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As you know, on July 4th, the U.S. joined other OAS member-states in unanimously deciding to suspend the right of Honduras to participate in the OAS. Our goal remains the restoration of the democratic order in Honduras. And we renew our call on all political and social actors in Honduras to find a peaceful solution to this crisis. We regret the necessity of this measure and look forward to the day when circumstances will allow the measure to be lifted and Honduras’ participation resumed. It’s important to note that under the provisions of the Inter-American Democratic Charter, this suspension does...

Bill Gertz, defense and national security reporter for The Washington Times, argues that high-level bureaucrats in the State Department, White House, Pentagon, and CIA have repeatedly undermined the Bush administration's national security policies. Mr. Gertz says that these unelected officials - liberals from both political parties - have pursued their own agendas towards countries like Iran, China, North Korea, and Iraq and have weakened U.S. security as a result. Mr. Gertz discusses his book with Frank Gaffney, president and CEO of the Center for Security Policy.

Minutes before airtime Friday night, the two co-founders of the Commission on Presidential Debates, former Democratic chairman Paul Kirk and former Republican chairman Frank Fahrenkopf, made their move. The two men appeared without warning on center stage of the Gertrude Ford Center, and, as Kirk began to speak - declaiming such phrases as "The stakes could not be higher" and "the complexities that lie before us" and "serious choices that face the nation" and "it is in our power to decide," he might have been taken (and was, by this observer) to be someone out there to check the mikes...

Former State Dept. employee Lawrence C. Yontz, 48, pled guilty before a U.S. magistrate to illegally accessing hundreds of passport files, including those of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McCain. He didn’t access Sarah Palin’s passport file, presumably because she obtained a passport for the first time last year. According to the Justice Dept.: In pleading guilty, Yontz admitted that between February 2005 and March 2008, he logged onto the PIERS database and viewed the passport applications of approximately 200 celebrities, athletes, actors, politicians and their immediate families, musicians, game show contestants, members of the media corps, prominent business...

"...Two officials of the Bush administration say that if Obama had done what the Post story asserted – which they believe to be untrue – U.S. Ambassador Crocker and embassy officials attending the meeting would have ensured that the Bush administration heard about it immediately. If such an incident occurred in front of officials of the Bush administration, it would have constituted a foreign policy breach and would have been front-page huge news; it would not have leaked out two months later in an op-ed column..."

The United States registered an official protest with Israel against its ambassador to the United Nations, Dan Gillerman, for calling former U.S. President Jimmy Carter an "enemy of Israel" prior to Carter's recent visit to the region. A senior Foreign Ministry source said Saturday that the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv asked that Gillerman be made aware of the U.S. administration's dissatisfaction with the disrespectful comments about the former U.S. President.

Former American ambassador to UN slams president's foreign policy, says Bush 'doesn't supervise Secretary of State Rice enough' US President George W. Bush's foreign policy is in free fall and puts the nation's security at risk, former ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton told a German magazine on Sunday. Bolton , who was a leading hawk in the US administration and favored a tough stance against Iran, North Korea and Iraq, told the Der Spiegel weekly that Bush needed to rein in Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. "His foreign policy is in free fall. The president is acting against...

Author Kenneth Timmerman has provided us one more reason to doubt the validity and objectivity of the recently released National Intelligence Estimate. In an interview with Frontpage magazine, Timmerman discusses the efforts by the "Shadow Warriors" within the CIA and the State Department to sabotage the policies of the Bush Administration. During the Q and A he discusses Van Vann Diepen-one of the three authors of the National Intelligence Estimate. The story concerns John Bolton's efforts to derail North Korea and Iran's nuclear weapons programs. Bolton, who later became the US Ambassador to the United Nations, at the time conceived...

President Bush has been scrambling to rescue his Iran policy after this week's intelligence switcheroo, but the fact that the White House has had to spin so furiously is a sign of how badly it has bungled this episode. In sum, Mr. Bush and his staff have allowed the intelligence bureaucracy to frame a new judgment in a way that has undermined four years of U.S. effort to stop Iran's nuclear ambitions. This kind of national security mismanagement has bedeviled the Bush Presidency. Recall the internal disputes over post-invasion Iraq, the smearing of Ahmad Chalabi by the State Department and...

If only the bumblers, blusterers and other bureaucrats in our "intelligence" services could make up their minds. The estimates of what we know about Iran and its nuclear ambitions, released this week just in time to undercut the U.N. sanctions meant to deter another Islamic bomb, underscores how little the bumblers know. These are the wiseheads who only four months ago were telling the president and Congress that Iran was hard at work developing their bomb. Now they want the president, Congress and the rest of us to believe that the Iranians actually stopped work, maybe, on their bomb four...

Stupid Intelligence By Alan M. DershowitzFrontPageMagazine.com | Friday, December 07, 2007 The recent national intelligence estimate that concluded that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 is just about the stupidest intelligence assessment I have ever read. It falls hook, line and sinker for a transparent bait and switch tactic employed not only by Iran, but by several other nuclear powers in the past. The tactic is obvious and well-known to all intelligence officials with an IQ above room temperature. It goes like this: There are two tracks to making nuclear weapons: One is to conduct research and develop...

Rarely has a document from the supposedly hidden world of intelligence had such an impact as the National Intelligence Estimate released this week. Rarely has an administration been so unprepared for such an event. And rarely have vehement critics of the "intelligence community" on issues such as Iraq's weapons of mass destruction reversed themselves so quickly. All this shows that we not only have a problem interpreting what the mullahs in Tehran are up to, but also a more fundamental problem: Too much of the intelligence community is engaging in policy formulation rather than "intelligence" analysis, and too many in...

