Free Republic

The mishandling of the would-be airplane bomber Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab’s visa is only the latest piece of evidence that the granting of visas should be taken away from the State Department. Doing so would improve our national security — and actually help the State Department itself. The granting of visas has little to do with State’s main function, which is to manage relations with foreign governments. The department’s “mission statement” reads as follows: Advance freedom for the benefit of the American people and the international community by helping to build and sustain a more democratic, secure, and prosperous world...

Sunday night Jan 8, US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice discussed the forthcoming Palestinian elections to the legislative council on the telephone with Palestinian Authority chairman Abu Mazen. Jerusalem was not briefed, DEBKAfile’s political sources report. Twelve hours later, the US consul in Jerusalem Jacob Walles visited Abu Mazen’s office in Ramallah with an oral message from President George W. Bush. According to our sources, it was a presidential guarantee that all the Palestinian parties running for election on Jan 25 would be allowed to campaign openly in East Jerusalem, eligible voters in the city would be permitted to cast...

Reader Mark Coffey pointed out that the Yemen Observer has a theory about who is responsible for the assassination of former Lebanon prime minister Rafik Hariri: According to high-level Lebanese intelligence sources—Christian and Muslim—former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri was reportedly assassinated in a sophisticated explosion-by-wire bombing authorized by the Bush administration and Ariel Sharon's Likud government in Israel. This kind of thing is old hat in the Arab press of course, but this time the conspiracy theory delves deeper: A number of intelligence sources have reported that assassinations of foreign leaders like Hariri and Hobeika are ultimately authorized by...

US President George Bush's top strategist on the Middle East conflict has told private gatherings of scholars and Jewish leaders that Jewish settlements outside Israel's controversial barrier through the West Bank will have to be dismantled. The comments by Elliot Abrams, a senior director at the National Security Council, exceed previous Bush Administration statements and have sent a signal to tens of thousands of settlers that they are on untenable ground. But by specifying that these settlements must be abandoned, Mr Abrams indicated that Israel would be able to hold on to its most populous settlements and continue building the...