Free Republic

WASHINGTON – The "War on Terror" is losing the war of words. The catchphrase burned into the American lexicon hours after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, is fading away, slowly if not deliberately being replaced by a new administration bent on repairing the U.S. image among Muslim nations. Since taking office less than two weeks ago, President Barack Obama has talked broadly of the "enduring struggle against terrorism and extremism." Another time it was an "ongoing struggle." He has pledged to "go after" extremists and "win this fight." There even was an oblique reference to a "twilight struggle" as...

The insane emperor Caligula made his horse, Incitatus, a Roman consul. In 2008, the people of the United States elected Barack Obama and Joseph Biden. The Romans got the better of the two arrangements, because Caligula appointed the ENTIRE horse. Within 72 hours of his election, Barack Obama has already turned the nation's highest office and the leadership of the Free World into a carnival sideshow. Obama began his career as President-Elect by mocking former First Lady Nancy Reagan, whom he said held seances in the White House. It is an unspoken custom of the Presidency that one does not...

AN ALLEGED attempt to kill a former Russian spy who defected to Britain was being investigated by police last night. Oleg Gordievsky was admitted to a hospital in Guildford after falling ill in November last year. And yesterday he claimed he had been poisoned with the highly toxic metal thallium in a botched assassination attempt. Gordievsky, a KGB double agent who spied on Russia for British intelligence during the 1980s, claims he was targeted by a Russian assassin who visited him at his safe house in Surrey. The 69-year-old was unconscious for 34 hours after falling ill last year and...

An armed female member of Colombia's Farc rebel group hijacked a small plane to escape her "tortuous life" with the guerrillas, police have said... Carrying a rifle, machete, knife and 150 bullets, she forced the pilot to fly her to the city of Villavicencio. Upon arrival she surrendered her gun and said she wished to desert Farc. Colonel Pablo Gomez, head of police in the state of Meta, where the plane landed, told reporters her plan was clear... Police said the hijacker would not be charged with a crime and would be admitted to the government's rebel rehabilitation programme. Amnesty...

CIA analysis finds no Iranian nuclear weapons drive: report Sat Nov 18, 11:18 PM ET WASHINGTON (AFP) - A classifed draft CIA assessment has found no firm evidence of a secret drive by Iran to develop nuclear weapons, as alleged by the White House, a top US investigative reporter has said. Seymour Hersh, writing in an article for the November 27 issue of the magazine The New Yorker released in advance, reported on whether the administration of Republican President George W. Bush was more, or less, inclined to attack Iran after Democrats won control of Congress last week. A month...

Operation infiltration update UPDATE Submitted by staff on Sat, 11/04/2006 - 8:48pm. [UPDATE] We're fully staffed for phase II You can Sign up for the GOP 72 hour program here, and become a GOTV double agent. Before you do however, send me an email, and I'll give you your mission profile. Some field reports coming in indicate day 1 was a big success - more on that Monday

Meet Alberto Fernandez: State Dept. apologist for jihad Alberto Fernandez, director of public diplomacy in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs at the US State Department, is al Jazeera's favorite pet tool. He has been praised as "sassy" and is a fixture on Arab TV. From a Newsweek profile published in August, which proclaimed him "the face of the United States in the Middle East:" On paper, at least, Fernandez's job is basically that of a high-powered booker, coordinating appearances of high-level State Department officials on Arab media. But in reality, he's the main act. According to his own...

National Review's Byron York sensibly asks: what are the next steps in the investigation into the intelligence community's leaking of classified information to the press, including the deeply sensitive detention arrangements for high-ranking al Qaeda captives (the so-called "black-site" prisons)? That disclosure profoundly harmed our nation's critical relationship with foreign intelligence services which have been assisting the war effort. In connection with the internal CIA end of that probe, one intelligence officer, Mary O. McCarthy, has been terminated for unauthorized contacts with members of the media, including the Washington Post's Dana Priest. It was Priest who reported the black-sites story...

LOS ANGELES – The government ended its crippled spy case against a woman once accused of being a Chinese double agent, accepting her guilty pleas to lesser charges of making a false statement to the FBI and filing a false tax return. Katrina Leung, 51, admitted Friday she lied to the FBI about her intimate relationship with her FBI handler, James J. Smith, and that she failed to include all her income on her tax returns for the year 2000. Leung, who already spent three months in jail and 18 months in home detention, agreed to be immediately sentenced. The...

Israeli Soldier Is Killed as Palestinian Agent Sets Trap By GREG MYRE Published: December 7, 2004 ERUSALEM, Dec. 7 - An Israeli soldier was killed and four were wounded today when a Palestinian double agent lured the troops into a booby-trapped chicken coop in Gaza City, the Hamas movement said.In the fighting that followed, Israeli forces killed four Palestinian militants in the bloodiest single clash since the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat died near four weeks ago, Hamas said. The Israeli military declined to comment on the Hamas statement. Fighting in the Gaza Strip had become less frequent recently as Israelis...

WASHINGTON - Intelligence shortcomings, as we see, have a thousand fathers; secret intelligence triumphs are orphans. Here is the unremarked story of "the Farewell dossier": how a CIA campaign of computer sabotage resulting in a huge explosion in Siberia -- all engineered by a mild-mannered economist named Gus Weiss -- helped us win the Cold War. Weiss worked down the hall from me in the Nixon administration. In early 1974, he wrote a report on Soviet advances in technology through purchasing and copying that led the beleaguered president -- detente notwithstanding -- to place restrictions on the export of computers...

WASHINGTON - One of the most damaging espionage cases in U.S. history was more the result of poor oversight by the FBI than master spying by Robert Hanssen, said a Justice Department report released Thursday. The FBI's deficiencies, including an almost blind trust in its own agents, enabled Hanssen to spy for the Soviet Union and Russia for more than two decades, according to the investigation by inspector general Glenn A. Fine. The report concluded that Hanssen, a top FBI counterespionage official, received little supervision and the bureau had few checks in place that would deter him from spying or...

Captured al-Qa'eda man was FBI spy By David Rennie in Washington (Filed: 23/06/2003) The American al-Qa'eda operative unmasked last week as having planned to bring down the Brooklyn Bridge was first detained in March, and has been used by the FBI for months as a double agent, it was reported yesterday. Iyman Faris US authorities waited until last week to announce a plea bargain struck with Iyman Faris, a Pakistani-born lorry driver ordered to scout out terror targets, including the New York landmark. They did not say that Faris, who was also ordered to study ultralight aircraft, and the possibility...

<p>LOS ANGELES -- A San Marino businesswoman who worked as a double agent for the FBI was indicted Thursday on charges of illegally taking, copying and keeping secret documents obtained during romantic liaisons with her government handler.</p> <p>A Los Angeles federal grand jury issued a five-count indictment against Katrina Leung, a Republican activist who is a prominent member of Southern California's Chinese American community.</p>

In the new issue of Doublethink, a Washington-based right-wing quarterly, Hitchens reveals that if the election were today he'd support President Bush -- never mind his recent Vanity Fair puff piece about Democratic hopeful John Edwards. "I don't believe in [Edwards]," Hitchens tells Doublethink interviewer Tom Ivancie. "I mean, I told him I wouldn't vote for him. . . . Because I'd vote for Bush. The important thing is this: Meanwhile, Hitchens suggests that old nemesis Bill Clinton was a CIA plant at Oxford, where both were students in the late 1960s. "I think he was a double," Hitchens says....