Free Republic

A top White House national security adviser and key proponent of the Obama administration’s diplomacy with Iran is the focus of a congressional inquiry following disclosures the FBI may have denied him top-level security clearances, according to communications exclusively obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. Ben Rhodes, a White House deputy national security adviser who led the administration’s efforts to mislead Congress about the terms of the Iran nuclear agreement, is under scrutiny in the wake of disclosures he was declined interim clearance status by the FBI in 2008, when the administration was moving into the White House. Since that...

Human Rights Travesty By Kenneth R. Timmerman FrontPageMagazine.com | July 23, 2007 If human rights abuses were ranked like baseball careers, Iran’s ruling clerics and the mighty midget they’ve installed as president would deserve honored places in the 21st Century’s Hall of Shame. On July 10, Iran’s Interior ministry confirmed the sentence, handed down ten days earlier by a court in the north of the country, condemning a man to death by stoning. If you’ve never witnessed a stoning (and most of us haven’t, I trust), you can get a flavor for the barbarity of this Koranic punishment from a...

... In November of 2011, the Washington Post reported that the Iranian government had mastered the critical steps needed to build a nuclear weapon after receiving assistance from foreign scientists. The Post went on to say: An intelligence update will be circulated among International Atomic Energy Agency [IAEA] members... It is expected to focus on Iran's alleged efforts towards putting radioactive material in a warhead and developing missiles... Julian Borger of the Guardian-UK reported in November of 2009: The UN's nuclear watchdog has asked Iran to explain evidence suggesting that Iranian scientists have experimented with an advanced nuclear warhead design......

DAVOS, Switzerland (Reuters) - Former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami on Thursday called for calm heads to reduce building tensions between the United States and his country over its nuclear program. "I hope that they would be good enough in managing the situation. We deeply need patience and understanding and not to get too emotional," Khatami said at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos. Tehran and Washington have collided head-on over Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's decision last February to resume the country's uranium enrichment program, reversing a more than two-year pause under Khatami's government. Iran says it needs nuclear power...

Iran: The Conspiracy that Wasn't July 20, 2007 The New York Post Amir Taheri . . . THOUGH IT DOES SEEM A FINE IDEA Esfandiari: Hardly a "foreign plotter." EVER since its creation in 1979, the Islamic Republic in Iran has been obsessed with conspiracy theories, especially "foreign plots" to topple it. This paranoia was demonstrated again Wednesday with the televised confessions of two U.S. citizens of Iranian origin arrested in Tehran and accused of working for the "Great Satan." To most Iranians who watched the sordid show, the two "enemies of Islam" seemed unlikely heroes of an international conspiracy....

WASHINGTON - A progress report on Iraq will conclude that the U.S.-backed government in Baghdad has not met any of its targets for political, economic and other reform, speeding up the Bush administration's reckoning on what to do next, a U.S. official said Monday. One likely result of the report will be a vastly accelerated debate among President Bush's top aides on withdrawing troops and scaling back the U.S. presence in Iraq. The "pivot point" for addressing the matter will no longer be Sept. 15, as initially envisioned, when a full report on Bush's so-called "surge" plan is due, but...

Mika Brzezinski is at it again. As noted here and here, the daughter of Jimmy Carter's former NSA is inclined to inject her own political views into her MSNBC newsreading role.At 6:10 am EDT on today's "Morning Joe," Mika read an item reporting that Sen. Richard Lugar [R-IN] had called for a change of course in Iraq and expressed support for the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group, co-chaired by James Baker and Lugar's fellow Hoosier, Lee Hamilton.Mika couldn't restrain herself. MSNBC NEWSREADER MIKA BRZEZINSKI: Whatever happened to the Iraq Study Group, because I believe President Bush asked for those...

Rudy Giuliani quit an elite Iraq study panel last spring after he failed to show up for a single official group meeting, citing "previous time commitments” – a speaking tour that brought in $11.4 million in 14 months. The 10-member panel, known as the Baker-Hamilton commission, was chartered by Congress and encouraged by President Bush to explore U.S. policy in Iraq. On May 18, 2006, when the panel gathered in Washington, Giuliani gave a $100,000 speech on leadership at a business awards breakfast in Atlanta, Newsday reports. The month before, he skipped another panel session to deliver the keynote speech...

Top Democrats sought to tamp down on Wednesday any speculation that Rep. Tom Lantos — or possibly House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — may be traveling to Iran, a day after revealing their willingness to travel there. "No, the speaker has no intentions of going to Iran," Pelosi spokesman Nadeam Elshami said Wednesday afternoon in a telephone interview with FOXNews.com. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid also confirmed Wednesday that he is not going to Iran, although he didn't discount others who may make such plans. Reid pointed to the Iraq Study Group's recommendation that the United States begin discussions — at...

