Free Republic

How an Americanist devoted to destroying international alliances became the US envoy to the UNIn the heat of the battle over the Florida vote after the 2000 US presidential election, a burly, mustachioed man burst into the room where the ballots for Miami-Dade County were being tabulated, like John Wayne barging into a saloon for a shoot-out. "I'm with the Bush-Cheney team, and I'm here to stop the count," drawled John Bolton. And those ballots from Miami-Dade were not counted.Now that same John Bolton has been named by President Bush as the US ambassador to the UN. "If I were...

WASHINGTON — President Obama ordered his advisers last August to produce a secret report on unrest in the Arab world, which concluded that without sweeping political changes, countries from Bahrain to Yemen were ripe for popular revolt, administration officials said Wednesday. Mr. Obama’s order, known as a Presidential Study Directive, identified likely flashpoints, most notably Egypt, and solicited proposals for how the administration could push for political change in countries with autocratic rulers who are also valuable allies of the United States, these officials said.

IkhwanOnline, the official Web site of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, posted an article on Thursday asserting that the country’s new interim president, Adly Mansour, is secretly Jewish. The article, since taken offline,suggested that Mansour was part of an American and Israeli conspiracy to install Mohamed ElBaradei, a former U.N. official and Egyptian opposition figure, as president. Mansour, the supreme justice of Egypt’s Supreme Constitutional Court, was sworn in as interim president on Thursday after the military announced that President Mohamed Morsi was no longer in charge. Morsi was a close ally of the Muslim Brotherhood, which has held large demonstrations protesting...

As the civil war in Syria enters its third year, there is much discussion of the regimeÂ’s chemical weapons and whether SyriaÂ’s Bashar al-Assad will unleash them against Syrian rebels, or whether a power vacuum after AssadÂ’s fall might make those horrific tools available to the highest bidder. The conversation centers on SyriaÂ’s chemical weaponry, not on something vastly more serious: its nuclear weaponry. It well might have. This is the inside story of why it does not. Relations between the United States and Israel had grown rocky after IsraelÂ’s incursion into Lebanon in 2006, for Secretary of State Condoleezza...

Liberals, modernists and secularists are infidels and must be brought to trial for abandoning Islam, according to an ultra-conservative preacher in the Muslim Brotherhood. In a video posted on the YouTube channel of the privately owned newspaper Al-Shorouk newspaper on Sunday, preacher Wagdy Ghoneim said: “If they do not repent, the judge must apply the penalty for apostasy. “If anyone tells you that he is liberal, tell him directly that he is infidel.” Earlier this month, Ghoneim caused controversy after issuing a fatwa — an Islamic religious edict — that said joining the Constitution Party, led by Nobel laureate Mohamed...

TEL AVIV – A staunch denier of the Holocaust who long served as the deputy of late PLO leader Yasser Arafat served on the committee that invented the military doctrine used by President Obama as the main justification for U.S. and international airstrikes against Libya. As WND first reported, billionaire philanthropist George Soros is a primary funder and key proponent of the Global Centre for Responsibility to Protect, the world's leading organization pushing the military doctrine. Several of the doctrine's main founders sit on multiple boards with Soros. The doctrine and its founders, as WND reported, have been deeply tied...

The military junta ruling Egypt has announced that parliamentary elections will be held in September. Rather than spending the next five months complaining, those who aren’t supporting the Muslim Brotherhood better get started actually working and organizing. I’ll analyze this a lot more in the coming months but briefly the blocs are as follows: Islamists: The Muslim Brotherhood says it is aiming at getting 30 percent of the seats. I think they’ll succeed. A smaller, moderate Islamist party — whose members split from the Brotherhood because they say it is too extremist — would be lucky to get any seats....

TEHRAN, Oct. 4 (Xinhua) -- Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Mohamed ElBaradei said Sunday that "Israel is number one threat to Middle East" with its nuclear arms, the official IRNA news agency reported.

VIENNA - Egypt’s ambassador to the UN atomic agency blasted as “totally baseless” a French newspaper report Tuesday that the Egyptian head of the agency Mohamed ElBaradei was helping Cairo hide a secret nuclear program. “There is no clandestine program and therefore there is no dossier,” ambassador Ramzy Ezzeldin Ramzy told AFP. “The issue of a connection between Egypt and Tripoli in the nuclear field is totally baseless,” Ramzy said. He was reacting to a report in the French newspaper Liberation, citing unnamed Western diplomats, that the now dismantled Libyan nuclear program “had Egyptian links.” The United States and Britain...

Mohamed ElBaradei, the Egyptian dissident, flew home to Cairo on Thursday night to stake his claim as the leader of the would-be revolution to overthrow President Hosni Mubarak. As fresh violence erupted across Egypt's towns and cities for a third successive day, Mr ElBaradei urged Mr Mubarak, the country's president of nearly 30 years, to stand down. With the protesters preparing for their biggest show of force after noon prayers on Friday, the Nobel Peace laureate offered to step in as a transitional leader. "If people, in particular young people, if they want me to lead the transition, I will...

