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A former CIA officer was charged Monday with illegally leaking the identity of a covert officer and other classified information to journalists. John Kiriakou, a former CIA officer and author who defended waterboarding, was charged by the Department of Justice with one count of illegally disclosing a covert officer’s identity and two counts of violating the Espionage Act for illegally leaking classified national defense information. He was also charged with making false statements for allegedly trying to trick the CIA’s Publications Review Board to let him use information in his 2010 book, The Reluctant Spy. The investigation led by U.S....

NOTE The following text is a quote: www.number10.gov.uk/news/prime-minister-statement-on-alan-mcmenemy/ Prime Minister's statement on Alan McMenemy Friday 20 January 2012 Prime Minister David Cameron confirmed the British Embassy in Baghdad have received the body of hostage Alan McMenemy. The Prime Minister said: “It is with great sadness that I can confirm that the British Embassy in Baghdad received a body today that has been identified as Alan McMenemy, who was kidnapped in Baghdad in 2007, along with four other men. The bodies of Jason Swindlehurst, Jason Creswell and Alec MacLachlan were returned in 2009. Peter Moore was the only hostage released alive...

The mystery surrounding Russian-made tanks that the government denied were destined for South Sudan last year has been unravelled by a secret diplomatic cable. A 2009 cable released by whistleblowing site WikiLeaks says a senior State Department official produced satellite images that appeared to show that the tanks unloaded in Kenya were trans-shipped to South Sudan. The evidence contradicted claims by Kenyan officials that the hardware imported from Ukraine was intended for the Kenyan military. A bill of lading and manifest of the hijacked MV Faina, which was seen by the Nation when the ship was released by pirates showed...

Israeli fighter jets, helicopters and possibly a submarine were involved in multiple attacks on targets in Sudan last week, according to local news outlets. The reports say that Israeli jets hit targets in the eastern part of the African country, near its border with Egypt, last Thursday. They hit six Land Cruiser jeeps and killed four people. An earlier strike took place last Sunday and reportedly involved Israeli helicopters. A truck was targeted. Some reports say an Israeli submarine was also spotted at the same time. However, the Sudanese army spokesman, Col. Al-Sawarmi Haled Sa'ad, said that the military's air...

Israeli fighter jets, helicopters and possibly a submarine were involved in multiple attacks on targets in Sudan last week, according to local news outlets. The reports say that Israeli jets hit targets in the eastern part of the African country, near its border with Egypt, last Thursday. They hit six Land Cruiser jeeps and killed four people. An earlier strike took place last Sunday and reportedly involved Israeli helicopters. A truck was targeted. Some reports say an Israeli submarine was also spotted at the same time. However, the Sudanese army spokesman, Col. Al-Sawarmi Haled Sa'ad, said that the military's air...

The U.S. Department of State has bought more than $70,000 worth of books authored by President Obama, sending out copies as Christmas gratuities and stocking “key libraries” around the world with “Dreams from My Father” more than a decade after its release. The U.S. embassy in Egypt, for instance, spent $28,636 in August 2009 for copies of Mr. Obama’s bestselling 1995 memoir. Six weeks earlier, the embassy had placed another order with the same book seller, Kalemat Arabia, for more than $9,000 for copies of the same book, federal purchasing records show. Around the same time, halfway around the world,...

In a speech at Macomb Community College in Warren, Mich., today, President Obama veered off his prepared remarks to take this shot at some of the "it's Obama's economy" critics: I love those folks who helped get us in this mess, and suddenly they say, "This is Obama's economy." That's fine. Give it to me. My job is to solve problems, not stand on the sidelines and carp and gripe.

Delusion guided accused shooter of soldiers at Little Rock recruiting centerPsychiatrist says reality was lost on Muhammad By Kristina Goetz Memphis Commercial Appeal Posted July 23, 2011 at midnight LITTLE ROCK -- The star defense witness in the capital murder trial of Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad said Friday that the defendant believes he is persecuted because he's Muslim and that his actions are more important than they really are -- all because he suffers from a delusional disorder. "Saying you're an operative of a major terrorist organization is grandiose," said Dr. Shawn Agharkar, a psychiatrist who examined Muhammad three times in...

