Free Republic

The world was well aware of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) stockpiles. Politicians from both parties admitted that Saddam would not disarm voluntarily, and that military force was the only solution. Intelligence sources estimate that Iraq had 100 million tons of munitions, which is an astonishing 60 percent of our own arsenal. According to the House Armed Service Committee, Saddam himself admitted to possessing thousands of tons of WMD. Since we have not found the “smoking gun” proof of a WMD arsenal, they must have gone somewhere else. Prior to our liberation of Iraq, it was clear we...

State Duma deputies warned Lithuania against agreeing to place U.S. missile defense sites on its soil, saying Wednesday that such a move could trigger a Russian military buildup in the region.

Publisher Peter Osnos, who admits to personally working with former Bush White House press secretary Scott McClellan on his new book, What Happened, began his career as an assistant to I.F. Stone, the pro-communist "journalist" named as a Soviet agent of influence who was the uncle of Weather Underground communist terrorist Kathy Boudin. But the connections don't end there. Boudin's son Chesa was raised by Barack Obama associates Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, who were Boudin's comrades in the communist terrorist group, after Kathy Boudin went to prison for her involvement in an armed robbery and assault that took the...

British soldiers seriously injured in Iraq and Afghanistan are being denied government compensation because they were wounded by the 'wrong type of bomb'. The Ministry of Defence has refused payouts for injuries under its criminal injuries scheme that may have been caused by landmines left by the Soviet army in Afghanistan or other discarded ordnance. Under the MoD's criminal injuries compensation overseas scheme, frontline troops can claim for an injury or death not caused by military operations against the Taliban or Iraqi militia. Alternatively, troops injured after April 2005 can also apply for financial support under the armed forces compensation...

The increasing vitriol of the Democratic presidential WrestleMania shouldn't distract from the opportunity before progressives. The election this year has the potential to be not simply a change election but a sea-change election, one that marks the end of the conservative era that has dominated our politics for nearly three decades. It could be the progressive equivalent of the conservative triumph of 1980. In 1980 Ronald Reagan, the self-described "movement conservative," took the White House from incumbent Jimmy Carter while Republicans picked up thirty-four seats in the House and gained control of the Senate, sweeping out liberal stalwarts like George...

If there exists one visional depiction of the Cold War’s end, it is still a Eurocentric one, November 9, 1989, the day East Berliners joined with those of the city’s West in celebration of the Berlin Wall’s demise. Three weeks earlier, on October 19, 1989, Stalinist East German dictator Erich Honecker, facing mass internal opposition, was forced from power when the Kremlin, overwhelmed with comparable resistance on many fronts, for the first time refused to provide the East German dictatorship with the political or military cover it had come to expect in its Cold War defense of the regime’s totalitarian...

LAURENS - Republican White House hopeful Fred Thompson said Wednesday that the United State's spending on programs like Medicare and welfare puts the country on a course for the same financial oblivion that brought down the Soviet Union during the Cold War. "We're doing it in a different way," Thompson said during a radio interview in response to a question about President Ronald Reagan's strategy of outspending the Soviet Union and whether the U.S. was now on the same course. "The bottom line could be the same." Recurring spending demands for programs that pay for health care, welfare and social...

Calling most existing textbooks “Russophobic, the Putin Regime has approved a revised version. The new Russian history textbook praises President Vladimir Putin as “a savior in the heroic tradition of Joseph Stalin.” "I have analyzed books on Russian history in neighboring countries and come to the conclusion that our neighbors excel at educational Russophobia," said Alexander Filippov, editor of the new textbook. “They portray Soviet domination of Eastern Europe as a bad thing. Overlooked is the fact that Russian tanks are all that stood between these nations and Western decadence. As we have seen, since the withdrawal of this protection...

The official presidential portrait of John Fitzgerald Kennedy tells quite a story. His pensive expression, curled shoulders and folded arms are not mere emblems of the physical ailments he so manfully absorbed; they help cut the figure of a northeastern liberal -- a Democrat -- who through inspired oratory and steely resolve faced down Soviet communism. This, at a time when many were resigned to the inevitability of its expansion. But Kennedy -- historic though his presidency was, and beatified though it has become -- in his time was not breaking the mould of the Democratic party in the United...

