Free Republic

Assassinations are a big hit againBy MATTHEW STEVENSON | 5/10/12 9:33 PM EDT As a useful instrument of statecraft, assassination is somewhere between impressment (dragging sailors off neutral ships) and piracy (the poor man’s defense appropriations). Nonetheless, the Obama administration has elevated the gangland rub-out into an article of faith — what with predator drone strikes, CIA “executive actions” and “no-fly zones,” which usually include a few Tomahawks directed down the chimney at a dictator’s hideout. The romance with assassination is a legacy of World War II, when it was felt that if only “someone” had murdered Adolf Hitler (many...

FBI Director Robert Mueller on Wednesday said he would have to go back and check with the Department of Justice whether Attorney General Eric Holder's "three criteria" for the targeted killing of Americans also applied to Americans inside the U.S. Pressed by House lawmakers about a recent speech in which Holder described the legal justification for assassination, Mueller, who was attending a hearing on his agency's budget, did not say without qualification that the three criteria could not be applied inside the U.S. "I have to go back. Uh, I'm not certain whether that was addressed or not," Mueller said...

Every so often I want to watch some TV program in my PC. Ok, it usually is football! When I google "this game lifestream" I usually get lots of sites from where I can download something for free that will allow me to watch the game. But I don't know anything about that site, how safe it is... Does any body have any recommendations? At least, does someone know how I can watch the Denver-New England game tomorrow? Thanks

Give the good ship Juliano some props -- literally. The Swedish-flagged craft was in the Greek port of Piraeus as part of a flotilla seeking to challenge Israel’s naval security cordon around Gaza when, according to flotilla organizers, “hostile divers destroyed the [ship’s] propeller house and cut the propeller shaft.” It seems that someone one-upped the peaceniks’ attempt to create an international incident. They should count themselves lucky no-one was hurt. Last year nine demonstrators were killed when they attacked Israeli naval commandos boarding the Turkish ship Mavi Marmara. And there are more direct responses in more serious cases. In...

... In terms of vanquishing terrorism, targeted assassinations can be classified as a measured response in that they exclusively focus on actual perpetrators of militant attacks, while dramatically reducing collateral damage in terms of civilian and non-combatant casualties. In a 2010 article entitled "Targeted Killings Work" that appeared in Infinity Journal, the argument was made that targeted assassinations are a strategy that entails "limited force in support of policy" and that it has proven most successful. ...

Sound too conspiratorial to be true? Like the cover-up ops of spy novels? Well, it's reality. And it is possibly the most bizarre, inhumane and abusive way that the White House is expanding its power over the American people. It's not an extremist belief or theory of the far right. It's a fact that has been confirmed by The New York Times, The Washington Post and MSNBC and even documented by the far-left online magazine Salon.com. And it's the gravest nightmare of U.S. citizens and abandonment of our Constitution to date: a presidential assassination program in which U.S. citizens are...

IT COULD have been a scene from Gabriel García Márquez’s novella, “Chronicle of a Death Foretold”. But there was nothing magical about the realism of the video recorded by Rodrigo Rosenberg, a Guatemalan lawyer, four days before he was shot dead on Sunday May 10th while cycling on a busy avenue. “If you are hearing this message,” he intoned, “it is because I, Rodrigo Rosenberg Marzano, was assassinated by the president’s private secretary, Gustavo Alejos, and his partner, Gregorio Valdez, with the approval of Álvaro Colom and Sandra de Colom [Guatemala’s president and first lady]”. Political murders are sadly nothing...

I’d like everyone whose mind is unclouded by the radical hatred of America to read these two paragraph from the Washington Times in which Eli Lake interviews Terrorism adviser John Brennan. Brennan says: Dozens of Americans have joined terrorist groups and are posing a threat to the United States and its interests abroad, the president’s most senior adviser on counterterrorism and homeland security said Thursday. . . . “There are, in my mind, dozens of U.S. persons who are in different parts of the world, and they are very concerning to us,” said John O. Brennan, deputy White House national...

An attack over the weekend on the U.S. consulate in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, the second against U.S. government employees on the Mexican border in less than a month, highlights the mounting safety risks to U.S. outposts in the area ... Late Friday evening, unknown attackers threw a bomb onto the patio of the consulate. The blast shattered windows, but occurred after hours and injured no one... Mexican authorities are investigating. The bomb came less than a month after a grisly attack on people associated with the Ciudad Juárez consulate, which left three people dead. On March 12, hit men chased...

Wednesday, 3/17/10 Correo (Leon, Guanajuato) 3/15/10 Mexican senators call on U.S. to share responsibility Gustavo Madero and Carlos Navarrete are the leaders of the “PAN” & “PRD” party factions, respectively, in the Mexican Senate. They now call upon the United States to assume part of the responsibility for the death of three persons linked to the U.S. Consulate in Ciudad Juarez. Navarrete, who is also President of the Senate, said that he trusted that President Obama’s “indignation” will help the latter to understand that serious condition, “that our country is infested with North American arms,” and added that the assassins...