An official from Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) told the BBC that the compound was raided by the ISI while still under construction in 2003 when the agency believed senior al-Qaeda operative Abu Faraj al-Libi was on site. Since then, however, the official claimed the intelligence agency had taken no interest in the facility: "The compound was not on our radar; it is an embarrassment for the ISI… We're good, but we're not God" (BBC, May 3). However, in a statement that appeared to reveal the confusion over the incident at the highest levels of the Pakistani government, an official from...

Apparently, the key to the whole operation was finding and tracking Bin Laden’s most trusted courier, a process that took years — and involved info given by Guantanamo detainees: Sunday afternoon’s raid by U.S. forces that killed Osama bin Laden was the “culmination of years of careful and highly advanced intelligence work,” senior administration officials said in a conference call, describing the genesis of an operation that sounded like it was right out of a “Mission Impossible” movie. Some time after Sept. 11, detainees held by the U.S. told interrogators about a man believed to work as a courier for...

The leader of a group that marketed a fake currency called Liberty Dollars in the Asheville area and elsewhere has been found guilty by a federal jury of conspiracy against the government in a case of “domestic terrorism.” Bernard von NotHaus was convicted Friday at the conclusion of an eight-day trial in U.S. District Court in Statesville. The jury deliberated less than two hours, according to the Department of Justice. Charges remain pending against William Kevin Innes, an Asheville man who authorities said recruited merchants in Western North Carolina willing to accept the “barter” currency, according to court records. Innes...

Pajamas Media gives an exclusive look at an analysis prepared for the Department of Defense’s Irregular Warfare Support Program (IWSP) by Cross Consulting and Services in 2009 that alleges that the economic meltdown in 2008 was no accident. Kevin Freeman argued that a run-up of speculation by sovereign-wealth funds created a bubble in the oil industry that allowed bear raids on American financial institutions, using credit swaps and other non-regulated investment instruments to crash the US financial system. Bill Gertz reported on the analysis today for the Washington Times: Evidence outlined in a Pentagon contractor report suggests that financial subversion...

A lot has happened since Newsweek's Nov. 9 cover story -- mostrecently the retraction of Al Gore's rising-seas scenario. Climate Fraud: The godfather of climate hysteria is in hiding as another of his wild claims unravels — this one about global warming causing seas to swallow us up. We've not seen or heard much of the former vice president, Oscar winner and Nobel Prize recipient recently as the case for disastrous man-made climate change collapses. Perhaps he's off reading how scientists were forced to withdraw a study on a projected sea level rise due to global warming after finding two...

U.S. President Barack Obama met with members of Egypt's Islamist opposition movement, the Muslim Brotherhood, earlier this year, according to a report in Thursday editions of the Egyptian daily newspaper Almasry Alyoum. The newspaper reported that Obama met the group's members, who reside in the U.S. and Europe, in Washington two months ago. According to the report, the members requested that news of the meeting not be publicized. They expressed to Obama their support for democracy and the war on terror.

As the cliche goes, there are no coincidences in politics. Obama fundraiser group Code Pink just happened to have arrived in Cairo last week for the group’s ninth visit there in two years as part of its campaign to undermine the Mubarak government and help Hamas, the terrorist group that controls Gaza. Code Pink and the media are trying to portray the leftist group's 'sudden' appearance in Cairo Wednesday as an act of courageous support for a democratic revolution. Nothing could be further from the truth.Code Pink protests the Mubarak government in Tahrir Square, Cairo, Egypt. February 2, 2011. Code...

An Obama administration official, speaking anonymously to the Washington Post, said the administration is open to the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood being in the government of Egypt that will likely replace the rule of Hosni Mubarak:The official said that while the administration was concerned about "some elements" of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood and other non-secular groups participating in the demonstrations, it was "not ruling out their legitimacy" and place in a future government. Obama was aware that the Muslim Brotherhood and others were in the audience when he spoke of "a new beginning" in a 2009 speech in Cairo that was...

The Dutch government has frozen all contacts with Iran in protest over the hanging of a Dutch-Iranian woman. The Dutch foreign ministry said it was "shocked, shattered by this act by a barbaric regime". Sahra Bahrami, aged 46, was hanged for drug smuggling early on Saturday, Iranian officials said. Her family accuses Tehran of fabricating the case against her after she was detained for taking part in anti-government protests in 2009.