Fifty years ago, a small Soviet satellite was launched, stunning the U.S. and sparking a massive technology research effort. Could we be in for another "October surprise"? Quick, what's the most influential piece of hardware from the early days of computing? The IBM 360 mainframe? The DEC PDP-1 minicomputer? Maybe earlier computers such as Binac, ENIAC or Univac? Or, going way back to the 1800s, is it the Babbage Difference Engine? More likely, it was a 183-pound aluminum sphere called Sputnik, Russian for "traveling companion." Fifty years ago, on Oct. 4, 1957, radio-transmitted beeps from the first man-made object to...

Newspapers like to play gotcha games with presidential candidates and their stump speeches. Most of the time, the fact-checking sessions focus on number-juggling on tax proposals and spending policy, and they find plenty of daylight between claims and reality. However, when the Washington Post attempts to fact-check Fred Thompson on historical references, they reveal more of their bias than of Fred's. They try to take apart Fred's claim that Americans "have shed more blood for other people's liberty than any other combination of nations in the history of the world", and manage to completely miss the point: The number of...

“Al-Qaeda Stronger than Ever.” “U.S. Concern at Al-Qaeda Strength.” These and similar titles accompanied news stories that began breaking during the second week of July, announcing leaks of a disturbing new classified intelligence report. Prepared for President Bush by the National Counter Terrorism Center (NCTC), the five-page report entitled Al-Qaeda Better Prepared to Strike the West paints a picture of a revived, more dangerous terror network led by Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri. The Associated Press reported on July 11 that an unnamed counterterrorism official familiar with the still-unreleased report paraphrased the briefing paper as finding that al-Qaeda is...

Russia and China today carried out joint war games after both had warned the US not to interfere in central Asia. Some 6,000 troops and hundred of armoured vehicles and fighter jets took part in military manoeuvres in the Ural mountains watched by the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and his Chinese counterpart, Hu Jintao. The two men, as well as the leaders of a clutch of former Soviet central Asian republics, had taken part in yesterday's regional summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. The meeting concluded with a thinly veiled warning to the US to keep away from the energy-rich...

RUSSIAN President Vladimir Putin sent 14 bomber aircraft on patrols far beyond its own territory today, marking the permanent return to a Soviet-era practice. Mr Putin said the resumption of flights was a response to security threats posed by other military powers. “We have decided to restore flights by Russian strategic aviation on a permanent basis,” Mr Putin said at joint military exercises with China and four Central Asian states in Russia's Ural mountains. “Today, August 17 at 00:00 hours, 14 strategic bombers took to the air from seven airfields across the country, along with support and refuelling aircraft. “In...

MOSCOW (Thomson Financial) - A Moscow court has given the green light for the seizure of 100 pct of the shares of the Russian oil group Russneft, Russian news agencies reported, citing a Russian interior ministry statement. 'A Moscow court has approved the seizure of 100 pct of the shares of the company. Russneft shares have now been seized,' the statement said. The ministerial press office was unavailable for comment. The seizure follows a judicial procedure launched in January by the interior ministry's committee responsible for tax arrears. Another Moscow court had found in favour of the Russian fiscal authorities...

MURMANSK, Russia - Heavy sedatives keep Larisa Arap languishing in a woozy haze at a mental asylum, the victim not of a troubled mind, her family says, but of a Soviet-era practice that continues to muzzle and punish dissent in today's Russia. Earlier this summer, Arap, an activist with former chess champion Garry Kasparov's opposition movement, co-wrote an article that alleged abusive practices at local psychiatric clinics. When Arap appeared at a Murmansk clinic to pick up a routine medical certificate July 5, a doctor called police and had her taken to a local asylum. The doctors handling Arap's case...

The riddle of Afghan graves By Bilal Sarwary BBC News, Kabul On a dusty desert plain a few kilometres north of Kabul, Afghan security officials recently revealed to reporters the latest mass grave discovered in the country. Some of the bodies were still in a sitting position in rooms built underground the former weapons depot in the Shomali plain. Others were in a lying position. Some still had clothes on. What is known is that the bodies are of victims of Afghanistan's war-torn past. But what is not known is - from which war? Afghanistan is no stranger to such...

