Free Republic

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...

Mistake That is Fake by: Cliff Kincaid, June 24, 2008 If Barack Obama wanted to dispel doubts about his national security credentials, he hasn’t done so with the announcement of a new “Senior Working Group on National Security” that includes Dr. Tony Lake, a former national security adviser to Bill Clinton. Lake became a laughingstock for expressing doubts as to whether Alger Hiss, the founder of the United Nations and a top State Department official, was a communist spy. Lake’s doubts led to a controversy that caused him to withdraw his nomination as Clinton’s CIA director. Interestingly, Lake had expressed...

CHOEUNG EK, Cambodia (Reuters) - The chief torturer under the Khmer Rouge "Killing Fields" regime wept and prayed on Tuesday as he led the judges who will try him for crimes against humanity around the mass graves for some of its victims. Duch, also known as Kaing Guek Eav, accompanied 80 judges, lawyers and other officials of a U.N.-backed tribunal to the 129 graves, uncovered after a Vietnamese invasion sent the Khmer Rouge back to the jungles in 1979. "I saw Duch kneel in front of the trees where Khmer Rouge soldiers smashed children to death," a policeman told reporters...

One of Barack Obama's senior foreign policy advisers has said the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran is the biggest threat facing the world. In an interview with the Financial Times, Anthony Lake, a former US national security adviser now working with Obama, said: "I believe that the most dangerous crisis we are going to face in the next three to 10 years is if the Iranians get on the edge of developing a nuclear weapon." Obama and his advisers, such as Lake, have stressed the Democratic candidate's readiness to sit down with Iranian leaders without conditions. In the interview, Lake...

By James A. Barnes, National Journal © National Journal Group Inc. Monday, March 31, 2008 If potential presidents can be judged by how they run their campaigns, then how they staff those efforts may provide important clues to the kinds of talent they would recruit for their administrations. Because Democratic front-runner Barack Obama is a relative newcomer to national politics, an examination of his inner circle of political and policy advisers offers new windows into his thinking, leadership style, and sources of expertise. The Democratic front-runner's team has a relatively shallow bench, but its political achievements thus far are quite...

c By MICHELLE FAUL The Associated Press Tuesday, May 31, 2005; 9:20 PM SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico -- They fed them well. The Pakistani tribesmen slaughtered a sheep in honor of their guests, Arabs and Chinese Muslims famished from fleeing U.S. bombing in the Afghan mountains. But their hosts had ulterior motives: to sell them to the Americans, said the men who are now prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. Bounties ranged from $3,000 to $25,000, the detainees testified during military tribunals, according to transcripts the U.S. government gave The Associated Press to comply with a Freedom of Information lawsuit. A former...

Pol Pot was the leader of the Khmer Rouge, the Communist Party that ruled Cambodia from 1976-1979. "Khmer Rouge" (or Khmer Reds) was the French rendering of the organization’s official name: the "Communist Party of Cambodia," later the "Party of Democratic Kampuchea" and also the "Communist Party of Kampuchea," or CPK. (Kampuchea is the local name for Cambodia.) Pol Pot was born Saloth Sar in what is now the province of Kompong Thong, Cambodia in 1925. He came from a prosperous farming family that in 1931 moved to the capital, Phnom Penh, where the young Pol Pot learned some of...

The US is turning on old friends in Europe, writes John Laughland. Before he denounced the "prevailing influence" of the US in the "anti-constitutional coup" that overthrew him, President Askar Akayev of Kyrgyzstan used an interesting phrase to attack those who were stirring up trouble in the drug-ridden Ferghana Valley. A criminal "third force", linked to the drug mafia, was struggling to gain power. Originally a label for covert operatives shoring up apartheid in South Africa before it was adopted by the US-backed "pro-democracy" movement in Iran in November 2001, the third force is also the title of a book...