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WASHINGTON - A turf war between the two senior intelligence chiefs over the role of CIA station chiefs in U.S. embassies has forced National Security Adviser James L. Jones to step in to mediate, according to current and former U.S. government officials. The jockeying between CIA director Leon Panetta and National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair centers on Blair's effort to choose his own representatives abroad instead of relying only on CIA station chiefs, the current and former officials said. They spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the dispute.

A leading figure in the Catholic church has claimed that the charity threatens human rights and religious freedom. At a conference in the Vatican, Prof Michel Schooyans, an expert on bioethics and demography, said Blair wanted to remake the world's major religions and use them to expand "new rights". The Belgian priest argued that its goals could not be realised "except at the price of sacrificing religious freedom, of the imposition of a 'politically correct' interpretation of the Sacred Scriptures and of the sabotage of the natural foundations of law". Mandrake reported earlier this month that William Chapman, the foundation's...

Daily Blog Obama & Blair: False Messiahs? BY Tom McFeely Tuesday, May 12, 2009 10:50 AM Msgr. Michel Schooyans, an international human-rights expert, says President Barack Obama has a flawed, totalitarian vision of human existence. In his May 1 address at the Vatican to the plenary assembly of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, posted here at the Chiesa.com website, Msgr. Schooyans warned that Obama is motivated by a “messianic” desire to reorder the world in keeping with the president’s political pro-abortion philosophy. One of the significant aspects of the talk given by Msgr. Schooyans, who is professor emeritus...

KIGALI (AFP) – Former Prime Minister Tony Blair on Sunday praised genocide-scarred Rwanda as "an inspiration to the world," after talks with President Paul Kagame. "Rwanda has in a remarkably short period of time become a role model for Africa," said Blair, highlighting the small central African state's tourism industry just 15 years after a genocide that that left around 800,000 people massacred during a 100-day carnage. "A country that was once a no-go area attracted more than a million visitors in 2008," Blair stated. "It is one of the most stable countries in Africa," he added.

TOLEDO, Ohio, May 5, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Bishop Leonard Blair of the Diocese of Toledo has forbade a gay-friendly “Catholic” ministry from presenting a workshop on gay and lesbian ministry at the Sisters of St. Francis’s convent in Tiffin, Ohio, reports the Toledo Blade. Bishop Blair, who was recently commissioned by the Vatican to investigate the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, an organization representing 95% of the nation’s nuns, sent a letter to the head of the Sisters of St. Francis, Jacquelyn Doepker, requesting that she cancel the workshop that was scheduled for May 1.  "The positions of New Ways...

Yesterday Tony Blair, the former British prime minister, delivered an important speech in Chicago. As Oliver Kamm of London's Times notes, it was a follow-up to a speech 10 years ago, also in Chicago, in which Blair, as Kamm puts it, "rightly perceived that rogue states posed a threat to civilised values and regional stability" and, in Blair's own words, "set out what I described as a doctrine of international community that sought to justify intervention." When Blair spoke in 1999, Saddam Hussein still held power in Iraq and Slobodan Milosevic ruled what was left of Yugoslavia. The end of...

Secretary of state Hillary got into a verbal tussle this afternoon with Congressman Dana Rohrabacher during today’s Foreign Affairs Committee hearing. Congressman Rohrabacher asked her if she agreed with former VP Dick Chaney's suggestion that more interrogation memos be declassified, specifically the ones that showed that the interrogation techniques resulted in avoiding major terror attacks on US Soil . Clinton avoided the question by responding, “It won’t surprise you that I don’t consider him to be a particularly reliable source of information.” Rohrabacher shot back, ““ Madam Secretary, I asked you a specific question…Dick Cheney has asked that specific documents...

Tony Blair has spoken to the BBC about his first spiritual experience, which occurred when he was a child. (Blair).. said that he reads the Koran nearly every day.

I really wanted to go through Holy Week without doing any fisking or public pulling of air or wild rolling of the eyes, but I had the misfortune of reading this piece, just posted by BBC News: "Blair questions Papal gay policy." It reports on a recent interview given by Tony Blair to Attitude, a popular British "gay" magazine (a PDF of the interview, sans advertising, can be accesssed here), which opens by stating Blair "is probably the most prominent pro-gay religious figure in the world." All of those who criticized or expressed serious doubts about the former Prime Minister's...

