Free Republic

Report Shows Tight C.I.A. Control on Interrogations By SCOTT SHANE and MARK MAZZETTI WASHINGTON — Two 17-watt fluorescent-tube bulbs — no more, no less — illuminated each cell, 24 hours a day. White noise played constantly but was never to exceed 79 decibels. A prisoner could be doused with 41-degree water but for only 20 minutes at a stretch. The Central Intelligence Agency’s secret interrogation program operated under strict rules, and the rules were dictated from Washington with the painstaking, eye-glazing detail beloved by any bureaucracy. The first news reports this week about hundreds of pages of newly released documents...

In what almost seems a gleeful pronouncement, The New York Times trumpeted America's powerlessness over the recent capture by pirates of a captain of a U.S. run freighter on the high seas. With an April 9 headline that blares, "Standoff With Pirates Shows U.S. Power Has Limits,"

Check out this Ad praising Zero in my AOL mail view!

Lost in the overall cratering in the stock market yesterday in reaction to Tim Geithner's awful "soiled the bed" TARP II presentation yesterday -- New York Times Company stock closed at $4.23. As of 3:30 PM today, the stock was up 12 cents. Yesterday's close is the stock's lowest point since the company went public in July 1986, and is down over 50% in real terms during that time:

Americans have watched in horror as President Bush has trampled on the Bill of Rights and the balance of power. The list of abuses that President-elect Barack Obama must address is long: once again require the government to get warrants to eavesdrop on Americans; undo scores of executive orders and bill-signing statements that have undermined the powers of Congress; strip out the unnecessary invasions of privacy embedded in the Patriot Act; block new F.B.I. investigative guidelines straight out of J. Edgar Hoover’s playbook. Those are not the only disasters Mr. Obama will inherit. He will have to rescue a drowning...

Senator John McCain was on a roll. In a room reserved for high-stakes gamblers at the Foxwoods Resort Casino in Connecticut, he tossed $100 chips around a hot craps table. When the marathon session ended around 2:30 a.m., the Arizona senator and his entourage emerged with thousands of dollars in winnings. A lifelong gambler, Mr. McCain takes risks, both on and off the craps table. He was throwing dice that night not long after his failed 2000 presidential bid, in which he was skewered by the Republican Party’s evangelical base, opponents of gambling. Mr. McCain was betting at a casino...

The world arrived here more than a century ago with the gold rush and later the railroad. Yet one aspect of American life did not come to town until 1996, the year Sarah Palin ran for mayor and Wasilla got its first local lesson in wedge politics. -SNIP- Anti-abortion fliers circulated. Ms. Palin played up her church work and her membership in the National Rifle Association. The state Republican Party, never involved before because city elections are nonpartisan, ran advertisements on Ms. Palin’s behalf. Two years after Representative Newt Gingrich helped draft the Contract With America to advance Republican positions,...

It wasnt so long ago that John McCain was The New York Times' favorite Republican. Now, the editorial board is apparently so fed up that they can't wait until next day's paper and is blogging about him in the middle of the day: [T]here was something surreal, and offensive, about today’s soundbite from the campaign of Senator John McCain. The presumptive Republican nominee has embarked on a bare-knuckled barrage of negative advertising aimed at belittling Mr. Obama. The most recent ad compares the presumptive Democratic nominee for president to Britney Spears and Paris Hilton — suggesting to voters that he’s...

Wiping the nervous sweat off his brow, Adam Nagourney at the New York Times tries to figure out who misplaced the emperor’s clothes.

When a distinguished American military commander accuses the United States of committing war crimes in its handling of detainees, you know that we need a new way forward. “There is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes,” Antonio Taguba, the retired major general who investigated abuses in Iraq, declares in a powerful new report on American torture from Physicians for Human Rights. “The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.” The first step of accountability isn’t prosecutions. Rather, we...

The New York Times launches its long-awaited smear of John McCain today, and the most impressive aspect of the smear is just how baseless it is. They basically emulate Page Six at the Post, but add in a rehash of a well-known scandal from twenty years ago to pad it out and make it look more impressive. In the end, they present absolutely no evidence of wrongdoing -- only innuendo denied by all of the principals: Early in Senator John McCain’s first run for the White House eight years ago, waves of anxiety swept through his small circle of advisers....

