Free Republic

Wednesday morning, August 27, between 11 am and 1:30 pm EST or 9 am and 11:30 am mountain time, I'll be chairing a New America Foundation/Middle East Task Force event in Denver at the Colorado History Museum. The keynotes are Senator JOHN KERRY (D-MA), Obama National Security Adviser GREG CRAIG, Princeton University Woodrow Wilson School Dean ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER, former Congressman and Obama Adviser MEL LEVINE, former German Foreign Minister JOSCHKA FISCHER, and Aspen Institute President (and former CNN Chairman and CEO and TIME Managing Editor) Walter Isaacson. Our panel will be former Israeli negotiator and New America Foundation Senior Fellow...

'An official U.S. State Department document acknowledges that America knew Yasser Arafat was personally behind the 1973 murder of its Khartoum ambassador; the upcoming Palestinian statehood bid has much to thank the perpetrators for.'

‘If they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern.’ secretary of state heard telling Nixon on 1973 tape. WASHINGTON – Henry Kissinger is heard saying the genocide of Soviet Jews would not be an American problem on newly released tapes chronicling President Nixon’s obsession with disparaging Jews and other minorities. Kissinger’s remarks come after a meeting between the two men and former prime minister Golda Meir on March 1, 1973, in which Meir pleads for US pressure on the Soviet Union to release its Jews. The men dismiss her plea after Meir...

Detail by painful detail, the CIA is coming to grips with one of the most devastating episodes in its history, a botched cloak-and-dagger flight into China that stole two decades of freedom from a pair of fresh-faced American operatives and cost the lives of their two pilots. In opening up about the 1952 debacle, the CIA is finding ways to use it as a teaching tool. Mistakes of the past can serve as cautionary tales for today's spies and paramilitary officers taking on al-Qaida and other terrorist targets. At the center of the story are two eager CIA paramilitary officers...

In June 2002 I wrote a column for the Minneapolis Star Tribune regarding Yasser Arafat's responsibility for the 1973 assassination of two United States State Department officers -- Ambassador Cleo Noel and charge d'affaires Curtis Moore -- in Khartoum, Sudan. The column was based on accounts of the events in David Korn's Assassination in Khartoum, Neil Livingstone and David Halevy's Inside the PLO, and the testimony of former National Security Agency analyst Jim Welsh. Welsh has doggedly purused the story for over thirty years as a result of his personal involvement in disseminating a warning relating to the communications intercepted...