Free Republic

"Leave America, and leave it to them? No way. Got to slug it out," Seymour Hersh says in a chat. He's asked why the news media "isn't making more of a stink" about the secretive White House. His reply: "The major media have been part of the problem since 9-11, merely because they have far too often taken the president's public utterances at face value. There also is a terrific unwillingness, perhaps understandable (though not by me), to make a moral judgment about a president's policies. There are plenty of people on the inside who are worried about the policies,...

NEW YORK (CNN) -- Officials in the Pentagon and the U.S. intelligence community Monday flatly denied a New Yorker magazine report that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld approved a clandestine unit to crack down on terrorists held at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, where inmates were abused. The article, by Seymour Hersh, quotes a former intelligence official saying the unit's instructions were, "Grab whom you must. Do what you want." The report also says the CIA pulled its people from involvement in interrogations at the prison in October "because it was out of control." "This is the most hysterical piece of journalist...