Free Republic

he oil tanker Marinera, seized by the United States, had been chartered by a private trader under the flag of Guyana.It changed its flag to Russian while in the Atlantic, already being escorted by a U.S. Coast Guard vessel, Caliber.Az reports, citing REN TV.The U.S. Coast Guard began pursuing the tanker off the coast of Venezuela after failing to obtain confirmation from Guyanese authorities that the ship was sailing under their flag.U.S. officials demanded that the captain proceed to a U.S. port, but he refused and steered the vessel into the Atlantic. En route, the tanker requested temporary registration under...

January 21, 2022 With inflation at a record high, millions of its citizens fleeing the country, and a political opposition recognized by most Western democracies as the legitimate government of Venezuela, the regime of Nicolás Maduro seemed to be on the brink of collapse in 2019. But Maduro regime survived, thanks to a number of factors — among them the external support it received from malign state actors such as Russia and China. Moscow and Beijing never wavered in their political support of the Venezuelan regime, or of Maduro himself, including by refusing to recognize the constitutionally mandated interim presidency...

WASHINGTON — A bombshell FBI informant file containing a $10 million bribery allegation against President Biden and his son was released Thursday by Sen. Chuck Grassley, showing that a Ukrainian oligarch claimed he was “coerced” into making the payoff. The owner of Ukrainian gas company Burisma Holdings, Mykola Zlochevsky, told the FBI informant in 2016 during a meeting at a coffee shop in Vienna, Austria, that “it cost 5 [million] to pay one Biden, and 5 [million] to another Biden,” according to the redacted FD-1023 form. “Zlochevsky made some comment that although Hunter Biden ‘was stupid, and his (Zlochevsky’s) dog...

Fresh turf marks spot where poisoned Russian spy and his daughter were found slumped on a bench as sealed off Salisbury businesses reopen for first time since nerve agent attack Thoroughfare near bench has been closed since nerve agent attack 11 weeks ago Sergei Skripal and daughter Yulia were found unconscious on bench on March 4 Businesses are preparing to reopen today as Salisbury makes steps in recovery Shoppers were avoiding area over health and safety fears, harming businessesFresh turf marks the spot where former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were found slumped on a bench after...

As Russian tanks rumble through Georgia, and Western pundits talk of the "new Cold War," one trope keeps reappearing in their discourse. Russia's newly aggressive stance, we are told, is partly our fault: After the fall of Communism, the West went out of its way to humiliate and trample Russia instead of treating it as a partner--and now, an oil-powered Russia is striking back. "Russia's litany of indignities dates to the early 1990s when the Soviet empire collapsed," Samantha Power, a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and former Barack Obama adviser, wrote in Time. "A bipolar universe gave...

In the early morning hours of Thursday, Syria’s al-Tala’i military research facility located in Masyaf was reduced to ash and flames. The Jerusalem Post reports that contemporaneous with the strike on al-Tala’I, a Hezbollah weapons convoy in the vicinity was also hit and destroyed. According to Western intelligence sources, al-Tala’i is a center for the production of chemical weapons. Syria blamed Israel and claimed that at least two regime soldiers were killed in the attack. The regime issued a banal and somewhat hypocritical warning of the “dangerous repercussions of this aggressive action to the security and stability of the region.”...

21st Century SocialismThe attempt to destroy democracy in Latin America.  The Obama administration started out on the wrong foot in world affairs. It used techniques better suited for domestic political campaigns — popularity contests — in its foreign policy. In our own hemisphere, the result was confusion for our allies and our enemies alike. The overriding objective of U.S. policy — in Latin America and elsewhere — should be to advance U.S. national interests, not to curry favor with foreign leaders. If we can be liked while advancing our interests, so much the better. But when we try to befriend...

The Communist Roots of Palestinian Terror   By David Meir-LeviFrontPageMagazine.com | Friday, December 14, 2007 The following is chapter from David Meir-Levi's new book, History Upside Down: The Roots of Palestinian Fascism and the Myth of Israeli Aggression. The Terrorism Awareness Project previous printed his history of the "right-wing" influence on Islamic extremism, "The Nazi Roots of Palestinian Nationalism and Islamic Jihad." Taken together (with his entire book), these chapters show that Islamofascism is a political, not merely a religious force; and the potent and deadly offspring of the totalitarian ideologies of the past. -- The Editors. Although many Nazis...

December 2015 was a pivotal month in many respects. During the first week of December 2015, Donald Trump began to establish a substantial lead over his Republican primary opponents. Vice President Joseph Biden traveled to Ukraine to announce, on December 7th, a $190 million program to “fight corruption in law enforcement and reform the justice sector,” but behind the scenes explicitly linked a $1 billion loan guarantee to the firing of Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who had been investigating the energy company Burisma, which employed Biden’s son Hunter. On December 9, 2015, the reported whistleblower Eric Ciaramella held a meeting...

Anxious FBI chiefs are trawling through 'numerous' top-level investigations spanning 22 years for fear they were compromised by convicted bureau spook Charles McGonigal, DailyMail.com can reveal. The forensic clean-up operation ranges over the entire time the philandering former head of counterintelligence in New York worked for the agency. McGonigal, 55, has already been sentenced to four years and two months in prison for taking money and conspiring with a sanctioned Russian oligarch who is a crony of despot President Vladimir Putin. But the full possible repercussions of his treachery are outlined in a sentencing memorandum by the US government for...

