Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The fake news is - I mean, as a tool of warfare - has been there for decades and decades and decades. It was never very well done until, really, the Ukraine, though I would say that the Russians used to complain about fake things to say the State Department.
Throughout my career, I learned plenty about war on the battlefield, but I learned even more about the importance of finding peace. And that is what the State Department and U.S.A.I.D. do: prevent the wars that we can avoid so that we fight only the ones we must.
When someone at the State Department proclaims Facebook to be the most organic tool for promoting democracy the world has ever seen - that's a direct quote - it may help in the short run by getting more people onto Facebook by making it more popular with dissidents.
During my 20 years as a Marine, I served three combat tours and as a Congressional Fellow advising a senior member of the House Armed Services Committee on defense and foreign policy. I went on to serve in the Pentagon as Marine Corps' liaison to the State Department.
A document was drafted in the State Department in July 1946 by an official named Samuel Klaus. This indicated that there were then 20 alleged Soviet agents, 13 alleged Communists, about a dozen sympathizers, and about 75 suspects in the department, according to the FBI.
There's a reason that students don't grade their own papers. There's a reason defendants don't sentence themselves. And there's the reason the State Department doesn't get to investigate itself, determine whether or not it made errors in Benghazi. That is Congress's job.
My father was a Foreign Service officer, a diplomat and an Arabist who spent virtually all his career in the Near East, as it was called in the State Department. So I spent most of my childhood among the Israelis and the Arabs of Palestine, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.
The State Department has promised they will never have another temporary mission facility like the one in Benghazi that is so lightly protected. But at the same time, history tends to repeat itself here, and so it might not repeat itself in exactly the same way as Benghazi.
Over my career, I've reinvented myself numerous times. I covered the Pentagon, the State Department, and the CIA. I wrote about labor wars, trade wars and real wars. I chronicled a nuclear plant meltdown and the defeat of Communism. I co-founded a couple of media businesses.
After Secretary Clinton announced in January 2010 that Internet freedom would be a major pillar of U.S. foreign policy, the State Department decided to take what Clinton calls a 'venture capital' approach to the funding of tools, research, public information projects, and training.
I'd worked in the state senate in college and seen how important legal decisions were. And at the last minute, Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison said, 'Why don't you come do an internship?' That turned into almost 15 years in the government, in the White House, and at the State Department.
In case anyone needs reminding, it was the relentless drive of the tourism industry and kowtowing State Department bureaucrats that led to the Bush-era Visa Express Program, which relaxed visa policies, eliminated in-person consulate interviews and opened the door to the 9/11 hijackers.
Every dollar that we send in State Department aid or humanitarian aid that saves us from having to get involved with very expensive military actions is a good investment. And frankly, helping Israel fight terrorism in the Middle East is much cheaper than us fighting it here on our shores.
The Secretary of the State at the time was James Baker, who had also been Secretary of Treasury and White House Chief of Staff: very powerful guy. And I went to see him in his very ornate office at the State Department to say I wasn't going to cover him anymore. It was just a courtesy call.
I first met Kim Dae Jung when he was a Korean dissident whose life was threatened by the military regime ruling in Seoul. I was Ronald Reagan's Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights, and Kim was directed to me because the East Asia Bureau at the State Department had long shunned him.
Americans weren't generally aware of Joe and Hunter Biden's shenanigans in Ukraine, but Obama's State Department certainly was, as was Ukraine, its pro-Russian newspaper sardonically referring to the soon to be then-Vice President Joe Biden showing up to protect his son's business in Ukraine.
It is no surprise that neither Hillary Clinton nor the Obama State Department agrees with our request to depose Mrs. Clinton concerning her exclusive use of her non-state.gov email account to house and send tens of thousands of official emails throughout her entire tenure as secretary of state.
Like Hillary Clinton in the United States, Kuczynski is a prototypical member of the trans-American governing class, with deep roots in both the private and public sector and its revolving-door relationship between Washington think tanks, the State Department, and high-level Latin American ministries.
While I cannot comment in detail about the inter workings of the State Department, it is a matter of public record that I recommended a visa for Gerry Adams to visit the United States. I believe then, and I continue to believe now, that this step did help to advance the peace process in Northern Ireland.
Just several years ago, Shaykh Kabbani, who is the head of the Islamic Supreme Council of America, when he was speaking at the State Department, said that more than 80 percent of the mosques were controlled by extremists. And from all I've seen over the last four or five years, the situation has even gotten worse.
When Clinton traveled to Russia, known for its hackers and cyber warfare against the United States and other democracies, she didn't bother to tap into the government-protected email system provided by the State Department. Instead, she continued to communicate through her personal, home-brewed and unsecured server.
I will not comment on or confirm what are alleged to be stolen State Department cables. But I can say that the United States deeply regrets the disclosure of any information that was intended to be confidential, including private discussions between counterparts or our diplomats' personal assessments and observations.
This is sort of typical Hillary Clinton: to do things that are not legal, to say that they are, and then try to cover them up. Hillary Clinton severely chastised other whistleblowers for using Internet channels that were not secure, and yet she herself was doing that with private, high-level State Department information.
In Iraq, State Department civilians and U.S. soldiers have been operating in the same location in an active war zone. While the troops have been facing insurgents, the State Department civilians have been working to rebuild institutions and infrastructure. Blackwater's role in this war evolved from this unprecedented dynamic.
Anne Richard, a senior U.S. State Department official, testified at a Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing in November 2015 that any Syrian refugee trying to get into the United States is scrutinized by officials from the National Counterterrorism Center, FBI, Department of Homeland Security, State Department and Pentagon.
The mishandling of the would-be airplane bomber Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab's visa is only the latest piece of evidence that the granting of visas should be taken away from the State Department. For the granting of visas - especially today, when terrorism is such a complex threat - is far closer to being a law-enforcement function.
A decade ago, I lived in Saudi Arabia, in Riyadh, as the treasury attache to our embassy there, and I was, of course, on the ground in the Middle East whenever the Arab Spring started, and it's fast-forward a decade later, nine years later. It's hard to believe that I am still working on this issue. You know, here in the State Department.
Secretary Clinton used several different servers and administrators of those servers during her four years at the State Department and used numerous mobile devices to view and send e-mail on that personal domain. As new servers and equipment were employed, older servers were taken out of service, stored, and decommissioned in various ways.
Since United States military operations in Iraq began in 2003, I have visited Iraq at least 15 times. But unlike politicians who visit, the question for me has never been why the U.S. got into Iraq. Instead, as the CEO of Blackwater, the urgent question was how the company I head could perform the duties asked of us by the U.S. State Department.