Free Republic

[SNIP] In a clear swipe at his predecessor, George W. Bush, the committee praised the “change in the international climate” that the President had brought, along with his cherished goal of ridding the world of nuclear weapons. [SNIP] But Lech Walesa, [SNIP], who won the Peace Prize in 1983, [SNIP], declaring: “So soon? Too early. He has no contribution so far.” Mr Obama’s domestic critics leapt on the award as evidence of foreigners fawning over an untested “celebrity” leader. [SNIP] The Nobel Peace Prize is a notoriously difficult award to predict, but yesterday's decision was clearly a political choice, with...

The president picks a China apologist and Israel basher to write his intelligence summaries. During the presidential campaign, a constant refrain of Barack Obama and other Democratic candidates was that the Bush administration had severely politicized intelligence, resulting in such disasters as the war in Iraq. The irony of course is that, if anything, President Bush badly failed at depoliticizing a CIA that was often hostile to his agenda. Witness the repeated leaks of classified information that undercut his policies. It now appears Mr. Obama has appointed a highly controversial figure to head the National Intelligence Council, which is responsible...

Then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft was "feeble," "barely articulate" and "stressed" moments after a hospital room confrontation in March 2004 with Alberto R. Gonzales, who wanted Ashcroft to approve a warrantless wiretapping program over Justice Department objections, according to notes from FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III that were released yesterday. One of Mueller's entries in five pages of a daily log pertaining to the dispute also indicated that Ashcroft's deputy was so concerned about undue pressure by Gonzales and other White House aides for the attorney general to back the wiretapping program that the deputy asked Mueller to bar...

Senate Democrats have mapped a political battle plan for the March congressional recess that calls on lawmakers to stage press events with active duty military personnel, veterans and emergency responders to bash President Bush on virtually every one of his national security policies. The game plan, devised by the office of Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, Nevada Democrat, is contained in a six-page memo distributed to Democratic senators on Thursday at a closed-door meeting at the Capitol and provided to The Washington Times by a congressional staffer. Titled "Real Security," the political document calls for staged town hall events at...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Even as prosecutors build a case against the Army private suspected of passing hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks, the State Department is promoting a documentary film that celebrates Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg. Amid its struggle to contain damage from the WikiLeaks revelations, the State Department announced Saturday that "The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers" has been selected as one of 18 films that will tour the world this year as part of its "American Documentary Showcase" program. Ellsberg, whom the film portrays as a whistleblower of conscience,...

Rocky Anderson, it turns out, is not stepping aside quietly. Joining a list of liberal luminaries, including Noam Chomsky and George McGovern, Salt Lake City's outgoing mayor submitted a letter Friday that calls on the House Judiciary Committee to investigate the Bush administration for abuses of power. The letter, signed by 18 political and cultural figures, asks House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, D-Mich., to hold hearings on alleged violations of the law under President Bush that include kidnapping and torture, warrantless wiretapping, a war of aggression against Iraq and disseminating false propaganda to deceive the American people. It came...

Back in 2007, the National Intelligence Estimate was released which all but absolved Iran of suspicions that it was on course to develop nuclear weapons. Rich Lowry writes In November 2007, US intelligence agencies wrote a National Intelligence Estimate concluding, "We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program." . . The 2007 NIE had a very circumscribed definition of a weapons program, but it included "covert conversion-related and uranium enrichment-related work." Exactly what Qom is for. What do the Iranians have to do to convince US intelligence they have a weapons program? The...

Best-sellers were once made by being banned in Boston. Now a pair of New Jersey state legislators are trying to ban a book already atop the best-sellers list. Once again, the book stirring all the controversy is Ann Coulter's "Godless: The Church of Liberalism." Two Democrats – Assemblywomen Joan Quigley and Linda Stender – are pushing to ban "Godless" from all bookstores in their state because of Coulter's biting criticism of four 9-11 widows known as "the Jersey Girls," who demanded investigations into President Bush's role in allowing the terrorist attacks. No one in New Jersey should buy this book...

