U.s Embassy Quotes

During discussions in his office, Bradlee frequently picked up an undersize sponge-rubber basketball from the table and tossed it toward a hoop attached by suction cups to the picture window. The gesture was indicative both of the editor's short attention span and of a studied informality. There was an alluring combination of aristocrat and commoner about Bradlee: Boston Brahmin, Harvard, the World War II Navy, press attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Paris, police-beat reporter, news-magazine political reporter and Washington bureau chief of Newsweek. -- Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward

One view at the highest levels of the U.S. embassy in Kabul by summer’s end was that Karzai “was a very clever madman—just because he was insane doesn’t mean he was stupid.

Three years before the terrible events of September 11, 2001, a former lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force, Robert Bowman, who had flown 101 combat missions in Vietnam, and then had become a Catholic bishop, commented on the terrorist bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. In an article in the National Catholic Reporter he wrote about the roots of terrorism: We are not hated because we practice democracy, value freedom, or uphold human rights. We are hated because our government denies these things to people in Third World countries whose resources are coveted by our multinational corporations. That hatred we have sown has come back to haunt us in the form of terrorism. . . . Instead of sending our sons and daughters around the world to kill Arabs so we can have the oil under their sand, we should send them to rebuild their infrastructure, supply clean water, and feed starving children. . . . In short, we should do good instead of evil. Who would try to stop us? Who would hate us? Who would want to bomb us? That is the truth the American people need to hear.

There is also a global consensus that Tehran’s unbridled terrorism and other malevolent actions are byproducts of its extremist, suppressive, and expansionist nature.

The events in Benghazi were a stark revelation of the consequences of a foreign policy without a moral compass. The battle over the embassy lasted seven hours. Although the President learned about the attack shortly after it began and although the embattled Americans inside the compound begged the White House for help, and although U.S. fighter jets were stationed in Italy only an hour away, the president, in one of the most shameful acts in the history of that office, denied help by leaving his post, so that only silence answered their desperate calls.

The Afghans and their international guards made a show of clearing a patch of poppies right outside the base gate--a patch they had been saving to show off for the media and top Kabul luminaries, a patch with limited risk of attack. A man from the U.S. embassy, thrilled to be outside, wore a patch on his flak vest: AMERICA, FUCK YEAH, it said, quoting the movie Team America. Was there a better description for what we were trying to do here? If so, I had yet to hear it.

Powell’s superiors at State had instructed her before she departed for Islamabad not to get into cabling wars with the U.S. embassies in Kabul and India over I.S.I.’ s conduct or other sources of controversy about Pakistan. But Khalilzad raised the temperature. In one cable, Powell felt that he had attempted to question her “loyalty and patriotism” simply because she had tried to describe Pakistan’s position of relative weakness in relation to the Taliban and the fact that the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan “has never ever been controlled.

Haerizadeh, Sayyed Abul-Hassan (1894–1987)—an early Mossadeq supporter who soon turned against him. He was a retired judge and veteran Majles deputy. The British embassy described him as an “extreme neutralist” who was “quarrelsome and usually at logger-heads with his colleagues.

In 1885 a U.S. citizen, Andrew D. White, returned from a tour of duty as attaché in the American Embassy at St. Petersburg and described the Russian situation as follows: “The whole governmental system is the most atrociously barbarous in the world. There is on earth no parallel example of a polite society so degraded, a people so crushed, an official system so unscrupulous.

Vann was vindicated when, on January 31, 1968, the Communists took advantage of Tet, the Vietnamese Lunar New Year holiday, to launch a surprise offensive against installations in cities and towns throughout the country, penetrating even the U.S. Embassy compound in the middle of Saigon. The war-of-attrition strategy was discredited. Westmoreland was relieved as commanding general in Vietnam.

Robert Bowman, who had flown 101 combat missions in Vietnam, and then had become a Catholic bishop, commented on the terrorist bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. In an article in the National Catholic Reporter he wrote about the roots of terrorism: We are not hated because we practice democracy, value freedom, or uphold human rights. We are hated because our government denies these things to people in Third World countries whose resources are coveted by our multinational corporations. That hatred we have sown has come back to haunt us in the form of terrorism. . . . Instead of sending our sons and daughters around the world to kill Arabs so we can have the oil under their sand we should send them to rebuild their infrastructure, supply clean water, and feed starving children. In short, we should do good instead of evil. Who would try to stop us? Who would hate us? Who would want to bomb us? That is the truth the American people need to hear.

