Free Republic

The Navy lawyer who led a successful Supreme Court challenge of the Bush administration's military tribunals for detainees at Guantanamo Bay has been passed over for promotion and will have to leave the military, The Miami Herald reported Sunday. Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift, 44, will retire in March or April under the military's "up or out" promotion system. Swift said last week he was notified he would not be promoted to commander. He said the notification came about two weeks after the Supreme Court sided with him and against the White House in the case involving Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a...

...Has Times editor gotten away with murder?Posted: September 22, 2006 1:00 a.m. Eastern If you blinked you would have missed it. I'm speaking of the news coverage about who really leaked Valerie Plame's identity as a non-covert CIA agent. The leaker, former Colin Powell aide Richard Armitage, was a vocal critic of the war in Iraq. Perhaps the media "overlooked" Armitage and his role in this scandal precisely because he shared their disdain for the war in Iraq. Did you happen to notice that Karl Rove, Dick Cheney and Scooter Libby didn't receive that same consideration – even though they...

Dear Friend, The topic of this email -- and the subject of a major speech I will deliver in Boston's Faneuil Hall tomorrow -- is national security. If you think I'm planning to alert people to Republican pre-election fear-mongering on this vitally important issue, you're only half right. Of course, we need to reject the Republicans' idea that a "debate" on national security involves them demanding another book of blank checks for policies that don't work. And, needless to say, we can't tolerate them smearing any Democrat who stands up to their miserable record of failure. I will be campaigning...

LONDON (Reuters) - Teams of international scientists have used observations from NASA's Swift satellite and other telescopes to witness the evolution of a cosmic blast into a stellar explosion or supernova. The blast is thought to be a milder type of gamma-ray burst (GRB) -- the most powerful type of explosion known to astronomers -- called an X-ray flash. It is known as GRB060218 after the February 18 date it began in the constellation of Aries about 440 million light years away. A light year is about 6 trillion miles, the distance light travels in a year. "This extends the...

By Walter Pincus pincusw@washpost.com Courage in journalism today takes all the obvious, traditional forms -- reporting from a war zone or from a totalitarian country where a reporter's life or safety are issues. In Washington, D.C., where I work, it's a far less dramatic form of courage if a journalist stands up to a government official or a politician who he or she has reason to believe is not telling the truth or living up to his or her responsibilities. But I believe a new kind of courage is needed in journalism in this age of instant news, instant analysis,...

A civil liberties group asked six governments Wednesday to block the release of confidential financial records to U.S. authorities as part of American anti-terrorist probes. London-based watchdog Privacy International said it filed complaints with authorities in Japan, Israel, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and Argentina, demanding a halt to the monitoring of millions of transactions as part of a CIA-U.S. Treasury program. The group filed similar complaints in 32 countries, mostly in Europe, last month. The U.S. Treasury has acknowledged that since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks it has tracked millions of financial transactions handled by the Belgium-based Society for...

Highlight - "What we had not spoken about publicly, however, is this particular source. And, unfortunately, this revelation is very damaging. Since being asked to oversee this program by then-Secretary Snow and then-Deputy Secretary Bodman almost two years ago, I have received the written output from this program as part of my daily intelligence briefing. For two years, I have been reviewing that output every morning. I cannot remember a day when that briefing did not include at least one terrorism lead from this program. Despite attempts at secrecy, terrorist facilitators have continued to use the international banking system to...

Why do they hate us? No, I'm not talking about Islamofascist terrorists. We know why they hate us: because we have freedom of speech and freedom of religion, because we refuse to treat women as second-class citizens, because we do not kill homosexuals, because we are a free society. No, the "they" I'm referring to are the editors of The New York Times. And do they hate us? Well, that may be stretching it. But at the least they have gotten into the habit of acting in reckless disregard of our safety. Last December, the Times ran a story revealing...

By a vote of 302 to 219, the European Parliament approved a resolution demanding that European banks and governments disclose what they knew about the U.S. program to monitor terrorists' financial transactions. The New York Times reports one French politician accused the U.S. of "rifling through our private bank accounts," and an Italian lawmaker compared the case to alleged CIA kidnappings of terror suspects, saying it has the same objective, "to extort information." The administration had tried to convince the Times not to unveil the secret program, arguing among other things, that it would hurt cooperation with the Europeans. But...

In an op-ed that appeared in the New York Times on July 1, 2006, Dean Baquet (L.A. Times editor) and Bill Keller (New York Times executive editor) said: "…We, and the people who work for us, are not neutral in the struggle against terrorism. ... "…The New York Times has held articles that, if published, might have jeopardized efforts to protect vulnerable stockpiles of nuclear material, and articles about highly sensitive counterterrorism initiatives that are still in operation." They say they are “not neutral” in the GWOT, after all, they too are in the enemy’s kill zone. They infer they...

