Free Republic

Submitted by Michael Snyder via The End of The American Dream blog, Have you ever come across someone on the Internet that you suspected was a paid government troll? Well, there is a very good chance that you were not imagining things. Thanks to Edward Snowden, we now have solid proof that paid government trolls are using “psychology-based influence techniques” on social media websites such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. Documents leaked by Snowden also reveal that government agents have been conducting denial-of-service attacks, flooding social media websites with thinly veiled propaganda and have been purposely attempting to warp public...

WASHINGTON (AP) — A Senate report on the CIA's interrogation and detention practices after the 9/11 attacks concludes that the agency initially kept the secretary of state and some U.S. ambassadors in the dark about harsh techniques and secret prisons, according to a document circulating among White House staff. The still-classified report also says some ambassadors who were informed about interrogations of al-Qaida detainees at so-called black sites in their countries were instructed not to tell their superiors at the State Department, the document says. The 6,300-page Senate report on the CIA's interrogation program has been years in the making....

While the world may have become habituated to (and perhaps revels in, thank you social media exhibitionist culture) the fact that the NSA is watching anyone and everyone, intercepting, recording, and hacking every electronic exchange regardless if it involves foreign "terrorists" or US housewives, the discoveries from the Snowden whistleblowing campaign continue. The latest revelation from the biggest wholesale spying scandal since Nixon, exposed by Germany's Spiegel which continues the strategy of revealing Snowden leaks on a staggered, delayed basis, involves a back door access-focused NSA division called ANT, (which supposedly stands for Access Network Technology), described by Spiegel as...

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Thursday defended tough interrogation techniques for terrorism suspects approved by the Bush administration in the wake of 9/11, saying they were necessary to protect America from new attacks. In her most extensive public comments about how the administration dealt with detainee interrogations in the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, and the anthrax attacks that followed, Rice insisted the methods of questioning complied with both U.S. law and treaty obligations. But she acknowledged that those rules had since changed and that the United States was a "different place" then, adding that the administration's top priority...

BAGRAM AIRFIELD, Afghanistan, Feb. 23, 2007 — Five years ago, Sadrai, an Afghan from Paktika Province, fell off a donkey and broke his arm. After a failed surgery in Pakistan two years later, he waited another three before coming to Bagram so that American doctors would look at it. But it’s not just American doctors who gave him the use of his arm back, Feb. 21. Dr. Said Wali and Dr. Abdul Khaliq, surgeons from Qalat in Zabul Province, are working side by side with the doctors of Task Force Med while they learn new surgical and management techniques. The...

DJIBOUTI CITY, Djibouti (NNS) -- The boarding team of USCGC Midgett (WHEC 726) began two days of law enforcement training and professional exchanges with the Djibouti navy Jan. 13. The boarding team said they had a lot in common with their Djiboutian counterparts. "I was excited to find another law enforcement organization that showed as much enthusiasm about getting boots on deck as we do,” said Petty Officer 1st Class Scott Kirker, a gunner’s mate aboard Midgett. The teams split off into smaller groups to demonstrate handcuffing and safe weapons handling techniques with the Djiboutians on the pier, using orange...

BAGHDAD, Feb. 10, 2006 – NATO soldiers assigned to the Iraqi Military Academy of Rustamiyah here trained with the U.S. 801st Brigade Support Battalion, 506th Regimental Combat Team, this week on Eagle First Responder lifesaving techniques. Soldiers and officers from Great Britain, Romania, Hungary and Poland participated in the life-saving courses during the "train-the-trainer" classes. After completing the course, they will be able to, in turn, train and certify their soldiers in Eagle First Responder skills. During the training, the soldiers learned advanced lifesaving techniques, ranging from applying a tourniquet to providing intravenous therapy and shock treatment, as well as...

Lake Placid, N.Y. (Oct. 12, 2005) -- “Left, right, left, right… Double Time!” And just like that, the pristine peace and quiet of the Lake Placid was broken recently by the cadence of a Marine as the young New York Apple Core’s Future Stars Junior “C” minor team hustled down the town’s main road for Boot Camp Hockey. Maj. Dave Andersen, an active-duty Marine, part time junior hockey league coach, and founder of the week-long hockey intensive known as Boot Camp Hockey, said he drew his inspiration for the program from his years as a Basic School instructor at Marine...