I wrote yesterday on this whole new NIE story:******************************************* FreeRepublic thread: The New, Suddenly Correct, NIE on Iran********************************* Surprise surprise.  VIPS at work once again?  It smells like more leaks by the VIPS types ala Plame and friends, trying to influence either the tactics used by this Administrations to stop Iran from getting a nuke, or to influence the upcoming elections. And now more information is coming out that bolsters the case that this was another shot over the bow of this Administration by our rogue intelligence agencies.  Kenneth Timmermann, the author of the excellent book "The Shadow Warriors" writes:...

Deja vu?  Remember a few weeks ago when that McClellan story came out in which he supposedly said he was lied to about the Plame affair?  I wrote then: Isn't it curious how the left constantly wailed about Scott McClellan allegedly lying during his press conferences, but now that he is saying something that smells like trash talk about Bush, he is suddenly a truth teller. And now when a new NIE is released to the public saying that Iran has stopped its nuclear weapons program, NOW the left believes our intelligence agencies.  For the last year the left has...

Wild Speculation Alert: I have listed a lot of coincidental and circumstantial evidence in this post folks. I feel compelled to warn everyone when I see links to this NIE and Valerie Plame! It seems the NIE was NOT a consensus view of the US Intelligence Community but a hack job by some folks with possible political aspirations (wonder what CNN debate these folks will turn up in): A highly controversial, 150 page National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran’s nuclear programs was coordinated and written by former State Department political and intelligence analysts — not by more seasoned members of...

JACK CRODDY, FOREIGN SERVICE OFFICER: It's one thing if someone believes in what is going on over there and volunteers. I am sorry, but, basically, that is a potential death sentence, and you know it. And then another thought—who will take care of our children? Who will raise our children if we are dead or seriously wounded? REP. DUNCAN HUNTER, R-CALIF.: I think we should fire those folks that don't want to go. You can't have people on the payroll who refuse to be deployed to the tough places. (END VIDEO CLIP) BRET BAIER, CO-HOST: There you see some of...

United States Department of State (Washington, DC) Washington, DC Some years ago, Amir Muhammad began researching his family's roots without any thought that it might lead him to America's little-known Islamic heritage. Until then, he assumed that most American Muslims arrived in the 20th century, and he was unaware of any Islamic connection in his own family prior to his personal acceptance of Islam 35 years ago. But Muhammad discovered he does have Muslim ancestors, as do many African Americans and Native Americans, and that the story of Islam in America reaches back much further than most people imagine. In...

"It is absolutely outrageous and reprehensible for anyone to suggest attacks on holy sites, whether they are Muslim, Christian, Jewish or those of any other religion ... Any suggestion that the defense of the American homeland or the defense of American interests would ever justify attacking holy sites or religious sites is just simply an idea that goes against the length or breadth of US history"State Department spokesman Tom Casey Perhaps one of the greatest tragedies in contemporary United States history has been the gross usurpation of our nation's State Department by those ignorant of history who would relentlessly promote...

Meet Alberto Fernandez: State Dept. apologist for jihad Alberto Fernandez, director of public diplomacy in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs at the US State Department, is al Jazeera's favorite pet tool. He has been praised as "sassy" and is a fixture on Arab TV. From a Newsweek profile published in August, which proclaimed him "the face of the United States in the Middle East:" On paper, at least, Fernandez's job is basically that of a high-powered booker, coordinating appearances of high-level State Department officials on Arab media. But in reality, he's the main act. According to his own...

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - A senior U.S. diplomat said the United States had shown "arrogance" and "stupidity" in Iraq but was ready to talk with any group except Al-Qaida in Iraq to facilitate national reconciliation. In an interview with Al-Jazeera television aired late yesterday, Alberto Fernandez, director of public diplomacy in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs at the Department of State, offered an unusually candid assessment of America’s war in Iraq. "We tried to do our best, but I think there is much room for criticism because, undoubtedly, there was arrogance and there was stupidity from the United States...

A senior U.S. diplomat said the United States had shown "arrogance" and "stupidity" in Iraq but was now ready to talk with any group except Al-Qaida in Iraq to facilitate national reconciliation. In an interview with Al-Jazeera television aired late Saturday, Alberto Fernandez, director of public diplomacy in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs at the State Department offered an unusually candid assessment of America's war in Iraq. "We tried to do our best but I think there is much room for criticism because, undoubtedly, there was arrogance and there was stupidity from the United States in Iraq," he said....

BAGHDAD, Oct 22 (Reuters) - A senior U.S. diplomat who said the United States has shown "arrogance" and "stupidity" in Iraq said he "seriously misspoke" in an interview aired on Sunday after U.S. President George W. Bush said he was flexible on tactics, if not strategy. In an attack that highlights the problems Washington faces in recruiting and training Iraqi security forces, 13 police recruits were killed and 25 wounded in an ambush on a convoy of buses near the town of Baquba on Sunday. U.S. military deaths in Iraq in October have reached 83, making it the most deadly...

Jack Kelly: Meet the worst ex-presidentAn odious Iranian will see Jimmy Carter on his U.S. visitSunday, September 03, 2006 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette The State Department has granted a visa to Mohammad Khatami, the former president of Iran, to visit the United States.           Mr. Khatami is coming this week chiefly to attend meetings at the United Nations. He also will speak at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard; at a function sponsored by the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Arlington, Va., and at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. And he will meet with former president...

A State Department reorganization of analysts involved in preventing the spread of deadly weapons has spawned internal turmoil, with more than half a dozen career employees alleging in interviews that political appointees sought to punish long-term employees whose views they considered suspect. Senior State Department officials deny that and say an investigation has found that the proper personnel practices were followed. But three officials involved in the reorganization, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly, acknowledge that a merger of two bureaus reduced the influence of employees who were viewed by some...