Free Republic

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis urged President Trump to get congressional approval before the United States launched airstrikes against Syria last week, but was overruled by Mr. Trump, who wanted a rapid and dramatic response, military and administration officials said. Mr. Trump, the officials said, wanted to be seen as backing up a series of bellicose tweets with action, but was warned that an overly aggressive response risked igniting a wider war with Russia. Friday night’s limited strikes on three targets, which lasted under two minutes, were the compromise.

Annoyed with the U.S. missile strike last week on an airfield in Syria, among other things, hacker group Shadow Brokers resurfaced on Saturday and released what they said was the password to files containing suspected National Security Agency tools they had earlier tried to sell.“Is appearing you are abandoning ‘your base’, ‘the movement’, and the peoples who getting you elected,” the group wrote in broken English in a letter to U.S. President Donald Trump posted online on Saturday.The hacker group, believed by some security experts to have Russian links, released in January an arsenal of tools that appeared designed to...

Lefty journalist Jeremy Scahill found a graphic way to describe the MSM's support for the cruise missile attack that President Trump ordered this past week. Appearing on CNN's Reliable Sources today, The Intercept's Scahill said, "Fareed Zakaria: if that guy could have sex with this cruise missile attack, I think he would do it." Along similar lines, Scahill said that MSNBC's Brian Williams seemed to be "in true love with the cruise missile strike." View the video here.

The Pentagon released a map Thursday that reportedly shows the flight pattern of a Syrian aircraft that dropped chemical weapons on civilians Tuesday. The map was released hours after President Donald Trump ordered the U.S. military to fire 59 Tomahawk missiles at a northern Syrian airbase, in retaliation for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s attack.