Free Republic

WASHINGTON — It's a lonely world out there, black conservatives said Monday, especially as they try to recruit more African-American voters to their ranks. Many black voters will quietly tell conservative African-American politicians that they support their social agenda, said Rep. Allen West, R-Fla., one of just two black Republicans in Congress and the organizer of Monday's panel discussion on black conservatism. But they don't end up voting with the Republican Party, said West, who invited about a dozen black conservatives to speak on his panel. Here's how J.C. Watts, a former Republican congressman from Oklahoma, put it for West:...

One of Osama bin Laden's sons went missing in the midst of the Navy SEAL raid that took the life of the al Qaeda leader more than a week ago, Pakistani security officials told ABC News today. The officials said bin Laden's three wives, who are all in Pakistani custody, said that one of bin Laden's sons has not been seen since the raid. The son has not been identified, but Pakistani investigators agreed that it appeared someone was missing from the sprawling compound, the officials said. U.S. officials said that one of bin Laden's sons, Khalid, was killed in...

I'm a big fan of written SF. I can enjoy reading authors whose political views differ from my own so long as their politics don't clumsily interfere with the story. I recalled an essay by Arthur C. Clarke that illustrates just how whacked out his views were. and was able to find it online. I present to you an excerpt from "Scenario for a Civilized Planet", in which he outlines what weaponry would be permitted. Mind you, he thinks this will apply to the entire planet: http://www.lightmillennium.org/2006_18th/arthur_c_clarke_civilized.html (yeah, it's looney webite...what a shock) High-tech weapon systems are the crutches of...

Red Reps 7 here; [caption id="attachment_5755" align="alignright" width="150" caption="Hansen Clarke"][/caption] Freshman Congressman Hansen Clarke (D-MI) has a close working relationship with one of the U.S.'s most extreme Marxist-Leninist organizations - the pro North Korean Workers World Party. A former chief of staff to Michigan's pro Marxist congressman John Conyers, Hansen Clarke seems to be following in his former mentor's political footsteps. In 2008 Hansen Clarke worked closely with Detroit leaders of the Workers World Party on the house foreclosures issue. Clarke drafted and sponsored SB 1306 with long time W.W.P. collaborator Reverend Ed Rowe of Central United Methodist Church, a...

It is an absolute fact that Jared Lee Loughner shot and killed six people. So what should happen to Loughner? Which one of the following three would you choose? Piñata JusticeAssemble all the relatives of those killed and issue them ball bats. Hang Loughner upside down by his feet at the same location he did the killing. Notify the public there will be Piñata Justice at sundown and they are all welcome to attend. Have at it at sundown. Public HangingHave a public hanging at sundown, same location as he did the killing. Trial by JuryAssign public defender Judy Clarke...

Take less than three minutes and laugh until you cry (or maybe the other way around), about the sorry state of the economy. I found this gem on Market Ticker, but the link takes you right to the video. Clarke and Dawes ask the million dollar questions

Keith Ellison, widely hailed as America's first Muslim congressman, could more accurately be described as CAIR and Hamas' man in Congress. Congressman Ellison has been a regular presence at CAIR fundraisers and at pro-Hamas rallies in the United States. As a former member of Farrakhan's Nation of Islam , Ellison has enough anti-semitic and Islamist credentials to satisfy anyone, and had expressed openly anti-semitic beliefs in the past. Since Ellison got his start with CAIR , his attempt to provide support for Hamas is completely unsurprising. Both Hamas and CAIR are projects of the Muslim Brotherhood, which also helped...

ABDULMUTALLAB: More Like Me In Yemen Accused Northwest Bomber Says More Bombers On the Way; Al Qaeda Promises to Hit Americans By BRIAN ROSS and RICHARD ESPOSITO Dec. 28, 2009 — American officials have cause to worry there may be more al Qaeda-trained young men in Yemen planning to bring down American jets. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, charged with the attempted Christmas Day bombing of Northwest Airlines flight 253, told FBI agents there were more just like him in Yemen who would strike soon. And in a tape released four days before the attempted destruction of the Detroit-bound Northwest plane, the...

