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Anbar Province and the Iraq Study Group Report Iraqi Politicians and Tribal Sheihks are concerned about the implications of the Iraq Study Group report The release of the Iraq Study Group report, a 79 point plan to address Iraq, created by a blue ribbon panel lead by former Secretary of State James Baker and Representative Lee Hamilton, has implications far beyond domestic U.S. politics. I've been asked numerous times how this report has effected the U.S. troops serving in Iraq. The answer is very little. Most shrug their shoulders at the news reports, and haven't had time to digest the...

ISG moves from consensus to conflictBy DANIEL LIBIT 4/22/08 4:32 AM EST In December 2006, in an effort to build a national consensus on a “new way forward in Iraq,” the Iraq Study Group painted itself as a portrait of bipartisan chumminess, with all political hackery checked at the door. Sixteen months later, seven of the 10 ISG members are backing presidential candidates with radically different views about how to proceed in Iraq. Republicans James Baker, Lawrence Eagleburger and Ed Meese are supporting Sen. John McCain, who argues that the United States should be sending more troops to Iraq. Democrats...

A top White House national security adviser and key proponent of the Obama administration’s diplomacy with Iran is the focus of a congressional inquiry following disclosures the FBI may have denied him top-level security clearances, according to communications exclusively obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. Ben Rhodes, a White House deputy national security adviser who led the administration’s efforts to mislead Congress about the terms of the Iran nuclear agreement, is under scrutiny in the wake of disclosures he was declined interim clearance status by the FBI in 2008, when the administration was moving into the White House. Since that...

President Barack Obama will not allow any further United Nations measures critical of Israel to pass during the remainder of his term, deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes promised on Wednesday. When asked by CNN’s Jake Tapper if secretary of state John Kerry had indicated in his speech earlier Wednesday that the US would veto any other potential UN resolution that may come forward during the rest of Obama’s presidency, Rhodes said “yes.” Since the anti-settlements resolution passed in the Security Council last Friday, Israel has expressed concern that another measure may come up before the international body for a...

Israel’s ambassador to the U.S. on Monday contemptuously dismissed White House deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes’ denials that the Obama administration played a key behind-the-scenes role in getting a resolution condemning Israel through the U.N. Security Council, describing him as an “expert at fiction.” Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s government says it has “iron-clad” information indicating that the Obama administration had a role in the crafting and passage of the resolution that passed Friday in the absence of a U.S. veto. Ambassador Ron Dermer told MSNBC the Israeli government had proof that it would share that evidence with the incoming...

Among my favorite DUmmie FUnnies editions are the ones involving our favorite con artist---Bev Harris who conned the DUmmies out of some big bucks. Of course, the DUmmies didn’t wake up to her scam until LONG after Bev’s con artistry was revealed HERE on the DUmmie FUnnies. Finally, after shelling out HUNDREDS of THOUSANDS of dollars with NO results even the DUmmies woke up to the fact that they were gullible suckers and banned her from DUmmieland. Therefore it is with much relish, that I am DUFUing this DUmmie THREAD titled, “The Bev Harris story for newbies and those...

The State Department acknowledged Wednesday that someone in its public affairs bureau made a “deliberate” request that several minutes of tape be cut from the video of a 2013 press briefing in which a reporter asked if the administration had lied about secret talks with Iran. The embarrassing admission by State Department spokesman John Kirby came three weeks after another spokesperson insisted that a “glitch” had caused the gap, discovered only last month by the reporter whose questioning had mysteriously disappeared. “This wasn’t a technical glitch, this was a deliberate step to excise the video,” Kirby told reporters. Kirby said...

Stop by your local post office and you might just see a poster of Rodrigo “Timochenko” Londono hanging next to the Most Wanted posters of bank robbers and fugitives. The State Department is offering a $5 million reward for information about the Communist terrorist leader. But all the State Department had to do was ask Secretary of State Kerry. Obama did the wave with the Cuban dictator and Kerry met with Timochenko , the leader of FARC, a Marxist terrorist organization that appears on his own department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations a little above Al Qaeda. Timochenko is a...

A group the White House recently identified as a key surrogate in selling the Iran nuclear deal gave National Public Radio $100,000 last year to help it report on the pact and related issues, according to the group's annual report. It also funded reporters and partnerships with other news outlets.

TEL AVIV – A group that advocates a nuclear-free world and was identified earlier this month by the White House as central in helping to market the Iran nuclear deal to the news media has funded National Public Radio since 2005, an Associated Press investigation has revealed. Think tanks funded by the Ploughshares Fund include the Arms Control Association, Brookings Institution, and the Atlantic Council, the AP reported. Unmentioned by the AP is that the Ploughshares Fund is financed by billionaire GEORGE SOROS' OPEN SOCIETY INSTITUTE. The involvement of Ploughshares in selling the Iran agreement to the public was revealed...