Once more we have been granted a look into the dark abyss of Left-wing character. It is an abyss of inarticulate invective, obscenity, and hatred. It is a vacuum of immense proportion completely devoid of morality, logic, or intellect, fed by the paranoid delusions generated by marijuana befogged brains filled with the misinformation fed to them by their Leftist programmers; parrots spouting the latest hateful mantras. For a look into this frightening world of irrationality, you need only visit my previous post titled, Cindy Sheehan: Are Those Crocodile Tears? , and read the comments left by them. I hope you...

Complaints about the U.S. military's treatment of terrorists at Guantanamo Bay were once again featured on all three broadcast network evening newscasts Wednesday. Full stories on ABC, CBS and NBC cast the military on the defensive at congressional hearings. CBS Evening News anchor Bob Schieffer — who has likened Guantanamo to the "Hanoi Hilton," the infamous North Vietnamese prison camp — grumped that "Congress asked a lot of questions today" about Guantanamo, but "the problem is, they didn't get many answers." ABC followed up its story on yesterday's hearings with a second full report by ABC's Terry Moran, who zeroed...

MANILA, Philippines -- My Fox News producers and I have just returned from documenting an atrocity. While we were at the scene of the crime interviewing eyewitnesses, a copy of this week's Time magazine was placed in my hotel room. Our day was devoted to detailing the horrific treatment meted out to more than 75,000 Allied prisoners of war in the Philippines between 1942 and 1945. The day ended with an American "news" magazine's "sometimes shocking" classified account of how captured terrorists are treated at Guantanamo. A day that began with the Bataan Death March ended with a death wish....

Newsweek magazine and reporter-writers, Mark Isikoff and John Barry forgot the most important and one of the oldest clichés in the business, “You can’t unring a bell.” They also forgot one of the most memorable slogans in WW II, “Loose Lips Sink Ships.” As a result, over 15 people are dead in Afghanistan and many hurt. Riots continue in Muslim countries. All this is due to that fact that Newsweek reported that U.S. investigators found evidence that interrogators had flushed a copy of Muslim's holy book down a toilet in an attempt to rattle detainees. Just the thought that it...

FOR OUR FRIENDS THE EARTHQUAKE AREAS... "My name is Doug Copp. I am the Rescue Chief and Disaster Manager of The American Rescue Team International (ARTI), the world's most experienced rescue team. The information in this article will save lives in an earthquake. I have crawled inside 875 collapsed buildings, worked with rescue teams from 60 countries, founded rescue teams in several countries, and I am a member of many rescue teams from many countries. I was the United Nations expert in Disaster Mitigation (UNX051 -UNIENET) for two years. I have worked at every major disaster in the world since...

The newly appointed CIA Director Porter Goss, believes that terrorists may bring urban warfare techniques learned in Iraq to our homeland. If he is right, we could have a whole new war on our hands. The prospect is indeed scary. The idea of terrorist cells operating clandestinely in the United States, quietly amassing handguns and assault rifles, and planning suicide shooting rampages in our malls, is right out of Tom Clancy’s most recent novel. If not for the fact that the 9/11 attacks were also foreshadowed in a Clancy novel, I would have given the idea no further thought. However,...

What Real Torture Is While questioning Attorney General nominee Alberto Gonzales, Republican-of-the-Year Arlen Specter (PA) asked the hard-hitting question: “Do you approve of torture?” It almost reminded me of the time Specter asked Bill Clinton during his impeachment if he believed in sexually harassing women at the workplace. Oh wait, that didn’t happen. Specter and his friends (Democrats) were quite upset at Gonzales’s involvement in presidential initiatives allowing aggressive “tools of persuasion” against Al-Qaida terrorists. They feared another reign of terror, as seen under John Ashcroft, whereby murdering lunatics weren’t given five-star hotel accommodations, massages, and discounted tennis lessons. And...

The assassination of the controversial Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh has provoked some uncomfortable debates in Europe. The killer was not dispatched on his mission by sinister al-Qaeda masterminds scheming somewhere from their hideout in Asia. On the contrary, the assassin epitomizes the new European jihadists: a very loosely connected network with little or no organizational links to Osama bin Laden. The International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) noted in its 2004 annual report that support and recruitment for Islamist terrorism is increasing worldwide. Any illusions that Europe would be spared a mega-terror attack were shattered with the coordinated attacks...