The deadlock was broken when we ordered Walter Stoessel, the U.S. ambassador in Warsaw, to approach Chinese diplomats at the next social function and express the desire for a dialogue. The setting for this encounter was a Yugoslav fashion show in the Polish capital. The Chinese diplomats in attendance, who were without instructions, fled the scene. The Chinese attaché’s account of the incident shows how constrained relations had become. Interviewed years later, he recalled seeing two Americans talking and pointing at the Chinese contingent from across the room; this prompted the Chinese to stand up and leave, lest they be drawn into conversation. The Americans, determined to carry out their instructions, followed the Chinese. When the desperate Chinese diplomats speeded up, the Americans started running after them, shouting in Polish (the only mutually intelligible language available), “We are from American embassy. We want to meet your ambassador… President Nixon said he wanted to resume his talk with Chinese.”35

Ever since the Truman administration, official U.S. war plans assumed that the Soviets would begin a nuclear exchange by exploding smuggled nuclear weapons inside their Washington, D.C., embassy and their U.N. mission in New York—thus ensuring that the opening salvo came without any warning whatsoever. In the early 1950s, the FBI had searched frantically for a nuclear weapon that a Brazilian informant told them had already been smuggled into one of the Soviet-bloc U.N. consulates in New York. They never found it—but that didn’t mean it didn’t exist. Several

In 1998, Ali Mohamed, who at times used the alias Abu Osama, or Father of Osama, was one of the al-Qaeda conspirators who bombed a pair of U.S. embassies in East Africa, an act of indiscriminate mass murder that killed hundreds of people in Kenya and Tanzania. At that point, his American handlers reeled him in, arrested him, secured his guilty plea on charges of conspiracy to commit terrorism in closed-door, anonymized federal court proceedings, then forever disappeared him into the bowels of the U.S. government without his ever having been formally sentenced.

In order to go to Somalia, I took a job as a radio reporter for ABC news. It wasn’t a country I could cover by myself. News organizations had to create fortresses for themselves in Mogadishu and man those forts with armies. ABC sent in its most experienced fixers, men known in the news business (and not without respect) as “combat accountants.” The accountants hired forty gunmen and found a large walled house that used to belong to an Arab ambassador. The house was almost intact and close to the ruins of the American embassy, which—the accountants hoped—would soon be occupied by U.S. Marines.

Kennedy paused, fork between plate and mouth, and told Sidey, “You know, they have an atom bomb on the third floor of the embassy.” Sidey brushed off the remark, “Sure, why not?” No, really, Kennedy replied. The president told Sidey that U.S. intelligence believed the Soviets had smuggled atomic bomb components into Washington using diplomatic pouches and assembled it in the embassy’s attic. “If things get too bad and war is inevitable,” he said, “they will set it off and that’s the end of the White House and the rest of the city.” Sidey laughed, still not believing such a fantastic rumor. Kennedy replied, “That’s what I’m told. Do you know something that I don’t?” •

the Shower Posse solely as the U.S. embassy cable did—as an “international criminal syndicate”—is to describe only a small part of the group’s role. The Shower Posse was (and is) both local and transnational, a nonstate armed group that nests within a marginalized and poor but tightly knit local community in Kingston, yet is connected both to the Jamaican government and to a far broader international network. It was and is as much a communitarian militia, social welfare organization, grassroots political mobilization tool, dispute resolution and mediation mechanism, and local informal justice enforcement system as it is an extortion racket or a transnational drug trafficking organization. Drug trafficking doesn’t define what an organization like Coke’s group is; it’s just one of the things the group does.