The liberal New York Times is wasting no time in smearing John McCain, the Republican Party nominee for President. Late Wednesday, the Times published to its website a story set to hit print editions Thursday, linking McCain to a female lobbyist. The paper suggested the Arizona Senator has been engaged in an illicit relationship. "A female lobbyist had been turning up with him at fund-raisers, visiting his offices and accompanying him on a client’s corporate jet," the Times reported. "Convinced the relationship had become romantic, some of his top advisers intervened to protect the candidate from himself — instructing staff...

TOLEDO, Ohio - Republican presidential hopeful John McCain issued a statement Wednesday night saying he "will not allow a smear campaign" to distract from his campaign as published reports questioned his relationship with a lobbyist. The Washington Post quoted longtime aide John Weaver, who split with McCain last year, as saying he met with Vicki Iseman and urged her to stay away from McCain. The New York Times suggested an inappropriate relationship between the Arizona senator and Iseman, a Washington lobbyist. The New York Times quoted anonymous aides saying they had confronted McCain and Iseman, urging them to stay away...

<p>The CaucusThe latest political news from around the nation. Join the discussion.</p> <p>Vicki Iseman at an awards dinner in 2004.</p> <p>A female lobbyist had been turning up with him at fund-raisers, in his offices and aboard a client’s corporate jet. Convinced the relationship had become romantic, some of his top advisers intervened to protect the candidate from himself — instructing staff members to block the woman’s access, privately warning her away and repeatedly confronting him, several people involved in the campaign said on the condition of anonymity.</p>

I post this on the vanity thread, and have been a part of the Mitt or McCain (or Huck or Rudy) debate since the South Carolina primary ended. I chose to go with Mitt. Everyone has an argument AGAINST the candidates who are NOT their guys...and some are good...others not so good... I frankly understand why some might vote for Rudy, or maybe even Mike Huck...these two guys weren't endorsed by two of the biggest liberal newspapers in America. I think Mitt is the best of the bunch, and I don't understand why ANYONE who is conservative would embrace the...

IT is probably not to his advantage that Mitt Romney’s clean-scrubbed, youthful presence so readily reminds voters of those earnest Mormon missionaries knocking on their doors. If it were almost any other church, a missionary past would most likely be an asset for a presidential candidate. To have spent two years in mission work after high school is a sign of early and admirable idealism, commitment and strength of character. But to many American Christians, those friendly Mormon missionaries embody exactly what they fear and resent about Mormonism. And Mr. Romney, after nearly a year of graciously sidestepping invitations to...

To believe that this corruption will simply evaporate when the Bush presidency is done is to underestimate the permanent erosion inflicted over the past six years. What was once shocking and unacceptable in America has now been internalized as the new normal. This is most apparent in the Republican presidential race, where most of the candidates seem to be running for dictator and make no apologies for it. They’re falling over each other to expand Gitmo, see who can promise the most torture and abridge the largest number of constitutional rights.

The New York Times is still obsessing over Blackwater – well at least it gives Halliburton a break. Today the Times reports: The American security contractor Blackwater USA has been involved in a far higher rate of shootings while guarding American diplomats in Iraq than other security firms providing similar services to the State Department, according to Bush administration officials and industry officials. The Times doesn't have any precise figures for Blackwater, but explains: In 2005, DynCorp reported 32 shootings during about 3,200 convoy missions, and in 2006 that company reported 10 episodes during about 1,500 convoy missions. While comparable...

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- President Bush's spokesman on Monday denied a published report that described intensifying debate among White House officials over whether to begin a gradual pullback of U.S. troops in Iraq. White House spokesman Tony Snow said a story in The New York Times about a proposed "gradual withdrawal"of forces in "high-casualty neighborhoods in Baghdad and other cities" is "way ahead of the facts." "There's no debate right now on withdrawing forces from Iraq," Snow said. The report and denial come as a GOP senator said support for the president's war policy was eroding and as the Senate prepares...

MIAMI, June 14 — Addressing rising anger about the cost of owning a home in Florida — and the recent troubles of the state’s real estate industry — the Legislature on Thursday approved a plan for a property tax cut it said would be the largest in state history. The plan was championed by Gov. Charlie Crist, a Republican who has vowed to make taxes “drop like a rock,” and Marco Rubio, the Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, who has made property-tax relief the main goal of his first year in power. The cost of the package was...