Soros Shadow Party Stalks DeLayBy Richard PoeFrontPageMagazine.com | April 12, 2005 On the day that Terri Schiavo died — victim of a court order condemning the brain-damaged woman to death by thirst and starvation — Representative Tom DeLay of Texas did what few politicians have the courage to do these days. He spoke his mind."This loss happened because our legal system did not protect the people who need protection most," DeLay told Fox News on March 31. "The time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior." DeLay’s strong language worried some Republicans. They pointed...

Actor and Democratic activist/contributor Richard Dreyfuss, who after 9-11 claimed a “lack of clarity” as to America’s reasons for war against terror, yesterday promoted an America of intellectually sophisticated children, unhampered by allegiance to any particular viewpoint. Speaking before the National Press Club, Dreyfuss lamented that adults are often “victims of political hypnosis,” and decried parental tendencies to pass on their political views to their children. Instead, America’s children need only be handed the tools of “reason” and “logic” to be “ sovereign.” He sniffed, “How do we not guarantee our gods will be our children’s gods?”

The Volokh Conspirators and an interesting bunch of guys. It may not be their fault that they attract a bunch of nuts and Jacobins to their blog site. The individual contributors are capable of making reasonable-sounding arguments as to why the detention of enemy combatants should not be held indefinitely at Guantanamo (assuming you view our war against Islamic radicals as a civil police action in which the US military got involved). But, as I said, their arguments usually avoid the foam flecked comments that follow these postings. But suddenly, now that Obama has been elected, the subject has been...

C-Span2 televised a series of panel conferences from authors on the right and the left who have recently written books on President Bush. The conservative conferences were interesting, but devoid, I thought, of anything approaching hysteria about the left's unyielding assaults on the president. They were just discussions from sober panelists, addressing various aspects of media bias and the like. But the liberal panel -- and I only watched parts of it -- featured New York Times Columnist Paul Krugman, New York liberal Mark Green, Sidney Blumenthal, and various others. I just want to call your attention to two comments,...

In an attempt to win sanctions against a former top Bush administration official over brutal interrogations of prisoners at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, a lawyers group deployed a strategy Monday that worked against Presidents Nixon and Clinton. Former Defense Department General Counsel William J. Haynes II is the first of several former policy makers the National Lawyers Guild wants reprimanded, suspended or disbarred for their roles in detainee abuse, said Carlos Villarreal, executive director of the San Francisco Bay Area guild chapter that filed a complaint against Haynes with the California Bar Assn. Haynes, now an attorney with Chevron Corp....

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department on Monday released a long-secret legal document from 2001 in which the Bush administration claimed the military could search and seize terror suspects in the United States without warrants. The legal memo was written about a month after the Sept. 11 terror attacks. It says constitutional protections against unlawful search and seizure would not apply to terror suspects in the U.S., as long as the president or another high official authorized the action. >snip The memo was one of nine released Monday by the Obama administration.

Senate Democratic leaders today called the Bush administration’s plan to keep 130,000 or more troops in Iraq through mid-2008 unacceptable and promised to challenge the approach through legislation next week.

How the CIA Funds Anti-Bush Propaganda By Bill Gertz The Washington Times | September 14, 2004 The CIA's Counterterrorist Center has spent more than $15 million in the past three years funding studies, reports and conferences produced by former Democratic administration officials and other critics of the Bush administration. The latest effort was a $300,000 grant by the CIA to the Atlantic Council for a study co-authored by Richard A. Clarke, the former counterterrorism official who wrote a best seller accusing the Bush administration of failing in the war on terrorism by invading Iraq.

AUSTRALIAN investigative journalist John Pilger says he has evidence the war against Iraq was based on a lie that could cost George W. Bush and Tony Blair their jobs and bring Prime Minister John Howard down with them. A television report by Pilger aired on British screens overnight said US Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice confirmed in early 2001 that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had been disarmed and was no threat. But after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on September 11 that year, Pilger claimed Rice said the US "must move...