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John Kerry in front of congress

Retired Marine Gen. John Allen has been selected to coordinate the international effort against the Islamic State militant group, Secretary of State John Kerry announced Saturday. "General Allen is a patriot and a remarkable leader," Kerry said in a statement issued late Saturday. "His extraordinary career in the military speaks for itself." Allen's official title is Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter ISIL. ISIL is another name for the Islamic State, which is also known as ISIS. Allen, who has been serving as a security adviser to Secretary of State John Kerry, is expected to work with...

There’s not much about the Obama administration that earns the confidence of the American public anymore. Obamacare has destroyed what was left of the good will the general public had for Obama. Discovering that you could not keep your doctor and that your insurance rates and deductibles would increase substantially created an environment wherein the President’s word was no longer trustworthy. Obama’s polls are largely in the lower 40’s as a result. These days the President is beating the war drum against ISIS and while the public wants to go after the terrorists they don’t completely trust this administration to...

p>The Talk Shows September 14th, 2014 Guests to be interviewed today on major television talk shows: FOX NEWS SUNDAY (Fox Network): White House chief of staff Denis McDonough; Sens. Jack Reed, D-R.I., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C; Michael Hayden, a former CIA and National Security Agency director.MEET THE PRESS (NBC): McDonough; former Secretary of State James Baker; Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.FACE THE NATION (CBS): McDonough; Secretary of State John Kerry; Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y.; Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas.THIS WEEK (ABC): McDonough; Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa; Education Secretary Arne Duncan.STATE OF THE UNION (CNN): McDonough; Harkin; Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn.; Rep. John...

Q. When is a war not a war?A. When it is a “fairly significant counter-terrorist operation” (according to Jean Carré) rather than a “war per se” (according to Josh Earnest); when our State Department rejects the “notion” of us engaging in a “war” on terrorism” (according to Marie Harf) and when the Commander in Chief says that the group calling itself the “Islamic State” is neither Islamic…nor a state; ipso fatso, we can’t declare war on it. And while we’re at it, perhaps someone can get to the bottom of this mystery too: who forgot to order the White House...

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on Thursday would not say the United States is at war with ISIS, telling CNN in an interview that the administration's strategy includes "many different things that one doesn't think of normally in context of war." "What we are doing is engaging in a very significant counter-terrorism operation," Kerry told CNN's Elise Labott in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. "It's going to go on for some period of time. If somebody wants to think about it as being a war with ISIL, they can do so, but the fact is it's a major counterterrorism operation that...

ANKARA: Turkey will refuse to allow a US-led coalition to attack jihadists in neighbouring Iraq and Syria from its air bases, nor will it take part in combat operations against militants, a government official told AFP Thursday. " Turkey will not be involved in any armed operation but will entirely concentrate on humanitarian operations," the official said on condition of anonymity. The decision echoes the country's refusal to allow the US to station 60,000 troops in Turkey in 2003 to invade Iraq from the north, which triggered a crisis between the two allies. Ankara then also refused Washington permission to...

JOHN KERRY, SECRETARY OF STATE: ISIL claims to be fighting on behalf of Islam but the fact is that its hateful ideology has nothing do with Islam. ISIL a manifestation of evil, a vicious terrorist organization and it is an organization that achieves its goals only through violence, repression and destruction. Fed by illicit funding and a stream of foreign fighters, it has seized territory and terrorized the people who live there regardless of their sect or ethnicity. There is literally no place for their barbarity in the modern world. This is a fight that the Iraqi people must win...

Infidels are infidels as far as Islam is concerned: Make no difference if the sin of Christian America were over-producing greenhouse gases or being who we are, a mainly Christian nation Secretary of State John Kerry has an interesting worldview if he believes that addressing “Muslim-majority” nations with the concept that climate change is the prevalent challenge for this generation. He probably wouldn’t get much agreement among the very people he thinks we should be protecting. Frankly, if Muslims were more worried about climate change perhaps there wouldn’t be such a surge in jihad, that is, if they believed that...

Secretary of State John Kerry announced that he will be trying to create as broad a coalition as possible to deal with ISIS. Not all of the countries in this coalition will be providing military support. Some will be providing humanitarian aid and some will make sure Islam, “one of the world’s great peaceful religions,” isn’t tarnished by ISIS: Tomorrow, I will travel to the Middle East to continue to build the broadest possible coalition of partners around the globe to confront, degrade, and ultimately defeat ISIL. On Wednesday, President Obama will lay out in even greater detail our coordinated...