A little over a week ago, Vladimir Putin tested a weapon deadlier than anything developed by the Soviet Union. A missile launched from a submarine in the White Sea entered the stratosphere and returned precisely on target 3,800 miles away in the Russian Far East — the other side of the world. Such tests are meant to send messages. The target could just have easily been Tehran, Los Angeles or London. It signalled that Russia means business. After a hiatus of two decades, the arms race is back. ...The Russian military is once again treating Nato as the glavny protivnik,...

"Vladimir Bukovksy, the 63-year old former Soviet dissident, fears that the European Union is on its way to becoming another Soviet Union. In a speech he delivered in Brussels last week Mr Bukovsky called the EU a “monster” that must be destroyed, the sooner the better, before it develops into a fullfledged totalitarian state. ... Hence, we have now been warned. Meanwhile they are introducing more and more ideology. The Soviet Union used to be a state run by ideology. Today’s ideology of the European Union is social-democratic, statist, and a big part of it is also political correctness. I...

Remembering Communism’s Victims By Jacob Laksin FrontPageMagazine.com June 15, 2007 Washington D.C. -- Holocaust victims have one. So do the fallen of World War II and Vietnam. But what of the estimated 100 million who perished at the hands of the last century’s greatest tragedy, communist totalitarianism? Until recently, these silenced masses -- victims of Soviet gulags, Vietnamese concentration camps, Cambodia‘s killing fields, the East German, Cuban and North Korean police states -- had no fitting memorial to remind the world of their unjust, and often inhuman, fate, let alone of the ideology that abbreviated so many lives. That changed...

In an interview with the Globe and Mail, Russian President Vladimir Putin has threatened to target Europe with missiles, including potentially nuclear weapons, in a dramatic escalation of his Cold War-style showdown with the United States. Mr. Putin, in an interview at his country residence outside Moscow, said he considers U.S. plans to build an eastern European anti-missile site to shoot down Iranian missiles a provocation aimed at Russia. Asked what he might do to retaliate, he said he would return Russia to the Cold War status where missiles were aimed at European targets. "It is obvious that if part...

via translation - Ukraine: thousands of soldiers move towards Kiev KIEV - Several thousands of soldiers belonging to the troops of the ministry for the Interior, carried out by their commander, honest to president Viktor Iouchtchenko, move towards Kiev, in spite of the order of their minister, faithful to the Ukrainian government, affirmed Saturday the ministry. “On May 26 (...) of the units of the interior, strong troops several thousands of people, took the road towards Kiev”, affirmed the ministry all while being said “worried” by this situation. “The order on their displacement was given personally by the commander of...

'Soviets engineered Six Day War' David Horovitz, THE JERUSALEM POST May. 16, 2007 In a new book that "totally contradicts everything that has been accepted to this day" about the Six Day War, two Israeli authors claim that the conflict was deliberately engineered by the Soviet Union to create the conditions in which Israel's nuclear program could be destroyed. Having received information about Israel's progress towards nuclear arms, the Soviets aimed to draw Israel into a confrontation in which their counterstrike would include a joint Egyptian-Soviet bombing of the reactor at Dimona. They had also geared up for a naval...

Russian President Vladimir Putin and his aides at the Kremlin say they feel surrounded, and they're not going to take it anymore. Russian corporations are being foiled abroad; the Russian state is being unfairly blamed for volatility in global energy markets; and suggestions that the state is eliminating its critics are just preposterous. Why all the bad press? Because of "Russophobia" — an unreasoning Western hostility toward Russia — according to the Kremlin. "I see a campaign here," Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said in a TV interview last week. Amid all the allegations that the Kremlin — in a...

China's intelligence services are among the most aggressive at spying on the United States, followed by Cuban, Russian and Iranian spy agencies, according to the U.S. government's top counterintelligence coordinator. "These services are eating our lunch," Joel F. Brenner, the new head of the Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive, said in his first interview since being named to the counterspy post in August. Mr. Brenner, a former inspector general at the National Security Agency, told The Washington Times that the U.S. remains the No. 1 target of "virtually every significant espionage service on the face of the Earth." China's...

