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A former senior policy adviser to President Barack Obama has been arrested and accused of child sex crimes in Great Britain. According to court documents, Rahamim 'Rami' Shy, a 46-year-old resident of New Jersey, stands accused of arranging a child sex offense, in addition to charges of possessing indecent images of children, according to a report from The Daily Mail. Shy, a US citizen, who lives in New Jersey, worked for the White House under president Barack Obama and secretary of state Hillary Clinton, was arrested in late February by Bedfordshire Police. He was charged the following day and appeared...

Bush dinner tastes sour for Obama - PMO decision to entertain former President causes hurt in Washington K.P. NAYAR Washington, Oct. 24: Preparations for Manmohan Singh’s visit to Washington on November 24 have begun on a negative signal to the Obama administration with a decision by the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) to host former President George W. Bush for dinner at Singh’s residence at the end of this month. Bush is visiting New Delhi on October 30 and 31 at the invitation of an Indian newspaper and will speak at a conference organised in New Delhi on October 31 on...

Pakistan's Foreign Minister says his country needs energy, emphasizing that Islamabad will continue a gas pipeline deal with Iran despite sanctions on Tehran. Shah Mehmood Qureshi told reporters on Sunday that the present government has struck the gas pipeline deal with Iran in view of Pakistan's energy requirements. "This agreement is in the interest of Pakistan and it will only see its interests and the international laws…… the Iran-Pakistan gas pipeline agreement will not come under the ambit of the sanctions on Tehran," he said, a Press TV correspondent reported. Pakistan's Foreign Minister disclosed that all the different phases of...

ISLAMABAD (June 20 2010): The United States has no concern on Iran-Pakistan Gas Pipeline as Pakistan is an independent country and the project is its own decision, US Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan Ambassador Richard Holbrooke said here on Saturday. Holbrooke told a joint news conference with Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi that work is going on regarding Reconstruction Opportunity Zones (ROZs). He said efforts are being made for more market access for Pakistan. He especially motioned the possibility of opening up market for Pakistani mangoes to America and said these mangoes were of very high quality and taste....

<p>President Joe Biden once dismissed America’s obligations to Afghan women and girls when he was vice president, telling officials “Fuck that” when it was brought to his attention.</p><p>Atlantic reporter George Packer, also a biographer of former President Barack Obama’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke, revealed the 2010 exchange in March.</p>

The rapid US withdrawal from Afghanistan that has left the gate open for the Taliban to surge to power may come as a surprise to some, but President Biden has been in favour of pulling out for years. In 2010, Biden reportedly told Richard Holbrooke, then Obama's special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, that the US had to leave Afghanistan regardless of the cost for the Afghan people. According to Holbrooke, when Biden was asked about America's obligation to maintain their presence in Afghanistan to protect vulnerable civilians, he scornfully replied by referencing the US exit from southeast Asia in...

You may ask yourself, is it worth one of the best American non-fiction writers producing a book of just under 600 pages on an arrogant and abrasive egotist whose highest sustained rank in the State Department was that of a lowly assistant secretary? The answer is unabashedly yes. This is a remarkable work about a remarkable, if deeply flawed, statesman whose career was intimately intertwined with the 50 years of American decline from Vietnam to Afghanistan. Nearly all biographies have long, boring stretches you want to skip. This one has none. The access to Richard Holbrooke’s papers and to the...

I don't know whether Gen. Wesley Clark is qualified to be president, but Peter J. Boyer's profile in this week's New Yorker—which paints him as scarily unqualified—is an unfair portrait as well as a misleading, occasionally inaccurate précis of the 1999 Kosovo war and Clark's role in commanding it.Boyer relies heavily on some of Clark's fellow retired Army generals who clearly despise him. The gist of their critique, as Boyer summarizes, is that Clark, while a brilliant analyst, "had a certainty about the rightness of his views which led to conflicts with his colleagues and, sometimes, his superiors." I have...

Albanian-American roofer Florin Krasniqi has been living in Brooklyn and smuggling American guns into Kosovo to arm the Kosovo Liberation Army--this time for war against its erstwhile saviors, NATO and the UN. The KLA are the bin Laden-trained, Iran-backed narco-terrorists whose 1999 jihad against the Christian Serbs we helped fight, abetting secession and creating a mono-ethnic terror haven and future Islamic republic in Europe. Krasniqi, who raised $30 million from fellow Albanian-Americans to help finance the KLA's war, is the subject of a documentary by Dutch filmmaker Klaartje Quirijns, titled "The Brooklyn Connection," which will air Tuesday night at 10...

War On Terror: The death of skilled diplomat Richard Holbrooke is said to be a devastating blow to our Afghan war effort. But diplomats don't win wars; they do, unfortunately, often lose them. 'A huge vacuum." "A major void." "A towering, one-of-a-kind presence." These are some of the extravagant descriptions bandied about after the unexpected death Monday of the 69-year-old Obama administration envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, "AfPak czar" Richard Holbrooke. The media love personalities, so it's no surprise to see this foreign policy adviser to four Democratic presidents rendered larger than life, especially since he'd been expected to become...

