Free Republic

This column was co-authored by Bob MorrisonSen. John Kerry has a long and dubious record in foreign policy. In the 1970's, he testified against his fellow Vietnam War veterans before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He charged that they were violating the Geneva Conventions every day in Vietnam. Some POWs were outraged at Kerry's disloyal statements. They said they had been tortured by their Communist captors trying to force them to make such untrue statements. Worse, Kerry went to Paris in 1971. There, he met with North Vietnamese Communists. We need to see all his notes from those meetings....

Russia: Putin Talks Up Power Of Nuclear Arsenal Russia's Defense Ministry has issued a document reaffirming its right to undertake pre-emptive military strikes while warning NATO that the alliance's continued military posture could prompt Moscow to conduct what it called a "fundamental reassessment of Russia's military planning and arms procurement." At the same time, President Vladimir Putin, in a meeting with top military brass, emphasized the power of Russia's nuclear arsenal. Coming so soon after Putin's visit to the United States, the saber-rattling from Moscow took some observers by surprise. Should the U.S. and NATO be alarmed? Prague, 3 October...

President Speaks to Muslim World Speaking to Al-Jazeera in particular and the Arab world in general, President Vladimir Putin on Friday criticized the United States' positions on Chechnya and Iraq and said Russia retains the right to use preemptive strikes if the UN continues to be sidelined in decisions on dealing with a security threat. "With preemptive strikes, we start from the assumption that international law is most important. Any use of force is appropriate only in the case of a decision by the UN Security Council," Putin said in remarks broadcast on the Qatar-based network and picked up by...

MOSCOW: Moving to boost its strategic arsenal, Russia has acquired a batch of Soviet-built ballistic missiles from Ukraine and is preparing to begin producing a new generation of nuclear submarines, officials said on Friday. Ukraine inherited the world's third-largest nuclear arsenal with the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, but later renounced nuclear weapons and transferred all its 1,300 nuclear warheads to Russia for destruction. It has also dismantled most of its Soviet-made strategic missiles with US financial assistance, but Ukraine's space agency reportedly took over some 30 RS-18 missiles -- called SS-19 by Nato. The Ukrainian government decided last...