FBI let go of someone with years of top national security experience.

"The Pentagon has released new color photos as proof that Iran was behind last week's attack on two oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman," ABC News reported. Hours before that attack, Iranians launched surface-to-air missile at a U.S. drone monitoring the tankers. The missile missed. In response, 1,000 American troops are being dispatched to the region for the declared purpose of defending American forces already there. Reacting to these charges and U.S. military moves and threats, Iran has said it will resume (did it ever stop?) the enrichment of uranium by next week, which it had pledged not to...

President Trump on Monday signed an executive clemency granting a full pardon to a former Army first lieutenant convicted of murdering an Iraqi prisoner. The White House released a statement announcing Trump's decision to pardon Michael Behenna, who was sentenced in 2009 to 15 years for shooting and killing Ali Mansur Mohamed. The move comes after repeated requests from Oklahoma's attorney general for Trump to pardon Behenna. "Mr. Behenna’s case has attracted broad support from the military, Oklahoma elected officials, and the public," the White House said, noting that more than two-dozen generals and admirals, as well as numerous Oklahoma...

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has portrayed himself as a champion of a free press, but the U.S. Department of Justice’s decision to charge him with conspiring to hack government computers limits his ability to mount a vigorous free speech defense, some legal experts said.The charge unsealed in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia on Thursday said that in 2010 Assange agreed to help Chelsea Manning, a former U.S. Army intelligence analyst then known as Bradley Manning, crack a password to a U.S. government network. At the time, Manning had already given WikiLeaks classified information about U.S. war activities in both Afghanistan...

When Edward Snowden decided he wanted to release details about the NSA's intelligence operations to the public, he reached out to Laura Poitras, a 49-year-old film maker and political activist opposed to the war on terror. As the Washington Post noted on Monday, Poitras had "the odd distinction of sharing a byline in The Washington Post and in London’s Guardian newspaper last week on two blockbuster stories." snip But perhaps it isn't such a mystery why the U.S. government might want to question Poitras if you simply crack open John R. Bruning's 2006 book, The Devil's Sandbox: With the 2nd...

The US Army has concluded that Iran was the only victor of the eight-year US campaign to remove Iraqi president Saddam Hussein and replace him with a democratic regime. That’s one of the findings of a massive historical study released Jan. 17, the first major military review of the Iraq war’s lessons. Commissioned in 2013 by General Ray Odierno, then the Army’s top commander, it was conducted by half a dozen field grade officers at the US Army War College.

I received my Academy screener of "Vice" -- Adam McKay's intermittently black comic biopic of Dick Cheney --- just a few days before its Christmas opening and watched it almost immediately, even though I knew I would hate it. I did. It had exactly the retrograde, conformist Hollywood politics I expected. What I didn't expect was that it would be an aesthetic jumble and quite boring. Nevertheless, "Vice" led the pack of Golden Globe nominations with six and is an early favorite for the Best Picture Oscar. So unfortunately, due to the biased state of our educational system, this could...