Free Republic

...Hillary’s private email server acted as portal to a private intelligence network that included retired members of special operations, former CIA clandestine personnel and foreign informers. Acting in some indeterminate capacity over it was Sidney Blumenthal, former aide to president Bill Clinton and now apparently a retainer to the family dynasty. It was the compromise of Blumenthal’s emails by the Romanian hacker Guccifer that in part led to journalists to discover Hillary’s private email account. Publicly available sources describe Guccifer as a taxi driver who penetrated the email accounts of the Bush family, Colin Powell and of course Sidney Blumenthal...

'Mr. President, I've got a few scores to settle' Democratic congressional candidate Valerie Plame's (N.M.) campaign on Monday released a new ad, where she ended it with a message of having a "few scores to settle." The ad, which is titled, "Undercover," shows liberal activist and ex-CIA operative Plame driving a Chevy Camaro backwards on an empty road in rural New Mexico while narrating her background throughout the ad. "I was an undercover CIA operative. My assignment was preventing rogue states and terrorists from getting nuclear weapons. You name a hot spot, I lived it," Plame said, as Iran, Iraq,...

Retired US Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson is no stranger to controversy, with a legacy of questionable statements on Israel and the US government. In 2013 the former chief of staff for then-Secretary of State Colin Powell suggested that Israel was responsible for the use of chemical weapons in Syria. In 2007 Wilkerson appeared in a Dutch documentary, claiming that American foreign policy was dominated by “the Jewish lobby”. Despite his history of inflammatory rhetoric and frequent conspiracy theories, Wilkerson was tapped to serve as a military and foreign policy adviser for the Bernie Sanders campaign in 2015. In the wake...

Liz Cheney said Sunday that some of the stories in print about her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, were "fantasies" cooked up by some of his old Bush administration rivals. Responding to a question about Dick Cheney's role in pushing for aggressive interrogations, Liz Cheney pointed to Lawrence Wilkerson, the chief of staff to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, for spreading inaccurate information about her father. Wilkerson "has made a cottage industry of fantasies about the vice president," she said on ABC's "This Week." "It's important to look at the source" of media reports, Cheney said. "Nobody talking about...

Lawrence Wilkerson is a contradictory figure. Wilkerson is a career military man, who served as chief of staff for Secretary of State Colin Powell; but he has also voiced reluctance to involve American forces in foreign conflicts, and slammed the Bush administration for its handling of the Iraq War. He is also a lifelong Republican who, far from just criticizing his party, has actually gone on the warpath against it at times. When Powell was attacked by conservatives in 2012 for endorsing Barack Obama for reelection — Mitt Romney surrogate John Sununu famously suggested that the endorsement was motivated by...

WASHINGTON - Vice President Dick Cheney chose someone in his own likeness to be his new chief of staff. Like Cheney, David Addington shuns the limelight. And like Cheney, Addington already has made a large imprint on the Bush White House. At Cheney's side since the 1980s, Addington has been a behind-the-scenes player in one after another of the hot-button controversies the Bush administration has faced: _The CIA leak probe. _The fight to disclose which corporations advised the White House on energy policy. _The dispute over the treatment of suspected terrorists. _The White House disagreements with the Sept. 11 commission...

The same top Bush administration neoconservatives who leap-frogged Washington’s foreign policy establishment to topple Saddam Hussein nearly pulled off a similar coup in U.S.-China relations—creating the potential of a nuclear war over Taiwan, a top aide to former Secretary of State Colin Powell says. Lawrence B. Wilkerson, the U.S. Army colonel who was Powell’s chief of staff through two administrations, said in little-noted remarks early last month that “neocons” in the top rungs of the administration quietly encouraged Taiwanese politicians to move toward a declaration of independence from mainland China — an act that the communist regime has repeatedly warned...

Vice-President Dick Cheney and a handful of others had hijacked the government's foreign policy apparatus, deciding in secret to carry out policies that had left the US weaker and more isolated in the world, the top aide to former Secretary of State Colin Powell claimed on Wednesday. In a scathing attack on the record of President George W. Bush, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Mr Powell until last January, said: “What I saw was a cabal between the vice-president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions...

WASHINGTON, (AP) -- John R. Bolton, nominated to be U.N. ambassador, vastly overrated the military might of Syria and Cuba and had to be talked into toning down his assessments, a former senior intelligence official told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff Friday. Robert L. Hutchings, who was responsible for coordinating American intelligence assessments in 2003, told the committee staff he felt Bolton was intent on drawing conclusions in public speeches that were "politicized" and exceeded U.S. intelligence on both countries, said a committee source, speaking on condition of anonymity. In another interview, former Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief...

...snip.... Nuclear forecast Amid the Bush administration's tough talk toward North Korea, a new fear is emerging: Could Pyongyang test a nuclear weapon this year? Some insiders think so. "Knowing Kim Jong Il 's track record for brinksmanship, I'd bet on it," says Larry Wilkerson , who worked the North Korea issue as former Secretary of State Colin Powell 's chief of staff. "If we don't resume negotiations, I'd give it a 70-30 chance." The CIA is not predicting anything imminent. But then again, it missed India's nuke test in 1998. "The only thing that would preclude this," says Wilkerson,...

<p>The State Department yesterday backed away from public criticism of Bush administration policies, saying that published remarks, while accurately quoted, "are not an accurate reflection of [Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's] views."</p> <p>"The facts of the matter are that you have a secretary of state who's happy in his job, proud to serve the president, accomplishing a lot along with the president, satisfied with his service," Mr. Powell's spokesman, Richard Boucher told reporters.</p>

Powell aides go public on rift with Bush Chief of staff says secretary of state is fed up with apologising for the administration and is disdainful of 'ideological' hawks Gary Younge in New York Thursday May 6, 2004 The Guardian Colin Powell's key aide has described US sanctions policy against countries such as Pakistan and Cuba as "the dumbest policy on the face of the Earth". In an article in GQ magazine Larry Wilkerson, chief of staff of the United States secretary of state, bemoans Mr Powell's firefighting role in President George Bush's cabinet. "He has spent as much time...