http://www.freerepublic.com/tag/stephenfhayes/ en-us Wed, 13 Feb 2008 12:44:50 GMT Focus Forum 15 http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1969573/posts JOHN MCCAIN AND Barack Obama swept the Chesapeake Primaries, as expected. With his victories last night, McCain further solidified his status as the almost-certain nominee of his party. Obama, meanwhile, has taken a lead among delegates to the Democratic convention and is now arguably the frontrunner. With the outcomes last night widely expected, aides to both Obama and McCain had plenty of time to craft victory speeches that would reflect their candidate's thinking on the state of the race. And with varying degrees of intensity, both men used that freedom to begin to frame a McCain-versus-Obama general election contest, something... The Weekly Standard | Frontpagemagazine http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1969573/posts#comment Wed, 13 Feb 2008 12:44:50 GMT http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1689029/posts Hi, You may have heard the news today of a CBS/New York Times poll that stated 51 percent of the American people do not believe Iraq is linked to the war on terrorism. It is a reflection of a biased and dishonest American MSM that people don't know better. If the Democrats should win in November, there will be a "wave the white flag, cut and run surrender in Iraq" (along with cuts or the decimation of the U.S. ballistic missile defense program). I have included a letter that my wife submitted to the Tracy Press (Aug. 22 edition) about... The Weekly Standard http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1689029/posts#comment Thu, 24 Aug 2006 04:05:25 GMT http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1647113/posts THE LAST QUESTION to General Bill Caldwell at his briefing last Thursday on the death of Abu Musab al Zarqawi came from New York Times reporter Richard Oppel, who wanted to know about Abu al-Masri, an Egyptian whom many expect to replace Zarqawi as the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq. Said Caldwell: "Yeah, al Masri, Egyptian Arab. He's not an Iraqi. Born and raised in Egypt. He was trained in Afghanistan, went through his training there. We know he has been involved with IEDs and making here in Iraq. Probably came here around 2002 into Iraq, probably actually helped... Weekly Standard http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1647113/posts#comment Sun, 11 Jun 2006 05:45:57 GMT http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1635831/posts PORTER GOSS'S TENURE as director of central intelligence began with a public spat between the new reform-minded CIA leadership and an intransigent bureaucracy. Now, 18 months later, it is ending in a cloud of confusion. Goss is gone and so are his agents of change. Two of the CIA officials at the heart of that opening battle--Mary Margaret Graham and Stephen Kappes--have been promoted. And the old guard is happy. "The move was seen as a direct repudiation of Goss's leadership and as an olive branch to CIA veterans disaffected by his 18-month tenure," wrote Peter Baker and Charles Babington... Weekly Standard http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1635831/posts#comment Sun, 21 May 2006 13:56:40 GMT http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1598689/posts SADDAM HUSSEIN'S REGIME PROVIDED FINANCIAL support to Abu Sayyaf, the al Qaeda-linked jihadist group founded by Osama bin Laden's brother-in-law in the Philippines in the late 1990s, according to documents captured in postwar Iraq. An eight-page fax dated June 6, 2001, and sent from the Iraqi ambassador in Manila to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Baghdad, provides an update on Abu Sayyaf kidnappings and indicates that the Iraqi regime was providing the group with money to purchase weapons. The Iraqi regime suspended its support--temporarily, it seems--after high-profile kidnappings, including of Americans, focused international attention on the terrorist group. The... Weekly Standard http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1598689/posts#comment Sat, 18 Mar 2006 13:58:16 GMT http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1597225/posts The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) has created a website where it will post documents captured in postwar Afghanistan and Iraq. The website is hosted by the Foreign Military Studies Office Joint Reserve Intelligence Center at Fort Leavenworth and will be updated continuously with new documents. The first batch of materials, released late Wednesday, includes nine documents captured in connection with Operation Iraqi Freedom and 28 documents previously released on February 14, 2006, in conjunction with a study of those documents conducted by analysts at West Point. Sources on Capitol Hill and within the intelligence community tell... Weekly Standard http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1597225/posts#comment Thu, 16 Mar 2006 05:02:25 GMT http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1596393/posts Though crucial details have yet to be resolved, the Bush administration has decided to release the documentsThe Bush administration has decided to release most of the documents captured in post-war Afghanistan and Iraq. The details of the document release are still being worked out, according to officials with knowledge of the discussions. Those details are critical. At issue are things like the timeframe for releasing the documents, the mechanism for scrubbing documents for sensitive information, and most important, the criteria for withholding documents from the public. But some of the captured files should be available to the public and