Free Republic

Watch this important video. Very graphic! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiMGoPRuzRc

According to USAID (United States Agency For International Development), the federal agency in charge of distributing the vast majority of foreign aid monies to other countries, United States taxpayers have paid for over one billion dollars in foreign aid packages to help support the “Syrian Humanitarian Response." Despite the threat of continued chemical attacks against the Syrian people that has served as the focal point of rallying cries for advocates of US military intervention (including the Obama administration), The Daily Beast reported that gas masks were not among the items

John Kerry to Democrats: ‘Munich moment’ By: John Bresnahan and Seung Min Kim and Jonathan Allen September 2, 2013 01:29 PM EDT Secretary of State John Kerry told House Democrats that the United States faced a “Munich moment” in deciding whether to respond to the alleged use of chemical weapons by the Syrian government. In a 70-minute conference call on Monday afternoon, Kerry derided Syrian President Bashar Assad as a “two-bit dictator” who will “continue to act with impunity,” and he urged lawmakers to back President Barack Obama’s plan for “limited, narrow” strikes against the Assad regime, Democratic sources on...

It's a potent sign of how low the American political bar is set that gratitude is expressed because a US president says he will ask Congress to vote before he starts bombing another country that is not attacking or threatening the US. That the US will not become involved in foreign wars of choice without the consent of the American people through their representatives Congress is a central mandate of the US Constitution. George Bush, of course, sought Congressional approval for the war in Iraq. There is no reason to believe that a Congressional rejection of the war's authorization would...

"The West behaves towards the Islamic world like a monkey with a grenade," Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin, who is known for his sharp tongue, wrote on Twitter.

As you know, on July 4th, the U.S. joined other OAS member-states in unanimously deciding to suspend the right of Honduras to participate in the OAS. Our goal remains the restoration of the democratic order in Honduras. And we renew our call on all political and social actors in Honduras to find a peaceful solution to this crisis. We regret the necessity of this measure and look forward to the day when circumstances will allow the measure to be lifted and Honduras’ participation resumed. It’s important to note that under the provisions of the Inter-American Democratic Charter, this suspension does...

Bill Gertz, defense and national security reporter for The Washington Times, argues that high-level bureaucrats in the State Department, White House, Pentagon, and CIA have repeatedly undermined the Bush administration's national security policies. Mr. Gertz says that these unelected officials - liberals from both political parties - have pursued their own agendas towards countries like Iran, China, North Korea, and Iraq and have weakened U.S. security as a result. Mr. Gertz discusses his book with Frank Gaffney, president and CEO of the Center for Security Policy.

Minutes before airtime Friday night, the two co-founders of the Commission on Presidential Debates, former Democratic chairman Paul Kirk and former Republican chairman Frank Fahrenkopf, made their move. The two men appeared without warning on center stage of the Gertrude Ford Center, and, as Kirk began to speak - declaiming such phrases as "The stakes could not be higher" and "the complexities that lie before us" and "serious choices that face the nation" and "it is in our power to decide," he might have been taken (and was, by this observer) to be someone out there to check the mikes...

Former State Dept. employee Lawrence C. Yontz, 48, pled guilty before a U.S. magistrate to illegally accessing hundreds of passport files, including those of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McCain. He didn’t access Sarah Palin’s passport file, presumably because she obtained a passport for the first time last year. According to the Justice Dept.: In pleading guilty, Yontz admitted that between February 2005 and March 2008, he logged onto the PIERS database and viewed the passport applications of approximately 200 celebrities, athletes, actors, politicians and their immediate families, musicians, game show contestants, members of the media corps, prominent business...

"...Two officials of the Bush administration say that if Obama had done what the Post story asserted – which they believe to be untrue – U.S. Ambassador Crocker and embassy officials attending the meeting would have ensured that the Bush administration heard about it immediately. If such an incident occurred in front of officials of the Bush administration, it would have constituted a foreign policy breach and would have been front-page huge news; it would not have leaked out two months later in an op-ed column..."

The United States registered an official protest with Israel against its ambassador to the United Nations, Dan Gillerman, for calling former U.S. President Jimmy Carter an "enemy of Israel" prior to Carter's recent visit to the region. A senior Foreign Ministry source said Saturday that the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv asked that Gillerman be made aware of the U.S. administration's dissatisfaction with the disrespectful comments about the former U.S. President.

