Free Republic

SACRAMENTO — Assemblywoman Nicole Parra and her father traveled to Cuba in early December on what has reportedly become an annual event organized by one of California’s most powerful lobbyists and political fundraisers. Parra, D-Hanford, and other participants said the trip was arranged by Darius Anderson, founder of one of Sacramento’s premiere lobbying firms and a top fundraiser for former Gov. Gray Davis. Since travel to communist Cuba is generally prohibited except under a license from the U.S. government, Anderson’s repeated trips there with lawmakers, business people and others raise a number of questions. Why is a lobbyist arranging religious...

Romania and the United States have signed an agreement that would establish the first U.S. military bases in an Eastern European country from the former Soviet bloc. The United States already has the rights to a base in the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan, and is in the process of vacating one in neighboring Uzbekistan. With the United States already possessing a military presence in much of the world, what does it want with even more foreign bases? Washington, 7 December 2005 (RFE/RL) -- Romanian President Traian Basescu seemed as pleased to be hosting the bases as the Americans are...

DECEMBER 5, 2005. UPDATE (12/6): During my appearance on the Noory show last night, I also pointed out that, because of the enormous PR and propaganda blitz concerning "the imminent--could be--may be" bird flu pandemic, Senate Bill 1873 has a chance of passing into law. THIS is one of the payoffs from all that propaganda. Establish, on the basis of no fact, the illusion of a pandemic---and then bring this heinous, unconstitutional, and repellent bill into the Congress. snip This is a bad one, folks. It will give the federal government---if Senate Bill 1873 passes---the right to shove drugs and...

JAKARTA, Indonesia - The closest most people will ever get to remote Papua, or the operations of Freeport-McMoRan, is a computer tour using Google Earth to swoop down over the rain forests and glacier-capped mountains where the American company mines the world's largest gold reserve. With a few taps on a keyboard, satellite images quickly reveal the deepening spiral that Freeport has bored out of its Grasberg mine as it pursues a virtually bottomless store of gold hidden inside. They also show a spreading soot-colored bruise of almost a billion tons of mine waste that the New Orleans-based company has...

BEIJING - Chinese state-controlled oil company CNOOC Ltd. said Monday it is paying $2.3 billion for a 45 percent stake in a Nigerian oil field in its first major investment since its failed bid to take over Unocal Corp. last year. The deal adds to a multibillion-dollar string of foreign acquisitions by Chinese oil companies, which are aggressively pursuing energy supplies to fuel China's booming economy. The agreement, which requires approval from the Nigerian and Chinese governments, covers a deep-water area of the oil-rich Niger Delta region, CNOOC said. It said the area includes the Akpo oil field discovered in...

All those who wanted to read the December issue of the Russian Forbes will not be able to do it in the short run: one of the articles was dedicated to the only woman in the list of billionaires - Elena Baturina. The article or, to be more exact, the cover made jurists working for Baturina's company "Inteko" lodge a complaint against the magazine for the publicity containing untrustworthy and slandering information. As a result the publishing house Axel Springer responsible for Russian Forbes circulation called off the whole December issue. Baturina's words printed on the cover said: "I was...

Conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch obtained 323 pages of emails between former FBI lovebirds Peter Strzok and Lisa Page showing Comey’s FBI was investigating President Trump over his critical tweets of Barack Obama and the FBI. The FBI is purposely slow-rolling its production of emails to Judicial Watch and only processing 500 pages per month in response to a 2017 FOIA lawsuit. Judicial Watch obtained a March 2017 email Peter Strzok sent his boss Bill Priestap and others about probing President Trump’s tweets about being wiretapped by the FBI. Judicial Watch reported:

Evidence accumulates of a hoax in Haditha. The weblog Sweetness & Light has done an estimable service gathering together the articles which cast substantial doubt on the charge of a massacre of civilians at Haditha . Because the blog is too busy gathering and fisking the news, I offered and the publisher accepted my offer to put what he has uncovered in a narrative form. Having done so, I can tell you that the story has a whiff of yet another mediagenic scandal like the TANG memos or the Plame “outing.” While the Marines quite correctly will not comment on...

BEIRUT, Dec 20 (Reuters) - Germany has secretly released a Hizbollah member jailed for life for killing a U.S. Navy diver and returned him to Lebanon despite an extradition request from the United States, Lebanese political sources said on Tuesday. They said Mohammad Ali Hammadi, convicted of killing Navy diver Robert Dean Stethem during the 1985 hijacking of a TWA flight to Beirut and sentenced to life without parole, was flown back to Beirut last week.

A former CIA officer was arrested on Thursday on charges of illegally disclosing national defense information about Iran to a New York Times reporter who wrote a book. The U.S. Justice Department said Jeffrey Sterling, 43, was charged with six counts of unauthorized disclosure of national defense information and one count of unlawfully keeping national defense information, mail fraud, unauthorized conveyance of government property and obstructing justice.

