Free Republic

I recently found some interesting articles about anthrax, the domestic theory, and Hatfill that gave me some new ideas to consider. Foremostly, I found that the first comments espousing the domestic theory often arose in the context of a war on Iraq, or finishing the war, depending on how you look at it. For years the government tried to build the consensus to getting rid of Saddam. Before and immediately after 9/11 Bush made it clear he wanted to complete the job. Interestingly the first voice after 9/11 against finishing off Iraq and dissuading consideration that the anthrax was Iraqi...

A Soviet spacecraft launched in 1972 on a failed mission to Venus is believed to have crashed back onto Earth early on Saturday morning. The European Space Agency, which was monitoring the craft's uncontrolled descent, said it was last spotted by radar over Germany. At at the time of its expected crash, radars could no longer detect the Kosmos 482, concluding that “it is most likely that the reentry has already occurred.”

Russia and China warned on Wednesday that Donald Trump’s proposed “Golden Iron Dome for America” missile defense system would destabilize global security and turn outer space into a new arena for armed confrontation. “The recently announced large-scale ‘Golden (Iron) Dome for America’ program is deeply destabilizing,” the two sides said in a joint statement during a visit by Chinese President Xi Jinping to Moscow. The U.S. plan “explicitly provides for a significant strengthening of the arsenal for conducting combat operations in space,” it added. -snip- Moscow and Beijing claimed nuclear states must “reject Cold War mentality” and avoid seeking military...

During the 1970s and 1980s, the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), then based in the United Methodist Building on Capitol Hill, vigorously lobbied for Nicaragua's Sandinista regime, the Cuban-style Marxist regime that shot its way to power in 1979. Today, WOLA pretends it is concerned about the rule of law in Honduras after the Honduran Congress and Supreme Court supported removing the leftist president for defying its constitution. WOLA and Jim Wallis' publication Sojourners have teamed up to spin Honduras' defense of its democracy as another example of a U.S.-supported, imperialist military coup. The constitutional coup in Honduras was...

Russian Security Council Deputy Chair Dmitry Medvedev, a former Russian president, referred to Ukraine as "a disappearing country" in a post on Telegram. "But Trump has finally broken the Kiev regime into paying for American aid with minerals. Now they will have to pay for military supplies with the national wealth of a disappearing country," Medvedev said, according to a Google translation of part of his post. The Russian official also noted President Donald Trump's ratings have declined. "And the US Senate, led by Republicans, is preparing to introduce more ‘crushing sanctions’ against us. Let's see how the new administration...

In 1972 the Soviet union launched two spacecraft to explore the planet Venus, Venera 8 would become the second spacecraft to land on Venus, while the other spacecraft got stuck in Earth orbit and so was designated Kosmos 482. Now, 50 years later we expect the spacecraft to finally fall back to Earth, and unlike most spacecraft this one is designed to survive atmospheric entry. So it could land as a solid mass and maybe there's hardware that will survive, or more likely it will land in the ocean and sink.... 50 Year Old Venus Spacecraft Is About To Land...

From Kaliningrad to Vladivostok, Russian schoolchildren are preparing for the most important holiday of the year: Victory Day. Commemorated with a grand military parade on Moscow’s Red Square every May 9, the Soviet Union’s defeat of Nazi Germany has long been used by authorities to rally support for the state. And it starts in school. In September 2016, three history textbooks were sanctioned by the Ministry of Education, all of which gloss over Stalin’s crimes and his initial alliance with Nazi Germany. “My main issue with the textbooks is that they do not reveal the whole truth,” says historian and...

Stalin, a cynical and clever leader, didn’t experience any epiphany but simply knew that taking it easy on the Orthodox Church was important for winning the war. First, many Soviet citizens remained secretly religious (which was not directly forbidden), so the “legalization” of Orthodoxy helped to keep the nation at war united – quite a crucial thing. Second, the Allies were pushing Stalin towards loosening his grip on the religious: the oppression of the faithful was bad publicity, internationally speaking. Third, in 1943 the Red Army was regaining the Soviet lands previously occupied by Germans. The occupants, trying to gain...

John Kerry’s Fellow TravellersA 5-part series exposing John Kerry’s Communist connections.Part 3: Hanoi John: Kerry and the Antiwar Movement’s Communist ConnectionsBy Fedora *NOTE: The term “fellow traveller” as used in this article series refers to someone who is not a member of the Communist Party (CP) but regularly engages in actions which advance the Party’s program. Some apparent fellow travellers may actually be “concealed party members”: members of the CP who conceal their membership. Which of these classifications is applicable to the Kerrys is a question this series leaves unresolved. This series does not argue for any direct evidence of...

A bone-chilling document declassified by the CIA has exposed an alleged massacre by aliens from a crashed UFO who turned an entire military unit into stone. According to the report, Soviet troops shot down a flying saucer hovering over the Soviet military unit in Siberia roughly 35 years ago, and what happened next was truly terrifying. In the document, summarizing a 250-page top secret file acquired by US intelligence agents, eyewitnesses said five aliens climbed out of their wrecked craft, combined themselves into one creature, exploded in a burst of intense energy, and turned 23 soldiers into solid rock. One...