By late 1940 the Japanese Foreign Ministry in Tokyo was sending secret messages to its U.S. embassy and various consulates requesting “utilization of our ‘Second Generations’ and resident nationals” to commit acts of espionage and to stir up antiwar feelings among “Negroes, communists, anti-Semites and labor union members.” The U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence reported that “a number of second-generation Japanese have been placed in airplane plants for intelligence purposes” and “will observe closely all shipments of airplanes and other war materials [from the West Coast] and report the amounts and destinations of such shipments.” The Japanese consulates were soon sending a series of detailed responses to the Tokyo authorities outlining almost every aspect of U.S. warplane production on the Pacific coast, as well as which warships were in harbor and which ones had sailed.

I visited with American diplomats at the U.S. embassy just before they became entangled in the impeachment of President Donald Trump. On the day I visited, they were overwhelmed by Russia’s latest disinformation campaign: Russian trolls had been inundating Facebook pages frequented by young Ukrainian mothers with anti-vaccination propaganda. This, as the country reeled from the worst measles outbreak in modern history. Ukraine now had one of the lowest vaccination rates in the world and the Kremlin was capitalizing on the chaos. Ukraine’s outbreak was already spreading back to the States, where Russian trolls were now pushing anti-vaxxer memes on Americans. American officials seemed at a loss for how to contain it. (And they were no better prepared when, one year later, Russians seized on the pandemic to push conspiracy theories that Covid-19 was an American-made bioweapon, or a sinister plot by Bill Gates to profit off vaccines.) There seemed no bottom to the lengths Russia was willing to go to divide and conquer.

But the real concern is not so much the vulnerability of merchant ships as it is their use by terrorist groups. Osama bin Laden is said to own or control up to twenty aging freighters--a fleet dubbed the 'al Qaeda Navy' by the tabloids. To skeptics who wonder why bin Laden would want to own so many freighters, the explanation quite simply is that he and his associates are in the shipping business. Given his need for anonymity, this makes perfect sense--and it reflects as much on the shipping industry as on al Qaeda that the details remain murky. Such systematic lack of transparency is what worries U.S. officials when they contemplate the sea. The al Qaeda ships are believed to have carried cement and sesame seeds, among other legitimate cargoes. In 1998 one of them delivered the explosives to Africa that were used to bomb the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. But immediately before and afterward it was an ordinary merchant ship, going about ordinary business. As a result, that ship has never been found. Nor have any of the others.

According to the Pulitzer-winning PolitiFact (a left-tilting website that’s clearly no admirer of Trump), President Trump has kept the following campaign promises: He promised to take no salary—promise kept. He promised to create a twenty-four-hour White House hotline for veterans—promise kept. He promised to slash federal regulations—promise kept. He promised to ban White House officials from ever lobbying for a foreign nation—promise kept. He promised to nominate a replacement for Antonin Scalia from a list of conservative, strict constructionist judges—promise kept. Trump promised to keep the Guantanamo Bay Detention Center open—promise kept. He promised to move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem—promise kept. He promised to pull the United States out of the Paris Climate Accord—promise kept. He promised to persuade NATO nations to contribute more for their common defense—promise kept. He promised to halt emigration to America from unstable, terrorist-ridden nations—promise kept. And on and on, one campaign promise after another, kept by President Trump and checked off by PolitiFact.184 This isn’t the record of someone who aspires to be a dictator; it’s the record of a democratic politician who keeps his word.

And if McCloy couldn’t get government money to fund these operations, there were other options available to him. Toward the end of his tenure as high commissioner in Germany in the early 50s, McCloy wrote to the Ford Foundation mentioning Der Monat and asking them to “help to carry on certain operations which the future U.S. Embassy may find it difficult to continue, but which are of great significance to United States objectives in Germany.” The Ford Foundation, we are told, “obliged.” Other organizations were happy to oblige as well. One of the things one notices in the reports on the housing riots in Chicago is that the reports which were filed by spies working for the Office of War Information and the Office of Facts and Figures during the war years started getting filed by spies working for the American Civil Liberties Union and the American Friends Service Committee once the war was over. This was precisely the devolution of government policy by “private” agency which McCloy was urging at the Ford Foundation, which would in turn become a major benefactor of the American Friends Service Committee, which in turn became a major player in disrupting ethnic neighborhoods in cities like Philadelphia, Chicago, Oakland, California and elsewhere by promoting racial “integration.