The rally last December was one of nearly a dozen paid-for protests organized by Russian émigrés in the U.S. in the past two years. They spent $150,000 to $200,000 in some months, accounting records indicate, to rally thousands of demonstrators near spots such as United Nations headquarters and the World Trade Center site. State-controlled Russian television, whose content is closely guided by Kremlin handlers, covered some of the events, often as the only news organ present, showing video of them on the evening news back home. Boris Barshevsky at a pay-for-protest rally in Queens, N.Y., last year. Organizers said the...

He's mad .. and rightfully so. Without any notice, his Sat. radio address was televised live. He's putting Congress and the press on notice that he's got the authority to do what he's done to protect US .. that Congress was notified at least a dozen times about these NSA oversights .. and that the press leaks and any such security leaks are illegal and are aiding and abetting the enemy. Whoo .. fireworks to come, and go get 'em W!

Democrats have their own scandal brewing at the moment, but they are doing much better in covering it up than their Republican counterparts. At issue is the report by David Barrett, the last remaining U.S. independent counsel. Over ten years, Barrett has spent $21 million on the investigation of former Housing Secretary Henry Cisneros, who lied to FBI investigators about hush money paid to an ex-mistress. The reason the report and the investigation have taken so long is that allies to Cisneros and the legal team of former President Bill Clinton at the powerhouse Washington law firm of Williams and...

ABC News is reporting that Current and former CIA officers speaking to ABC News on the condition of confidentiality say the United States scrambled to get all the suspects off European soil before Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice arrived there today. The officers say 11 top al Qaeda suspects have now been moved to a new CIA facility in the North African desert. The disgrunted intelligence officers even disclosed an actual list of 12 high-value targets allegedly held by the CIA, and ABC is reporting it : Abu Zubaydah: Held first in Thailand then Poland Ibn Al-Shaykh al-Libi: Held in...

A Saudi national who served as director of the Virginia office of the Muslim World League (MWL) has been deported by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents on immigration charges. ICE spokesman Dean Boyd said Abdullah Alnoshan, 44, of Falls Church, was returned to Saudi Arabia over the weekend. He was arrested in July by ICE and FBI agents assigned to the Joint Terrorism Task Force. A criminal complaint charged Alnoshan with conspiring to commit immigration fraud by using fake employment documents to enter, exit and live in the United States. Alnoshan also was accused of seeking to deter...

<p>NEW WHISTLEBLOWER WEBSITE - Equal Justice Foundation of America. See the latest trailer here.</p> <p>This story is about the Clinton role in the collapse of a public company, Stan Lee Media, Bill Clinton's failure to honor a verbal agreement with Peter Paul to come aboard Stan Lee Media as a rainmaker, four false FEC reports, a conspiracy at the highest levels of the DNC, and the greatest campaign finance fraud in U.S. history. It is a crime that was done in broad daylight, but if people don't see it on network news or read it in the NEW YORK TIMES or WASHPOST (or WSJ), apparently it never happened.</p>

In particular, Islamic radicals are looking to create cells of so-called white al Qaeda, non-Arab members who can evade racial profiling used by police forces to watch for potential terrorists. "They want to look European to carry out operations in Europe," said a Western intelligence agent in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia and Montenegro, adjacent to Bosnia. "It's yet another evolution in the tools used by terrorists." ... n addition, Serbian police accidentally came across a key suspect in the March 2004 bombings of Madrid commuter trains while he was traveling through the country by train. He arrived in the...

Albania Seizes Assets Of Bin Laden Associate TIRANA (AP)--The Albanian government has seized the assets and bank accounts of a man who allegedly worked with Osama bin Laden and others to provide support to terror networks in Albania, the Finance Ministry said Wednesday. Abdul Latif Saleh, who holds Jordanian and Albanian citizenship, was placed on a U.N. sanctions list in September, requiring all U.N. members to impose a travel ban on him and block his assets. Albania earlier had blocked 33 bank accounts in three commercial banks as well as assets and investments in Saleh's businesses and civic organizations he...

Last night John rendered his "Verdict: The New York Times blew the story." The "story" was the testimony of five federal judges -- Magistrate Judge Allan Kornblum and four former FISA court judges -- on Senator Specter's proposed revision of the FISA statute. According to yesterday's New York Times story by Eric Lichtblau: In a rare glimpse into the inner workings of the secretive court, known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, several former judges who served on the panel...voiced skepticism at a Senate hearing about the president's constitutional authority to order wiretapping on Americans without a court order. They...

Is The New York Times about to be indicted? That would be a fair inference from the strange exchanges that have gone back and forth over the past few days between the Justice Department and the editors of the paper. On Sunday, during the ABC news program, "This Week," Attorney General Gonzales was asked if the federal government might prosecute journalists who published classified information. "There are some statutes on the books," he answered, "which . . . would seem to indicate that this is a possibility." He went on to suggest that such prosecutions were implicitly authorized by the...