Leading members of Congress are calling on President Barack Obama to fire one of his top advisers amid a deepening scandal over accusations the White House intentionally misled lawmakers and the American public about the contents of last summer’s comprehensive nuclear agreement with Iran, according to a letter sent Monday to Obama and obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. The lawmakers are pressing Obama to fire deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes following revelations he and other officials “spearheaded the charge to mislead elected lawmakers and the American people about the Iran nuclear deal and the negotiations that led to...

The White House told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Monday that Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes won't be testifying on Tuesday about his controversial comments on the Iran deal. In a letter to Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, Neil Eggleston, counsel to President Obama, said it would raise "constitutional concerns" if Rhodes were to testify. He also said Congress has been consulted enough. "While the administration will continue to consult closely with Congress on this important matter, testimony by one of the most senior advisers to the president raises significant constitutional concerns rooted in the separation of...

remarks Published May 16, 2016 FoxNews.com Facebook117 Twitter335 livefyre1070 Email Print Now Playing White House defends Iran deal in wake of Rhodes profile Never autoplay videos The White House confirmed Monday that Obama adviser Ben Rhodes will not be allowed to testify before House lawmakers on the Iran nuclear deal, after a last-ditch attempt by Republican Rep. Jason Chaffetz to pry the controversial aide loose for the hearing. Chaffetz and the White House have been engaged in an escalating feud, all on the heels of a New York Times Magazine piece where Rhodes was quoted boasting about the administration’s success...

Employing his college degree in fiction writing, White House communications strategist Ben Rhodes wrote deceitful talking points on the Benghazi attack and one-sided Iran nuclear deal – and later bragged about manipulating “clueless reporters.” Perhaps he’s also orchestrating administration climate spin. Rising ocean tides will bring “waves of climate refugees” to America and Europe, President Obama has declared. “Environmental migrants” are already fleeing shrinking islands in the Pacific, and it is a “dereliction of duty” for military officers to “deny the reality” of dangerous manmade climate change. Even if we act in accord with the Paris climate “accords” (none dare...

A number of people at AT and elsewhere have written about the New York Times’ fascinating but also deeply disturbing story of how Ben Rhodes, a callow, unsuccessful but well-connected short-story writer became the Obama administration’s primary foreign policy mandarin. This should come as no surprise to careful observers of this administration. Rhodes, according to the Times piece, is Obama’s foreign policy “guru” a man who has a “mind meld” with the president. What Rhodes and the president share though, is not so much a leftist approach to foreign affairs -- though presumably that plays a role -- but rather...

Obama’s Master of Deceit on the Iran Nuke Deal From aspiring novelist to chief spinner of the president's lies. May 11, 2016 Joseph Klein    Deputy National Security Adviser for Strategic Communications Ben Rhodes confirmed what FrontPage Magazine has been saying all along. President Obama and senior members of his administration sold his nuclear deal with Iran, known formally as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), with a pack of lies.  Rhodes was an aspiring fiction writer, who fulfilled his aspirations for make-believe as a senior member of the Obama administration.  In a profile of Rhodes, written by...

resident Obama's political appointees are not only celebrated by the media as the best and brightest America has to offer; they are promoted as being so bright that they are allowed to boast about how they masterfully manipulate the press, like sculpting a can of smelly, journalistic Play-Doh. The New York Times Magazine wrote a long profile of Obama's deputy national security advisor for strategic communications -- his foreign-policy communications whiz -- Ben Rhodes, lauded as "the master shaper and retailer of Obama's foreign-policy narratives, at a time when the killer wave of social media has washed away the sand...

The mediasphere is boiling after the New York Times ran a piece on Ben Rhodes, Obama's foreign policy guru, a failed writer who openly boasted about manipulating the media. It was full of quotes like this... Rhodes singled out a key example to me one day, laced with the brutal contempt that is a hallmark of his private utterances. “All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus,” he said. “Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we...

White House spokesman Josh Earnest angrily reacted to the suggestion that embattled Obama aide Ben Rhodes testify in a hearing on the Iran nuclear deal on Thursday. “With all due respect to the chairman, if he has an interest in a hearing about false narratives as it relates to the Iran deal then I’ve got some suggestions for people they should swear in,” Earnest said. Earnest went on to name congressional members who either opposed the Iran deal or as the Earnest put it were “wrong or just lying.” Earnest admitted he did not know the procedure for swearing in...

The internet was abuzz following a story by David Samuels on the jerk who admitted he manipulated the truth to get the president’s absurd deal with Iran accepted (accepted, that is, by the Democrats in Congress who blocked a Republican resolution to reject it). In case you missed it I’ll provide a quick summary of the salient parts, but that shouldn’t be the end of the story: the press having allowed itself to be flimflammed into being mere White House megaphones needs to redeem itself, should it care to win back even the tiniest shred of credibility. It probably won’t,...