Soviet defector and KGB operative Yuri Bezmenov, specializing in the fields of Marxist-Leninist propaganda and ideological subversion, warned us about the silent war being waged against America and the West as part of a long term plan to destroy our system, culture, traditions, and even our will to survive. It's been apparent for some time that they succeed brilliantly in brainwashing a significant chunk of the American populace. In Western Europe, the damage is far greater. Western academia and the mainstream media have taken the baton and run with the Soviets' old subversion efforts. Cleon Skousen's "The Communist Takeover of...

The unnamed Tennessee-based company that the Justice Department alleges was being funded by Russian operatives working as part of a Kremlin-orchestrated influence operation targeting the 2024 US election is Tenet Media, which is linked to right-wing commentators with millions of subscribers on YouTube and other social media platforms, according to a US official briefed on the matter. The indictment unsealed in New York’s Southern District accused two employees of RT, the Kremlin’s media arm, of funneling nearly $10 million to an unidentified company, described only as “Company 1” in court documents. CNN has independently confirmed that “Company 1” is Tenet...

Our federal government paid for Russian disinformation to frame the president of the United States for colluding with Russia. ============================================================ The FBI put a contributor to the Hillary Clinton campaign’s Donald Trump smear dossier on FBI payroll as a confidential human source after investigating Igor Danchenko for allegedly spying for the Russian government, revealed Special Counsel John Durham in a court filing unsealed by a Virginia federal court yesterday. The filing contains this bombshell and seven other significant details about the Democrat-led plot to use U.S. intelligence agencies to deny Americans the results of their choice for president in 2016....

One of Russia’s most highly decorated heroes in the war with Ukraine instructed his troops to intentionally shoot him to sit out of combat and collect a fat paycheck, according to investigators — who also found his alleged heroics were completely bogus. Lt. Col. Konstantin Frolov — nicknamed the “Executioner” for his reputation as a highly skilled sniper — was identified as the mastermind behind the massive military scam where he instructed 35 officers and soldiers in Russia’s elite sniper unit, the prestigious 83rd Air Assault Brigade, to deliberately fire at him and each other, the probe recently concluded, according...

This is getting very very interesting. Now surfaces an Intel gem from Julian Assange’s Wikileaks alleging that the lawyer for Adam Schiff’s anti-Trump and Ukraine whistleblower was called out by Wikileaks and Assange for selling out a legal client to the CIA. And the client ended up in prison, according to Wikileaks. Wikileaks previouly hurled a brutal and damning Tweet at attorney Mark Zaid accusing him of selling out a client and working with the CIA to get that client locked up. Sounds familiar. Mark S. Zaid ✔ @MarkSZaidEsq · Nov 23, 2018 Replying to @NaomiPitcairn and 6 others Lol,...

A growing number of young Ukrainians have been unknowingly recruited by Russian forces as unwilling suicide bombers as the Ukraine-Russia War drags on in its third year, the Guardian reported last week. Russian forces have been recruiting Ukrainians, mainly teenagers, to bomb police stations, post offices, or military targets under the guise of odd jobs postings on Telegram as part of an ongoing shadow war. For example, 19-year-old Oleh told the Guardian that he was offered $1,000 to video himself vandalizing a police station in western Ukraine with provided materials. He collected a rucksack from a given exchange point with...

The Kremlin on Monday condemned the killing of Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah in an Israeli air attack last week and said it assessed the risk of a major Middle East war as "extremely high". "The Russian side condemns such actions, we believe that they have led to a significant destabilisation of the situation in the region," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters. "The main thing is that such indiscriminate bombing of residential areas in Lebanon leads to a huge number of human casualties, which will inevitably bring on a humanitarian catastrophe like the one we are seeing in Gaza,"...

Baroudi & Associates, who represented the Russian vessel's crew, published a statement on Wednesday saying they sent letters in July 2014 to officials at Beirut Port and the Ministry of Transportation "warning of the dangers of the materials carried on the ship." Customs authorities issued repeated notices to a judge about the dangerous cargo, according to documents seen by CNN. But the judge, who cannot be named for legal reasons, responded multiple times saying that the ship and its cargo might not be within the court's jurisdiction, the documents show. In four handwritten responses written in 2016 and 2017, the...

WASHINGTON -- Just when the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) thought it had its hands around the Iranian nuclear program, NewsMax has learned from intelligence sources that Iran's Revolutionary Guards Corps is completing a secret, underground uranium enrichment plant that should begin operating in October 2006. Work on the new plant, located 50 miles outside the northeastern Iranian city of Mashad, was begun with help from Russian engineers in 2003, Iranian intelligence sources said. The facility has been built 150 meters below ground in a rugged highlands valley some 38 kilometers southeast of the city of Nishabour. The nearest inhabited...

David Bloom is live on MSNBC now, with the news that captured soldiers have revealed to his battalion that Russians and French companies have been supplying NightVision goggles and that former Russian military officers are advising the Iraqis on how to fight American forces.