VIENNA — Egypt fears being grouped with the likes of Iran and Syria if a UN investigation into traces of highly enriched uranium found in the country isn't brought to a swift end, according to what officials describe as a confidential report from the country's nuclear agency. The particles — enriched close to the levels required to arm nuclear missiles — have been under investigation since being detected by the International Atomic Energy Agency in 2007 and 2008. Egypt, a US ally in the Middle East, has said the particles originated from abroad and were inadvertently imported, but the agency...

Perhaps it was just a little “Pillow Talk” with his Iranian wife!  Who is Dr. Mohamed El Baradei? A quick Google search yields the following general biographical information:Dr. ElBaradei is the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency [IAEA], an inter-governmental organization based in Vienna, and formed under the auspices of the United Nations in 1957. He was appointed to the office effective Dec. 1 1997, and re-appointed to a second term in Sept. 2001. El Baradi was born in Egypt in 1942. He gained a Bachelor’s degree in Law in 1962 at the University of Cairo, and a...

The head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency said he should have "howled harder" on Iraq and that the war was the most "dissatisfying moment" of his life. Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, in responding to 10 questions in Time magazine, also said the jury is out on whether Iran was developing nuclear weapons. One of the main justifications for the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 by the administration of President George W. Bush was the assertion that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. No such weapons were found in the years since the...

Former U.S./U.N. ambassador John Bolton returned to U.N. headquarters in NYC on Friday to launch his new book "Surrender Is Not An Option" (Threshold Editions- Simon & Schuster - 486 pgs.) The controversial U.S. diplomat quit his U.N. post in November 2006 when the Senate Foreign Relations Committee stalled a vote on his nomination. For the preceding 18 mos. Bolton served as UN ambassador under a temporary Congressional recess appointment that was to expire on January 1, 2007. With a Democratic Congress taking office and a rejected nomination likely, Bolton asked President Bush to withdraw his name rather than face...

The venue was different -- the grand hall of the UN General Assembly -- but Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's message was the same as it has been for months. Fresh from his performance as a human pinata at Columbia University, the Iranian president took the opportunity this week to remind the nations of the world just how much contempt he and his country held for the UN Security Council. In sum, a lot. After two sets of sanctions, and many more deadlines for Iran to suspend its nuclear program, Ahmadinejad dared the nations of the world to stop Iran's nuclear...

DAVOS - UN nuclear chief Mohamed ElBaradei on Friday called on the United States to provide Iran with nuclear reactors, and urged Tehran to declare a moratorium on enriching uranium for at least eight years. He said eight or nine years would enable the country to earn the confidence of the international community that it was really interested in nuclear energy - not nuclear weapons.

BAGHDAD, Iraq, March 12 - In the weeks after Baghdad fell in April 2003, looters systematically dismantled and removed tons of machinery from Saddam Hussein's most important weapons installations, including some with high-precision equipment capable of making parts for nuclear arms, a senior Iraqi official said this week in the government's first extensive comments on the looting. The Iraqi official, Sami al-Araji, the deputy minister of industry, said it appeared that a highly organized operation had pinpointed specific plants in search of valuable equipment, some of which could be used for both military and civilian applications, and carted the machinery...

WASHINGTON, (AFP) - There is no evidence to support the claim that Iran is developing nuclear weapons, the head of the UN nuclear watchdog Mohamed ElBaradei said in an interview published by The Washington Post. "On Iran, there really hasn't been much development, neither as a result of our inspections or as a result of intelligence," said the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) director general. ElBaradei called for greater US participation in diplomatic efforts to engage Iran and North Korea in talks about their nuclear programs. "North Korea and Iran are still the two 800-pound gorillas in the room and...

Since midsummer, the Senate Intelligence Committee has been attempting to solve the biggest mystery of the Iraq war: the disparity between the Bush Administration’s prewar assessment of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and what has actually been discovered. The committee is concentrating on the last ten years’ worth of reports by the C.I.A. Preliminary findings, one intelligence official told me, are disquieting. “The intelligence community made all kinds of errors and handled things sloppily,” he said. The problems range from a lack of quality control to different agencies’ reporting contradictory assessments at the same time. One finding, the official went...

UN nuclear watchdog chief Mohamed El Baradei has rejected charges that he has attacked President George W. Bush by saying the invasion and occupation of Iraq have damaged the credibility of the United States, his spokesman said Friday. Spokesman Mark Gwozdecky said in a statement: "Some media have misrepresented Dr. ElBaradei's essential message in his speech at Stanford and quoted him out of context." Gwozdecky was referring to an article published Friday in the San Francisco Chronicle after International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) director general ElBaradei gave a speech at Stanford University in California on Thursday. "The main message he...