Well, this sounds a bit like a strategy, does it not? John Kerry’s essay in the New York Times this weekend (in one of the more sleepy news cycles of the year) raises echoes from both Bush administrations in dealing with a clear threat to global security, and in fact explicitly cites the first Bush coalition to repel Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. That has its own irony, but we’ll get back to that in a moment. Kerry prefaces this call for a global coalition on the imminent and clear threat from ISIS, which Kerry argues exceeds that of any...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)There are 65 prominent people who might run for president in 2016. The Democratic and Republican fields contrast sharply. Hillary Clinton is the clear front-runner, while there is no front-runner on the Republican side. Twenty-three Democrats have been mentioned as a candidate or are eyeing a bid, according to an analysis by The Hill. The GOP side has 42. Most of the people on this list won’t run, and some have adamantly claimed that they’re not interested. But many politicians have changed their minds on seeking the White House. Before mounting his 2008 bid, then-Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) said he...

US Secretary of State John Kerry on Saturday called for “a world coalition” to defeat the Islamic State (Isis) militant group which has seized control of large parts of Iraq and Syria and was cited by the British prime minister, David Cameron, when he raised the UK’s terror threat level to “severe” on Friday. In an op-ed for the New York Times that was released online on Friday night and in print on Saturday, Kerry wrote: “In a polarised region and a complicated world, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria presents a unifying threat to a broad array of...

Palestinians are taking notice of the effectiveness of extremist, violent resistance movements against the governments of Israel and Iraq, said former US special envoy for Israeli-Palestinian Negotiations Martin Indyk in an interview published this week. Speaking extensively on US relations with Jerusalem since the end of the latest round of peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians last April, and throughout Operation Protective Edge, a candid Indyk said at times US President Barack Obama has become “enraged” at the Israeli government, both for its actions and for its treatment of his chief diplomat, US Secretary of State John Kerry. [....]...

Editor’s Note: When you’re too far left to work in the government for a Democratic Administration, an academic berth probably awaits. With wars raging in the Middle East, and Russia still threatening Ukraine, the problem of anti-Americanism in Latin America has been put on the back burner. But since Secretary of State John Kerry declared last year that the Monroe Doctrine was dead, Vladimir Putin of Russia has traveled to Brazil, Argentina, Nicaragua and Cuba. This doesn’t seem like an accident. The Obama administration is inviting aggression against the U.S. During the Cold War, Cuba hosted Soviet nuclear missiles targeting...

Western intelligence agencies have been assisting the Syrian government of Bashar al Assad fight militants of Isis (now called the 'Islamic State'), by providing details on the location of militant leaders for targeted air strikes. The information was passed to Assad's government by German intelligence service Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), which acted as an intermediary, a source told the Independent... In recent weeks, Syrian forces have launched a series of airstrikes against Islamic State commanders and headquarters, as they battle to halt the advance of jihadist forces from their stronghold in the east of the country. The Assad regime has been accused...

Deputy State Department spokesperson Marie Harf on Wednesday condemned the beheading of American journalist James Foley by Islamic terrorists, but she also stated that the ISIS threat “is not about the United States and what we do.” Harf spoke after President Obama told the nation that “governments and peoples across the Middle East” should come together in a “common effort to extract this cancer, so that it does not spread.” He then went golfing. "I think ISIL wants to make this about the United States and our actions. And I think what the President was trying to say was that...

The American government has been asked by the international community to directly intervene in any truce agreement between Israel and Hamas, according to a report in Arabic daily Al-Hayat, and force Israel to agree to Hamas's demands in future ceasefire agreements. Egypt was reportedly behind the guarantee, as rumors swirl that the current conditions being discussed have found support both from the international community at large and from UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon. Israel has denied agreeing to any truce deal proposed so far, however, and diplomatic sources in Jerusalem have emphasized repeatedly that Israel will not agree to any...

German secret agents intercepted one of Hillary Clinton's phone calls while she was US secretary of state and also listened in to a call by John Kerry, her successor, it emerged this weekend, in an embarrassing reversal of the spying scandal that blew up when it was revealed last year that America bugged Angela Merkel's mobile phone. Mrs Clinton was on a US government plane when German intelligence services overheard her call and, against their own internal protocol, stored it, intelligence sources told German media. The intercepted phone call took place in 2012 between Mrs Clinton and Kofi Annan, the...

BERLIN — German weekly Der Spiegel reports that the country's foreign intelligence agency eavesdropped on calls made by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and his predecessor Hillary Clinton. Der Spiegel reported Saturday that the agency, known by its acronym BND, tapped a satellite phone conversation Kerry made in 2013. The magazine says the agency also recorded a conversation between Clinton and former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan a year earlier. Without naming its sources, Der Spiegel says the calls were collected accidentally and the three officials weren't directly targeted.