journalists... The Weekly Standard http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1596393/posts#comment Wed, 15 Mar 2006 00:45:56 GMT http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1595925/posts The Bush administration has decided to release most of the documents captured in post-war Afghanistan and Iraq. The details of the document release are still being worked out, according to officials with knowledge of the discussions. Those details are critical. At issue are things like the timeframe for releasing the documents, the mechanism for scrubbing documents for sensitive information, and most important, the criteria for withholding documents from the public. But some of the captured files should be available to the public and journalists within weeks if not days. President George W. Bush has made clear in recent weeks his... The Weekly Standard http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1595925/posts#comment Tue, 14 Mar 2006 02:45:48 GMT http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1576272/posts 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... Weekly Standard http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1576272/posts#comment Sat, 11 Feb 2006 01:16:05 GMT http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1567451/posts Unfinished Story of Iraqi WMD - Saturday, January 28, 2006 @ 11:08:27 PM Speaking routinely now with Steve Hayes of the Weekly Standard and John Loftus of IntelligenceSummit.org and also my best source with regard the Byzantine tale of the Iraqi WMD program that cannot be proved or unproved by the public record of facts established since the capture of Baghdad in April 2003. I mention again the promising mysterious treasure said to be coming to all of us within the next month. John Loftus is in possession of a CD that came to him by a reportedly trustworthy route... American Spectator http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1567451/posts#comment Sun, 29 Jan 2006 18:55:36 GMT http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1566820/posts STEPHEN F. HAYES has written extensively in these pages about a large cache of documents and digital media captured in the course of Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom. As a former intelligence officer who dealt with digital media exploitation and analysis issues at the Defense Intelligence Agency for nearly four years (2001 to 2005), I am prohibited from speaking publicly about what these documents may contain. What I can do is share my professional opinion on how one might solve some of the major problems associated with media exploitation. Let us assume hypothetically that the United States has... Weekly Standard http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1566820/posts#comment Sat, 28 Jan 2006 15:53:20 GMT http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1562725/posts MORE THAN TWO MONTHS AGO, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Pete Hoekstra requested 40 documents captured in postwar Iraq as he sought better understand the activities of the Iraqi regime in the months and years before the U.S. invasion in March 2003. On Friday afternoon, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence finally provided 39 of the 40 documents Hoekstra had requested. I had been seeking the same documents. For more than five months I pestered Department of Defense public affairs staff to see them. I provided titles to the Pentagon staff and, eventually, filed a Freedom of Information Act... The Weekly Standard. http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1562725/posts#comment Sun, 22 Jan 2006 15:51:04 GMT http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1562222/posts AT HIS CONFIRMATION HEARING FOR the new post of director of national intelligence, John Negroponte pledged to keep open lines of communication with Congress. He also explained that his experience as the first U.S. ambassador to Iraq after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein would help him meet the director's responsibility to--in the president's words--"make sure that those whose duty it is to defend America have the information they need to make the right decisions." Testifying in April 2005, Negroponte said: I saw firsthand the savage depredations of terrorists and insurgents who oppose the birth of a new democracy. These are... http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1562222/posts#comment Sat, 21 Jan 2006 15:54:43 GMT http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1555122/posts Terrorist Involvement - Was There Or Wasn't There? By Thomas D. Segel January 10, 2006 In the latest issue of The Weekly Standard there is an interesting article by Stephen F. Hayes titled "Saddam's Terror Training Camps". In it the author reports the former Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein... "Trained thousands of radical Islamic terrorists from the region at camps in Iraq over four years immediately preceding the U.S. invasion, according to documents and photographs recovered by the U.S. military in postwar Iraq." Now this can't possibly be correct. The mainstream media and the liberal left have repeatedly told us... GOP USA http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1555122/posts#comment Tue, 10 Jan 2006 05:28:53 GMT http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1554822/posts THE FORMER IRAQI REGIME OF Saddam Hussein trained thousands of radical Islamic terrorists from the region at camps in Iraq over the four years immediately preceding the U.S. invasion, according to documents and photographs recovered by the U.S. military in postwar Iraq. The existence and character of these documents has been confirmed to THE WEEKLY