By now, most of us have heard about the coordinated assassinations of our government consulate representatives in Mexico, only yards from our border as they frantically tried to escape the killers. We have yet to hear of any of our elected officials speaking out against this most recent outrage, except to be told our president is 'outraged'. On CBS news last night, Mexican security analyst, Alberto Islas put it this way, "It was a deliberate act of terrorism." He is exactly right. Our friends with the National Association of Former Border Patrol Agents, who translate the daily news for us...

Israel is conducting a “secret war,” assassinating top officials in Hamas and Hizbullah in order to hamper the terror groups’ communications with their backer Iran, the London-based Times reported Saturday. “There has been growing co-operation between Gaza and Iran. Israel can read the writing on the wall and they know that with the help of Iran, the Hamas government in Gaza will become stronger and will fight better. But Israel is overstepping their boundaries. Other countries don’t want to become a killing field for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” the paper quotes an unnamed Palestinian official in Ramallah as saying. The official...

new, heavily researched book on John F. Kennedy's murder and its investigation sees links with a bagful of sensational stories, including the killing of Martin Luther King Jr. The links connect with the main contention in "Legacy of Secrecy/The Long Shadow of the JFK Assassination" (Counterpoint, 848 pages, $33), by Lamar Waldron with Thom Hartmann, that the assassination was engineered by Carlos Marcello, longtime Mafia boss in New Orleans.

It's important for Muslims to keep reminding us that there is absolutely, positively no relationship between Islam and violence. Otherwise it's easy to forget. The latest excuse for Islamic bonhomie is the documentary "Fitna" by Geert Wilders. In the 15-minute film, showing on YouTube and other Internet sites, the Dutch MP says that far from getting Islam wrong, terrorists understand their religion only too well. "Fitna" (Arabic for "upheaval" or "ordeal") has verses from the Koran -- which Wilders calls a "fascist book" -- artfully interspersed with scenes of carnage from 9/11 and the March, 2004 Madrid train bombing, as...

Guns don't kill presidents, Democrats do.Politically motivated presidential assassinations come from only one side of the political spectrum.By Christopher Cook Sara Jane Moore, who attempted to assassinate President Ford, has been released from prison. The caption under her photo reads... "Sara Jane Moore, shown here in a photo from 1975, said she was blinded by her radical political views at the time, convinced that the government had declared war on the left." We have been pointing out for a long time that political violence is part of the left's stock and trade, and that political violence perpetrated by Republicans is...

  Dave Gaubatz A former U.S. federal agent and counter-terrorism specialist deployed to Iraq before the war says he waged a three-year, unsuccessful battle to get officials to search four sites where he believes the former Saddam regime buried weapons of mass destruction. Dave Gaubatz, an Arabic linguist who now serves as chief investigator with the Dallas County Medical Examiner, told his story to Ryan Mauro of WorldThreats.com. Gaubatz said the suspected sites have never been searched by the Iraq Survey Group, the fact-finding mission dispatched by the U.S.-led multinational force. Two sites are within the city limits of Nasariyah,...

National Museum of Health and Medicine, Armed Forces Institute of Pathology Garfield lingered on his deathbed for 80 days, attended by doctors who disagreed on his treatment, and by his wife and daughter. Even Alexander Graham Bell tried to help locate the bullet that was lodged in the president. Correction Appended WASHINGTON — Three vertebrae, removed from the body of President James A. Garfield, sit on a stretch of blue satin. A red plastic probe running through them marks the path of his assassin’s bullet, fired on July 2, 1881. The vertebrae form the centerpiece of a new exhibit, commemorating...

American Gunfight: The Plot to Kill Harry Truman and the Shoot-Out That Stopped It by Stephen Hunter and John Bainbridge, Jr. The firearms finikins at freerepublic.com, and they are legion, favor one writer above all others for gun lore and gun adventure. Stephen Hunter, author of novels including The Master Sniper (1980), The Day Before Midnight (1989), Point of Impact (1993), and Havana (2003), has been for more than two decades the film critic of what his freeper fans generally call "The Washington Compost," in which position he has won a Pulitzer Prize (and published Violent Screen, a collection of...

Al-Jazeera has set up this poll about whether you think that Syria is guilty of the explosions in Lebanon. The page is in arabic! The poll is on the right hand side of the page (arabic goes from right to left), right above the last advertisement on the page (the poll is in the middle of the page so you need to scroll down a little). The Syrians have been voting No (second choice) and therefore Lebanese are losing 55 to 45. You know what to do...

Declassified documents reveal the U.S. State Department held secret meetings with top Taleban officials in 1998 and discussed assassinating or expelling al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden from Afghanistan. Documents declassified Thursday show diplomatic efforts between Washington and the Taleban rulers took place a few months after deadly terrorist bombings at U.S. Embassies in Africa. That also places the meetings nearly three years before the September 11 terrorist attacks on the United States. The documents show that a diplomat from the U.S. Embassy in Pakistan met with a top aide to Taleban leader Mullah Omar twice in late 1998. During the...