Free Republic

Renowned investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has claimed that the U.S.-led war effort in Ukraine is “all lies.”According to Hersh, the war is already “over” and “Russia has won.”The veteran reporter alleges that the CIA and MI-6 have been running a “secret disinformation operation” to convince the public to keep funding “the war.”He says the American and British intelligence agencies have been misleading the public about the disastrous state of the war effort.“The war is over. Russia has won,” a senior U.S. intel official reportedly told Hersh.“There is no Ukrainian offensive anymore, but the White House and the American media have...

Last week, renowned investigative reporter Seymour Hersh published an article claiming that the US was responsible for the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline transporting natural gas to Germany from Russia. He spoke to Jacobin about the allegations.n September 26, 2022, the Nord Stream natural gas pipeline from Russia to Germany was largely destroyed by several explosions in the Baltic Sea. Last week, the award-winning investigative reporter Seymour Hersh published an article, based on information from a single anonymous source, arguing that the Biden administration and the CIA were responsible.Hersh won the Pulitzer Prize in 1970 for the role he...

The blood libel is one of the most hateful and destructive lies launched against the Jewish people over the centuries. While it takes on many different forms, it boils down to the false accusation that the Jews would kidnap and kill a non-Jewish child (or adult), using the victim’s blood for some ritual purpose. In the last week, it has raised its ugly head once again. According to the ADL, “The ‘blood libel’ refers to a centuries-old false allegation that Jews murder Christians – especially Christian children – to use their blood for ritual purposes, such as an ingredient in...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Saddam Hussein's fear of internal rebellion led him to distrust his military commanders even after U.S. forces began their invasion in 2003, crippling the country's defenses, the New York Times reported in Sunday editions. Citing a classified U.S. military report as well other documents and interviews, the Times also said that top Iraqi commanders were shocked when Saddam told them three months before the war that he had no weapons of mass destruction. Prepared nearly a year ago, the classified military report shows that Saddam discounted the possibility of a full-scale American invasion, the Times said....

WASHINGTON (AFP) - The former top aide to then-secretary of state Colin Powell has reportedly emerged as an increasingly high-profile and vocal critic of US administration policy at home and abroad. Lawrence Wilkerson, who was Powell's chief-of-staff, "says his decision to speak in the open about the policy wars of the first Bush term was slow in coming, but a major factor was the revelations about Abu Ghraib, which he said he realized ... had resulted from decisions on prisoner treatment and intelligence set shortly after September 11, 2001," the New York Times reported. "What I saw was a cabal...

The US must release photographs showing abuse of detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan, a federal judge has ruled in a long-running clash over letting the world see potentially disturbing images of how the military treated prisoners. US district judge Alvin Hellerstein’s ruling Friday gives the government, which has fought the case for over a decade, two months to decide whether to appeal before the photos could be released. The American Civil Liberties Union has been seeking to make them public in the name of holding government accountable.

You say "Jeb Bush," Thomas Roberts says "the Kouachi brothers." It's got to be one of the strangest political Rorschach test results of all time. MSNBC's Roberts believes that Jeb Bush would have a "big onus" around his neck if he runs for president "because if we hear 'Bush' we're automatically going to go to people bringing up the Kouachi brothers and their photos of Abu Ghraib that radicalized them about Iraq." View the video here.

The FBI “most wanted” mugshot shows a tough, swarthy figure, his hair in a jailbird crew-cut. The $10 million price on his head, meanwhile, suggests that whoever released him from US custody four years ago may now be regretting it. Taken during his years as a detainee at the US-run Camp Bucca in southern Iraq, this is the only known photograph of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the new leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq and Syria. But while he may lack the photogenic qualities of his hero, Osama bin Laden, he is fast becoming the new poster-boy for the global jihadist movement....

Here we go. It has always been difficult for Westerners to understand a murderous, illiberal ideology of Islamist extremism. The torturous course of self-examination in which liberals engage in the wake of this kind of a terrorist attack has become a familiar ritual. This customary practice following the deadly assault on the offices of Charlie Hebdo began just 24 hours after the bloody attack. In a profile published in the French center-left paper Le Monde, one of the two French brothers responsible for the massacre of 12 and the injury of 11 others on Wednesday reportedly cited the abuse of...

GENEVA: The United States said Wednesday it did not condone torture under any circumstances, but acknowledged to a UN anti-torture watchdog it had “crossed the line” following the September 11 attacks. “The US is proud of its record as a leader in respecting, promoting and defending human rights and the rule of law, both at home and around the world,” acting US legal advisor Mary McLeod told the 10-member UN Committee on Torture. “But in the wake of 9/11 attacks, we regrettably did not always live up to our own values,” she said. “We crossed the line and we take...