President-elect Barack Obama predicted Tuesday that the nation could see "trillion-dollar deficits for years to come," but said the country needs to continue spending taxpayer dollars to get the economy back on track. Obama, speaking to reporters at his Washington transition office, said he didn't want to get into specific budget numbers because his proposal is still being worked out with lawmakers and has yet to be submitted for debate. But he expects a trillion-dollar deficit before the next fiscal-year budget is even proposed. "We're already looking at a trillion-dollar budget deficit or close to a trillion-dollar budget deficit, and...

China Hits Back at US Duties, Says It's Been Made A Scapegoat Published: Thursday, 31 Dec 2009 | 1:06 AM ET Text Size By: Reuters China on Thursday decried a U.S. decision to impose duties of 10 to 16 percent on Chinese-made steel pipe, the biggest U.S. trade case to date against China, and said it had been made a scapegoat of protectionist interests. The Ministry of Commerce said it was "strongly dissatisfied with and resolutely opposed" to the vote of the U.S. International Trade Commission for countervailing duties, which Washington said were needed to balance out unfair state subsidies...

The State Department in 2009 sought the Chinese government's help in blocking a sale to Iran of 25 tons of specialty steel for Tehran's defense industry to be used in building nuclear-related centrifuges, according to a classified department cable. "Post is instructed to inform appropriate-level Chinese officials of this transaction, and request that they investigate the entity and individuals involved," according to the cable, which is labeled "secret." It noted that the Chinese were to be told that the company faces sanctions for the proposed sale under U.S. law. (Snip) An earlier State Department cable revealed that China helped North

MIAMI – A suspected al-Qaida operative who lived for more than 15 years in the U.S. has become chief of the terror network's global operations, the FBI says, marking the first time a leader so intimately familiar with American society has been placed in charge of planning attacks. Adnan Shukrijumah, 35, has taken over a position once held by 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Miami-based FBI counterterrorism agent Brian LeBlanc (said). That puts him in regular contact with al-Qaida's senior leadership, including Osama bin Laden... Shukrijumah and two others were part of an "external operations council" that designed and approved...

It’s all a grand charade — the matinee show put on by the Theater of Science was merely being used for the Grand Extravaganza called the Theater of Politics.Wikileaks, not surprisingly, turned up some not-so-diplomatic and not-so-scientific goings-on in the political race to steer power and dollars.From The Guardian The US diplomatic cables reveal how the US seeks dirt on nations opposed to its approach to tackling global warming; how financial and other aid is used by countries to gain political backing; how distrust, broken promises and creative accounting dog negotiations; and how the US mounted a secret global diplomatic...

Revelation about funding sources prompts distancing from J StreetThe White House appears to be distancing itself from the liberal advocacy group J Street that it once embraced as its envoy to the U.S. Jewish community after disclosures that nearly half the group's funding for 2008 came from a single Hong Kong donor. White House spokesman Thomas Vietor declined to comment when asked on Monday if the White House would continue its past practice of inviting J Street's leaders to take part in conference calls with senior White House officials and to other White House events, and whether senior Obama administration...

Topic: Economic StimulusTotal Allocated Cost: $862,000,000,000 *   In February 2009, President Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. In early 2009, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the Recovery Act's combined spending and tax provisions would cost $787 billion. In early 2010, CBO updated its estimate of the cost of the Recovery Act. It now estimates that the Recovery Act will cost $75 billion more than originally estimated - CBO now anticipates that the 2009 Stimulus will increase deficits by $862 billion over ten years. *Source: Committee for a Reasonable Federal Budget  

<p>A 67-year-old man on Thursday admitted hijacking a plane four decades ago and forcing it to land in Cuba, telling a judge how he threatened to cut a flight attendant's throat to get access to the cockpit, where another man held a gun to the back of the co-pilot.</p>

TOKYO -- North Korea provided about 45 tons of "yellowcake" uranium to Syria in September 2007 for production of fuel for an undeclared nuclear reactor, diplomatic and military sources knowledgeable on North Korean issues said Saturday. But the shipment was followed shortly by an Israeli air strike targeting the reactor and the uranium involved is believed to have been transferred to Iran around last summer, according to a Western diplomatic source.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Obama has declared a disaster in eight counties in Maryland because of damage done by a snowstorm in December. Baltimore, Caroline, Cecil, Harford, Howard, Kent, Montgomery and Queen Anne's counties will be eligible for federal funding. The state of Maryland and certain private nonprofits will also be eligible for emergency protective measures.