Russia has warned Poland and the Czech Republic against hosting elements of a US anti-missile defence shield. For the former Soviet satellites Moscow's sabre rattling underlines the need to forge strong military links with the US. The missile defence system is designed to protect the eastern US seaboard against a nuclear attack from the Middle East. Poland and the Czech Republic stand to gain little direct security from the shield bases on their territory but they see the US presence as a bulwark against Russian influence and repayment for the US's role in defeating the Soviet Union. "Considering the relative...

TALLINN, Estonia — Estonian lawmakers on Thursday narrowly approved a bill calling for the removal of a Soviet war memorial from their capital, ignoring Moscow's warning of "irreversible consequences" for relations between the two countries. In a 46-44 vote, lawmakers in the 101-member assembly approved the Law on Forbidden Structures, which prohibits the public display of monuments that glorify the five-decade Soviet occupation of Estonia. Eleven lawmakers were absent or abstained.

Mr Putin said the US "has overstepped its borders" The Munich security conference was born in the 1960s - the height of the Cold War. Forty years on, there been talk of a new chill. Given the tone and content of Russian President Vladimir Putin's address to the gathered defence ministers, parliamentarians and pundits, it is not, perhaps, hard to see why. Warming quickly to his task after only the briefest of greetings, President Putin accused the US of establishing, or trying to establish, a "uni-polar" world. "What is a uni-polar world? No matter how we beautify this term,...

WASHINGTON -- An old saying in politics in Moscow is that relations between the United States and Russia are always better when a Republican rules in the White House. We are statesmen, and the Republicans are statesmen. Because we both believe in power, it is easy for the two of us to understand each other. The problem with this saying is the paranoid mind-set behind it, for it implies that the nature of Russian-U.S. relations has not changed fundamentally since the Cold War's end -- that the animosities that exist between the two countries are those of two permanently implacable...

Russia has denounced moves in Estonia, a former part of the Soviet Union, to criminalize public displays of Soviet symbols. Foreign Ministry spokesman Mikhail Kamynin described the draft law, which would equate Soviet and Nazi symbols, as "blasphemous." The Estonian government on November 30 approved the bill and sent it to parliament for adoption. The amendment bans the public display of symbols including the Soviet hammer and sickle and the Nazi swastika, saying these emblems incite hatred.

THE COLD WAR was supposed to have ended 15 years ago, but the death in London of Alexander V. Litvinenko presents Scotland Yard with more than your average murder mystery. The former Russian spy and fierce critic of the Kremlin was poisoned. But how and by whom? The tale began Nov. 1 at itsu, a busy London sushi restaurant near Piccadilly Circus that features a Madame Butterfly Zinger, Squirrels Dreams and something called Bang Bang Free Range Chicken. Poison is definitely not on the menu. Litvinenko, an outspoken critic of Russian President Vladimir V. Putin and a KGB successor agency,...

Poisoned Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko died on Thursday in an intensive care ward, London's University College Hospital said. Litvinenko, a fierce critic of the Russian government, suffered a rapid deterioration in his health on Thursday, but doctors still were unable to determine the cause of his death, a spokesman said in a statement.

While interacting with a select gathering of "Russia hands" from Western academia, media and think tanks recently, President Vladimir Putin ventured onto the topic of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) in terms, as he put it, that would be a "revelation ... something probably I have never said to anyone before". Putin, known for his reticence and choice of words, revealed that the Kremlin did not "plan" for the SCO's present standing, but had only set its sights on the organization's potential to resolve the "utilitarian question of settling borders" between China and its post-Soviet neighbors. SCO includes China, Russia,...

Ortega's Return? By Frank J Gaffney Jr. FrontPageMagazine.com | November 1, 2006 This Sunday, the people of Nicaragua will cast votes that may elect their next president in the first round of balloting. Depending on their choice, that exercise in democracy may be the last for some time to come – if the winning candidate reverts to form and ushers in a new era of authoritarianism in a country too long afflicted by his misrule. According to the polls, all other things being equal, Daniel Ortega – the communist revolutionary whose repressive regime ruled in Managua in the 1980s –...