Remember back in April, 2007, when then-CIA director George Tenet appeared on 60 Minutes, angrily telling the program host, "we don't torture people"? Remember a few months later, in October, President George W. Bush saying, "this government does not torture people"? We knew then it was not true because we had already seen the photos of Iraqis tortured at Abu Ghraib prison four years earlier. Still the US administration denied that torture was torture, preferring to call it "enhanced interrogation" and claiming that it had disrupted so many terrorist plots. Of course, we later found out that the CIA...

A federal appeals court has revived a lawsuit against CACI International Inc that accused the defense contractor's employees of directing the torture of detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad. The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia, said a lower court judge had erred in concluding he lacked jurisdiction to hear claims by four Iraqi plaintiffs because the alleged incidents occurred in Iraq. Monday's decision has the potential to expand legal liability for contractors who work with and undertake sensitive tasks on behalf of U.S. troops outside the country.

Gloria Steinem, Jesse Jackson, Bonnie Raitt and Jay Leno have joined prison hunger strikers in calling for an end to California's use of solitary confinement to control prison gang violence. The civil rights crusaders, singer and late-night comedian are among those who signed a letter sent Monday to Gov. Jerry Brown. The letter calls isolation units "extensions of the same inhumanity practiced at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay." The letter to Brown, to be followed by a demonstration Tuesday at the Capitol, was arranged by the National Religion Campaign Against Torture and local supporters of the prison protesters. The organization,...

Two spectacular al Qaeda prison breaks in Iraq, freeing over 500 of its members in two separate prisons simultaneously this week, demonstrate the group is back with a vengeance. Al Qaeda’s Iraq branch is also the moving force behind the jihadist success in Syria. The resurgence of al Qaeda in Iraq has sobering implications for what is likely to follow the drawdown of NATO forces in Afghanistan for the al Qaeda mother ship in Pakistan. The double jailbreaks at Abu Ghraib and Taji prisons were massive attacks. Suicide bombers, teams of attackers using mortars and small arms, and two dozen...

Thomas Joscelyn, Long War Journal senior editor, and Bill Roggio, Long War Journal and FDD, in re: 500 prisoners or more released from Abu Ghraib, the most secure prison in Iraq. Global al Qaeda: Affiliates, objectives, and future challenges Testimony to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Terrorism, Nonproliferation, and Trade, on al Qaeda, the nature of the group's central command and its relationship with its affiliates, and the future challenges the West faces in battling the terror organization. [more] Are the Iraqi police incapable of contesting al Q? Yes, rhe reality is that they needed our support...

BAGHDAD — Iraq’s al-Qaeda affiliate claimed responsibility Tuesday for a jailbreak from the infamous Abu Ghraib prison that unleashed hundreds of militants into an already unstable region and boosted the group’s resurgent fortunes in Iraq and Syria. The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant said in a statement that hundreds of prisoners were freed late Sunday in two coordinated assaults in which fighters used suicide bombs and mortars to storm the two top security prisons on Baghdad’s outskirts at Abu Ghraib and Taji. Both were once run by the U.S. military and housed the country’s most senior al-Qaeda detainees....

BAGHDAD/MOSUL, Iraq (Reuters) - Hundreds of convicts, including senior members of al Qaeda, broke out of Iraq's Abu Ghraib jail as comrades launched a military-style assault to free them.

The Army staff sergeant charged with slaughtering 16 villagers in one of the worst atrocities of the Afghanistan war will plead guilty to avoid the death penalty in a deal that requires him to recount the horrific attack for the first time, his attorney told The Associated Press on Wednesday.

December 3, 2006: In the United States, a federal judge has ruled that the President does not have the authority to designate certain organizations as terrorist groups. This ruling is the latest round of lawfare against the war on terror. In this case, two foreign terrorist organizations, the Kurdistan Worker's Party (PKK) and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elan (LTTE), were the beneficiaries of this suit. Why is this case, filed on behalf of the Humanitarian Law Project, important? After all, a number of human rights groups have still been waging lawfare, largely on behalf of al Qaeda. This suit...

Obama’s Amazing AchievementsHis military intervention prompted some stunning reversals. By bombing Libya, President Obama has accomplished some things once thought absolutely impossible in America:(a) War-mongering liberals: Liberals are now chest-thumping about military “progress” in Libya. Even liberal television and radio commentators cite ingenious reasons why an optional, preemptive American intervention in an oil-producing Arab country, without prior congressional approval or majority public support — and at a time of soaring deficits — is well worth supporting, in a sort of “my president, right or wrong,” fashion. Apparently, liberal foreign policy is returning to the pre-Vietnam days of the hawkish “best...