On the eve of the eight year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, an FBI informant who infiltrated alleged terrorist cells in the U.S. tells ABC News the FBI missed a chance to stop the al Qaeda plot because they focused more on undercover stings than on the man who would later become known as 9/11 ringleader Mohammed Atta. Brian Ross reports on the undercover agent in al Qaeda. In an exclusive interview to be broadcast tonight on ABC World News with Charles Gibson and Nightline, former undercover operative Elie Assaad says he spotted and became suspicious of Atta in early...

Click here for the video. A very funny and accurate view of what the Dems want to do with our money. Clarke and Dawe are a comedy team from Australila who do mock interviews.

BBC Audio: Dyson and Clarke Will life spread out from Earth to flourish in the cosmos? Freeman Dyson has always supported the idea, and with great persuasiveness. BBC Four has created an archive of interviews on its Web site, among which is a clip of Dyson discussing life’s variety and the imperative of broadening its range. The theoretical physicist, who played an important role in the development of the ‘atomic spaceship’ concept called Project Orion, doesn’t believe man’s role is simply to send the occasional astronaut out in what he calls ‘a metal can’ to look out a window....

PRISTINA, Kosovo, Oct. 7, 2008 – Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates visited with U.S. troops assigned to NATO’s Kosovo Force here today. Gates – making the first visit to Kosovo by a defense secretary since 2001 -- said he wanted to thank the 1,400 American servicemembers deployed here. “We haven’t forgotten about them, and we know how important they are,” Gates said during a news conference with Pentagon reporters. The Europeans and Kosovars depend on the American presence, Gates noted. “There has been a great concern that we might pull out, and what I have reassured our allies is...

WASHINGTON (CNN) — Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan said Friday he would be willing to comply with a rumored congressional subpoena to discuss the administration’s handling of pre-war intelligence, telling CNN’s Wolf Blitzer he’d be “glad to share my views” if asked to testify. Facing a firestorm over his book, McClellan also confirmed reports that he had apologized to Richard Clarke for questioning his honesty after the former counterterrorism official published his own book critical of the White House. “That was part of our talking points at the time. I didn’t even read the book,” McClellan admitted Friday....

Bush's War Monday, March 24 and Tuesday, March 25, 2008 9 P.M. (check local listings) From the horror of 9/11 to the invasion of Iraq; the truth about WMD to the rise of an insurgency; the scandal of Abu Ghraib to the strategy of the surge-for six years, FRONTLINE has revealed the defining stories of the war on terror in meticulous detail, and the political dramas that played out at the highest levels of power and influence. Now, on the fifth anniversary of the Iraq invasion, the full saga unfolds in the two-part FRONTLINE special Bush's War, airing Monday, March...

Science fiction author Arthur C Clarke dies aged 90 Arthur C Clarke at his home in the Sri Lankan capital Colombo Lech Mintowt-Czyz Science fiction writer Sir Arthur C Clarke has died aged 90 in his adopted home of Sri Lanka, it was confirmed tonight. Clarke, who had battled debilitating post-polio syndrome since the 1960s and sometimes used a wheelchair, died at 1:30am after suffering breathing problems, his personal secretary Rohan De Silva said. “Sir Arthur passed away a short while ago at the Apollo Hospital [in Colombo}. He had a cardio-respiratory attack,” he said. His valet, W. K. M....

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — An aide says science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke has died. Rohan De Silva says Clarke died early Wednesday after suffering from breathing problems. He was 90-years-old. Clarke is the author of more than 100 books, including "2001: A Space Odyssey."

Another Failed State? Kosovo's declaration of independence isn't likely to solve its many problems—or defuse tensions in the troubled Balkans. Kosovo declared independence Sunday, but it's unlikely any time soon to become the world's 193rd country. What it will almost certainly be is a failed state, unrecognized by the United Nations, unable to govern itself, dependent on Europe for its police and NATO for its armed forces. After eight years as an international protectorate and billions of dollars in aid and reconstruction funds, its economic prospects are grim. Unemployment is 57 percent, and among youths it's more like 70 percent;...

