Free Republic

AS a result of the horror of Sept. 11, 2001, President Bush has transformed the way we fight terrorism and the tools we use. We successfully attack those very things our enemies need to operate and survive: leadership, communications, the ability to travel, weapons; foot soldiers and financing. The president has strengthened and transformed the intelligence community, integrated our military and intelligence assets, and broken down the barriers that kept domestic law enforcement and intelligence agencies from sharing information.

It has become grimly commonplace. While the horrific strikes in the United States are foremost in Americans’ minds, other parts of the world — as far away as Bali, but in large cities in particular — have also found themselves the targets of vicious attacks in recent years. The Op-Ed page asked writers who know some of these cities well to describe the events and consider their aftermath.

You read our headline correctly. Right there on the New York Times' online front page, under TV critic Alessandra Stanley's byline is this headline: Laying Blame and Passing the Buck, Dramatized. Here is the screen shot:Mr. Stanley is not the Times' foreign policy expert. He watches TV for a living. Yet with one click of your mouse (or on Mr. Stanley's remote control), you get his "expert" opinion: All mini-series Photoshop the facts. “The Path to 9/11” is not a documentary, or even a docu-drama; it is a fictionalized account of what took place. It relies on the report of...

One widow has more than $2 million but walks or rides the bus everywhere, terrified of drawing attention. Another millionaire widow stopped going to 9/11 support groups because she feared that families of police officers and firefighters might betray her. A widower has enough money to start a business building houses, but cannot buy himself a home. One of the 9/11 widows in the office of her lawyer. “I can’t dream very high, because I have no papers,” one says. All three lost a husband or a wife when the World Trade Center collapsed. Like thousands of others, they were...

SNIP.... Politicians, however, are nothing if not fickle in their affections. So it was that last week the California Legislature, at the behest of a Republican lawmaker, decided that a statue of King should be replaced in the National Statuary Hall at the United States Capitol by one of a more modern Republican with a similar gift for public speaking: Ronald Reagan.The measure, which passed nearly unanimously just before the end of the legislative session on Thursday night, was hailed by State Senator Dennis Hollingsworth, its Republican author, as a fitting nod to the Great Communicator. “We have a lot...

As Chad Kingsbury watches his daughter playing in the sandbox behind their suburban Chicago house, the thought that has flashed through his mind a million times in her two years of life comes again: Chloe will never be sick. Not, at least, with the inherited form of colon cancer that has devastated his family, killing his mother, her father and her two brothers, and that he too may face because of a genetic mutation that makes him unusually susceptible. By subjecting Chloe to a genetic test when she was an eight-cell embryo in a petri dish, Mr. Kingsbury and his...

KABUL, Afghanistan, Sept. 2 — Afghanistan’s opium harvest this year has reached the highest levels ever recorded, showing an increase of almost 50 percent from last year, the executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Antonio Maria Costa, said Saturday in Kabul. He said the increase in cultivation was significantly fueled by the resurgence of Taliban rebels in the south, the country’s prime opium growing region. As the insurgents have stepped up attacks, they have also encouraged and profited from the drug trade, promising protection to growers if they expanded their opium operations. “This year’s harvest...

WASHINGTON, Sept. 1 — An enduring mystery of the C.I.A. leak case has been solved in recent days, but with a new twist: Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the prosecutor, knew the identity of the leaker from his very first day in the special counsel’s chair, but kept the inquiry open for nearly two more years before indicting I. Lewis Libby Jr., Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, on obstruction charges. Now, the question of whether Mr. Fitzgerald properly exercised his prosecutorial discretion in continuing to pursue possible wrongdoing in the case has become the subject of rich debate on...

I have bad news for the G.O.P. regarding that promising new bloc of voters, the South Park Republicans. It turns out they're not Republicans, at least not anymore. According to Wikipedia, which would definitely be these voters' encyclopedia of choice, South Park Republicans are young Americans who "hold political beliefs that are, in general, aligned with those that seem to underpin gags and storylines in the popular television cartoon." The encyclopedia summarizes these beliefs with a quotation from one of the show's creators, Matt Stone, which includes a crucial expletive I must elide: "I hate conservatives, but I really ......

by Mark Finkelstein September 1, 2006 - 07:01 I kept waiting. Dutifully wading through Paul Krugman's prolonged subscription-required kvetch over the economy, The Big Disconnect, I figured I'd eventually be rewarded for my perseverence with his proposed solutions - if only to be able to critique them. But the New York Times columnist's economic nostrums never came. Krugman's basic complaint is that workers haven't shared in the fruits of the extended economic expansion. This is Krugman being late to the MSM party noted here, here, and here. Even so, he chooses to ignore the reporting in his own paper that...