March 21, 2007 Editorial Tom DeLay Looks Back Since his forced retreat from power in a corruption scandal, Tom DeLay, the former House Republican majority leader, must have been watching re-runs of “Cool Hand Luke.” That film’s cynical rationalization of life’s conflicts as merely a “failure to communicate” is Mr. DeLay’s approach to explaining the Republicans’ loss of Congress last year. No, no, he insists in a new memoir, it wasn’t voters revolting against the quid pro quo corruption that Mr. DeLay turned into a dark art. Rather, Republicans “did not communicate their message” and overcome “short-term, media-fed issues.”...

March 16, 2007 Editorial Phony Fraud Charges In its fumbling attempts to explain the purge of United States attorneys, the Bush administration has argued that the fired prosecutors were not aggressive enough about addressing voter fraud. It is a phony argument; there is no evidence that any of them ignored real instances of voter fraud. But more than that, it is a window on what may be a major reason for some of the firings. In partisan Republican circles, the pursuit of voter fraud is code for suppressing the votes of minorities and poor people. By resisting pressure to crack...

WASHINGTON — The New York Times will express regret for hurting the feelings of the family of a Texas soldier after publishing a photograph and a video showing him as he lay dying in Baghdad. The letter is part of an agreement reached Wednesday between the Army and the Times to resolve a controversy about the use of images of Staff Sgt. Hector Leija without his consent.

We’ve been down this road before. This time, it has to be different. There have been too many times that President Bush has promised a new strategy on Iraq, only to repeat the same old set of failed approaches and unachievable objectives. Americans need to hear Mr. Bush offer something truly new — not more glossy statements about ultimate victory, condescending platitudes about what hard work war is, or aimless vows to remain “until the job is done.” If the voters sent one clear message to Mr. Bush last November, it was that it is time to start winding down...

"In a discussion about the Vietnam war with former President Dwight Eisenhower, President Johnson said he was 'trying to win it just as fast as I can in every way that I know how.'" 11-18-2006 Associated Press Tapes Reveal Lyndon Johnson Railing at New York Times Recording Also Released a Discussion With Dwight Eisenhower on Vietnam By KELLEY SHANNON, AP AUSTIN, Texas (Nov. 18) - As American involvement in Vietnam deepened, President Lyndon Johnson railed against "bunch of commies" running The New York Times and complained about the newspaper's criticism of the war, according to taped phone conversations released Friday....

Yesterday we noted that Jill Abramson, managing editor of the New York Times, had remarked that "people are always surprised when I tell them that we sell a lot of subscriptions at West Point." Many readers wrote us to explain why this is. Here's one of them, Rob Munden: Cadets are required to subscribe to the New York Times (fees deducted from your account, no alternatives given), and unless things have changed from the late '80s when I was there, plebes [freshmen] are required to be conversant with every story on the front page and front page of the sports...

Separating anatomy from what it means to be a man or a woman, New York City is moving forward with a plan to let people alter the sex on their birth certificate even if they have not had sex-change surgery. Under the rule being considered by the city’s Board of Health, which is likely to be adopted soon, people born in the city would be able to change the documented sex on their birth certificates by providing affidavits from a doctor and a mental health professional laying out why their patients should be considered members of the opposite sex, and...

The New York Times is moaning the supposed loss of the "Republican Moderate" in Congress with their latest piece, Moderate Republicans Feeling Like Endangered Species. Amusingly, some of the names they use to define a "Republican Moderate" are Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine and Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island. They also mention Mike DeWine of Ohio, but the three they focus on are Snowe, Collins and Chafee... these are the people they call "moderate". Let's take a look at how the ACU rates the conservative voting record of these three (0 being least conservative and 100 the most...

Many adults in the United States believe the current federal government has not been completely forthcoming on the issue of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, according to a poll by the New York Times and CBS News. 53 per cent of respondents think the Bush administration is hiding something, and 28 per cent believe it is lying. Only 16 per cent of respondents say the government headed by U.S. president George W. Bush is telling the truth on what it knew prior to the terrorist attacks, down five points since May 2002. On Aug. 6, 2001, a Presidential Daily Briefing titled...

