Free Republic

UNITED NATIONS - A former Russian top spy says his agents helped the Russian government steal nearly $500 million from the U.N.'s oil-for-food program in Iraq before the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003. Sergei Tretyakov, who defected to the United States in 2000 as a double agent, says he oversaw an operation that helped Saddam's regime manipulate the price of Iraqi oil sold under the program — and allow Russia to skim profits. Tretyakov, former deputy head of intelligence at Russia's U.N. mission from 1995 to 2000, names some names, but sticks mainly to code names. Among the spies...

Americans are being played for fools by Iran—and fooling themselves. There is no case to be made that Iran is not pursuing a nuclear weapons capability. There is no evidence that Iran's decision-makers are willing to stop the nuclear program in exchange for lifting sanctions or anything else. The International Atomic Energy Agency reported on Friday that it has made no progress in its negotiations with Iran and that Iran continues to accelerate its enrichment operations, which are in violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions and agreements with the IAEA. Yet the policy discussion in the U.S. is confused. Former...

...[T]he governments of Britain, France and Germany cut a deal with Iran whereby the Islamic Republic agreed to a temporary suspension of its nuclear-weapons programs. Yet within hours, evidence began piling up that Tehran was already in breach. What does this mean for the Bush Administration? We'll get to that in a moment, but first let's be clear on what this says about Iran's purposes, and about Europe's. ...[T]his latest agreement rehashes a similar deal reached by the same parties in October 2003. In both cases, Iran promised not to seek nuclear weapons and pledged full cooperation with the International...