A great section of author Kenneth Timmerman's new book Shadow Warriors: The Untold Story of Traitors, Saboteurs, and the Party of Surrender is the section about a supposed failing of the Bush administration. That failing being the fact that Bush didn't purge the CIA and other segments of the government of liberal influences as Clinton did of conservative influences when he came in. Who was at fault for this? Carl Levin understood that no president could govern effectively without putting his own highly skilled political appointees into key government positions. Although their numbers were small - the congressional "Plum Book"...

Did Clarke’s “Almost War” cause The Real One? January 31, 2008 - WND.com © Jack Cashill by Jack Cashill This is the sixth in a six-part series detailing the risks to American national security if Barack Obama (or Hillary Clinton) should ever choose to let Richard Clarke back into government. Clarke is currently one of Obama’s top national security advisors. "If they've been secretive in the past, they'll be secretive as president," Barack Obama said on the stump recently in reference to Bill and Hillary Clinton. But the keeper of the Clintons’ deepest secret now serves not the Clintons but...

This is the fifth in a six-part series detailing the risks to American national security if Barack Obama (or Hillary Clinton) should ever choose to let Richard Clarke back into government. Clarke is currently one of Obama’s top national security advisors. Half way into his 2004 bestseller, Against All Enemies, former Clinton counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke makes an oddly gratuitous claim. Clarke insists that as a natural skeptic, “always intrigued by the possibility of the unlikely explanation,” he has pushed his fellow analysts to examine all angles in a given case, even those that seemed improbable. As proof of his...

First, you have to frame the problem. How to orchestrate a multiple hatchet job on those men who, in a time of national fear and anxiety, stood a trembling nation back on it's feet, and said, "We will respond, and with vigor. No more swatting flies." At the same time, however, you have to find some magic way of presenting those discredited, terminated and bitter ex-employees of the agency which apparently failed in their duties to faithfully watch at the walls, but yet not expose them as bitter, disgruntled employees. Apparently, no one was supposed to notice your one-sided lineup,...

Why Bush really demoted Richard Clarke by Jack Cashill This is the fourth in a six-part series detailing the risks to American national security if Barack Obama (or Hillary Clinton) should ever choose to let Richard Clarke back into government. Clarke is currently one of Obama’s top national security advisors. “When George Bush came into office, though he kept Clarke on at the White House, he stripped him of his cabinet level rank.” So lamented Leslie Stahl during the March 2004 60 Minutes profile that would make Richard Clarke ace crowd surfer in the intellectual mosh pit of the anti-war...

This is the first in a five-part series detailing the risks to American national security if Barack Obama (or Hillary Clinton) should ever choose to let Richard Clarke back into government. Clarke is currently one of Obama’s top national security advisors. At the beginning of the campaign season, top Democratic candidates scrambled after Clinton national security veterans with almost as much urgency as the U.S. and the Soviets once pursued German rocket scientists. In either case, the winner would corner a certain market on national security expertise, a virtue in glaringly short supply among top Democratic candidates in this year’s...

You can tell the man who boozes, by the company he chooses ... and the pig got up and slowly walked away. The poem by Clarke Van Ness warns people that they will be judged by the actions of those with whom they choose to associate -- and even a pig has enough sense to walk away from disaster. Hillary Clinton has a big problem with her associates, and it's self-inflicted. Lost in the Norman Hsu shuffle, the news that Hillary has asked former Clinton national-security adviser Sandy Berger to join her campaign should cause even more questions about her...

Mohammed Warsame seen in an undated photograph. (The photograph's background has been obscured to protect the source. ABCNEWS independently confirmed that the photograph shows Warsame.) U.S. Attempt to Turn Al Qaeda Suspect Into U.S. Informant Soured by Press Leak By Pierre Thomas Feb. 13 — When a Somali-born computer student was arrested in Minneapolis last December on suspicion of helping al Qaeda, federal counterterrorism officials thought they might finally have found what they desperately need — a way of getting inside Osama bin Laden's shadowy network. The counterterrorism officials developed a plan to turn the man, Mohammed Warsame, into a...

