Friends and Citizens: The period for a new election of a citizen to administer the executive government of the United States being not far distant, and the time actually arrived when your thoughts must be employed in designating the person who is to be clothed with that important trust, it appears to me proper, especially as it may conduce to a more distinct expression of the public voice, that I should now apprise you of the resolution I have formed, to decline being considered among the...

And now, friends and countrymen, if the wise and learned philosophers of the elder world, the first observers of nutation and aberration, the discoverers of maddening ether and invisible planets, the inventors of Congreve rockets and Shrapnel shells, should find their hearts disposed to enquire what has America done for the benefit of mankind? Let our answer be this: America, with the same voice which spoke herself into existence as a nation, proclaimed to mankind the inextinguishable rights...

The House had under consideration a bill proposing to draft men for service in the War of 1812. MR. Webster: Mr. Chairman: After the best reflection which I have been able to bestow on the subject of the bill before you, I am of the opinion that its principles are not warranted by any provision of the constitution. It appears to me to partake of the nature of those other propositions for military measures, which this session, so fertile in invention, has produced. It is of the same class with...

The Australian The Times UK US plots to arm Syrian rebels with Muammar Gaddafi leftovers THE US is launching a covert operation to send weapons to Syrian rebels for the first time as it ramps up military efforts to oust President Bashar al-Assad. Mortars, rocket-propelled grenades and anti-tank missiles will be sent through friendly Middle Eastern countries already supplying the rebels, according to well-placed diplomatic sources. The US has bought weapons from the stockpiles of Libya's former...

This was one of the all-time most memorable and hilarious columns by the late, great Jeff Huber, who died way too young and we all miss very much. Alexander the Great, eat your heart out.  Et tu, Julius Caesar.  The same goes for you, Charlemagne.  Dead or alive, Osama bin Laden is the greatest military and political strategist in human history, bar none. Neither Alexander nor Caesar nor Charlemagne managed, as bin Laden has, to lure the best-trained, best-equipped military of the world’s...

By Jeff Stein CQ Politics April 22, 2009 California Democrat Jane Harman, battling a controversy over her interactions with a suspected Israeli spy, was overheard on a 2005 wiretap discussing a failed fundraising ploy designed to get her named chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, according to a former national security official who has read the transcript. Harman was heard lamenting to the suspected Israeli agent how the tactics of a major Jewish fundraiser to use the threat of...

Jeff Stein April 21, 2009 2:20 AM The tremendous interest in my story yesterday about a 2005 NSA wiretap picking up California Democratic Rep. Jane Harman conversing with a suspected Israeli agent took me by surprise, frankly. It’s always gratifying to find so many people paying attention to things like this when Carrie Prejean is only a click away. The first thing I want to dispel, though, is the apparently widespread notion that the timing of my story Monday was somehow related to: (1) the...

By Jeff Stein | CQ Rep. Jane Harman, the California Democrat with a longtime involvement in intelligence issues, was overheard on an NSA wiretap telling a suspected Israeli agent that she would lobby the Justice Department to reduce espionage-related charges against two officials of the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, the most powerful pro-Israel organization in Washington. Harman was recorded saying she would 'waddle into' the AIPAC case 'if you think it’ll make a difference,'...

I. The Constitution has no inherent authority or obligation. It has no authority or obligation at all, unless as a contract between man and man. And it does not so much as even purport to be a contract between persons now existing. It purports, at most, to be only a contract between persons living eighty years ago. And it can be supposed to have been a contract then only between persons who had already come to years of discretion, so as to be competent to make reasonable and obligatory...

by Patrick J. Sloyan The Digital Journalist November, 2002 Leon Daniel, as did others who reported from Vietnam during the 1960s, knew about war and death. So he was puzzled by the lack of corpses at the tip of the Neutral Zone between Saudi Arabia and Iraq on Feb. 25, 1991. Clearly there had been plenty of killing. The 1st Infantry Division (Mechanized) had smashed through the defensive front-line of Saddam Hussein’s army the day before, Feb. 24, the opening of the Desert Storm ground war to...

By Peter Worthington – Toronto Sun, April 1, 2001 How the U.S., NATO and the western media were conned in Kosovo Back in March, 1999, what tipped the scales for then U.S. president Bill Clinton to launch an air war against Serbia, were reports of a massacre of 45 Albanian civilians by Serb security forces at the village of Racak, some 30 km from Pristina in southern Kosovo. Clinton told the world on March 19, 1999: "We should remember what happened in Racak ... innocent men, women and children...

The Herald, March 27, 2001, by Ian Bruce BRITISH special forces are being deployed to the Kosovo-Macedonian border to seal infiltration routes used by Albanian guerrillas to smuggle reinforcements and munitions to rebels threatening the stability of the southern Balkans. The elite troops, drawn from the SAS and from the Royal Marines' mountain and arctic warfare cadre, are being drafted in to try to end the confrontation between ethnic Albanian insurgents operating in the rugged Sar mountains...

By David Leppard, Paul Nuki and Gareth Walsh, Sunday Times, March 26, 2000 *Political fallout: Lord Simon ran BP at the time of the coup A secret intelligence report accuses BP–Britain’s biggest company–of backing a military coup which installed a ruthless KGB hardman in the former Soviet state of Azerbaijan. Turkish secret service documents allege middlemen paid off key officials of the democratically elected government of the oil-rich nation just before its president was overthrown. An...

Tom Walker and Aidan Laverty THE SUNDAY TIMES, London, UK March 12, 2000 Disclosure angers European diplomats AMERICAN intelligence agents have admitted they helped to train the Kosovo Liberation Army before Nato's bombing of Yugoslavia. The disclosure angered some European diplomats, who said this had undermined moves for a political solution to the conflict between Serbs and Albanians. Central Intelligence Agency officers were ceasefire monitors in Kosovo in 1998 and 1999, developing ties...

Agence France Presse – September 24, 1999 Sarajevo: Osama bin Laden, the Saudi billionaire wanted by the United States for organizing bloody terrorist attacks, was granted a Bosnian passport in 1993 by the country's [i.e., Bosnia]embassy in Vienna, an independent weekly reported Friday. "The Bosnian embassy in Vienna granted a passport to bin Laden in 1993," Dani magazine said, quoting anonymous sources, emphasizing that files and traces linked to his case have recently been destroyed by the...