STANDARD by eleven U.S. government officials. The secret training took place primarily at three camps--in Samarra, Ramadi, and Salman Pak--and was directed by elite Iraqi military units. Interviews by U.S. government interrogators with Iraqi regime officials and military leaders corroborate the documentary evidence. Many of... The Weekly Standard http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1554822/posts#comment Mon, 9 Jan 2006 20:52:47 GMT http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1553841/posts Saddam's Terror Training Camps What the documents captured from the former Iraqi regime reveal--and why they should all be made public. by Stephen F. Hayes 01/16/2006, Volume 011, Issue 17 THE FORMER IRAQI REGIME OF Saddam Hussein trained thousands of radical Islamic terrorists from the region at camps in Iraq over the four years immediately preceding the U.S. invasion, according to documents and photographs recovered by the U.S. military in postwar Iraq. The existence and character of these documents has been confirmed to THE WEEKLY STANDARD by eleven U.S. government officials. The secret training took place primarily at three camps--in... The Weekly Standard http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1553841/posts#comment Sun, 8 Jan 2006 00:43:10 GMT http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1553808/posts Saddam's Terrorist Ties The Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes has been trying for a significant amount of time to get released publicly the captured Iraqi documents (only 2.5 % of which have as yet been translated). He advises that some are about to be released. And they should put an end to the preposterous claims that the Baathists would never work with the Jihadis. Here is what the soon to be released documents reveal, Hayes says: The secret training took place primarily at three camps-in Samarra, Ramadi, and Salman Pak-and was directed by elite Iraqi military units. Interviews by U.S. government... The American Thinker http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1553808/posts#comment Sat, 7 Jan 2006 23:10:29 GMT http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1553358/posts THE FORMER IRAQI REGIME OF Saddam Hussein trained thousands of radical Islamic terrorists from the region at camps in Iraq over the four years immediately preceding the U.S. invasion, according to documents and photographs recovered by the U.S. military in postwar Iraq. The existence and character of these documents has been confirmed to THE WEEKLY STANDARD by eleven U.S. government officials. The secret training took place primarily at three camps--in Samarra, Ramadi, and Salman Pak--and was directed by elite Iraqi military units. Interviews by U.S. government interrogators with Iraqi regime officials and military leaders corroborate the documentary evidence. Many of... http://www.weeklystandard.com http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1553358/posts#comment Fri, 6 Jan 2006 23:22:52 GMT http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1547418/posts BaghdadOn a cool December morning, Vice President Dick Cheney and U.S. ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad waited for their distinguished guests on the sidewalk outside of the ambassador's residence in the heart of the fortified Green Zone in downtown Baghdad. Moments passed, but no one came. As Khalilzad chattered in Cheney's ear, the vice president stood looking at the cloudless blue sky with his hands clasped behind his back, sporadically shuffling his right foot back and forth. They waited some more. An eager press corps-with cameras and microphones, pens and pads at the ready--waited to capture the handshake between Cheney... The Weekly Standard http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1547418/posts#comment Tue, 27 Dec 2005 03:42:38 GMT http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1525425/posts FINALLY. For much of the past week, the White House has been engaged in an aggressive effort to defend the case for war in Iraq. Thus far, it has mainly pointed out the obvious: In the months and years before the invasion, many of those who now accuse the White House of misleading the country to war themselves were making precisely the same claims about the threat from Iraq as the Bush administration.President George W. Bush accused his critics of "rewriting history." Vice President Dick Cheney called the attacks a low point of his three decades in public life. Defense... The Weekly Standard http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1525425/posts#comment Sun, 20 Nov 2005 03:18:39 GMT http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1523981/posts WHEN SENATOR CARL LEVIN REQUESTED the partial declassification of a Defense Intelligence Agency report in mid-October, the response was swift: He had it in his hands in eight days, reports the New York Times. If only I were a senator. For two years, I have been working to obtain copies of unclassified documents discovered in postwar Iraq. My reasoning is simple: If we understand what the Iraqi regime was doing in the months and years before the war, we will be better able to assess the nature of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein and, perhaps, to better understand the... The Weekly Standard http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1523981/posts#comment Thu, 17 Nov 2005 19:30:15 GMT http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1522310/posts <p>WHEN SENATOR CARL LEVIN REQUESTED the partial declassification of a Defense Intelligence Agency report in mid-October, the response was swift: He had it in his hands in eight days, reports the New York Times. If only I were a senator. For