A civil servant and an MP's researcher have been found guilty of leaking a secret memo about talks between George Bush and Tony Blair. David Keogh, 50, from Northampton, has been found guilty of two offences under the Official Secrets Act. MP's researcher Leo O'Connor was found guilty of one Official Secrets offence. It recorded Oval Office talks between Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair about Iraq in 2004, the Old Bailey was told. Sentencing was adjourned for reports........

If not the most skillful of embezzlers, Samuel "Sandy" Berger is a far more formidable character than the media would have us believe. When he made his now-storied sorties into the National Archives, he risked his career and his reputation in so doing, and he knew it. Rest assured, he would not have done so were the secrets to be preserved not worth the risk of pilfering them. True to form, the major media refuse to even ask the most fundamental question: Just what secrets would justify so much personal exposure? Having read the report on Berger by the House...

Paul Pillar Speaks, Again The latest CIA attack on the Bush administration is nothing new. by Stephen F. Hayes 02/10/2006 4:15:00 PM IN A BREATHLESS front-page, above-the-fold article in today's Washington Post, Walter Pincus reports that a former senior CIA official named Paul Pillar accuses the Bush administration of "misusing" intelligence to take the country to war in Iraq. According to the Post account, Pillar uses a forthcoming article in Foreign Affairs to claim that the Bush administration "politicized" the intelligence on Iraq. Bush administration policymakers did this subtly, Pillar says, by repeatedly asking the CIA questions about Iraq, its...

Excerpt - WASHINGTON - Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and former Attorney General John Ashcroft received the same CIA briefing about an imminent al-Qaida strike on an American target that was given to the White House two months before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The State Department's disclosure Monday that the pair was briefed within a week after then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice was told about the threat on July 10, 2001, raised new questions about what the Bush administration did in response, and about why so many officials have claimed they never received or don't remember the warning. One...

Musings while waiting breathlessly for a reason to care about Terrell Owens’ poor pill-popping technique… - Congratulations to President Bush for declassifying the National Intelligence Estimate and exposing the partisan lies being spread by treasonous leakers in the spook community. Some Benedict Arnold fancying himself (or herself) a modern-day Daniel Ellsworth spewed out some of the NIE over the weekend to the Washington Post and New York Times, which then dutifully proceeded to report that the NIE called the Iraq War a breeding ground for terrorists. Naturally, that was a lie, which is nothing new for the drive-by media –...

In fact, a 1999 Clarke after-action memo - the one top Clinton aide Sandy Berger later stole from the National Archives - identified national-security weaknesses so "glaring" that only sheer "luck" prevented a cataclysmic attack back then. And, as Clarke told the 9/11 Commission publicly, there was nothing the Bush administration could have done that would have prevented the attacks. Sure, he tells a different story now. But that, he admitted, is because of his opposition to the Iraq war, which he believes distracted from the War on Terror. Secretary Rice was a lot more honest, explaining yesterday that there...

September 25, 2006 -- Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice yesterday accused Bill Clinton of making "flatly false" claims that the Bush administration didn't lift a finger to stop terrorism before the 9/11 attacks. Rice hammered Clinton, who leveled his charges in a contentious weekend interview with Chris Wallace of Fox News Channel, for his claims that the Bush administration "did not try" to kill Osama bin Laden in the eight months they controlled the White House before the Sept. 11 attacks. "The notion somehow for eight months the Bush administration sat there and didn't do that is just flatly false...

RICHARD CLARKE: Actually, I've got about seven points, let me just go through them quickly. Um, the first point, I think the overall point is, there was no plan on Al Qaeda that was passed from the Clinton administration to the Bush administration. JIM ANGLE: You're saying that the Bush administration did not stop anything that the Clinton administration was doing while it was making these decisions, and by the end of the summer had increased money for covert action five-fold. Is that correct? CLARKE: All of that's correct.