This is a great interactive election map showing which seats are safe, which are leaners, which voted for Bush vs Kerry, etc etc. Pretty amazing how we went from the dems winning both house and senate, to at least the house, to now maybe neither-at least according to the NYTimes latest predictions. http://www.nytimes.com/ref/washington/2006ELECTIONGUIDE.html?currentDataSet=senANALYSIS

He supports tax cuts and the war in Iraq. He opposes stem cell research and the Medicare drug plan. He is a master of his movement’s medium, talk radio. Jesus Christ is his personal savior and Ronald Reagan his political idol. Conjure what might be called the perfect conservative, and chances are he would look a lot like Representative Mike Pence, the Indiana Republican who in just three terms has turned 100 House allies into a vanguard and himself into one of his party’s rising stars..... Arriving in Washington, he was dismayed at conservatives’ support for government expansion. In 2001,...

<p>A federal study showing that fourth graders in charter schools score worse in reading and math than their public school counterparts should cause some soul-searching in Congress.</p> <p>Too many lawmakers seem to believe that the only thing wrong with American education is the public school system, and that converting lagging schools to charter schools would cause them to magically improve.</p>

KAYSERI, Turkey — As the muezzin heralded the noon prayers on a recent Friday, a small army of workers fanned out from an industrial park to take their places on mats in a nearby mosque. Fifteen minutes later, the prayers were over and the teachings of the Koran gave way to the demands of the factory floor. “In European countries, workers take a 15-minute smoking break; here we take a 15-minute prayer break,” said Ahmet Herdem, the mayor of Hacilar, a town of 20,000 people in central Anatolia, a deeply religious and socially conservative region which has produced some of...

by Mark Finkelstein August 27, 2006 - 06:29 "Comrade. Potato production 70% below target for 4th year in row in five-year plan!" "True, Kommissar. But we have solution. Will implement training and preparation program for workers!" "Budem - let's drink!" The ostensible purpose of this morning's New York Times editorial was to exult at the results of a study finding that 4th-grade charter school students performed worse than their public school counterparts, even when controlling for socio-economic background. Like a tiger on the smallest of mouses, the Times pounced on this one result to proclaim that it was "Exploding the...

Reporters Without Borders today condemned the three-year prison sentence which a Beijing court imposed yesterday on New York Times researcher Zhao Yan for alleged fraud while dismissing the original charge of treason and divulging state secrets. “The court cleared Zhao of the treason charge for lack of evidence and it should have done the same with the fraud charge,” the press freedom organisation said. “Zhao is known for his commitment to China’s peasants and the accusations that were brought against him were all ridiculous. We support his sister’s request for an appeal and we call for his provisional release as...

WASHINGTON, Aug. 24 - The State Department is investigating whether Israel's use of American-made cluster bombs in southern Lebanon violated secret agreements with the United States that restrict when it can employ such weapons, two officials said.The investigation by the department's Office of Defense Trade Controls began this week, after reports that three types of American cluster munitions, anti-personnel weapons that spray bomblets over a wide area, have been found in many areas of southern Lebanon and were responsible for civilian casualties.Gonzalo Gallegos, a State Department spokesman, said, "We have heard the allegations that these munitions were used, and we...

THREE years into the Sunni insurgency in Iraq, everyone from slicksleeved privates fighting for survival in Ramadi to the echelons above reality at the Pentagon still believes that eliminating insurgents will eliminate the insurgency. They are wrong. There is a difference between killing insurgents and fighting an insurgency. In three years, the Sunni insurgency has grown from nothing into a force that threatens our national objective of establishing and maintaining a free, independent and united Iraq. During that time, we have fought insurgents with airstrikes, artillery, the courage and tactical excellence of our forces, and new technology worth billions of...

Even legal experts who agreed with a federal judge’s conclusion on Thursday that a National Security Agency surveillance program is unlawful were distancing themselves from the decision’s reasoning and rhetoric yesterday. They said the opinion overlooked important precedents, failed to engage the government’s major arguments, used circular reasoning, substituted passion for analysis and did not even offer the best reasons for its own conclusions. Discomfort with the quality of the decision is almost universal, said Howard J. Bashman, a Pennsylvania lawyer whose Web log provides comprehensive and nonpartisan reports on legal developments. “It does appear,” Mr. Bashman said, “that folks...

If ever government whistle-blowers needed protection from official retaliation it is now, in the secrecy-obsessed Bush administration. Federal employees daring to disclose fraud and abuse in their bureaucracies have been under virtual siege, isolated as pariahs and shipped off under gag orders to lesser jobs in far-off places. Appeals to court review under the 17-year-old Whistle-Blower Protection Act have proved fruitless, with the Supreme Court ruling in May that workers have no right to First Amendment protection when they warn lawmakers and taxpayers of government waste and folly. The ruling has thrown the issue back into the lap of Congress....