Leon Panetta While a Southern California based congressman in the 1970s and ’80s, CIA director and Obama Secretary of Defense nominee Leon Panetta, was close to a pro-communist, Santa Cruz based “peace activist” named Lucy Haessler. In spite (or perhaps because of) Haessler’s involvement with the Women’s International Democratic Federation, Panetta placed a tribute in the Congressional Record, April 11, 1984, to mark Haessler’s 80th birthday. Panetta noted that Lucy Haessler attended several conferences of the East German based organization in France, the Soviet Union, Poland and East Germany. He did neglect to mention however that the W.I.D.F. was...

Brainchild of the KGB As Ion Mihai Pacepa, onetime director of the Romanian espionage service (DIE), later explained, the PLO was conceived at a time when the KGB was creating “liberation front” organizations throughout the Third world. Others included the National Liberation Army of Bolivia, created in 1964 with help from Ernesto “Che” Guevara, and the National Liberation Army of Colombia, created in 1965 with help from Fidel Castro. But the PLO was the KGB’s most enduring achievement. In 1964, the first PLO Council, consisting of 422 Palestinian representatives handpicked by the KGB, approved the Soviet blueprint for a Palestinian...

On Feb. 25, a flurry of accurate Russian drone strikes knocked out dozens of Ukrainian vehicles along the main road to Sudzha, the town that is—or was—the main base for the 10,000-strong Ukrainian force occupying a significant, but quickly shrinking, salient in Kursk Oblast in western Russia. That was “the day you started worrying about Kursk,” wrote independent analyst Andrew Perpetua. Two weeks later, it seems the bulk of the Ukrainian force—Ukrainian army’s heaviest brigades—has evacuated Kursk and repositioned on the Ukrainian side of the border. “My friends managed to leave Kursk, avoiding encirclement,” one Ukrainian source claimed Monday. “It’s...

  BOOKS CITED Central Asia's New States: Independence, Foreign Policy, and Regional Security by Martha Brill Olcott (U.S. Institute of Peace Press, 202 pp., $19.95) Highlanders: A Journey to the Caucasus in Quest of Memory by Yo'av Karny (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 436 pp., $15) The Moldovans: Romania, Russia, and the Politics of Culture by Charles King (Hoover Institution Press, 303 pp., $39.95) Ukraine: The Search for a National Identity edited by Sharon L. Wolchik and Volodymyr Zviglyanich (Rowman & Littlefield, 310 pp., $35) Return to the Western World: Cultural and Political Perspectives on the Estonian PostCommunist Transition edited...

The loss of the Skipjack-class nuclear attack submarine USS Scorpion (SSN-589) remains to many an unresolved mystery more than 56 years after it sank, with all hands, on 22 May 1968. But a closer look at the event suggests a different description: that it is one of the more closely guarded secrets of the Cold War.This is a focused review of the critical 18-day period immediately following the sinking, and eight key events that occurred during that span. It includes the sinking itself; the Scorpion’s failure to reach Norfolk as scheduled on Monday 27 May; the formal declaration of “Event...

As Russian tanks rumble through Georgia, and Western pundits talk of the "new Cold War," one trope keeps reappearing in their discourse. Russia's newly aggressive stance, we are told, is partly our fault: After the fall of Communism, the West went out of its way to humiliate and trample Russia instead of treating it as a partner--and now, an oil-powered Russia is striking back. "Russia's litany of indignities dates to the early 1990s when the Soviet empire collapsed," Samantha Power, a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and former Barack Obama adviser, wrote in Time. "A bipolar universe gave...

MI6 has pulled its spies out of 'hostile countries' and America's intelligence agencies are on high alert after Russia and China cracked encrypted files leaked by fugitive whistleblower Edward Snowden. The top-secret documents contain information that could lead to the identification of British and American spies, according to senior officials in Downing Street, the Home Office and the security services. A senior Home Office official accused Snowden - the former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor responsible for the biggest confidential information leak in US history - of having 'blood on his hands' after they gained access to over one million...

After years of Russiagate conspiracy theories about how the Russians had somehow rigged the 2016 presidential election using Facebook ads, the Senate Intelligence report awkwardly revealed that the Russian operation had focused most of its attention on black nationalists. The Senate report revealed that "most of the videos" put out by the Russian IRA troll factory on YouTube "pertained to police brutality and the activist efforts of the Black Lives Matter organization" and found that "no single group of Americans was targeted... more than African-Americans" around "race and related issues". But that was an understatement. The Russians had created their...

“Lawmakers in the House passed a bill this week aimed at reforming policing in this country. It's called the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act…this bill would ban chokeholds and make it easier to pursue misconduct claims against officers, among other reforms. The lead author is Congresswoman Karen Bass from California,” reported NPR on March 5.Well, Rep. Karen Bass certainly qualifies as an expert on “police misconduct,” considering that for decades she’s been providing aid and comfort to a police state that jailed and tortured political prisoners at a higher rate than Stalin’s during the Great Terror and murdered more...

Azeri president says apology isn’t enough, in confrontation that shows Moscow’s waning influence over former Soviet territories. Azerbaijan’s president accused Russia of trying to cover up its role in a plane crash that killed 38 people, delivering a harsh condemnation that signaled a reversal of the power dynamics that long saw Moscow hold sway over its former Soviet republics. President Ilham Aliyev said Sunday that Azerbaijan had laid out for the Kremlin the necessary conditions to satisfy the country, demanding that Russia take responsibility for causing the crash, provide compensation for the country and victims’ families, and bring those guilty...