During Bill Clinton’s presidency, the Palestinian terrorist Yasser Arafat was invited to spend more time in the White House than any other foreign leader—thirteen invitations.303 Clinton was dead set on helping the Israelis and Palestinians achieve a lasting peace. He pushed the Israelis to grant ever-greater concessions until the Israelis were willing to grant the Palestinians up to 98 percent of all the territory they requested. And what was the Palestinian response? They walked away from the bargaining table and launched the wave of suicide bombings and other terrorist attacks known as the Second Intifada. And what of Osama bin Laden? Even while America was granting concessions to Palestinians—and thereby theoretically easing the conditions that provided much of the pretext for Muslim terror—bin Laden was bombing U.S. embassies in Africa, almost sank the USS Cole in Yemen, and was well into the planning stages of the catastrophic attacks of September 11, 2001. After President George W. Bush ordered U.S. forces to invade Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001 and 2003, respectively, bringing American troops into direct ground combat with jihadists half a world away, many Americans quickly forgot the recent past and blamed American acts of self-defense for “inflaming” jihad. One of those Americans was Barack Obama. Soon after his election, Obama traveled to Cairo, Egypt, where he delivered a now-infamous speech that signaled America’s massive policy shifts. The United States pulled entirely out of Iraq despite the pleas of “all the major Iraqi parties.”304 In Egypt, the United States actually backed the Muslim Brotherhood government, going so far as agreeing to give it advanced F-16 fighters and M1 Abrams main battle tanks, even as the Muslim Brotherhood government was violating its peace treaty with Israel and persecuting Egypt’s ancient Coptic Christian community. The Obama administration continued supporting the Brotherhood, even when it stood aside and allowed jihadists to storm the American embassy, raising the black flag of jihad over an American diplomatic facility. In Libya, the United States persuaded its allies to come to the aid of a motley group of rebels, including jihadists. Then many of these same jihadists promptly turned their anger on the United States, attacking our diplomatic compound in Benghazi the afternoon and evening of September 11, 2012—killing the American ambassador and three more brave Americans. Compounding this disaster, the administration had steadfastly refused to reinforce the American security presence in spite of a deteriorating security situation, afraid that it would anger the local population. This naïve and foolish administration decision cost American lives.

The original flagship for the company was the MS City of New York, commanded by Captain George T. Sullivan, On March 29, 1942, she was attacked off the coast of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, by the German submarine U-160. The torpedo struck the MS City of New York at the waterline under the ship’s bridge, instantly disabling her. After allowing the survivors to get into lifeboats the submarine sunk the ship. Almost two days after the attack, a destroyer, the USS Roper, rescued 70 survivors, of which 69 survived. An additional 29 others were picked up by USS Acushnet, formerly a seagoing tugboat and revenue cutter, operated by the U.S. Coast Guard. All these survivors were taken to the Naval Base in Norfolk, Virginia. Almost two weeks later, on April 11, 1942, a U.S. Army bomber on its way to Europe spotted a lifeboat drifting in the Gulf Stream. The boat contained six passengers: four women, one man and a young girl plus thirteen crew members. Tragically two of the women died of exposure. The eleven survivors picked up by the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter CG-455 and were brought to Lewes, Delaware. The final count showed that seven passengers died as well as one armed guard and sixteen crewmen. Photo Caption: the MS City of New York Hot books by Captain Hank Bracker available at Amazon.com “Salty & Saucy Maine,” is a coming of age book that recounts Captain Hank Bracker’s formative years. “Salty & Saucy Maine – Sea Stories from Castine” tells many sea stories of Captain Hank’s years at Maine Maritime Academy and certainly demonstrates that life should be lived to the fullest! In 2020 it became the most talked about book Down East! “The Exciting Story of Cuba -Understanding Cuba’s Present by Knowing Its Past” ISBN-13: 978 1484809457. This multi-award winning history of Cuba is written in an easy-to-read style. Follow in the footsteps of the heroes, beautiful movie stars and sinister villains, who influenced the course of a country that is much bigger than its size! This book is on the shelf as a reference book at the American Embassy in Havana and most American Military and Maritime Academies.

