Tag Archives: national security

Standing O

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

The House of Representatives gave a standing ovation to the Capitol police force after the crazy event yesterday afternoon.

Some quipsters on the Twitter said that they would rather get paid than get the applause.

Don’t worry. They will get paid and they deserve the applause.

I owe my life to the Capitol Police. John Gibson, who served on Tom DeLay’s security detail in the late 1990’s, stopped an armed crazy person with his weapon in an office right next to mine. Unfortunately, Gibson was murdered in the process. Continue reading →

Watergate Lessons Not Learned (Part II)

BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON

The recent stream of classified information leaks compromise our national security on a number of fronts, and they only add to the crisis in public trust in government, the likes of which we haven’t seen since Watergate.

While the main body of leaks is investigated by Congress and the Justice Department there are several subplots, or as lawyers and editors like to call them, sidebars to this sad saga that should not go unattended.

The first is the misuse of anonymous sources. It has reached epidemic proportions among traditional and new media. Those journalists, or pseudo journalists, who use them have absolutely no public oversight. The users and abusers answer to no one, except in some cases, a faceless, nameless editor who may be as much a participant in the misuse as the reporters. We don’t get to judge. Continue reading →

Hawks, Doves Analogy Passe

By Tony Blankley

Reprinted from the Washington Times

Last weekend, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina tried his hand at dissecting Republican foreign policy attitudes. I commend the senator for trying to come to grips with this vital question, which is getting so little, if any, national discussion. As foreign events grow ever more threatening, the view of the now both culturally and congressionally dominant party – the GOP – becomes central to the range of political options President Obama has available to him.

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Wikileaks Crime Should Shock America

BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON

I wonder if there is a family somewhere in America whose son’s or daughter’s life was put at risk because of the Wikileaks.org release last month of 76,000 classified documents?

I wonder if there is an Afghan family whose son’s or daughter’s life was put at risk because of those leaks that we are told contain the names of Afghani citizens who have tried to help U.S. soldiers in their war against the Taliban.

I’m the father of five and I wonder about those things because war must get very personal and very heart wrenching for parents with children—age doesn’t matter and adulthood doesn’t exist for parents—involved on the violent fronts of the conflict.

So it was especially alarming to read the reactions of those detached observers suffering from chronic arrogance and elitism who thought the release of the documents was boring, telling us little we didn’t know already. “Overall, though, the most shocking thing about the ‘War Diary” may be that it fails to shock, wrote columnist Eugene Robinson. His colleague Richard Cohen went further: “The news in that massive data dump…is that there is no news at all.”

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