Free Republic

-The U.S. National Security Agency on Tuesday denied allegations by Fox News host Tucker Carlson that the agency is spying on him in an attempt to force him off the air. "This allegation is untrue. Tucker Carlson has never been an intelligence target of the Agency and the NSA has never had any plans to try to take his program off the air," the NSA said in a statement posted on Twitter. Carlson, a conservative talk show commentator and strident critic of the Joe Biden administration, said on his show on Monday night that he "heard from a whistleblower within...

...But there was never anything silly, nor light-hearted, nor casual, about Barack Obama's efforts to keep the public's eyes from the basic facts of his life, from birth to his candidacy for president. On the contrary, this opacity is a deliberate policy. Why? The presumptive answer, absent testimony from those involved, is to ensure that real facts interfere as little as possible with the image and narrative that he and his associates have carefully crafted for him. Distinguishing between reality and that narrative would require above all a skeptical attitude, sure to be characterized by Democrats and the media in...

An independent inspector general will look into the foreign financial ties of Chas W. Freeman Jr., the Obama administration's pick to serve as chairman of the group that prepares the U.S. intelligence community's most sensitive assessments, according to three congressional aides. The director of national intelligence, Dennis C. Blair, last Thursday named Mr. Freeman, a veteran former diplomat, to the chairmanship of the National Intelligence Council, known inside the government as the NIC. In that job, Mr. Freeman will have access to some of America's most closely guarded secrets and be charged with overseeing the drafting of the consensus view...

...The advance of technology is forcing a greater information flow. Internet blogs are appearing in countries where the press is still controlled by the government. Pro-democracy forces are communicating by email, pagers and blackberries. As more citizens gain access to new forms of information, to new ways of learning of the outside world, it will be that much more difficult for governments to cement their rule by holding monopolies on news and commentary.... • First, government officials will need to communicate clearly and often. When a government official is found to have put out information that is not exactly correct...

WASHINGTON -- Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah's historic trip to Crawford, Texas, this week ought to provoke Americans to plumb some of the deeper reasons behind the yawning U.S./Saudi estrangement. The "Arab street," according to every analyst here from the region, is increasingly anti-American. Their stories relate the skewed pictures most countries are getting about America -- from satellite-carried Israeli attacks on Palestinians to the often vulgar and sexually explicit American commercial TV programs sent around the world. But when one searches for the failure of American influence in the Middle East, one does not have to look far. We are...