I remember Germany and Austria in the late ‘20s and early ‘30s,” writes an American who served in the U.S. Embassy in Austria. The “idealistic youth” broke up classrooms, invaded university campuses, broke shop windows. The liberals of Berlin and Vienna sprang to the defense of the youth. They labeled any police action against them as ‘brutality.’ One of the phrases used to describe the idealistic German youth by editorial writers and educators, believe it or not, was ‘the culturally deprived.’ ... When they broke windows of Jewish shops, the liberals—even intellectual Jews of Germany and Austria—said: ‘how else shall they show their resentment? Most of the shops just happen to be owned by Jews.’17

In 1982, Smith enrolled at the Pakistan Army’s prestigious Command and Staff College in Quetta, where he befriended Pakistani officers on track for promotion. He kept up those relationships when he deployed to the U.S. embassy in Islamabad as an attaché in the late 1980s, just as the C.I.A.’s covert action program to thwart the Soviet Union in Afghanistan was winding down, and then again in the mid-1990s, as the Taliban rose to power. By the time the D.I.A. recruited Smith in late 2000 to return to Islamabad under light cover, the Pakistan Army officers he had first met almost two decades earlier had risen to become commanding generals. One of them was Mahmud Ahmed, the director-general of the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, or I.S.I., Pakistan’s most powerful intelligence agency, the locus of the country’s covert operations to aid Taliban rule in Afghanistan.

…the Arab section of MOIS’s foreign affairs division….One of the mandates of this office related to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Lebanese Hezbollah.

…[Iran’s] domestic reign of terror was reflected outside Iran’s borders by a foreign policy that used terror as a negotiating tool…

The key handler of terror ops abroad is the head of the MOIS Organization for Foreign Intelligence and Movements (OFIM), Reza Amiri Moqaddam (Moghadam).

The world came to realize the extent to which Tehran’s embassies and diplomats are at the core of both the planning and execution of terrorism targeting Iranian dissidents, as well as central to Tehran’s direct and proxy terrorism against other countries.

Tehran, then and now, is committed to using terrorism, directly or by proxy, to export what it calls the “Islamic Revolution.

… the Pentagon had announced earlier in the month [April 2019] that during “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” at least 603 U.S. personnel were killed in Iraq by the IRGC-backed militants.

… the government-sponsored acts of terror are facilitated, financed and directed at the highest levels of the regime, with the authorization of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei himself.

Since its inception, Iran’s theocratic dictatorship has maintained its hold on power essentially by two means: internal repression and the spread of extremism and terrorism abroad. Understanding the connection between these two is key to understanding Tehran’s motives and tactics in its execution of terrorism outside Iran’s borders.

The Quds Force…created a separate unit for terrorist operations called Unit 400, which is responsible for the provision of military support, training and guidance to terrorist agents and guerilla organizations in various parts of the world. The Quds Force uses foreign agents in countries in which it has influence, such as members of the Lebanese Hezbollah, to conduct its terrorist operations.

…the Quds terrorist network has experienced a secret expansion in Latin America, the Gulf states, Palestine, Afghanistan, Turkey, Iraq, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and other Muslim former-Soviet republics.

In 2011, the Quds Force planned a bombing at a restaurant in Washington D.C…organized by an Iranian-American, Mansour Arbabsiar, who had been recruited by the Quds Force, and involved local criminals of Mexican origin.

Given its common border with Iran, the regime’s embassy in Turkey has become one of Tehran’s central diplomatic bases for dozens of terrorist operations in European countries.

In December 2016, Jared again demonstrated his disloyalty. He approached Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to the U.S., and asked to use the Russian embassy’s secure communications link to contact the Kremlin without the knowledge of American national security agencies. Ponder that for a moment. Ask yourself what would have happened if anyone close to Obama or any other previous president had done this.

But the true moment of reckoning came on December 6, 2017, when Trump announced plans to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, thus recognizing the holy city as Israel’s capital. This was a profound betrayal of Palestinians and a significant break from previous U.S. administrations, which had considered, yet put off, making such a bold move.

Chinese authorities built green chain-link fences around the perimeter of the U.S. embassy compound in Beijing to prevent defections. Barbed wire was strewn across the tops of the fences and the fences were set a few yards outside the main walls in order to ensure that North Koreans would fall between the newly built fence and the old wall if they tried to jump it.

