Free Republic

Peek went on to major in international politics at Princeton, study Persian, and pursue a master's in international relations at Harvard before heading to D.C. as a foreign policy researcher for the conservative Heritage Foundation. He then became a foreign policy adviser to Oregon Senator Gordon Smith, a Republican. When Smith lost his next election, Peek went on to work for another Republican senator, Mike Johanns of Nebraska, on Syria and Lebanon policy, helping to draft a bill expanding sanctions on Hezbollah. In 2008, he enlisted as a reserve officer in the Army and spent a year in Afghanistan at...

Marine Gen. John Allen, a 1976 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, served this country admirably for more than 36 years. Now he has announced he wants to retire. The 59 year-old former top officer in Afghanistan cited his wife's "chronic" illness and said he wants to devote more time to helping his beloved Kathy cope with serious health problems, including an undisclosed "auto-immune disorder." We join the vast majority of Americans who pray the general's wife will get better, and thank him for his service to this country. But one would have to be pathetically naive not to realize...

BANGKOK — Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta has ordered the Pentagon to find out why so many generals and admirals have become embroiled in legal and ethical problems, a trend exacerbated by recent investigations of two of the military’s best-known commanders. The Pentagon disclosed Panetta’s directive on Thursday after he arrived in Thailand as part of a visit to Asia. But aides insisted that he had been considering the review for some time and that it was not prompted by revelations that the FBI has been investigating former CIA director David H. Petraeus, a retired Army general, and Marine Gen....

King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia urged the United States to attack Iran to destroy its nuclear programme, according to US documents leaked by WikiLeaks and published Sunday by daily newspapers. According to a leaked US cable, published by the New York Times, King Abdullah bin Abd al-Aziz made the call during an April 2008 meeting with US Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker and US General David Petraeus. "He told you to 'cut off the head of the snake'," Saudi Arabia's ambassador to Washington, Adel al-Jubeir, told the US embassy in Riyadh two days after the high-level talks, according to the...

When Iraqi tribal leaders came to D.C. looking for help against ISIL, the White House refused. Then the former president made a call. Late in the evening of Sunday, January 18, an eleven-member delegation of tribal leaders from Iraq’s western Anbar Province arrived in Washington, D.C. Just as their plane was touching down, Islamic State units back in Iraq attacked the compound of one of the delegation’s senior leaders, Sheik Ahmed Abu Risha, killing nine Iraqi police officers and wounding 28 of the sheik’s guards. A nearby Iraqi military unit failed to respond to repeated calls for help. The brutal...

Edward Jay Epstein has a large and distinguished body of work on intelligence and intelligence-related issues. Among his books in the field are Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald and Deception: The Invisible War Between the KGB and the CIA. Ed has also taken to the ebook form. His ebooks on intelligence-related issues include Killing Castro and James Jesus Angleton: Was He Right? This morning Ed has forwarded the following questions on the Petraeus scandal: Before we can walk the cat back, and establish the chronology of a possible penetration, we need to answer the following ten...

WASHINGTON — The F.B.I. and Justice Department prosecutors have recommended bringing felony charges against retired Gen. David H. Petraeus for providing classified information to his former mistress while he was director of the C.I.A., officials said, leaving Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to decide whether to seek an indictment that could send the pre-eminent military officer of his generation to prison. The Justice Department investigation stems from an affair Mr. Petraeus had with Paula Broadwell, an Army Reserve officer who was writing his biography, and focuses on whether he gave her access to his C.I.A. email account and other...

In what appears to be yet another desperate House Democrat attempt to stay relevant while in the minority, Rep. Lynn Woolsey accused General David Petraeus of using a “Charlie Sheen counter-insurgency strategy” in Afghanistan. Speaking at the Congressional Progressive Caucus Peace and Security Task Force, Woolsey made the comments while hearing testimony from Rolling Stone writer Michael Hastings and other military experts: Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-Calif.) on Wednesday sharply criticized David Petraeus, the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, and signaled agreement with an assessment from a Rolling Stone editor who likened the commander’s performance to that of...