Nearly half of Western European believe that Jews exploit the persecution of their past as a method of extorting money, according to an annual Jewish Agency report released on Sunday. A joint report on anti-Semitism conducted by the Agency and the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs found that 42 percent of those polled by the University of Bielefeld in Germany agreed that "Jews exploit the past to extort money." The countries in which the highest percentage of the population agreed with that statement were Poland and Spain.

WASHINGTON – What recession? Health care and business interests led the way as clients spent a record $3.5 billion on lobbying last year, prompted by Obama administration drives to reshape federal policy for the medical, financial and energy industries. Amid a stagnant national economy and the worst unemployment in nearly three decades, lobbying expenditures grew by 5 percent from the $3.3 billion spent in 2008, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. The growth also came despite efforts by President Barack Obama to curb lobbyists' influence. The figures underline the vast and growing sums that industries, unions and ideological...

The Obama administration's economic stimulus program created nearly 600,000 jobs in the final three months of 2009, a figure in line with the administration's goals for job creation through the end of 2010, the White House reported Saturday night. The new total was down from the totals reported for the previous quarter, partly because the administration decided in December to count only the jobs paid for with stimulus funding instead of estimating the number of jobs "created or saved" with the money. Critics had panned the "created or saved" measurement as a subjective and confusing way of determining the program's...

A record 14,033,824 NICS Instant Background checks were performed in 2009. This means that after the denial process takes place, some 13,753,147 guns were sold by FFL dealers alone to United States residents. That does not include private sales. The FBI, which administers the NICS system, says that the historic denial rate as a result of the checks is under 2%. Sales began to skyrocket in September, 2008 when it became apparent that Barack Obama would win the Presidency. Is it coincidence that the FBI has reported that the national crime rate dropped 10% during the same period of the...

With a failing economy, a misguided stimulus, two wars, continuing terror threats, staggering unemployment, record foreclosures, and a general malaise in public confidence, President Obama chose in his first year to ignore these problems and place all of his political capital in an effort to orchestrate a massive government take over of healthcare. Here is an ensemble of a year’s worth of healthcare quotes.

The breathless pace that President Obama set after taking office last January jolted lawmakers from the soporific haze of the final George W. Bush years, revving up dormant committees and lighting up phone lines with a frenzy of dealmaking. Wielding large Democratic majorities, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.) relied on their expert vote-counting skills to send Obama 13 major bills and bring an overhaul of the nation's health-care system to the brink of final passage. By Christmas Eve, when the Senate finally adjourned, lawmakers were exuberant, if exhausted. Then the bullet train...

The purpose of FreeRepublic.com's multiple message boards is to limit the topics for each board to particular topics. Posting the same message on all the boards defeats the purpose of multiple-boards for special topics. It is very annoying to see the same message on every bulletin board. PLEASE! DO THE READERS A FAVOR. STOP CROSS-POSTING YOUR MESSAGES!

Islamic terrorism is on the rise both domestically and internationally since Obama became President in 2009, according to a count of high-profile, terrorism incidents in 2009, both in the US and abroad. The number of Islamic terrorism incidents worldwide since Obama took office in 2009, including both domestic and international acts of terrorism, is on pace to surpass more than 1000 for all of 2009, according to a report by the American Security Project which is a bipartisan, Washington-based group. On the domestic front, for 2009 when Obama became President, the number of terror-related incidents hit a peak, the highest...

You voted, and this Hardee's ad was crowned the Funniest Commercial of 2009. Congratulations to our winner!

Article dated 01/05/2010 from Phil from the Right Side After I reported on Rep. Nathan Deal’s (R-GA) forthcoming request for Mr. Obama’s birth certificate (along with a previous update), the following commentary from “Pixel Patriot” at the CitizenWells blog reports that Rep. Deal sent a PDF document to the White House on December 1, 2009: I have just spoken with Todd Smith, the Chief of Staff for Representative Nathan Deal of the United States House of Representatives serving Georgia’s 9th district. (FACT) Representative Deal has sent a letter to Putative President Barack Hussein Obama requesting him to prove his eligibility...

