Free Republic

ABC News has learned that Richard Holbrooke, the US Special Representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, has died. On Friday, Holbrooke was rushed to the hospital with a torn aorta. He went through more than 20 hours of surgery. Earlier this evening, speaking at the US State Department, President Obama sang Holbrooke's praises and called him "a tough son of a gun." Holbrooke, 69, was a former ambassador to the United Nations and served as chief negotiator at the Dayton Peace Accords, which ended the war in Bosnia. The New Yorker's George Packer wrote a nice story about Holbrooke last year,...

Secret diner in Washington Holbrooke and Thaqui planned terror Less than a week before the clashes in Kosovo and Metohija occurred, a group of Albanian lobbyists from USA held a meeting at which they decided to help Kosovo Albanians to force international community to give independence to Kosovo. 'Blic' got this information from well-informed sources in the US. As 'Blic' further finds out this informal meeting was held at the initiative of David Philips, deputy director of the Center for preventive action within Council for international relations in New York. The meeting was held at his home with light diner....

The Rockefellers and Iran: Jay Rockefeller’s Reversal and the Iranian-American LobbyBy Fedora In 1979, Rockefeller representatives launched an unsuccessful operation to lobby the Carter administration in support of the Shah of Iran, who was seeking safe haven in the wake of a coup by Islamic revolutionaries. Codenamed Project Alpha, the operation was spearheaded by Chase Manhattan Bank Chairman David Rockefeller and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, with support from oil lobby lawyer John McCloy. Although Project Alpha won the support of National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, it met opposition from Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and failed to win...

AMERICANS will certainly have 9/11 in mind when they vote today. But they should keep another date in mind, too — one almost exactly a quarter-century ago: Nov. 4, 1979. A clear path runs to 9/11 from the day of the raid on the U.S. embassy in Tehran and the seizure of American hostages. The 1979 embassy attack came at a time when the administration of President Jimmy Carter was trying to prop up the new Khomeinist regime in Tehran. Carter had decided to support Khomeini in the context of the so-called "Green Belt" strategy developed by National Security...

When the Americans go to the polls on Tuesday they would do well to remember two events that have altered their lives forever. The first was the raid on the US Embassy in Tehran, and the seizure of American hostages on Nov. 4, 1979. The second was the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks against New York and Washington. The embassy seizure showed that Americans were no longer safe outside their homeland and that even diplomatic immunity would not protect them. The 9/11 attacks showed that the Americans were no longer safe even in their own homeland, and that no amount of...