Free Republic

The sordid tale now making the rounds in the "mainstream" press of a rogue Pentagon intelligence operation has all the elements of an urban legend: heavy breathing, a secret basement office "down by the ramp" and government officials who form a hidden alliance based on long-ago ties to an obscure but influential university guru. Only the work of a few good men with the courage to face up to this "cabal" - and a few crusader-journalists to help them - can make the demons scatter and scare the dark ones into the light. Or so the story goes on those...

i've been blocked from posting elsewhere.

What Pakistan Knew About the Bin Laden Raid Husain Haqqani With a litany of unproved claims, veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has revived discussion about the circumstances in which al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was discovered and killed in May 2011 in the Pakistani garrison city of Abbottabad. Some of Hersh’s assertions in a 10,000-word London Review of Books article border on fantasy. He claims that bin Laden lived under the protection of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), was given up for reward money by one of the agency’s officers, and was eventually eliminated in a U.S. raid covertly backed...

As soon as legendary journalist Sy Hersh's controversial story on the Osama bin Laden raid was published Sunday night, critics pounced and skeptics ripped his account because of its reliance on anonymous sourcing and its lack of documentary evidence. Now a respected New York Times foreign correspondent, who was based in Afghanistan and Pakistan, writes about a key detail "in Seymour Hersh's Bin Laden story that rings true." Carlotta Gall writes that she also learned from sources that Pakistan's intelligence service, ISI, had kept bin Laden prisoner since 2006 and that the CIA learned about his location from a Pakistani...

R.J. Hillhouse, a former professor, Fulbright fellow and novelist whose writing on intelligence and military outsourcing has appeared in the Washington Post and New York Times, made the same main assertions in 2011 about the death of Osama bin Laden as Seymour Hersh’s new story in the London Review of Books — apparently based on different sources than those used by Hersh. Bin Laden was killed by Navy SEALs on May 2, 2011. Three months later, on August 7, Hillhouse posted a story on her blog “The Spy Who Billed Me” stating that (1) the U.S. did not learn about...

If there were any doubt as to the degree to which the MSM loathes and distrusts President Bush, it should be dispelled by the performance of Sy Hersh on today's Hardball and the way he was applauded by Chris Matthews. At the end of Hersh's appearance, Matthews put this question to the investigative reporter: "What's your biggest worry in the world? Is it Iran? Is it this administration going to war with Iran? Is it a civil war in Iraq? Is it Musharraf's inability to fight the Taliban on his own soil? What's your biggest worry?" Hersh was nothing if...

Hersh, a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist and regular contributor to The New Yorker magazine, has been a thorn in the side of the U.S. government for nearly 40 years. Since his 1969 exposé of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, which is widely believed to have helped turn American public opinion against the Vietnam War, he has broken news about the secret U.S. bombing of Cambodia, covert C.I.A. attempts to overthrow Chilean president Salvador Allende, and, more recently, the first details about American soldiers abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. During his hour-and-a-half lecture – part of the launch...

This guy needs to provide proof or STFU. I am sick of his insane garbage!

US Ambassador to the UN John Bolton testified before the House subcommittee on international relations today and got in a little argument with Rep. Dennis Kucinich. Rep. Kucinich asked John Bolton about Sy Hersh's "New Yorker" article on Iran, to which Bolton said he didn't read it because he doesn't have time to read "fiction": KUCINICH: Have you ever heard of that report? BOLTON: I'd never heard of the report, I never read the article, nor do I intend to. KUCINICH: Do you have any interest as to whether or not -- as the U.S. Ambassador, you don’t have any...

by Mark Finkelstein November 29, 2005 - 08:00. Give me a moment, please. Got to let my head stop spinning. Been watching the Today show. See, I thought we all agreed it was bad for presidents to be poll-driven, in the image of a Bill Clinton deciding everything from foreign policy to vacation destinations based on the latest shift in public opinion. Turns out I was wrong, at least according to this morning's Today. Matt Lauer interviewed New Yorker reporter Seymour Hersh, or "Sy" as Lauer chummily called him, regarding Hersh's piece in the magazine's current edition. As Lauer described...

Since midsummer, the Senate Intelligence Committee has been attempting to solve the biggest mystery of the Iraq war: the disparity between the Bush Administration’s prewar assessment of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and what has actually been discovered. The committee is concentrating on the last ten years’ worth of reports by the C.I.A. Preliminary findings, one intelligence official told me, are disquieting. “The intelligence community made all kinds of errors and handled things sloppily,” he said. The problems range from a lack of quality control to different agencies’ reporting contradictory assessments at the same time. One finding, the official went...

Of the people who were outraged at the very idea that Valerie Plame’s identify as a CIA agent was exposed, is there one – just one – who is also outraged by Sy Hersh and the New Yorker publishing a report about what active CIA agents may be doing right now in Iran? Just one? Of course there is this difference: Ms. Plame, at the time her identify was published, was living in Georgetown and commuting to Langley. By contrast, the CIA agents in Iran are in somewhat less hospitable environs. Tony Blankley has a good column today -- “Espionage...

Last Thursday, Pres. Bush publicly apologized to Jordan's King Abdullah II for the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. I wasn't aware that Abdullah was the king of Iraq. Apparently, when America screws up, our leader must apologize to any and every Moslem in the world. I must have missed King Abdullah II's apology for the butchering of four American civilians in Fallujah. King Abdullah is a "moderate, pro-U.S." Arab, which means that his statements on behalf of genocidal terrorists are couched in restrained tones, and with an Oxbridge accent. And while being abused by Congress during his testimony...

WHO LIED TO WHOM? by SEYMOUR M. HERSH Why did the Administration endorse a forgery about Iraq's nuclear program?Issue of 2003-03-31Posted 2003-03-24 Last September 24th, as Congress prepared to vote on the resolution authorizing President George W. Bush to wage war in Iraq, a group of senior intelligence officials, including George Tenet, the Director of Central Intelligence, briefed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Iraq's weapons capability. It was an important presentation for the Bush Administration. Some Democrats were publicly questioning the President's claim that Iraq still possessed weapons of mass destruction which posed an immediate threat to the...

SENIOR US war planners have accused Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld of "micromanaging" operations in Iraq and ignoring recommendations from military officials, The New Yorker magazine has reported. "He thought he knew better. He was the decision-maker at every turn," one senior planner told the magazine, in its edition to be released on Monday. Planners with the Joint Chiefs of Staff had recommended deploying four or more Army divisions, which Rumsfeld rejected, the report said. Their plan also called for shipping by sea hundreds of tanks and other heavy vehicles - enough for three or four divisions - in advance, but...