Speaker J. Dennis Hastert faced intensifying questions on Monday about why Republicans had not reacted more assertively to Representative Mark Foley’s messages to a teenage page, as members of his party, fearing a political debacle, demanded a strong response. Straining to hold the party together five weeks from Election Day amid unfolding revelations about the case, Mr. Hastert and his leadership team held a conference call with House Republicans on Monday night and heard blunt advice and criticism from participants who pressed for further action to reassure voters. “This is a political problem, and we need to step up and...

At least two news organizations were tipped off to e-mail messages sent by Representative Mark Foley long before the story of his sexually explicit remarks to teenage pages broke last week and forced him to resign. --Snip-- Brian Ross of ABC News said he learned about the e-mail messages in August but was too busy with Hurricane Katrina and the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks to pursue them immediately. None of the organizations seemed to anticipate how big the story would become. ---Snip--- Then, in June, the reports resurfaced on Capitol Hill, where a neighborhood resident struck up a...

FLASH: 4 FOLEY STORIES PAGE ONE NYT MONDAY, NEWSROOM SOURCES TELL DRUDGE...

In the hierarchy of Congress, the high school students who serve as Congressional pages fall somewhere near the bottom, seemingly invisible as they scurry through the hallways of the Capitol ferrying messages to powerful lawmakers who often fail to give them a second glance. In that rarefied world, Representative Mark Foley, the silver-haired Republican from Florida, stood out. He took pains to befriend the 16- and 17-year-old aides, several former pages said in interviews on Sunday. He chatted with them on the House floor, they said, sent handwritten notes and urged them to keep in touch when they left Washington...

Report is far from damning of President's insistence on maintaining the course in Iraq TRUTH, like beauty, is apparently to be in the eye of the beholder. That's the only conclusion you can draw from the reaction to the US National Intelligence Estimate entitled Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the US, with a declassified summary of its conclusions released by President George W. Bush after parts were leaked to The New York Times.

Republicans and Democrats began showing at least 30 new campaign advertisements in contested House and Senate districts across the country on Tuesday. Of those, three were positive. For Republicans, it was the leading edge of a wave of negative advertisements against Democratic candidates, the product of more than a year of research into the personal and professional backgrounds of Democratic challengers. “What do we really know about Angie Paccione?” an announcer asks about a Democratic challenger in Colorado. “Angie Paccione had 10 legal claims against her for bad debts and campaign violations. A court even ordered her wages garnished.” For...

Expressing regret for his actions and apologies to his administration colleagues, Richard L. Armitage, the former deputy secretary of state, confirmed today that he was the source who first told a columnist about the intelligence officer at the center of the C.I.A. leak case. “It was a terrible error on my part,” Mr. Armitage said in an interview. He added, “ There wasn’t a day when I didn’t feel like I had let down the President, the Secretary of State, my colleagues, my family and the Wilsons. I value my ability to keep state secrets. This was bad and I...

Israel has asked the Bush administration to speed delivery of short-range antipersonnel rockets armed with cluster munitions, which it could use to strike Hezbollah missile sites in Lebanon, two American officials said Thursday. The request for M-26 artillery rockets, which are fired in barrages and carry hundreds of grenade-like bomblets that scatter and explode over a broad area, is likely to be approved shortly, along with other arms, a senior official said. But some State Department officials have sought to delay the approval because of concerns over the likelihood of civilian casualties, and the diplomatic repercussions. The rockets, while they...

When they first met as United States president and Israeli prime minister, George W. Bush made clear to Ariel Sharon he would not follow in the footsteps of his father. The first President Bush had been tough on Israel, especially the Israeli settlements in occupied lands that Mr. Sharon had helped develop. But over tea in the Oval Office that day in March 2001 — six months before the Sept. 11 attacks tightened their bond — the new president signaled a strong predisposition to support Israel. “He told Sharon in that first meeting that I’ll use force to protect Israel,...

LONDON, July 17 — The problem with most movie action heroes, said Alex Pettyfer, who plays a teenage secret agent in the forthcoming film “Stormbreaker,” is that they are way too old. “He said, like, ‘Imagine your dad on an ironing board, snowboarding down a mountain with a bunch of guys chasing him,’ ” Mr. Pettyfer, 16, said recently, recounting a preproduction conversation with the screenwriter of “Stormbreaker,” Anthony Horowitz. The full horror of the image is meant to speak for itself: Mr. Pettyfer’s father is “like 47, 48.” To open in Britain on Friday and in the United States...