Joanne’s federal government employment history had been hidden very efficiently, of course. DuBois hadn’t found anything specific about what the woman or her coworkers did. But you could deduce their mission from what my protégée did uncover: the group’s funding (lavish and murkily channeled through nonexistent government agencies) and jurisdiction—in the U.S. only (office leasing and travel authorizations). Its history was enlightening too. The organization was created two weeks after the first Trade Towers bombing in New York in the 1990s, and their budget and personnel were doubled after the African embassy bombings and tripled after the attack on the Cole. After

Day one we’re moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. Netanyahu’s all in.

Mru consulting is available to U.S. citizens at the embassies and consulates of the country or countries they plan to visit. While there may be some variables that are specific to a particular country, there are a lot of visa requirements that are common to most countries.

Just before Thanksgiving, I met with Bunker Hunt, then the richest man in the world, at the Petroleum Club in Dallas. Bud Dillard, a Texan friend and client of mine who was big in the oil and cattle businesses, had introduced us a couple of years before, and we regularly talked about the economy and markets, especially inflation. Just a few weeks before our meeting, Iranian militants had stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran, taking fifty-two Americans hostage. There were long lines to buy gas and extreme market volatility. There was clearly a sense of crisis: The nation was confused, frustrated, and angry. Bunker saw the debt crisis and inflation risks pretty much as I saw them. He’d been wanting to get his wealth out of paper money for the past few years, so he’d been buying commodities, especially silver, which he had started purchasing for about $ 1.29 per ounce, as a hedge against inflation. He kept buying and buying as inflation and the price of silver went up, until he had essentially cornered the silver market. At that point, silver was trading at around $ 10. I told him I thought it might be a good time to get out because the Fed was becoming tight enough to raise short-term interest rates above long-term rates (which was called “inverting the yield curve”). Every time that happened, inflation-hedged assets and the economy went down. But Bunker was in the oil business, and the Middle East oil producers he talked to were still worried about the depreciation of the dollar. They had told him they were also going to buy silver as a hedge against inflation so he held on to it in the expectation that its price would continue to rise. I got out.

I reached the end of the street and turned right. There they were, about twelve meters away. The Japanese guy had his left side to me. He was talking to the American. The American was facing me, an unlit cigarette in his mouth. He was holding a lighter at waist level, flicking it, trying to get it going. I forced myself to keep my pace casual, just another pedestrian. My heart began to beat harder. I could feel it pounding in my chest, behind my ears. Ten meters. I popped the plastic lid off the paper cup with my thumb. I felt it tumble across the back of my hand. Seven meters. Adrenaline was slowing down my perception of the scene. The Japanese guy glanced in my direction. He looked at my face. His eyes began to widen. Five meters. The Japanese guy reached out for the American, the gesture urgent even through my adrenalized slow-motion vision. He grabbed the American’s arm and started pulling on it. Three meters. The American looked up and saw me. The cigarette dangled from his lips. There was no recognition in his eyes. Two meters. I stepped in and flung the cup forward. Its contents of ninety-eight degrees centigrade Earl Gray tea exited and caught the American directly in the face and neck. His hands flew up and he shrieked. I turned to the Japanese. His eyes were popped all the way open, his head rotating back and forth in the universal gesture of negation. He started to raise his hands as though to ward me off. I grabbed his shoulders and shoved him into the wall. Using the same forward momentum, I stepped in and kneed him squarely in the balls. He grunted and doubled over. I turned back to the American. He was bent forward, staggering, his hands clutching at his face. I grabbed the collar of his jacket and the back of his trousers and accelerated him headfirst into the wall like a matador with a bull. His body shuddered from the impact and he dropped to the ground. The Japanese guy was lying on his side, clutching his crotch, gasping. I hauled him up by the lapels and shoved his back against the wall. I looked left, then right. It was just the three of us. “Tell me who you are,” I said in Japanese. He made retching noises. I could see he was going to need a minute. Keeping my left hand pressed against his throat, I patted him down to confirm he didn’t have a weapon, then checked his ears and jacket to ensure he wasn’t wired for sound. He was clean. I reached into the inside pocket of his suit jacket and pulled out a wallet. I flipped it open. The ID was right in front, in a slip-in laminated protector. Tomohisa Kanezaki. Second Secretary, Consular Affairs, U.S. Embassy. The bald eagle logo of the U.S. Department of State showed blue and yellow in the background.