Kennedy’s Comrade: Hunting a KGB Mole in the Democratic PartyBy Fedora With thanks to those who helped Profile of an Agent In 1999, espionage author Christopher Andrew revealed that Soviet archives smuggled by defector Vasili Mitrokhin described an unnamed KGB agent recruited from California Democratic Party circles in the 1970s: Though [Gus] Hall tended to overstate the influence of undeclared members of the CPUSA within the Democratic Party, there was at least one to whom the [KGB’s] Centre attached real importance during the 1970s: a Democratic activist in California recruited as a KGB agent during a visit to Russia. The...

Fifty years ago Monday, the 1956 Hungarian uprising put a crack in the Iron Curtain. But freedom came decades later.BUDAPEST, HUNGARYOctober 1956 was much too eventful a time for Gen. Bela Kiraly to spend in a hospital bed - even if he was recovering from a harrowing five-year jail sentence for alleged treason.In the streets of Budapest, secret police were mowing down ordinary Hungarians who on Oct. 23 attempted to have their demands for Soviet withdrawal read out on the state-controlled radio. But the protesters - armed only with Molotov cocktails and rifles - prevailed, driving out the Red Army...

János HorváthThe 1956 Hungarian Revolution in the Eyes of Ronald Reagan* President Ronald Reagan had a great interest in and knowledge of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, and this knowledge helped to shape his world views and contributed to his morally firm statesmanship. Contrary to the conventional wisdom of his time, he understood that the Soviet Union was not the strong, stable superpower and the wave of the future that it pretended to be. Moreover, he was aware that the smaller nations that had been engulfed into its colonial empire strongly resented the yoke under which they were held. As President...

Fifty years on, revolution still divides Hungary By David Chance and Gergely Szakacs Fri Oct 20, 7:41 AM ET Freedom fighters sit on top of a tank with a revolutionary flag in Budapest at the time of the uprising against the Soviet-supported Hungarian communist regime in 1956. Hungary will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the 1956 uprising on October 23. The picture was taken in the period between October 23 and November 4, 1956. (Laszlo Almasi/Reuters) BUDAPEST (Reuters) - The diary of Gyula Csics for October 23, 1956, starts with a 12-year-old boy tending his grandfathers' graves and ends with...

China has been angered by North Korea's reckless action, with Chinese Ambassador to the United Nations Wang Guangya said at the U.N. headquarters in New York on Tuesday, "There has to be some punitive action." This word--punitive--is heavily loaded, evoking memories of the China-Vietnam War, in which China used force against Vietnam as punishment for Hanoi's incursion into Cambodia, Beijing's ally, in 1979...Russia's maneuvering looks similar to that of China. Although Moscow has strongly opposed U.N. sanctions against Iraq, Iran and North Korea, Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly condemned North Korea's claimed tests, and said Tuesday his country would...

UNITED NATIONS (AP) - Russia and China on Thursday opposed tough sanctions the U.S. wants to impose against North Korea this week for its claimed nuclear test, saying they want more time to work out a more moderate response to Pyongyang's nuclear brinkmanship.

Russia's Foreign Ministry says the international community should take a measured response to North Korea's announced nuclear test. In a press statement, the ministry says the North Korean action threatens the peace, safety and stability of the region. It also calls for Pyongyang to return to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and agree to new talks. North Korea was a signatory of the treaty, but withdrew from it in 2003. Pyongyang also pulled out of six-party negotiations about its nuclear program last year, talks that included Russia. Along with China, Moscow maintains cordial diplomatic relations with Pyongyang, but Russia has been...

RUSSIAN PRESIDENT Vladimir Putin has been throwing a temper tantrum over Georgia's arrest of four members of Russian military intelligence for spying. Putin's anger is not confined to the immediate humiliation of having the Russian officers paraded on television by Georgia's defiant president, Mikhail Saakashvili. And Putin's retaliatory moves -- his imposition of transport and postal sanctions amounting to an economic blockade of the former Soviet republic -- have only made a dangerous situation worse. ... The four Russians were arrested shortly after NATO approved an accelerated dialogue with Georgia suggesting admission soon to the western military alliance. Saakashvili struck...

