Free Republic

     An opportunity to avoid war lost by the Bush administration or an opportunity taken advantage of by ABC News to push its anti-war agenda? ABC led Wednesday night with “an ABC News investigation” of what Peter Jennings characterized as “what appears to be an opportunity lost” to work with “a man who was in the process of trying to broker a deal that might have avoided war with Iraq.”      Brian Ross proceeded to recount how in the weeks before the war a Lebanese businessman forwarded an offer from Saddam Hussein’s intelligence chief to allow U.S. agents to travel...

Saddam Hussein's intelligence chief tried to arrange a meeting last week between US representatives and the former Iraqi leader, who an opposition official believes was seen about three days ago, ABC News reported. Leaders of Iraq's prominent Dulaym tribe told the US network that they had made contact with former CIA officer Bob Baer and others to try to arrange some kind of meeting."They told me the chief of Iraqi intelligence was seeking to get in touch with the United States and could I do anything about that," said Baer, who now works for ABC News.Saddam's intelligence chief, General...

Early on the morning of March 16th, 1984, William Buckley left for work at the American embassy in Beirut, Lebanon. Officially, Mr. Buckley, a decorated veteran of the Special Forces, served as the political officer at the embassy. In reality, however, Mr. Buckley was the embassy’s CIA station chief. On his way to the compound, Buckley’s car was stopped by a group of masked men, who forced him from his car at gunpoint. His assailants would later be identified as terrorists from the group Islamic Jihad, which served as an alias for the real perpetrators, Hezbollah. The circumstances surrounding the...

Sunday March 3, 2002 'Bombing Saddam is ignorance' Robert Baer, the ex-CIA man in Iraq during the failed uprising in 1995, says the US is not in a position to strike against Iraq because it does not understand anything about the country Robert Baer's objections to an attack on Iraq could hardly be principled. As the CIA's point man in Iraq during the failed uprising in 1995, he encouraged dissident groups to believe that the United States wanted the overthrow and death of Saddam Hussein. Yet Baer, whose memoir of life in the CIA, See No Evil, is published ...

Uncovered: The War on Iraq Directed by Robert Greenwald Cinema Libre, opens August 20 Anybody who tries to deconstruct the new American empire erected by the Bush regime's schnooks and crooks winds up babbling to himself and others, "You can't make this shit up." But then you have to get your hands dirty and mold it into something that's interesting to look at. That's something Michael Moore did in Fahrenheit 9/11, but which Robert Greenwald doesn't do in Uncovered: The War on Iraq. Moore created a movie; Greenwald gives us a cinematized blog. His vast made-for-TV experience (The Burning Bed,...

Matt Damon and George Clooney come back together for political thriller Matt Damon and George Clooney, who are currently working together on Steven Soder-bergh's Ocean's Eleven sequel - Ocean's Twelve, will reteam for the Stephen Gaghan-helmed political thriller Syriana. In addition, Amanda Peet is in final negotiations to join the project. Set up at Warner Bros., Clooney and Soderbergh's studio-based Section Eight will produce the project with shooting slated to begin during the summer. Gaghan adapted the script, which is loosely based on the Robert Baer non-fiction novel See No Evil: The True Story of a Foot Soldier in the...

<p>President Bush's attack on terrorism has been taking a beating on its right flank lately -- and for good reason. Domestically, the Bush administration has done little about illegal immigration and remains all too cozy with people openly sympathetic to terrorists.</p>

By now my enthusiasm for the liberation of Iraq is clear enough, I hope, that I can take a day to rain on the parade. As impressive as the current campaign is, American policy in dealing with Saddam Hussein has been a bipartisan chamber of horrors. Consider for example the Clinton administration low point, extensively described in Robert Baer's CIA memoir, "See No Evil." Mr. Baer headed a small CIA team in Northern Iraq in 1995, in contact with the two Kurdish factions as well as with Ahmad Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress and a defecting Iraqi general, Wafiq...