State Department – praag.org

Destroying Libya for profit

While advising Mrs. Clinton on Libya, Mr. Sydney Blumenthal, who had been barred from a State Department job by aides to President Obama, was employed by her family’s philanthropy, the Clinton Foundation, to help with research, “message guidance” and the planning of commemorative events, according to foundation officials.

During the same period, he also worked on and off as a paid consultant to Media Matters and American Bridge, organizations that helped lay the groundwork for Mrs. Clinton’s 2016 campaign.

Much of the Libya “intelligence” that Mr. Blumenthal passed on to Mrs. Clinton appears to have come from a group of business associates he was advising as they sought to win contracts from the Libyan transitional government.

The venture, which was ultimately unsuccessful, involved other Clinton friends, a private military contractor and one former C.I.A. spy seeking to get in on the “ground floor” of the new Libyan economy.

The projects — creating floating hospitals to treat Libya’s war wounded and temporary housing for displaced people, and building schools — would have required State Department permits, but foundered before the business partners could seek official approval.

It is not clear whether Mrs. Clinton or the State Department knew of Mr. Blumenthal’s interest in pursuing business in Libya; a State Department spokesman declined to say. Many aspects of Mr. Blumenthal’s involvement in the planned Libyan venture remain unclear. He declined repeated requests to discuss it.

But interviews with his associates and a review of previously unreported correspondence suggest that — once again — it may be difficult to determine where one of Mr. Blumenthal’s jobs ended and another began.

A series of memos from Mr. Blumenthal — who was not an employee of the State Department — to Mrs. Clinton about events unfolding in Libya before and after the death of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, have been obtained by The New York Times.

Mrs. Clinton, who was secretary of state at the time, took Mr. Blumenthal’s advice seriously, forwarding his memos to senior diplomatic officials in Libya and Washington and at times asking them to respond. Mrs. Clinton continued to pass around his memos even after other senior diplomats concluded that Mr. Blumenthal’s assessments were often unreliable.

Source: NYT

State Department’s Nuland wants to ‘fight against the Europeans’

There are increasingly signs that Angela Merkel and Francois Hollande operated behind the backs of the Americans, when they traveled to Minsk last week, in an attempt to reach an agreement between the warring factions.

The 53-year-old European representative of the US government, Victoria Nuland, is responsible for guiding the United States through the Ukraine crisis and solving the problems with Russian President Vladimir Putin. But in the crisis Nuland has herself become a problem.

The American gave an internal briefing to the US delegation at the Munich Security Conference last Friday. She sat on the sixth floor of the Hotel Bayerischer Hof; in the room were perhaps two dozen US diplomats and senators. The German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen had just publicly spoken about the fact that weapon deliveries could serve as an accelerant in eastern Ukraine. The Americans were angry.

According to the German “Bild” newspaper, Nuland said, “We can fight the Europeans.”

According to the report, Nuland called Chancellor Merkel’s trip to visit Russian President Vladimir Putin “Merkel’s Moscow stuff.” The atmosphere heated up; one of the senators was to have ridiculed the German Defense Minister (the “Defeatism Minister”); and made a reference to the Europeans’ “Moscow bullshit”.

The top diplomat Nuland will be considered a potential new Secretary of State. She is married to Robert Kagan, a neo-conservative thinker. Last year he published a text on why America must remain the undisputed leader of the world.

She already managed to make headlines after the Munich Security Conference last year with her somewhat limited mastery of language.

At that time she flew from Munich via Cyprus and Prague to Kiev, and on the way she called Geoffrey Pyatt, the US ambassador to Ukraine. Nuland dispensed with special security procedures and used her normal mobile phone. So the conversation went unencrypted.

In the evening of February 4, 2014, a four minute and eleven second recording appeared on YouTube. The conversation between the two top diplomats gave a rare glimpse into the world of American diplomacy.

At the end of the call Nuland mentioned a proposal by the US government, meant to outmaneuver the hesitant Europeans, which made her world-famous.

Shortly before she had spoken with the United Nations: the United Nations should send an envoy and engage with Ukraine, then the EU would no longer have much to say. “That would be great, I think, to help advance this thing, the UN would advance things,” Nuland said, and then added: “Fuck the EU”.

Source: RussiaInsider

Off-teleprompter blunder buys Syria time

In what looks like blunder, Secretary of State John Kerry might have accidentally given Russian President Vladmir Putin the opportunity to muddy the international diplomatic waters and buy his friends in Syria some time.

During a press briefing on Monday, Kerry said that Assad could avoid American air strikes by giving up all his chemical weapons within a week. Within hours, the State Department was forced to walk Kerry’s new red line back with the claim that he was making a “rhetorical argument about the impossibility and unlikelihood of Assad turning over chemical weapons he has denied he used.”

It seems, then, reasonable to conclude that Kerry spoke out of turn. Kerry was not authorized to offer Syria an “out” or a new ultimatum. But Kerry’s hypothetical hyperbole appears to have already backfired.

In an obvious desire to make Kerry pay for his flub and throw a wrench in Obama’s determination to go to war with Syria, Putin has seized upon Kerry’s hypothetical and called on Syria to accept Kerry’s offer and turn over all of its chemical weapons. No one believes Assad would ever willingly give up his chemical weapons, but should he agree to an offer the Obama administration did not mean to make, it could stall American action for weeks and even months.

Syria is already warming to the idea.

This complication could be a major blow to all of the Obama administration’s prepared plans to punish Assad for using the weapons and to change the balance of power in the ongoing Syrian civil war. Public opposition to Obama’s war is already surging. Weeks or months from now, after the torturous international diplomatic process that no one believes would end with Assad giving up the chemical weapons that keep him in power winds down, it is doubtful Congress or the American public would be ready to stomach a renewed push for war.

But now that Putin has suggested Syria say “yes” to an offer Kerry was sure no one would accept, the Associated Press is reporting that the State Department will take a “hard look” at Russia’s proposal.

Just like Obama’s unscripted “red line” comment that started this debacle, it looks as though another off-teleprompter administration blunder has shoved America’s foreign policy into a corner. – breitbart.com