Canada involved in effort to lift Iraq from chaos Steven Edwards, CanWest News Service Published: Friday, March 16, 2007 UNITED NATIONS — Canada offered Iraq help on Friday to lift it from chaos while speaking at a closed international meeting as one of the key powers seeking to involve as many countries as possible in the reconstruction of the war-torn country. While Ottawa kept wraps on its speech inside the United Nations meeting room, officials revealed the Canadian delegate spoke about the need to extend economic and political help. Attended by more than 80 countries, the meeting represented a...

Now it seems as though George W. Bush might be paying more attention to former Secretary of State James A. Baker III’s Iraq Study Group than he initially let on. For starters, the president’s apparent about-face last week from his earlier rejection of meetings with Iran or Syria falls right in line with one of Baker’s chief recommendations.Baker’s blue-ribbon panel, co-chaired with former Democratic Rep. Lee H. Hamilton of Indiana, unveiled 79 recommendations in December for salvaging Iraq. The 10 members of the group — five from each political party — checked their partisanship at the door to draw a...

“Reality therapy,” declared Time magazine’s Michael Duffy with satisfaction. “A chance to think anew,” added Newsweek’s Jon Meacham. These and similarly warm words of welcome from organs of respectable opinion greeted the December arrival of the long-awaited report of the Iraq Study Group (ISG), with its 79 prescriptions for U.S. policy in the Middle East. The sense of relief was palpable. With neoconservatism supposedly repudiated by the “fiasco” of Iraq, the backing of a wise man’s council composed equally of Republicans and Democrats, and a friendly media breeze in its sails, the ISG report was heralded not just as...

Lee Hamilton revealed Monday in Washington that some members of the Iraq Study Group nearly came to blows over the direction of the war. The former congressman also told the council and the board of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, of which he is president, that discussions of how to resolve the situation in Iraq became so contentious, he had his doubts they would ever agree enough to make their report to Congress. Hamilton co-chaired the study group with James Baker 3rd. "Lee said, 'There were almost fistfights. It happened several times,'" revealed our source. "He said some...

A "Citizens Report on Iraq" By Michelle Malkin   ·   January 30, 2007 11:51 AM Just released. Compiled as a response to the Iraq Study Group. Here's the 86-page PDF. From the press release: In the Citizens Report on Iraq, readers will learn that progress is being made in Iraq; there are large areas of Iraq that are safe and prospering; that the enemy is being killed and wounded in astounding proportion to American casualties; that the reporting on Iraq by the dominant media is universally despised as inaccurate and misleading by those fighting for Free Iraq -- Americans and Iraqis alike;...

MUST READ - James Baker Works to Establish Direct Diplomatic USA - Iran Ties Former US Secretary of State Baker Attempts to Bypass Bush White House on Iran Defense & Foreign Affairs Analysis. By Gregory R. Copley, Editor, GIS. Former US Secretary of State James Baker, who co-chaired the recent US Iraq Study Group — the main recommendations of which were rejected by the George W. Bush Administration — is working indirectly and behind the scenes to bring about direct diplomatic ties between the US and Iran. This is in defiance of Bush White House policy which essentially has said...

Recent visits by Syrian President Bashar Assad to U.S.-allied Yemen and the United Arab Emirates are prompting speculation that Syria is seeking to leave the Iranian orbit and pursue closer ties with the West. Such a move would fulfill a major recommendation of the Iraq Study Group, headed by former Secretary of State James A. Baker III and former Rep. Lee H. Hamilton, which suggested it might be possible through diplomacy to pry Syria away from Iran.

Former Secretary of State James Baker was involved in a cover-up of illegal trading by his law firm with the regime of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, according to a former contractor who did work for Mr. Baker’s firm. Mr. Baker used non-Americans to help acquire funds from Iraq in violation of the United Nations embargo and U.S. law, the former contractor said. Nir Gouaz, an Israeli security veteran, said that in 1999 Mr. Baker's leading deputy at the law firm of Baker Botts ordered him to destroy all documents that detailed how he obtained from Iraq more than $250 million...

As the Iraq Study Group issued its long-awaited report on the war, declaring that the United States should not dispatch more troops, Sen. John McCain reacted with his long-held and contrary view: It will take more boots on the ground, or the nation faces "sooner or later, our defeat in Iraq." Then the Arizona Republican discreetly flew to San Diego, where the next day, Dec. 8, he sat under a hot sun to watch a skinny 18-year-old in military-issue glasses graduate from boot camp and become a Marine. His son Jimmy. John McCain's public certainty about Iraq masks a more...

Anbar Province and the Iraq Study Group Report Iraqi Politicians and Tribal Sheihks are concerned about the implications of the Iraq Study Group report The release of the Iraq Study Group report, a 79 point plan to address Iraq, created by a blue ribbon panel lead by former Secretary of State James Baker and Representative Lee Hamilton, has implications far beyond domestic U.S. politics. I've been asked numerous times how this report has effected the U.S. troops serving in Iraq. The answer is very little. Most shrug their shoulders at the news reports, and haven't had time to digest the...

WELL done video! Zucker says in Comedy what everyone else is afraid to say!