Free Republic

We frequently report to you various underhanded tactics and sneaky tricks pulled by various bishops and clergy to stamp out any resistance of faithful Catholics to oppose their liberalization of the Church. Most of the time, we can't be very specific because if we were specific, various clergy or even laity would suffer repercussions for telling us details. However, we now have a case that we can be very specific about because the case was fumbled by Church officials, and Church Militant became aware of the details as part of the record. It involves dirty tricks by Bp. Kevin Vann and his cohorts...

Triumph Forsaken The Vietnam War, 1954-1965 by Mark Moyar Cambridge, 542 pp., $32 In the late summer of 1963, President John Kennedy dispatched two observers to South Vietnam. Their mission was to provide the president an assessment of the regime of Ngo Dinh Diem, the president of the Republic of Vietnam. The first, Major General Victor Krulak, USMC, the special assistant for counterinsurgency for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, visited some ten locations in all four Corps areas of Vietnam. Based on extensive interviews with U.S. advisers to the South Vietnamese army, Krulak concluded that the war was going well....

A veteran Bexar County sheriff's deputy was fatally shot during an apparent ambush while waiting at a traffic light in his marked patrol vehicle early Saturday, according to the San Antonio Express. Forty-five-year-old Sgt. Kenneth Vann was waiting at an intersection just after 2 a.m. Saturday when a small white vehicle pulled up next to him on the right side and started shooting through the front passenger window. Witnesses called police, who discovered Vann dead in the driver's seat.

Two agencies have offered rewards for information in connection with the slaying of a Bexar County Sheriff's Office sergeant ambushed on the East Side early Saturday. Sgt. Kenneth Vann, 48, was en route to a call for a shooting around 2 a.m. Saturday, when a small white car pulled up next to his marked patrol car at a red light at Loop 410 and Rigsby Avenue, officials said. Shots were fired — likely from a high-caliber semiautomatic weapon, according to Bexar County officials — out of the white car's front passenger window. Bullets struck the passenger-side windows of Vann's patrol...