Shocking /sarc

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 5 — Days before its scheduled debut, the first major television miniseries about the Sept. 11 attacks was being criticized on Tuesday as biased and inaccurate by bloggers, terrorism experts and a member of the Sept. 11 commission, whose report makes up much of the film’s source material. The six-hour miniseries, “The Path to 9/11,” is to be shown on ABC on Sunday and Monday. snip... On Tuesday, several liberal blogs were questioning whether ABC’s version was overly critical of the Clinton administration while letting the Bush administration off easy. In particular, some critics — including Richard...

Wouldn't it be WONDERFUL to see the USS Cole off the coast of Beruit providing protection for 25000 fleeing Americans? I think that'd send a knife-like message to UBL, and those who got so much pr from attacking it. It's in the area, and just did a port call in Greece a week or so ago. I think in the War on Terror it'd be a great reminder of the USS Cole incident and as the world media reported its presence. Al Jazeera, Al Arabiya, MSNBC, CBS, NYT....they'd all be compelled to report its signifigance, the attack done on it,...

With one credible September 11 movie, "United 93," under our belts, it will be interesting to see whether ABC-TV will complete the September 11 Commission's whitewashing of the pre-September 11 failure of U.S. intelligence-community leaders in its forthcoming mini-series based on Richard Clarke's memoir, "Against All Enemies." Media teasers about the mini-series have said that Mr. Clarke -- the former "terrorism czar" -- and a senior FBI officer, the late John O'Neill, will be the heroes of the saga. If true, and if ABC's fact-checkers are not diligent in verifying Mr. Clarke's stories and claims, the mini-series will be...

Richard Clarke, former presidential adviser on counter-terrorism and author of a book in 2004 that blasted the Bush and Clinton administrations for their handling of the war on terror, asserted Thursday that "We are no more secure than we were five years ago." Clarke gained national attention two years ago, not only for the book titled "Against All Enemies," but also for his testimony before the 9/11 Commission investigating the worst terrorist attacks in U.S. history. Thursday, he was in Washington promoting a task force report titled "The Forgotten Homeland." Clarke co-chaired the task force, which was sponsored by The...

COUNTERTERRORISM has become a source of continuing domestic and international political controversy. Much of it, like the role of the Iraq war in inspiring new terrorists, deserves analysis and debate. Increasingly, however, many of the political issues surrounding counterterrorism are formulaic, knee-jerk, disingenuous and purely partisan. The current debate about United States monitoring of transfers over the Swift international financial system strikes us as a case of over-reaction by both the Bush administration and its critics.

After 9/11, Vice President Richard Cheney seized the initiative. He pushed to expand executive power, transform America's intelligence agencies and bring the war on terror to Iraq. But first he had to take on George Tenet's CIA for control over intelligence.

June 16, 2006 — Did al Qaeda plot to release cyanide gas in New York City subways? A new book details the alleged plan, but the former chief of White House counterterrorism said there are reasons to be skeptical about the report. "There's reason to be skeptical," said ABC News consultant Richard Clarke, who is the former chief of White House counterterrorism. "Just because something is labeled in an intelligence report does not mean every word in it is true." He said the information describing the plot would have been just one of the hundreds of threats that would have...

LONDON - Abu Musab Al Zarqawi’s death should be a cause for celebration across the entire Arab world and could be felt more keenly in the area than the death of Osama bin Laden, leading British academics said on Thursday. Professor Paul Wilkinson, chairman of the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at St Andrews University in Scotland, said: “I do not think any of the decent majority in the Arab world will mourn his passing.” Michael Clarke, director of the International Policy Institute at King’s College London, said that because of the devotion Al Zarqawi inspired...