Pivoting from Trump himself, Bannon plunged on with the Trump agenda. “Day one we’re moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. Netanyahu’s all in. Sheldon”—Sheldon Adelson, the casino billionaire, far-right Israel defender, and Trump supporter—“is all in. We know where we’re heading on this.” “Does Donald know?” asked a skeptical Ailes. Bannon smiled—as though almost with a wink—and continued: “Let Jordan take the West Bank, let Egypt take Gaza. Let them deal with it. Or sink trying. The Saudis are on the brink, Egyptians are on the brink, all scared to death of Persia … Yemen, Sinai, Libya … this thing is bad.… That’s why Russia is so key.… Is Russia that bad? They’re bad guys. But the world is full of bad guys.

A young officer in my organization, Lyle Ahmad, was a solid, olive-skinned former marine with a trim crew cut. He was a clone, a close protection officer. I had met Ahmad when he was a marine guarding the U.S. embassy in Warsaw and I was an agent with the State Department’s protection and investigation arm, Diplomatic Security, where I worked before joining my present outfit. He was quiet and sharp and boasted impressive multiple-language skills. He was a rising star in our organization. Driving

Osama bin Laden wanted to coax just the right response out of the United States by creating a situation in which the United States could not ignore him. His goal was to cross a threshold that Americans would deem intolerable (something bin Laden had failed to do with his previous attacks on the U.S. embassies in Africa or the USS Cole in Yemen), causing a massive attack to be launched on the Islamic world that used the most advanced and sophisticated methods available. Bin Laden was confident that if the U.S. plunged into the Islamic world, he would get the uprising he wanted. He had studied the Afghan war against the Soviets carefully. He felt he knew how to survive the initial American attack and, over time, defeat the Americans. But first, he needed the Americans to attack.

Those who champion a so-called Independent America will tell you that drones create more enemies than they kill, and that America will attract more admirers by perfecting American democracy. Do you really believe that young men living among the tribes of the Afghan-Pakistan border are less likely to support extremist ideologies if we build better schools in Ohio and better hospitals in Arkansas? Do you accept that Somali jihadis are less likely to plan attacks on Western targets or that U.S. embassies around the world will be safer if U.S. policymakers redouble their commitment to American civil liberties? In the real world, a leader must often choose the least bad of many bad options. Drones achieve military objectives with much less risk for our military and at much lower cost to our economy. Use them. Never

Maury and I spent more than one month in Pakistan, talking with AID personnel and their Pakistani counterparts and learning about the conduct of the projects over the six-year period. Most importantly, we focused on the dialogue between senior U.S. embassy and mission personnel and those in the Pakistani government responsible for economic policy formulation. One day, he and I were asked to attend a “brown bag luncheon” with the senior mission staff. The idea was to be totally informal, put our feet on the desks and just chat about our impressions. Everyone was eager to learn what Maury thought about the program. Three important things emerged for me out of that discussion. 1. The mission director explained that he had held some very successful consultations and brainstorming sessions with senior Pakistani government leaders. He said the Pakistanis were open to his ideas for needed reform, listened carefully and took extensive notes during these meetings. Although there had been little concrete action to implement these recommendations to date, he was confident they were seriously considering them. Maury smiled and responded, “Yeah. They used to jerk me around the same way when I was in your position. The Paks are masters at that game. They know how to make you feel good. I doubt that they are serious. This is a government of inaction.” The mission director was crestfallen. 2. Then the program officer asked what Maury thought about the mix of projects that had been selected by the government of Pakistan and the mission for inclusion in the program for funding. Maury responded that the projects selected were “old friends” of his. He too, had focused on the same areas i.e. agriculture, health, and power generation and supply. That said, the development problems had not gone away. He gave the new program credit for identifying the same obstacles to economic development that had existed twenty years earlier. 3. Finally, the mission director asked Maury for his impressions of any major changes he sensed had occurred in Pakistan since his departure. Maury thought about that for a while. Then he offered perhaps the most prescient observation of the entire review. He said, when he served in Pakistan in the 1960s, he had found that the educated Pakistani visualized himself and his society as being an important part of the South-Asian subcontinent. “Today” he said, “after having lost East Pakistan, they seem to perceive themselves as being the eastern anchor of the Middle-East.” One wonders whether the Indian government understands this significant shift in its neighbor’s outlook and how important it is to work to reverse that world view among the Pakistanis for India’s own security andwell-being.