Former premier Tony Blair said the Catholic Church needed to rethink its attitude towards homosexuality, as it is out of step with ordinary church-goers', in an interview published Wednesday. Blair, who converted to Catholicism after leaving office in June 2007, cited a "huge generational difference" as the key to Pope Benedict XVI's opposition to homosexuality. A poll of the congregation at a Catholic Church on a Sunday would reveal how liberal those in attendance were, he claimed. "We need an attitude of mind where rethinking and the concept of evolving attitudes becomes part of the discipline with which you...

Tony Blair, Architect of Britain's Anti-Christian Culture, Complains Christians Are Being Marginalized LONDON, March 6, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Tony Blair, the former Prime Minister of Britain and leader of the ruling Labour Party for ten years, has decried in an interview the "ludicrous" recent decisions by which the religious expression of Christians is being suppressed in Britain. "I hope and believe that stories of people not being allowed to express their Christianity are exceptional or the result of individual ludicrous decisions. My view is that people should be proud of their Christianity and able to express it as they wish,"...

From The Times April 8, 2009 Tony Blair tells the Pope: you're wrong on homosexuality Ruth Gledhill, Religion Correspondent Tony Blair has challenged the “entrenched” attitudes of the Pope on homosexuality, and argued that it is time for him to “rethink” his views. Speaking to the gay magazine Attitude, the former Prime Minister, himself now a Roman Catholic, said that he wanted to urge religious figures everywhere to reinterpret their religious texts to see them as metaphorical, not literal, and suggested that in time this would make all religious groups accept gay people as equals. Asked about the Pope’s stance,...

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair is emerging as a favorite to be the first permanent president of the European Union... ....Blair’s interest in presiding over the EU is hardly new. In June 2007, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Blair met in Paris to discuss the post

Per article linked on this site - Gordon Brown and others are supporting Tont Blair to become the first "EU President" (new role under EU unification)

Add president Obama's national intelligence czar, Dennis Blair, to the list of embattled top-level appointees. Blair, a retired four-star Navy admiral who attended Oxford with Bill Clinton, courted controversy among pro-Israel and anti-China activists this month when he named Charles (Chas) Freeman, an outspoken former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, to chair the National Intelligence Council, a committee of the government's top intel analysts. After House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other pols complained to the White House, Freeman abruptly withdrew. Now both Republican and Democratic intel experts are raising questions about another Blair pick: John Deutch, a former CIA director once...

SNIPPET: ""The country is fortunate that Ambassador Freeman has agreed to return to public service and contribute his remarkable skills toward further strengthening the intelligence community's analytical process," Blair said. But statements that the former ambassador made over the last three decades on U.S. peace efforts in the Middle East and Iran's threat to the international community have prompted some to question his objectivity in a role that requires it. For example, in a speech to the Pacific Council on International Policy in October 2007, Freeman said the U.S. has "abandoned the role of Middle East peacemaker to back Israel's...

Friday, Feb 06 2009 MARY ELLEN SYNON: Sleaze, spin and how the Obamas are already turning into Tony and Cherie Blair By Mary Ellen Synon Last updated at 8:07 AM on 05th February 2009 Well, that didn't take long. Less than a fortnight into Obama's presidency, the gloss is off already. Looks like the new president has come out as what he was all along: a Chicago Democrat politician surrounded by cronies who've been failing to pay their income tax.

Tony Blair must have been infected with the same dhimmi virus as his sister-in-law Lauren Booth. On Sunday Blair said, "we need to find a way to bring hamas into the peace process." What?!Tony Blair's view of Hamas, Hizbullah, and Fatah should be non different than his view of Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda. Folks this is where the double standard hipocrisy is in the so-called "war on terror". Peace Process? That, its never been. But instead an imposed appasement surrender process.

He is stupid to think that Hamas will ever sincerely do this, but his stupidity is shared by most policymakers today, as Hugh explains here. This kind of stupidity stems directly from an ignorance of the Islamic doctrines of jihad and Islamic supremacism. "Hamas: Blair's statements 'stupid,'" by Roee Nahmias for Ynet News, January 31 (thanks to Dave): Quartet envoy Tony Blair's comments about the need to involve Hamas in the Middle Eastern dialogue are "worthless and stupid" but show that the world recognizes Hamas' strength, sources in the movement said Saturday. Blair, in an interview with the London-based Times...

Tony Blair has compared himself to Barack Obama in a wide-ranging interview given to The Times. The former Prime Minister, now international envoy to the Middle East, said he - like the new US President - was more interested in the practical than the ideological, and refused to be subjected to "traditional pigeonholing". When it was put to him during the Times Magazine interview that the euphoric mood in the US on Inauguration Day was similar to that in Britain after he was elected in 1997, Mr Blair agreed. "I think there is a new generation of political leaders who...