two years, I have been working to obtain copies of unclassified documents discovered in postwar Iraq. My reasoning is simple: If we understand what the Iraqi regime was doing in the months and years before the war, we will be better able to assess the nature of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein and, perhaps, to better understand the insurgency. It's not a light subject, to be sure. But the quest for the documents, while frustrating, has also been highly amusing. It is a story of bureaucratic incompetence and strategic incoherence. It is also a story--this one not funny at all--about the failure to explain the Iraq war. Two years after I started my pursuit, I'm not much closer to my goal. Why? I have been told countless times by officials of the executive branch that there is no need to reargue the case for war, that what matters now is winning on the ground, that our intelligence professionals don't have time to review history, so occupied are they with current intelligence about current threats. I'm sympathetic to at least part of that thinking; it's hard to insist in the face of new and evolving threats that intelligence analysts should spend their precious time evaluating the past. So if the intelligence professionals don't have time to analyze the papers left behind by Saddam Hussein's government, why not let the press and private-sector scholars do it? Besides, in the end, the notion that the Bush administration doesn't need to continue to make the case for war is shortsighted. Talk to senior American diplomats and military officers in Iraq today and they will tell you that the insurgents closely monitor the debate here in the United States. As domestic support for the war dwindles, the insurgents increasingly believe they can win; they fight harder, they raise more money, they gain new recruits. If these U.S. officials are correct, then continuing to make the case for war in Iraq--to remind people with specifics, not platitudes, why we're fighting--is not a distraction but a central component of fighting to win. Talk to Sen. John McCain, who urges "a renewed effort to win the homefront," lest we lose sight of this fact: "Success or failure in Iraq is the transcendent issue for our foreign policy and our national security, for now and years to come." Said McCain, speaking at the American Enterprise Institute last week, "A renewed effort at home starts with explaining precisely what is at stake in this war--not to alarm Americans, but so that they see the nature of this struggle for what it is. The president cannot do this alone." I DON'T REMEMBER when I first heard about the project in Doha, Qatar, but I do remember that I was very interested in learning more about it. The effort, led by Central Command with assistance from the Defense Intelligence Agency, is reviewing the detritus of the former Iraqi regime: videotapes, photographs, and many, many documents. One aspect of the effort is something called "Doc-Ex," short for document exploitation. Several intelligence analysts, together with several dozen translators, most of them from Jordan, are sifting through millions of pages of documents unearthed in Iraq after the toppling of the regime.</p> The Weekly Standard http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1522310/posts#comment Tue, 15 Nov 2005 13:14:47 GMT http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1520824/posts Matthews, after a commercial break: "Welcome back to Hardball. More now on our special report on how the Bush administration sold the war in Iraq, with Stephen Hayes, a senior writer for The Weekly Standard, who has reported extensively on the Iraq War, and Chuck Todd, editor-in-chief of The Hotline. What did you two guys make of the Vice President of the United States denying to Gloria Borger that he had made that claim that there was a connection, a meeting in Prague between intelligence officials of the Iraqi government, at the time, and Mohammed Atta, and then saying he... NewsBusters http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1520824/posts#comment Sat, 12 Nov 2005 17:20:31 GMT http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1520781/posts WHEN SENATOR CARL LEVIN REQUESTED the partial declassification of a Defense Intelligence Agency report in mid-October, the response was swift: He had it in his hands in eight days, reports the New York Times. If only I were a senator. For two years, I have been working to obtain copies of unclassified documents discovered in postwar Iraq. My reasoning is simple: If we understand what the Iraqi regime was doing in the months and years before the war, we will be better able to assess the nature of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein and, perhaps, to better understand the... The Weekly Standard http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1520781/posts#comment Sat, 12 Nov 2005 15:37:14 GMT http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1517223/posts LAST TUESDAY, Senate Democrats fired the opening shot in the coming battle over prewar intelligence on Iraq when Minority Leader Harry Reid took the Senate into a closed session. The offensive began in earnest this weekend with a New York Times article:  A high Qaeda official in American custody was identified as a likely fabricator months before the Bush administration began to use his statements as the foundation for its claims that Iraq trained Al Qaeda members to use biological and chemical weapons, according to newly declassified portions of a Defense Intelligence Agency document. The document, an intelligence report from... The Weekly Standard http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1517223/posts#comment Mon, 7 Nov 2005 13:21:22 GMT