Free Republic

Former U.S./U.N. ambassador John Bolton returned to U.N. headquarters in NYC on Friday to launch his new book "Surrender Is Not An Option" (Threshold Editions- Simon & Schuster - 486 pgs.) The controversial U.S. diplomat quit his U.N. post in November 2006 when the Senate Foreign Relations Committee stalled a vote on his nomination. For the preceding 18 mos. Bolton served as UN ambassador under a temporary Congressional recess appointment that was to expire on January 1, 2007. With a Democratic Congress taking office and a rejected nomination likely, Bolton asked President Bush to withdraw his name rather than face...

The venue was different -- the grand hall of the UN General Assembly -- but Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's message was the same as it has been for months. Fresh from his performance as a human pinata at Columbia University, the Iranian president took the opportunity this week to remind the nations of the world just how much contempt he and his country held for the UN Security Council. In sum, a lot. After two sets of sanctions, and many more deadlines for Iran to suspend its nuclear program, Ahmadinejad dared the nations of the world to stop Iran's nuclear...

DAVOS - UN nuclear chief Mohamed ElBaradei on Friday called on the United States to provide Iran with nuclear reactors, and urged Tehran to declare a moratorium on enriching uranium for at least eight years. He said eight or nine years would enable the country to earn the confidence of the international community that it was really interested in nuclear energy - not nuclear weapons.

BAGHDAD, Iraq, March 12 - In the weeks after Baghdad fell in April 2003, looters systematically dismantled and removed tons of machinery from Saddam Hussein's most important weapons installations, including some with high-precision equipment capable of making parts for nuclear arms, a senior Iraqi official said this week in the government's first extensive comments on the looting. The Iraqi official, Sami al-Araji, the deputy minister of industry, said it appeared that a highly organized operation had pinpointed specific plants in search of valuable equipment, some of which could be used for both military and civilian applications, and carted the machinery...

WASHINGTON, (AFP) - There is no evidence to support the claim that Iran is developing nuclear weapons, the head of the UN nuclear watchdog Mohamed ElBaradei said in an interview published by The Washington Post. "On Iran, there really hasn't been much development, neither as a result of our inspections or as a result of intelligence," said the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) director general. ElBaradei called for greater US participation in diplomatic efforts to engage Iran and North Korea in talks about their nuclear programs. "North Korea and Iran are still the two 800-pound gorillas in the room and...

Since midsummer, the Senate Intelligence Committee has been attempting to solve the biggest mystery of the Iraq war: the disparity between the Bush Administration’s prewar assessment of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and what has actually been discovered. The committee is concentrating on the last ten years’ worth of reports by the C.I.A. Preliminary findings, one intelligence official told me, are disquieting. “The intelligence community made all kinds of errors and handled things sloppily,” he said. The problems range from a lack of quality control to different agencies’ reporting contradictory assessments at the same time. One finding, the official went...

UN nuclear watchdog chief Mohamed El Baradei has rejected charges that he has attacked President George W. Bush by saying the invasion and occupation of Iraq have damaged the credibility of the United States, his spokesman said Friday. Spokesman Mark Gwozdecky said in a statement: "Some media have misrepresented Dr. ElBaradei's essential message in his speech at Stanford and quoted him out of context." Gwozdecky was referring to an article published Friday in the San Francisco Chronicle after International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) director general ElBaradei gave a speech at Stanford University in California on Thursday. "The main message he...

Bill Safire’s column today advances the case that UN official Mohamed ElBaradei has attempted to influence an American election by circulating false or misleading information. (Whether he succeeds or not remains to be determined.) Money quote: ElBaradei “has long known about the presence of ‘nuclear trigger’ explosives (evidence of Saddam's nuclear ambitions?) in one of Iraq's thousands of ammo dumps. But, The Wall Street Journal reports that with exquisite political timing, on Oct. 1 ElBaradei sent a ‘reminder’ to a Baathist science minister renewing the U.N. interest in these particular explosives. That produced a dutiful letter from the Iraqi bureaucrat...

VIENNA, Austria (AP) - The hunt for middlemen who worked with the father of Pakistan's nuclear program to supply rogue regimes with weapons technology has widened to Japan and Africa, diplomats said Thursday. Suspects in Germany and two other European countries are also being investigated in the growing probe of the clandestine black market apparently headed by Abdul Qadeer Khan of Pakistan, they said. Also, Malaysia announced Thursday it would investigate a company controlled by the prime minister's son for its alleged role in supplying components to Libya's nuclear program. The company also has been linked to the international nuclear...

DAVOS, Switzerland (Reuters) - Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf said on Friday it appeared Pakistani scientists had sold nuclear secrets abroad, but reiterated Islamabad's position that there had been no official involvement. Pakistan says it began questioning its nuclear scientists, including the father of its atomic bomb, Abdul Qadeer Khan, after the U.N. nuclear agency began investigating possible links between the Pakistani and Iranian nuclear programs. Musharraf told CNN while attending the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that the investigation, launched in November, would be finished in "a few weeks." Asked the likely outcome, he replied: "Well, I would not...

<p>The United States intercepted an illegal shipment of thousands of parts of uranium-enrichment equipment bound for Libya in October, leading to Tripoli agreeing to cap its weapons program, U.S. officials confirmed yesterday.</p> <p>Senior State Department official John R. Bolton plans to fly to London today to make plans with Britain for holding Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi to his pledge to dismantle his nuclear-weapons program.</p>

VIENNA: The head of the United Nations nuclear watchdog said on Friday that North Korea has been guilty of nuclear "blackmail" and could not be trusted, though he was encouraged by the six-country talks that took place in Beijing. "I don't think they can be trusted," head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IDEA) Mohamed ElBaradei said in an interview on BBC television. "However, we would like to work with them and bring them back to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)." Pyongyang expelled the IAEA's inspectors at the start of the year and then withdrew from the NPT, the global pact...