1944: Poles surrender after Warsaw uprising The Germans have crushed a rebellion in Warsaw led by the Polish Home Army. Street fighting began on 1 August as Soviet troops were heard battling on the outskirts of the Polish capital. After 63 days of struggle and little outside help, the Polish Home Army surrendered to the Germans after a ceasefire at 2200 local time yesterday. Resistance groups had used the sewers to travel from one part of the city to another and send messages. Much of the supplies that were dropped by the RAF and US Air Force landed on enemy...

MOSCOW (Reuters) - President Vladimir Putin warned Georgia on Wednesday not to provoke or blackmail Russia as Moscow ignored international appeals to drop economic sanctions against its southern neighbor. Discussing a dispute with Georgia over the arrests of four Russian officers, who were later released, Putin told lawmakers: "I would not allow anyone to talk to Russia in the language of provocation and blackmail." But in Georgia, the head of the central bank said his country would block Russia's bid to join the World Trade Organization (WTO) as long as economic sanctions were in force. Russia was hoping to end...

Analysis: Moscow wants to rein in its pro-NATO neighbor, and a spy scandal may have provided an opening By Yuri Zarakhovich in Moscow Russia has escalated its showdown with its small, NATO-inclined neighbor of Georgia by closing all transport and postal communications. No trains, no flights, no ships, no vehicles, no mail money orders — nothing can cross the border. This time, it's much worse than just another Russian spat with a former satellite state. The Georgia standoff may soon create a major headache for the Bush Administration, because of U.S. support for Georgia's right to align itself with the...

Russia and Georgia have opened a new front in their feud over the disputed territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Russian and Georgian envoys traded harsh words at the United Nations. Russia asked the U.N. Security Council Tuesday to condemn Georgia's military activities in its breakaway region of Abkhazia. Vitaly Churkin (file photo) Moscow's U.N. Ambassador Vitaly Churkin circulated a draft Security Council resolution calling on Georgia to withdraw its troops from Abkhazia's disputed Kodori Gorge region. The long-simmering Russia-Georgia tensions erupted last week when Georgia detained four Russian military observers in Tbilisi, accusing them of spying. Russia responded...

TV NZ.co New Zealand Russia refuses to lift Georgia ban Tbilisi, capital city of Georgia Oct 4, 2006 Russia has rejected US and EU calls to lift economic sanctions on Georgia, saying it had cut transport links to curb a dangerous military build-up by its pro-Western neighbour. In unusually strident remarks, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov lashed out at the United States. US support for Georgia had "stimulated" Tbilisi into taking unfriendly steps against Russia, he said. Russia cut rail, air and postal links with the former Soviet republic in response to the arrest of four Russian soldiers on spying...

WASHINGTON, October 4 (Itar-Tass) – As for to day Russia “has no Iegal obstacles to deliver nuclear fuel to Iran,” Nikolai Spassky, deputy head of the Russian Rosatom nuclear agency told reporters on Tuesday. “We normally work in the framework of international law which is international agreements signed by Russia and resolutions of the UN Security Council,” Spassky said noting that today there are no such resolutions limiting nuclear fuel deliveries to Iran. However if the United States adopts a law limiting partnership relations with countries cooperating with Iran and if this law affects relations between the two countries in...

If chills did not run down your spine when you heard the tune for the Soviet national anthem, written to glorify the mass-murdering dictator Joseph Stalin, playing for Russia at the Winter Olympics this year in Italy, if you do not shiver every time you hear about Russian people favoring Vladimir Putin, a proud KGB spy, with 70%-plus approval in opinion polls, then perhaps you are ready for this: Russia is re-weaponizing psychiatry as a method of dealing with anti-Kremlin dissent, just as in Soviet times. Two major articles from leading newspapers have documented the early stages of the phenomenon....

MOSCOW, October 1 (Itar-Tass) - Russian President Vladimir Putin sent Chinese President Hu Jintao a message of congratulations on the occasion of the Chinese national holiday – the 57th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China, the presidential press service reported on Sunday. The message of the Russian head of state says, inter alia, as follows: “The real breakthrough in key economic sectors and impressive successes in the social and humanitarian spheres, achieved by Chinese people over these years, evoke sincere respect. The rise in international prestige and influence of the People’s Republic of China and its contribution to strengthening...