NEW YORK According to a published report, Ann Coulter has (in jest, we assume) claimed to have sent that mysterious white powder to The New York Times. Reporter Jacob Bernstein, in a "Memo Pad" item in today's Women's Wear Daily, wrote that he received a message from a New York Times source saying that Friday's powder mailing -- which included an Xed-out Times editorial and what ended up being corn starch -- "makes all of Ann Coulter's comments a little less funny. I wonder if she considers herself at all responsible when lunatics read her columns and she says that...

This past Wednesday, the New York Times took the opportunity to praise their photographers and included the photo below by Joao Silva. The photo's caption reads: "A sniper loyal to Shiite cleric Moqtada al Sadr fires towards U.S. positions [emphasis added ours] in the cemetery in Najaf, Iraq." Following that was this critque by Michelle McNally: "Right there with the Mahdi army. Incredible courage." (Click on image to enlarge and to view the rest of slideshow.)...We have a suggestion for how the New York Times can show it truly is on America's side. We recommend that...

At the confirmation hearings for John Roberts, there were two theories about what kind of a chief justice he would be. His critics maintained that he was an extreme conservative whose politics would drive his legal rulings. Judge Roberts, on the other hand, insisted that he was "not an ideologue," and that his judicial philosophy was to be "modest," which he defined as recognizing that judges should "decide the cases before them" and not try to legislate or "execute the laws." Judicial modesty is an intriguing idea, with appeal across the political spectrum. For all the talk of liberal activist...

By a vote of 302 to 219, the European Parliament approved a resolution demanding that European banks and governments disclose what they knew about the U.S. program to monitor terrorists' financial transactions. The New York Times reports one French politician accused the U.S. of "rifling through our private bank accounts," and an Italian lawmaker compared the case to alleged CIA kidnappings of terror suspects, saying it has the same objective, "to extort information." The administration had tried to convince the Times not to unveil the secret program, arguing among other things, that it would hurt cooperation with the Europeans. But...

When Gov. Jon S. Corzine looks back at the Budget Crisis of '06 and begins to ponder re-election, he may be able to say that his tough-medicine plan to increase the sales tax was the right way to turn around the state's troubled finances. But as New Jersey braced for the fourth day of a government shutdown ordered on Saturday by Mr. Corzine — at a cost of several million dollars a day to the state coffers — he is the person residents seem to be holding responsible for the loss of services. Some have been heard to grumble that...

Memo to: Carl RoveFrom: Agent SmithCC: Dubya, Lord Cheney, Mark LevinSubject: It is clear that the arrogant treasonous clymers at the NY Times need a boot up their collective socialist butts ASAP.There is always a silver lining in the clouds if you look long enough. The proper means of dealing with the NY Times, in a completely fair and above reproach manner is already in place. The Justice Department should expand the investigative portfolio of Mr. Fitzgerald to include the security leaks at the NY Times. His office is obviously currently under utilized and he, and his team, have tremendous...

Mr. Bill Keller, Managing EditorThe New York Times229 West 43rd StreetNew York, NY 10036 Dear Mr. Keller: The New York Times' decision to disclose the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program, a robust and classified effort to map terrorist networks through the use of financial data, was irresponsible and harmful to the security of Americans and freedom-loving people worldwide.  In choosing to expose this program, despite repeated pleas from high-level officials on both sides of the aisle, including myself, the Times undermined a highly successful counter-terrorism program and alerted terrorists to the methods and sources used to track their money trails. Your...

The F.B.I. accused Representative William J. Jefferson, Democrat of Louisiana, on Sunday of taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes by a Kentucky businessman and hiding $90,000 from the scheme in his home freezer in Washington. The accusations appeared in court documents that were made public only hours after a team of 15 agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation completed an unusual all-night search of Mr. Jefferson's Congressional offices. F.B.I. officials said the raid, which began about 7:15 p.m. Saturday and ended early Sunday afternoon, was the first the agency had ever conducted at a lawmaker's office on...