Free Republic

ransomnote: 10 minute video interview with former CIA agent Frank Snepp circa 1983. TRANSCRIPT BELOW.On X Jan 2, 2024 TRANSCRIPT BEGINS~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Frank Snepp: Once again I want to make it perfectly clear that we were not hiring these reporters, they were not operating as our spies or as our dupes. But, in a war situation, when there are so few sources of information, a reporter may rely on a CIA contact, and he becomes vulnerable.In Saigon, if I planted a piece information with a reporter, I would ordinarily then try to create an environment in which he could not check the...

Daniel Ellsberg, the former government analyst who leaked a trove of classified documents that became known as the “Pentagon Papers” and has lived near Berkeley for more than four decades, announced that he has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. In a Facebook post Thursday, Ellsberg wrote that doctors told him that he has inoperable pancreatic cancer, and estimated he has three to six months to live. Ellsberg, 91, has decided to forgo chemotherapy.

Triumph Forsaken The Vietnam War, 1954-1965 by Mark Moyar Cambridge, 542 pp., $32 In the late summer of 1963, President John Kennedy dispatched two observers to South Vietnam. Their mission was to provide the president an assessment of the regime of Ngo Dinh Diem, the president of the Republic of Vietnam. The first, Major General Victor Krulak, USMC, the special assistant for counterinsurgency for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, visited some ten locations in all four Corps areas of Vietnam. Based on extensive interviews with U.S. advisers to the South Vietnamese army, Krulak concluded that the war was going well....

A man who’s a better speechwriter than his speechwriters, a better political director than his political directors, and who knows more about policy than his policy advisors must surely also be a better general than his generals, no? The U.S. military campaign against Islamist militants in Syria is being designed to allow President Barack Obama to exert a high degree of personal control, going so far as to require that the military obtain presidential signoff for strikes in Syrian territory, officials said.The requirements for strikes in Syria against the extremist group Islamic State will be far more stringent than...

“Fidel Castro could have been Cuba’s Elvis!” (Dan Rather.) “Fidel Castro is one hell of a guy! “You people would like him!” (Ted Turner to a capacity crowd at Harvard Law School during a speech in 1997.) “Fidel Castro is old-fashioned, courtly—even paternal, a thoroughly fascinating figure!” (Andrea Mitchell.) “Castro has brought very high literacy and great health-care to his country. His personal magnetism is powerful, his presence is commanding.” (Barbara Walters.) “Viva Fidel! Viva Che!” (Jesse Jackson while arm in arm with Fidel Castro himself in 1984.) "Fidel Castro is very shy and sensitive, I frankly like him and...

We are told by careful pollsters that half of the American people believe that American troops should be brought home from Iraq immediately. This news discourages supporters of our efforts there. Not me, though: I am relieved. Given press coverage of our efforts in Iraq, I am surprised that 90 percent of the public do not want us out right now. Between January 1 and September 30, 2005, nearly 1,400 stories appeared on the ABC, CBS, and NBC evening news. More than half focused on the costs and problems of the war, four times as many as those that discussed...

Rather than absolving him of his sins, former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s pseudo-mea culpa, “In Retrospect: Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam,” is a self-indictment. His lesser crime is self-indulgence. His arrogance and duplicity during the Vietnam conflict is echoed throughout his book as he recounts his mismanagement of the war. If as he admits, ignorance was his guiding light, then, it has grown to be a beacon today, proving that he has learned little about Vietnamese communism in the almost three decades that it took him to write his book. Besides the war, another tragedy is that McNamara seems...

'There's a space for everyone at the table' at Louisville festival By Frank E. Lockwood HERALD-LEADER STAFF WRITER Former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and National Council of Churches general secretary Bob Edgar are among those coming to Louisville for its 10th annual Festival of Faiths. The eight-day festival, which unites people of all faiths, includes about a dozen events, including a community thanksgiving service and a session on "Faith and Cooperation in a Nuclear Age" with McNamara, Edgar and arms control expert Thomas Graham Jr. Artists, musicians and academics also participate in the activities. Sacred songs and scriptures...

Thirty years ago Saigon fell. I was a company commander in the 2 nd Battalion, 508 th Airborne Infantry Regiment, 82 nd Airborne Division. When our Vietnam veterans cursed the war, I remembered one of the greatest speeches I ever heard - the day the Vietnam peace was announced to my Winter Ranger class in ’73. The senior Ranger Sergeant cursed everything about the Vietnam War and everyone involved, friend or foe, in a poetic rant of imaginative, sincere, foul-mouthed hatred. He swore most passionately about the waste of his buddies’ lives. He blamed everyone and everything he knew to...

<p>WASHINGTON - Three days after Pentagon enemies leaked stories accusing him of trying to run the Iraq war on the cheap, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld took to the lectern and, with his usual gleam-in-the-eye confidence, struck back.</p> <p>''What we all know is the strategy is working,'' he said on Thursday. ''The coalition has secured the majority of Iraq's oil wells for the Iraqi people, secured key roads and bridges ... and has now arrived near the regime's doorstep, all in less than two weeks.''</p>

Toogood Reports [Tuesday, February 25, 2003; 12:01 a.m. EST]URL: http://ToogoodReports.com/ For over forty years, America pursued the foreign policy, first developed in an anonymously penned, 1947 article by George Kennan (as "X," in what was probably the most important article ever published in the journal Foreign Affairs), of the "containment" of Soviet communism. One of the factors that made containment workable was the very bifurcation of the world that the policy addressed. A world without an Iron Curtain, is a world without containment. Containment Theory was heavily influenced by World War II, in which Nazi Germany toppled one European country...