Free Republic

ISIS fighters are taking cheap, easy-to-make amphetamine pills that help keep them awake for days, which is fuelling the civil war in Syria. The small tablets of the highly addictive substance Captagon are produced in Syria and is widely available across the Middle East. It is thought that the trade of the drugs brings in millions of dollars in revenue to Syria, providing funding for weapons and ammunition. .......A drug control officer in the central city of Homs said he had observed the effects of Captagon on protesters and fighters held for questioning. He told Reuters news agency: 'We would...

ISTANBUL/WASHINGTON- Turkey and the United States say forces are poised to launch a major joint military operation aimed at closing a 98-kilometer strip of the Turkey-Syria border used by Islamic State (IS) militants. "We have certain plans to put an end to the control that Islamic State is still exercising on a zone of our frontier," Turkish Foreign Minister Feridun Sinirlioglu told the Anatolia News Agency, adding that the military operation will be intense. “You will see this in the days to come.” U.S. ambassador to Turkey John Bass tells VOA that Ankara and Washington are increasing cooperation to stop...

While his father was vice president in 2016, Hunter Biden met with a State Department official on behalf of a Romanian businessman who paid the troubled first son more than $1 million to help his corruption case, raising questions about whether the younger Biden engaged in unregistered foreign lobbying. A review of emails and documents on Hunter Biden's laptop reveal a March 2016 meeting with then-U.S. ambassador to Romania Hans Klemm on the topic of a corruption case against Gabriel Popoviciu, a Romanian real estate tycoon. Popoviciu made more than $1 million in wire payments to Biden from November 2015...

FBI General Counsel James Baker, testifying under oath before a joint Congressional committee, stated that he took possession of Dennis Montgomery’s evidence. Baker dispatched FBI Special Agents Walter Giardina and William Barnett to the FBI Miami Field Office in August 2015 to pick up Montgomery’s computer hard drives. Baker testified before Congress in October 2018: "So his client was an individual named Dennis Montgomery, who I believe, to the best of my recollection, he said that he had been a U.S. Government contractor and, in the course of that work, had come across evidence of unlawful surveillance by the government...

Newly discovered emails prove beyond all doubt that the “true purpose” of Hunter Biden’s lucrative deal with a Ukrainian energy company was for Hunter to get “high-ranking US officials” to visit Ukraine and persuade the nation’s leaders to “close down” all criminal “cases/pursuits against” the firm’s primary owner, a notoriously corrupt oligarch with ties to Russia. Documentation of this illegal scheme begins with a widely overlooked email on Hunter’s laptop in which a top executive of the Ukrainian firm describes the plan. Now, emails uncovered by Just Facts prove that Hunter and his partners: explicitly agreed to this deal. concealed...

First came the text messages between FBI lovebirds Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, which gave us a painful glimpse at potential political bias inside America’s most famous crime-fighting bureau. Now, a series of “Hi Honey” emails from Nellie Ohr to her high-ranking federal prosecutor-husband and his colleagues raise the prospect that Hillary Clinton-funded opposition research was being funneled into the Justice Department during the 2016 election through a back-door marital channel. It's a tale that raises questions of both conflict of interest and possible false testimony. Ohr has admitted to Congress that, during the 2016 presidential election, she worked for...

While most of the press has focused on Obama's military machinations in Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq, the administration has also been quietly expanding its secret wars and assassination programs across Africa. From training the militaries of various unsavory regimes and boosting the military capabilities of the so-called African Union, to establishing drone bases to facilitate espionage and extrajudicial killings, the White House is literally treating the continent as a vast battlefield in need of perpetual U.S. "intervention." And the consequences have been deadly.

Pell was reportedly reprimanded for “interfering in sovereign business” by looking into the Vatican Secretariat of State’s dealings with a Swiss bank with a long track record of violating fraud safeguards.The Holy See’s relationship with a disreputable Swiss bank triggered an internal dispute between the Secretariat of State and Vatican financial authorities. At the center of the conflict was a multimillion-dollar line of credit used to fund a controversial investment in London property speculation. Sources inside the Vatican’s Prefecture for the Economy confirmed to CNA that a substantial part of the $200 million used to finance the Secretariat of State’s...

Two of the most senior intelligence officials in the US and UK privately shared concerns about “our strange situation” as the FBI launched its 2016 investigation into whether Donald Trump’s campaign was colluding with Russia, the Guardian has learned. Text messages between Andrew McCabe, the deputy director of the FBI at the time, and Jeremy Fleming, his then counterpart at MI5, now the head of GCHQ, also reveal their mutual surprise at the result of the EU referendum, which some US officials regarded as a “wake-up call”, according to a person familiar with the matter. While Russia had previously been...

A carefully redacted footnote within a report by FISA Court Presiding Judge Rosemary Collyer has always appeared to be a clue to a domestic surveillance program. Now details behind the redactions tell a concerning story. A brief refresher is needed for those new to the story. In April 2017 Judge Collyer wrote a highly critical FISA Court opinion following discoveries by Director Admiral Rogers of government contractors accessing the NSA database, and extracting illegal search results from the electronic records of every American. The scale of abuse was incredible [SEE HERE] and the surveillance issues had been covered up for...