Some Thoughts on Porter Goss Much has been made, in the Mainstream Media , and out in the hinterlands of the Internet , of the fact Porter Goss did some long-overdue”housecleaning” at the CIA. “Oh-oh-oh !” , the critics moan. “ He got rid of key employees with decades of experience in intelligence gathering – with the aid of a deputy he chose personally, and that we know next-to-nothing about !” It does not seem to have occurred to the critics that those who were swept out may have been those whose intransigence helped keep the CIA from discovering the...

If Mary O. McCarthy should ever be so desperate as to need a character witness, or to require one so badly that she must stoop to my level, I declare in advance that I shall step forward pro bono. I am quite willing to accept that whatever she did or did not do or say about the surreptitious incarceration of al-Qaida suspects overseas (and let's not prejudge this), she did it from the most exalted motives. I accept this because, however much of her hard-earned money she threw away on making a donation to the John Kerry presidential campaign, she...

WASHINGTON - Everyone is saying that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s days are numbered, thanks in part to increasing calls by some former generals for Rumsfeld’s resignation. But Rumsfeld was hired by George W. Bush to do precisely what he has done to the consternation of the generals who are now coming out to complain about him. When President Bush brought Rumsfeld back to the Pentagon, the president told him to shake up the Pentagon, to transform it from the Cold War structure and culture that it was stuck in to a new force with strategies that could respond to...

Special to The Times PRINCETON BOROUGH -- Daniel Ellsberg, famous for exposing government deception about the Vietnam War and its casualties, said yesterday the war in Iraq should be fought with the help of insiders in the Bush administration. As he once did, in leaking the famed Pentagon Papers to the New York Times in 1971, Ellsberg said insiders should be more forthcoming with information that might expose dangerous wrongdoing in government. Instead of waiting until the 2004 publication of his book, "Against All Enemies," presidential adviser Richard A. Clarke should have "taken a good drawer full of documents out...

Former CA Chief To Plead Guilty By William M. Bulkeley & Paul Davies April 24, 2006 12:59 p.m. Sanjay Kumar, former chief executive officer of Computer Associates International Inc., is expected to plead guilty to financial fraud charges later today. People familiar with the situation said Mr. Kumar and his co-defendant Stephen Richards, a former top sales executive, will appear in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn today at 2 p.m. Details of the expected guilty pleas weren't immediately available. Lawyers for Messrs. Kumar and Richards couldn't be reached for comment. Once the protégé of CA founder Charles Wang, Mr. Kumar...

The latest in a stream of eye-opening Iraqi documents shows Saddam Hussein's regime was planning suicide attacks on U.S. interests six months before 9-11. Why won't Washington get the word out?Last month the Pentagon began releasing records captured during Operation Iraqi Freedom. Among the documents is a letter dated March 11, 2001, written by Abdel Magid Hammod Ali, one of Saddam's air force generals.According to an unofficial translation, Page 6 of the letter asks for "the names of those who desire to volunteer for suicide mission to liberate Palestine and to strike American interests." Assuming the document's accuracy, this shows...

Proving that he’s just as adept at stuffing an election candidate’s coffers as he is at stuffing his own socks, Sandy Berger hosted an "almost secret" Washington fund-raiser for a recently retired three-star vice admiral last night. Vice Adm. Joseph Sestak Jr, as the Village People would say, is "In the Navy". And when you want to take an Able Danger Congressman Curt Weldon down, what better way than to send in the Navy? Berger, dubbed "Sandy Burglar" by radio meister Rush Limbaugh, gained notoriety for trying to stuff classified documents into his socks and other attire. The man, who...

Several members of President Bill Clinton’s national security team are hosting a Washington fund-raiser tonight for retired Vice Adm. Joseph Sestak Jr., the Democrat running against U.S. Rep. Curt Weldon in November. Officials at Sestak’s campaign headquarters in Media will not comment on the event, though an invitation sent out to potential donors and obtained by the Daily Times lists Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger as a host. "As a general rule, campaigns don’t comment on fund-raisers or people who hold them," said Sestak’s campaign chairman, Myles Duffy. Berger, who served as Clinton’s second-term national security adviser, pleaded guilty last year...