Free Republic

A CIA official who had a top role during the run-up to the Iraqi war charges the White House with ignoring intelligence that said there were no weapons of mass destruction or an active nuclear program in Iraq. The former highest ranking CIA officer in Europe, Tyler Drumheller, also says that while the intelligence community did give the White House some bad intelligence, it also gave the White House good intelligence — which the administration chose to ignore

Sunday March 3, 2002 'Bombing Saddam is ignorance' Robert Baer, the ex-CIA man in Iraq during the failed uprising in 1995, says the US is not in a position to strike against Iraq because it does not understand anything about the country Robert Baer's objections to an attack on Iraq could hardly be principled. As the CIA's point man in Iraq during the failed uprising in 1995, he encouraged dissident groups to believe that the United States wanted the overthrow and death of Saddam Hussein. Yet Baer, whose memoir of life in the CIA, See No Evil, is published ...

(CNSNews.com) - Sen. John Kerry's presidential campaign has hired a new director of religion outreach, who is being described by a Catholic group as "a curious choice." Mara Vanderslice, who formerly worked as religion outreach director for Democrat Howard Dean, was raised without any faith and didn't become an evangelical Christian until she attended Earlham College, a Quaker school known for its adherence to pacifism, the Catholic League said on Monday. According to Catholic League President William Donohue, when Vanderslice was in college she was active in the Earlham Socialist Alliance, a group that supports convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal and...

If he wins the White House, John F. Kerry will immediately confront a difficult, divisive and deeply personal decision: which close friend will he have to stiff for secretary of state? Kerry, who would name a national security team a few weeks after the election, is said by campaign sources to be under a fair amount of pressure to pick Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) or Richard Holbrooke to help repair global alliances and attract new allies to assist in Iraq. Both men are seasoned diplomats, ambitious and close friends and political advisers to Kerry. And both clearly want...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The Justice Department has opened an investigation of possible accounting fraud at Fannie Mae, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday, after a federal regulator said the mortgage giant may have manipulated its earnings targets. The Journal reported that the investigation is still in the preliminary stages. Fannie has been under fire since the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, or Ofheo, accused the company of improper accounting that allowed senior executives to pocket multimillion-dollar bonuses. According to the newspaper, officials have said that some Fannie Mae executives may have misled regulators, which in some cases...

NEWSWEEK: In the Months Before 9/11, Justice Department Curtailed Highly Classified Program to Monitor Al Qaeda Suspects in the U.S.Sunday March 21, 10:51 am ET 'They Came in There With Their Agenda and [Al Qaeda] was not on it,' Says Former Counterterrorism Chief Clarke of Bush Administration NEW YORK, March 21 /PRNewswire/ -- Newsweek has learned that in the months before 9/11, the U.S. Justice Department curtailed a highly classified program called "Catcher's Mitt" to monitor Al Qaeda suspects in the United States, after a federal judge severely chastised the FBI for improperly seeking permission to wiretap terrorists. During the...

WASHINGTON (AP)--A South Korean man who met with John Kerry's fund-raisers to discuss creating a new political group for Korean-Americans was an intelligence agent for his country, raising concerns among some U.S. officials that either he or his government may have tried to influence this fall's election. South Korean officials and U.S. officials told The Associated Press that Chung Byung-Man, a consular officer in Los Angeles, actually worked for South Korea's National Intelligence Service. A spokesman for the South Korean consulate office said Chung was sent home in May amid "speculation" he became involved with the Kerry campaign and...

During a speech "flogging" his book Wilson took shots at Bush: "Former Ambassador and Bush Administration critic Joe Wilson was seemingly preaching to the choir Saturday in City Hall. Not one dissenting voice was heard." Snip "The Bush administration sent Wilson to Niger to investigate the accusation that Saddam Hussein was trying to buy nuclear materials to construct weapons of mass destruction. Wilson said he determined it was untrue and reported that in February 2002 to Vice President Dick Cheney." Wilson said: "This was not a simple mistake...It was cleverly calculated to deceive the Congress of the United States, the...