united nations

Say this for the insurgents in Afghanistan: they evidently have a good lesson-learning process. As I wondered after gunmen stormed a U.N. safe house last week, the U.N. mission in Afghanistan will follow the a similar script as after the 2003 bombing of its compound in Iraq. It’s withdrawing hundreds of employees from Kabul until [...]

I asked Peter Galbraith, the deputy head of the United Nations’ mission to Afghanistan who was deposed for supporting a more rigorous U.N. role in opposing vote fraud in the August 20 elections, what he thought about Abdullah Abdullah’s withdrawal from the runoff. “Abdullah did the right thing,” he told me in an email from [...]

After receiving a letter from Richard Goldstone, the South African judge who investigated Israeli and Hamas war crimes in Gaza, to dispute an impending bipartisan House resolution denouncing his report, staffers for Rep. Howard Berman (D-Calif.) are “conferring” with staffers for bill co-sponsor Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen’s (R-Fla.). “Chairman Berman is studying Judge Goldstone’s letter,” Berman [...]

In August 2003, insurgents in Iraq, as part of a strategy of isolating the United States from the international community, bombed the United Nations compound in Baghdad, killing 19, including the legendary chief of U.N. operations in Iraq. It was a very successful attack: the U.N. quickly left Iraq, taking away a symbol of international [...]

Winning his freedom was a big step for Mohammed Jawad, reportedly the youngest prisoner at Guantanamo Bay until he was released in August. But Jawad, who two U.S. judges have said was tortured in U.S. custody, is still suffering from the effects of his treatment during seven years in custody without charge, according to a [...]

Fired deputy U.N. special representative to Afghanistan Peter Galbraith publishes an absolutely scathing op-ed in The Washington Post accusing the United Nations of passivity that amounts to complicity in election fraud that, he writes, “handed the Taliban its greatest strategic victory in eight years of fighting the United States and its Afghan partners.”
The U.N. has [...]

Human rights experts say there is a serious risk that some of the Guantanamo detainees cleared for release could face persecution or torture.

According to The New York Times, Ambassador Peter Galbraith, the top U.S. official on the United Nations’ Afghanistan mission, has been fired after urging his colleagues — and especially his boss Kai Eide — to take a harder line on addressing the election fraud that marred last month’s presidential election. It’s hard to improve on [...]

[UPDATE -- Video of the speech is below the jump.]
ST. LOUIS — Former Gov. Mike Huckabee (R-Ark.), speaking to a very friendly dinner crowd at the “How To Take Back America” conference, said that he’d “nearly had an Elvis moment” watching this week’s United Nations general assembly sessions and spoke about pulling out of the [...]

The Republican National Committee has sent reporters a “radio actuality” by John Bolton, President George W. Bush’s controversial ex-U.N. ambassador, who has parlayed a 16-month stint in that office into a career as a quotable defense hawk. So one of the GOP’s official responses to the President’s speech to the United Nations General Assembly is [...]