Author Kenneth Timmerman has provided us one more reason to doubt the validity and objectivity of the recently released National Intelligence Estimate. In an interview with Frontpage magazine, Timmerman discusses the efforts by the "Shadow Warriors" within the CIA and the State Department to sabotage the policies of the Bush Administration. During the Q and A he discusses Van Vann Diepen-one of the three authors of the National Intelligence Estimate. The story concerns John Bolton's efforts to derail North Korea and Iran's nuclear weapons programs. Bolton, who later became the US Ambassador to the United Nations, at the time conceived...

President Bush has been scrambling to rescue his Iran policy after this week's intelligence switcheroo, but the fact that the White House has had to spin so furiously is a sign of how badly it has bungled this episode. In sum, Mr. Bush and his staff have allowed the intelligence bureaucracy to frame a new judgment in a way that has undermined four years of U.S. effort to stop Iran's nuclear ambitions. This kind of national security mismanagement has bedeviled the Bush Presidency. Recall the internal disputes over post-invasion Iraq, the smearing of Ahmad Chalabi by the State Department and...

If only the bumblers, blusterers and other bureaucrats in our "intelligence" services could make up their minds. The estimates of what we know about Iran and its nuclear ambitions, released this week just in time to undercut the U.N. sanctions meant to deter another Islamic bomb, underscores how little the bumblers know. These are the wiseheads who only four months ago were telling the president and Congress that Iran was hard at work developing their bomb. Now they want the president, Congress and the rest of us to believe that the Iranians actually stopped work, maybe, on their bomb four...

Stupid Intelligence By Alan M. DershowitzFrontPageMagazine.com | Friday, December 07, 2007 The recent national intelligence estimate that concluded that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 is just about the stupidest intelligence assessment I have ever read. It falls hook, line and sinker for a transparent bait and switch tactic employed not only by Iran, but by several other nuclear powers in the past. The tactic is obvious and well-known to all intelligence officials with an IQ above room temperature. It goes like this: There are two tracks to making nuclear weapons: One is to conduct research and develop...

Rarely has a document from the supposedly hidden world of intelligence had such an impact as the National Intelligence Estimate released this week. Rarely has an administration been so unprepared for such an event. And rarely have vehement critics of the "intelligence community" on issues such as Iraq's weapons of mass destruction reversed themselves so quickly. All this shows that we not only have a problem interpreting what the mullahs in Tehran are up to, but also a more fundamental problem: Too much of the intelligence community is engaging in policy formulation rather than "intelligence" analysis, and too many in...

I wrote yesterday on this whole new NIE story:******************************************* FreeRepublic thread: The New, Suddenly Correct, NIE on Iran********************************* Surprise surprise.  VIPS at work once again?  It smells like more leaks by the VIPS types ala Plame and friends, trying to influence either the tactics used by this Administrations to stop Iran from getting a nuke, or to influence the upcoming elections. And now more information is coming out that bolsters the case that this was another shot over the bow of this Administration by our rogue intelligence agencies.  Kenneth Timmermann, the author of the excellent book "The Shadow Warriors" writes:...

Deja vu?  Remember a few weeks ago when that McClellan story came out in which he supposedly said he was lied to about the Plame affair?  I wrote then: Isn't it curious how the left constantly wailed about Scott McClellan allegedly lying during his press conferences, but now that he is saying something that smells like trash talk about Bush, he is suddenly a truth teller. And now when a new NIE is released to the public saying that Iran has stopped its nuclear weapons program, NOW the left believes our intelligence agencies.  For the last year the left has...

Wild Speculation Alert: I have listed a lot of coincidental and circumstantial evidence in this post folks. I feel compelled to warn everyone when I see links to this NIE and Valerie Plame! It seems the NIE was NOT a consensus view of the US Intelligence Community but a hack job by some folks with possible political aspirations (wonder what CNN debate these folks will turn up in): A highly controversial, 150 page National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran’s nuclear programs was coordinated and written by former State Department political and intelligence analysts — not by more seasoned members of...

JACK CRODDY, FOREIGN SERVICE OFFICER: It's one thing if someone believes in what is going on over there and volunteers. I am sorry, but, basically, that is a potential death sentence, and you know it. And then another thought—who will take care of our children? Who will raise our children if we are dead or seriously wounded? REP. DUNCAN HUNTER, R-CALIF.: I think we should fire those folks that don't want to go. You can't have people on the payroll who refuse to be deployed to the tough places. (END VIDEO CLIP) BRET BAIER, CO-HOST: There you see some of...