40) But it is really not easy to make fun of the Obamas, because they’re really — they’re kind of really perfect, aren’t they?" -- Joy Behar

FOX News has included a posting called "Top Stories Mainstream Media Missed in '09" about half-way down their page. See thefoxnation.com Here you go - They've opened the door for you to sound off!

May through July saw the stirrings of renewed conservative momentum!In Part I of this review of 2009 we traced the early signs of crumbling of the Obama fantasy. The unraveling of what Bill Clinton called the "Fairy Tale" of Obama began shortly after he took office. By mid march, many conservatives and GOP pundits who got caught up in "hoax and chains" were already admitting their mistake. Soon, moderates and independent voters who were key to Obama's election victory would begin deserting as it became all too clear they felt he ran as a centrist but was governing as a...

This is the Barack Obama Top 10 Bloopers of 2009 list, a complement and follow-up to my Top 10 Obama Failures of 2009 list. The Barack Obama Top 10 Bloopers of 2009 list is exclusively related to unflattering moments that the man caused for himself by his own bumbling; the latter list was strictly policy critiques. Due to the popularity of the failures list, I now bring to you a compilation of Obama humiliating himself all throughout 2009; in these ever-darkening times of non-stop deficits, double-digit unemployment rates, and attempted terrorism, laughter at the expense of Obama is among the...

Happy New Year to all my readers, and what better, oh, what better way to celebrate the start of a new year than by looking backwards. That's right...looking backwards at all the greatest failures of the Obama Administration from 2009, its first year in power! Here for your reading pleasure is a Top Ten compilation of what I deem to be the ten most failing moments of Barack Hussein Obama relating to his policies; this list is by no means complete, and he seems to add to it every day, but you get the picture. So, here's to a happy...

I Told You So: My Two Cents On My Own Two Cents By David J. Aland 31 December 2009 Last November, disappointed by the election of an inexperienced liberal as President, I wrote that I would “reserve the right” to judge the merit of Obama’s performance. As I wrote then, “we generally expect that the job of President is, in itself, transformational…” but has the job actually transformed the man? As the last year of what Charles Krauthammer has called “The Year of Living Fecklessly” has shown, the answers to the questions I raised a year ago are not promising....

Thank God 2010 is here! But there were some good moments in 2009!2009 was a difficult year for many on the right. The year started as the country was still buying the Hope and Change snake oil. It wasn't until we neared the end of the year that voters realized they made a mistake and instead got "hoax and chains." The single greatest thing to happen during this year occurred over many months and often in slow motion. There's one graphic which captures this greatest event of 2009 perfectly: Throughout the year we watched as Obama's popularity declined and wondered...

Well, it's gone. 2009 is finally freaking GONE The year started with my wife outta work, no family income (I just get beer money for my books), two sick kids, the neighbor's trampoline had just taken flight into the back of our car-almost totaling it. The year continued... Obama took office. He and Dems gave a trillion dollars in "stimulus" money to their organized labor donors who paid 80% of their campaign money (according to the Federal Election Commission website) with the idea that if the kickback wasn't given right away unemployment would rise above 8%. Then unemployment reached almost...

Here is video of Sean Hannity taking a look at President Barack Obama's first year in office. In his review, he focuses on the question, "Is President Obama a socialist?" . . . (VIDEO)

Here is video of Sean Hannity replaying what he calls the "most memorable moments" from the Health Care Debate that raged through the second half of 2009. . . . (VIDEO)

The first question is what to call it. Circa Jan. 1, 2005, halfway through the first decade of the 21st century, Slate’s Timothy Noah implored us to decide what to call the decade we were living in. Neither “aughts,” “naughts,” “ohs,” nor “double ohs” seemed to be catching. Either Mr. Noah lacks influence or the decade is simply unnamable, because as we stand on the precipice of 2010, we are no closer to an agreed upon moniker. A proper name may be important because of our recent tendency to segment history by its third digit. In the past, I have...

Part One: The GoodPart Two: The Bad And The Ugly