Free Republic

In a speech not long before she launched her 2016 presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton made a stunning declaration of war on religious Americans. Speaking to the 2015 Women in the World Summit, Clinton declared that “deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed.” Religious beliefs have to be changed? This is perhaps the most radical statement against religious liberty ever uttered by someone seeking the presidency. It is also deeply revealing. Clinton believes that, as president, it is her job not to respect the views of religious conservatives but to force them to change their beliefs...

<p>After Trayvon Martin was killed, President Obama spoke emotionally about his death, declaring “this could have been my son.”</p> <p>After Michael Brown was killed, Obama promised to ensure that “justice is done” and declared: “We lost a young man, Michael Brown, in heartbreaking and tragic circumstances. He was 18 years old. His family will never hold Michael in their arms again.” He even sent administration officials to attend Brown’s funeral.</p>

Obamacare is imploding. But thanks to the government shutdown, everyone is talking about the implosion of the GOP instead. The shutdown drama has distracted from the fact that Obamacare’s debut is worse than many realize — and it threatens the fundamental viability of the law itself. The administration claims the Obamacare online exchanges crashed because the Web site got more than 8 million hits in the first week. Please. You know how many people visit Amazon.com every week? More than 70 million. The difference is: 1.) Amazon seldom crashes, and 2.) on Amazon, people actually buy something.

The Politico headline reporting on the Obama administration’s reaction to my column yesterday exposing the fact that President Obama has skipped more than half of his daily intelligence meetings since taking office reads “White House disputes report on intel briefs.” For its part, CNN reports that “The president's spokesman disputed a Washington Post item that suggested the commander-in-chief has not attended the Presidential Daily Brief (PDB)  "more than half the time."  No, he didn’t.  In fact, no one in the Obama administration has “disputed” my report on the president’s record on attending his daily intelligence meeting.  No administration official has...

To be sure, waterboarding can be torture, depending on how it is carried out. “You can do waterboarding lots of different ways, “says former Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell, “you can get to the point that the person is actually drowning,” That would be torture- but that is not how the technique is carried out by the CIA. -Pg 131, Courting Disaster John McCain is intimately familiar with torture, having endured it at the hands of his Vietnamese captors during his years as a POW. But he was never waterboarded. Not by the Spanish Inquisition. Not by the...

Terror expert and author Marc Thiessen told Bill O’Reilly tonight that Obama eliminated the enhanced interrogation tool from our counter-terrorism arsenal his second day in office. So the tool that got us the information that led us to Osama Bin Laden is no longer in use. The US has not cpatured and detained and tinterrogated a single high level detainee since Barack Obama moved into office.

With midterm elections less than four months away, Republicans are fired up and ready to go. But they are not the only ones upset with Barack Obama. The president has also angered many of the key Democratic constituencies he needs to keep control of the House and Senate, and now Democrats are blowing furiously on the fading embers of their electoral coalition, hoping to stave off disaster this November. Unions are incensed with Obama and congressional Democrats for their failure to deliver on key priorities such as card-check legislation. Another disenchanted constituency is Hispanics. Latino support for Obama has dropped...

Would most Americans want to know if the Justice Department had hired a bunch of mob lawyers and put them in charge of mob cases? Or a group of drug cartel lawyers and put them in charge of drug cases? Would they want their elected representatives to find out who these lawyers were, which mob bosses and drug lords they had worked for, and what roles they were now playing at the Justice Department? Of course they would -- and rightly so. Yet Attorney General Eric Holder hired former al-Qaeda lawyers to serve in the Justice Department and resisted providing...

Much better, substantive debate than Thiessen's previous appearance where Lawrence O'Donnell frothed and foamed at the mouth and had to be tranquilized and put back in his kennel. Even good questions from the MSNBC Morning Joe hosts (all points addressed in Thiessen's book, Courting Disaster). Thiessen comes very well armed for debate. Ali Soufan wouldn't come on to defend and debate (Ali Soufan is the FBI agent- not evil, just wrong and a hero in my book- who has been lionized by the left for his opposition to the CIA interrogation program) so he is represented by Daniel Freedman, the...

...Much of the power of waterboarding and the other approved enhanced interrogation techniques was psychological. Such as the belief that drowning was taking place, as was the case of waterboarding; or that one was getting shoved hard ("walling") by hitting a flexible, false wall that made a loud sound to give the illusion that what was happening was worse than it actually was. As Thiessen puts it in an interview he did on the Dennis Prager Show, "Most of the techniques are psychological tricks, for the most part. They didn't depend upon physical pain to get the people to cooperate."...

And Marc Thiessen holds his own in enemy territory.

CNN spiked a hot story on Sunday. But if their plan was to keep a lid on a heated and unflattering Christiane Amanpour interview, it didn’t quite work out. Christiane Amanpour interviewed author Marc Thiessen about his hot new book, Courting Disaster: How the CIA Kept America Safe and How Barack Obama Is Inviting the Next Attack last Wednesday, January 20. But Thiessen turned the tables on Amanpour and instead confronted her about her biased reporting. The show broadcast to CNN’s international audience, as planned. The piece was then to air in the large U.S. market Sunday. However, it appears...

<p>Share a NiteCap and an interview LIVE with HonestConservative, fellow freepers on this live thread and Marc Thiessen, aurthor of the earthshaking new book "Courting Disaster: How the CIA Kept America Safe and How Barack Obama Is Inviting the Next Attack" . Candidate for the Republican Nomination for Lt. Gov. of PA Bob Guzzardi returns for a discussion on the Republican Party machine and candidates who respect our constitution. We have the further honor having Mr. Herman Cain of WSB radio 7 pm to 10 pm as our guest as he lets us in on his most important project at present, "The State of the Union; The Voice of the People", a project that requires YOUR participation! Tuesday evening 8 pm est, a live event on the web! See links below!</p>

In mid-2004, then-House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi learned something from a CIA briefing that made her blood boil. Pelosi reportedly "came unglued" at the revelation and had "strong words" with national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, demanding that the CIA abandon its plans. As a result, a top-secret finding that President George W. Bush signed to authorize the CIA's activities was revised. Pelosi succeeded in stopping the agency from moving forward with the controversial operation. What drove Pelosi to action? Not the CIA's waterboarding of suspected al-Qaeda terrorists. In a 2009 interview, a former senior Bush administration official directed me to...

"CIA Man Retracts Claim on Waterboarding" Yup, thats the headline the lefties are jumping all over today from Foreign Policy. The article purports: Well, it's official now: John Kiriakou, the former CIA operative who affirmed claims that waterboarding quickly unloosed the tongues of hard-core terrorists, says he didn't know what he was talking about. Of course there is more than meets the eye on this story. The fact of the matter is that Kiriakou says he "didn't know what he was talking about" because he wasn't in the room when the waterboarding took place. The whole piece uses over 900...

Today is the official publication date of ,a href="http://www.amazon.com/Courting-Disaster-America-Barack-Inviting/dp/1596986034/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1263816533&sr=8-1&tag=powlin-20">(ourting Disaster: How the CIA Kept America Safe and How Barack Obama is Inviting the Next Attack) by Marc Thiessen. Thiessen has unusual credentials to address the subject of his book. As White House speechwriter for George Bush, Thiessen was locked in a secure room and given access to the most sensitive intelligence when he was assigned the task of writing (Bush's September 2006 speech) explaining the CIA's interrogation program and why Congress should authorize it. Few public figures in a position to address the subject publicly know more about these CIA...