According to Treasury and Justice Department officials familiar with the briefings their senior leadership undertook with editors and reporters from the New York Times and Los Angeles Times, the media outlets were told that their reports on the SWIFT financial tracking system presented risks for three ongoing terrorism financing investigations. Despite this information, both papers chose to move forward with their stories. "We didn't give them specifics, just general information about regions where the investigations were ongoing, terrorist organizations that we believed were being assisted. These were off the record meetings set up to dissuade them from reporting on SWIFT,...

One of these days, if you lose a son, a daughter, a cousin or a good friend in a terrorist attack, blame whoever perpetrated the deed first, but secondly blame The New York Times, whose irresponsibility may have enabled the killers to obtain necessary financing. This story on how the government tracks terrorist funding likewise hurts the paper while also hurting America as a whole by telling the enemy how he might be found out. Said Tony Snow, presidential press secretary, the Times and other papers that broke the story "ought to think long and hard about whether a public's...

Because the war on terror is fought in a peacetime atmosphere, treason can be presented as dissent, and you can get away with it. Case in point is the energetic pursuit, and publication, of U.S. intelligence gathering techniques, by the American media. The latest one was the reporting of how the U.S. has been analyzing international bank wire transfers. This apparently led to the capture of several prominent terrorists, especially in Southeast Asia. But to opponents of the war, this is an assault on civil liberties, attacks they consider more dangerous than potential terrorist violence. Earlier scoops revealed to terrorists...

This is a WorldNetDaily printer-friendly version of the article which follows. To view this item online, visit http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=50883 Monday, July 3, 2006 In defense of the New York Times Posted: July 3, 20061:00 a.m. Eastern By Vox Day © 2006 WorldNetDaily.com I am no fan of the New York Times. It is a pompous, outdated media organization that combines a dedication to poisonous ideology with a predilection for mediocre art and faux eurostylism. Its reporters are columnists who write opinion columns that pass for news stories, while its columnists are talentless divas whose ignorance of politics and economics is only exceeded...

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) HOWARD KURTZ, HOST (voice-over): Targeting the "Times." George Bush, Dick Cheney and an army of conservative critics rip the "New York Times" for disclosing a secret program for monitoring the banking records of terror suspects. Did editor Bill Keller go too far, or is the White House just bashing the media for political gain? And why have the "Los Angeles Times" and "Wall Street Journal" have been given a pass for publishing similar stories? The co-author of the "New York Times" story, Eric Lichtblau, joins our discussion. Bloggers go mainstream. Hillary Clinton is the latest Democrat to hire...

The top editor of the New York Times remains unrepentant about publishing stories exposing national security intelligence programs, saying he would do it again. "I think it's useful for us to discuss, to know about how our government is waging this war to protect us," said Bill Keller, executive editor of the Times, on CBS' "Face the Nation" program. "This was a case where clearly the terrorists or the people who finance terrorism know quite well, because the Treasury Department and the White House have talked openly about it, that they monitor international banking transactions. It's not news to the...

The top editor of the New York Times said if he had it to do again, he would still publish his newspaper's controversial expose of a secret program monitoring global bank transfers, despite outrage from the Republican White House and members of Congress. Speaking on CBS television's "Face The Nation" program Sunday, Times executive editor Bill Keller said he did not regret his decision to run the story, which was condemned on Thursday in a vote by the Republican-led House of Representatives in a non-binding resolution. "I think it's useful for us to discuss, to know about how our government...

The battle of Midway Island was the turning point of the Pacific War. Victory at Midway was possible because the U.S. had broken the Japanese naval code. The Chicago Tribune spilled the beans in a story that ran under the headline: "NAVY HAD WORD OF JAP PLAN TO STRIKE AT SEA." President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was furious. He knew that if the Japanese read the story, they'd suspect their codes were compromised, and change them. The president "initially was disposed to send in the Marines to shut down Tribune tower," wrote Harry Evans. "He was talked out of that, then...

You could call it “Treason Central,” or “al Qaeda West,” but no matter what you call it, the building housing the once-august New York Times at 229 West 43rd St. in New York City is a beehive of anti-American hostility, where selling out the nation’s secrets has become the newspaper’s stock in trade. This latest episode of the Times revealing information vital to the government’s ability to protect the American people from new 9/11s is just another example of the Times’ contempt for the security of the people of the United States of America in a time of war. To...

You could call it "Treason Central," or "al-Qaida West," but no matter what you call it, the building housing the once-august New York Times at 229 West 43rd Street in New York City is a beehive of anti-American hostility, where selling out the nation's secrets has become the newspaper's stock in trade. This latest episode of the Times revealing information vital to the government's ability to protect the American people from new 9/11s is just another example of the Times' contempt for the security of the people of the United States of America in a time of war. To say...