Siamak Namazi, an Iranian-American citizen who helped establish a pro-Tehran lobbying group in America, has been arrested in Iran and imprisoned indefinitely. -excerpt- Namazi has been described as one of the “intellectual architects” of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), a Washington, D.C.-based lobbying group that has been accused of working in support of the regime in Tehran. He and NIAC Director Trita Parsi founded the organization as a way to continuously lobby for the removal of sanctions against Iran and to promote Iran’s foreign policy, while combating the pro-Israel sentiment in America, according to documents from a Cyprus convention...

A leaked document from the "Five Eyes" intelligence alliance – made up of the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand – shows China purposefully hid and/or destroyed evidence about the Wuhan coronavirus. Specifically, the alliance said the Chinese Communist Party's cover-up can be described as an "assault on international transparency." Australia's The Saturday Telegraph obtained a copy of the 15-page report which concluded China put other countries in grave danger by covering up different aspects of the coronavirus, including the fact that it can be transmitted from human-to-human, doctors magically "disappearing" when trying to talk about...

Republican presidential contender Donald Trump doubled down Monday night on his support for waterboarding terrorist suspects, saying the interrogation method worked – and even “if it doesn’t work, they deserve it anyway for what they’re doing to us.” Speaking at a rally in Columbus, Ohio, Trump returned to a topic that caused a stir when he said on ABC “This Week” on Sunday that as president he would bring back waterboarding. “Would I approve waterboarding? And I said, well, let me ask you a question. On the other side, they chop off our young people’s heads, and they put them...

Judicial Watch and The Daily Caller News Foundation today released 146 pages of State Department documents revealing that former British spy and dossier author Christopher Steele had an extensive and close working relationship dating back to May of 2014 with high-ranking Obama State Department officials. The documents obtained by Judicial Watch in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit show that, from May 2014 to November 2015, Steele filed dozens of reports with his close associate at State, Special Coordinator for Libya Jonathan Winer, who would then pass them to Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland. The reports focused mainly...

World 15 Islamist Kurds suspected of planning attacks arrested across Europe 12/11/2015 BARCELONA, Spain - Radical Kurdish cleric "Mullah Krekar" and 14 other Iraqi Kurds were arrested across Europe on Thursday in a coordinated police swoop on Islamist militants planning attacks, Italian media reported. The Corriere della Sera newspaper said the suspects were arrested in countries across Europe in collaboration with police from Italy, the UK, Norway, Finland, Germany and Switzerland. A non-Kurd, a man from Kosovo, was also arrested. Among the suspects picked up for links to the Islamic State group (ISIS), seven were arrested in Italy, four...

DNI Declassifies FISA Judge James Boasberg 2018 Ruling – FBI Conducted “Tens of Thousands” of Unauthorized NSA Database Queries… Posted on October 8, 2019 by sundance There is a lot to unpack in a decision today by the Director of National Intelligence to declassify (with redactions) a 2018 FISA court ruling about ongoing unauthorized database search queries by FBI agents/”contractors” in the period covering 2017/2018.BACKGROUND: In April 2017 the DNI released a FISA report written by Presiding Judge Rosemary Collery that showed massive abuse, via unauthorized searches of the NSA database, in the period of November 2015 through May 2016. Judge Collyer’s report specifically identified search query increases...

Several prominent US Senators and mayors have been outed as members of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) and other racist groups by the hacktivist collective Anonymous, and the group hints that more politicians and public figures will be named in the near future. In a new post on document-dumping site pastebin, Anonymous names US Senators Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), John Cornyn (R-Tx.), Dan Coats (R-In.) and Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.) as members of the KKK....

Revolutionary Guards Quds Force's notorious chief Qassem Suleimani severely injured in clashes south of Aleppo For nearly 5 years the Revolutionary Guards Quds Force’s notorious chief Qassem Suleimani has been spearheading Iran’s full-pledged support for the Syrian dictator Bashar Assad. This shadowy figure has been the symbol of Tehran’s infamous plots in Syria, and reports have also indicated Suleimani was running the show and issuing orders to senior Syrian generals and political officials, and at times, even Assad himself. Enjoying the full support of and reporting only to Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei, Suleimani had unimaginable authority in Syria. That...

On November 2, speaking at a Democratic fundraiser in New York, President Barack Obama poked fun at the Republicans, joking that if they cannot handle CNBC moderators how could they possibly handle Russia’s Vladimir Putin? “Every one of these candidates says, ‘Obama’s weak, Putin’s kicking sand in his face. When I talk to Putin, he’s gonna straighten out.’ …and then it turns out they can’t handle a bunch of CNBC moderators!” Mr. Obama said. “I mean, let me tell you: if you can’t handle those guys,” he continued, laughing, “I don’t think the Chinese and the Russians are going to...

On Saturday, conservative talk radio host Don Smith replayed an interview he conducted with then-Republican frontrunner Donald Trump in November 2015. The roughly 12-minute long interview was repeatedly interrupted by a strange static humming, and other noises. “During this interview there was something going on. I’ve never experienced this before,” Mr. Smith said on air Saturday. “I’ve done thousands of interviews, and I have never experienced this before. You could hear something.” “Something was going on.” The host of the namesake Don Smith Show said he initially thought the campaign was taping the interview for posterity. The media had repeatedly...