President Obama delivered a soaring eulogy for the late Richard Holbrooke today, calling him a "leading light" of U.S. diplomacy. But ... the president's warm remarks belie a far more complex relationship between the President and Holbrooke...Attention also turned to his tumultuous final years, when Holbrooke was portrayed as a disruptive force within the Obama administration, whose relationship with top American and foreign officials had chilled, and whose professional tenure was nearly over... The authors mine interviews with people who knew Holbrooke in Kabul, Islamabad, New York, Brussels, and Washington—including his wife Katie Marton, Gen. David Petraeus, and Secretary of...

The death of the veteran diplomat Richard C. Holbrooke last week shocked Americans and his many colleagues around the world. Mr. Holbrooke, 69, was a larger-than-life figure, a fearless and robust man who was apparently struck down without warning. He became ill on a Friday, and was dead by Monday. According to government officials, the cause was a tear in his aorta, the artery that carries blood from the heart to vessels that feed the rest of the body. Mr. Holbrooke underwent 21 hours of surgery from Friday to Saturday to repair the damage, and then another seven-hour operation on...

Vali Reza Nasr, a senior Obama administration advisor on Iran, has come to Iran. Iranian parliament speaker Ali Larijani and former parliament speaker Gholam-Ali Haddad-Adel may be behind the visit. "President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was informed well after Nasr entered the country," Tabnak reported on Wednesday. Nasr was appointed senior advisor to Richard Holbrooke -- the special US envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan. Tabnak and Fararu claim the unannounced trip by the US official to be linked to the recent release of Iranian-American journalist Roxana Saberi.

A veteran State Department diplomat and longtime Pakistan expert is under federal investigation as part of a counterintelligence probe and has had her security clearances withdrawn, according to U.S. officials. The FBI searched the Northwest Washington home of Robin L. Raphel last month, and her State Department office was also examined and sealed, officials said. Raphel, a fixture in Washington’s diplomatic and think-tank circles, was placed on administrative leave last month, and her contract with the State Department was allowed to expire this week. Two U.S. officials described the investigation as a counterintelligence matter, which typically involves allegations of spying...

What is wrong with the hosts at MSNBC? Ronan Farrow, who will begin anchoring a network program on February 24, made a tasteless joke on Tuesday night, comparing war hero Cory Remsburg's struggles to that of politicians in Congress. Farrow tweeted, "Cory 'struggles on the left side.' Congress relates.'" Farrow has not apologized for the tweet On Wednesday, political reporter Mark Murray, whose wife works in the Obama administration, compared Remsburg's struggle to that of the President: "Obama's ending on Remsburg wasn't just a story about America -- it also was a story about Obama.

The insider-account of the damaging divisions between the White House and the State Department comes as diplomats around the world wait to see if John Kerry, the new US secretary of state, can persuade Mr Obama to greater engagement on Syria, Egypt and the wider Middle East. Vali Nasr, a university professor who was seconded in 2009 to work with Richard Holbrooke, Mr Obama's special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, records his profound disillusion at how a "Berlin Wall" of domestic-focused advisers was erected to protect Mr Obama. "The president had a truly disturbing habit of funnelling major foreign policy...

"My time in the Obama administration turned out to be a deeply disillusioning experience." It was close to midnight on Jan. 20, 2009, and I was about to go to sleep when my iPhone beeped. There was a new text message. It was from Richard Holbrooke. It said, "Are you up, can you talk?" When I called, he told me that Barack Obama had asked him to serve as envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan. He would work out of the State Department, and he wanted me to join his team. "No one knows this yet. Don't tell anyone. Well, maybe...

ISLAMABAD: The US has established contacts with Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar to negotiate an end to the conflict in Afghanistan, a media report said on Tuesday. Abdul Haqiq, a former Afghan Taliban spokesman who used the alias Mohammad Hanif, played a key role in helping Washington reach out to Mullah Omar, The Express Tribune newspaper quoted a source as saying. Haqiq was arrested by US and Afghan intelligence agents in Afghanistan in June 2007. He was one of the high profile Afghan Taliban spokesmen along with Yousuf Ahmadi, appointed after chief spokesman Abdul Latif Hakimi was arrested in...

US Special Envoy Richard Holbrooke had requested talks with Mullah Omar during his July visit to Pakistan. During the visit, Holbrooke, asked Pakistani officials to make the effort in bringing either the Taliban leader or his special representative to the negotiating table.Holbrooke's request is being considered in Taliban's leadership council by Mowlavi Abdul Kabir and Mowlavi Abdul Latif Mansour, the report adds. According to a member of Taliban's leadership council, during his Islamabad visit in July, Holbrooke opposed suggestions by Pakistani officials that his appeal for talks with the Taliban leader should be made public. Holbrook then demanded that the...

OF the many notable Americans we lost in 2010, three leap out as paragons of a certain optimistic American spirit that we also seemed to lose this year. Two you know: Theodore Sorensen, the speechwriter present at the creation of J.F.K.’s clarion call to “ask what you can do for your country,” and Richard Holbrooke, the diplomat who brought peace to the killing fields of Bosnia in the 1990s. Holbrooke, who was my friend, came of age in the Kennedy years and exemplified its can-do idealism. He gave his life to the proposition that there was nothing an American couldn’t...