Maury and I spent more than one month in Pakistan, talking with AID personnel and their Pakistani counterparts and learning about the conduct of the projects over the six-year period. Most importantly, we focused on the dialogue between senior U.S. embassy and mission personnel and those in the Pakistani government responsible for economic policy formulation. One day, he and I were asked to attend a “brown bag luncheon” with the senior mission staff. The idea was to be totally informal, put our feet on the desks and just chat about our impressions. Everyone was eager to learn what Maury thought about the program. Three important things emerged for me out of that discussion. 1. The mission director explained that he had held some very successful consultations and brainstorming sessions with senior Pakistani government leaders. He said the Pakistanis were open to his ideas for needed reform, listened carefully and took extensive notes during these meetings. Although there had been little concrete action to implement these recommendations to date, he was confident they were seriously considering them. Maury smiled and responded, “Yeah. They used to jerk me around the same way when I was in your position. The Paks are masters at that game. They know how to make you feel good. I doubt that they are serious. This is a government of inaction.” The mission director was crestfallen. 2. Then the program officer asked what Maury thought about the mix of projects that had been selected by the government of Pakistan and the mission for inclusion in the program for funding. Maury responded that the projects selected were “old friends” of his. He too, had focused on the same areas i.e. agriculture, health, and power generation and supply. That said, the development problems had not gone away. He gave the new program credit for identifying the same obstacles to economic development that had existed twenty years earlier. 3. Finally, the mission director asked Maury for his impressions of any major changes he sensed had occurred in Pakistan since his departure. Maury thought about that for a while. Then he offered perhaps the most prescient observation of the entire review. He said, when he served in Pakistan in the 1960s, he had found that the educated Pakistani visualized himself and his society as being an important part of the South-Asian subcontinent. “Today” he said, “after having lost East Pakistan, they seem to perceive themselves as being the eastern anchor of the Middle-East.” One wonders whether the Indian government understands this significant shift in its neighbor’s outlook and how important it is to work to reverse that world view among the Pakistanis for India’s own security andwell-being.

Osama bin Laden drew inspiration from Hezbollah’s dual suicide attacks against the multinational forces in Beirut in 1983. Al Qaeda’s first simultaneous suicide attacks on two U.S. embassies in eastern Africa on August 7, 1998, were directly modeled on Hezbollah’s 1983 attacks. Al Qaeda’s coordinated suicide missions expanded the model three years later for four simultaneous airplane hijackings on September 11, 2001. The nineteen Islamic jihadists, who were armed only with box cutters, successfully hijacked four commercial planes to carry out their suicide mission. Their bravado spoke for itself in that they didn’t even bother to have a backup plan.

What do the current presidents and prime ministers of France, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, India, Georgia, Greece, Colombia, Mexico, Philippines, Portugal and many other countries have in common? They were selected by different U.S. Embassies and educated by our elite through the U.S. State Department. Earlier in their careers all have participated in the Foreign Leader Program.[63] After participating in this special Program more then 240 alumni became heads of government in their home countries!

the CIA knew that the Soviets routinely bombarded the U.S. embassy in Moscow with microwave signals. Turner brought this up constantly, saying he was worried about the “beams” at the embassy. Separately, after the fire, Turner wondered if the KGB could have deliberately caused the spark that started it, if

In the intervening thirty years since Sadat’s death at the hands of Jihadists, thousands of terror attacks have occurred in nations across the globe. Two years after Sadat’s death the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, Lebanon was bombed, killing 63. Six were killed in the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York City on February 26, 1993. The next month, 250 civilians died in the attacks on Bombay, India.  A year later, three members of the Armed Islamic Group hijacked Air France flight 8969 in Algiers, killing seven. In 1996 the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia were bombed, killing 19 U.S. Air Force airmen living in the towers.

Later, the Pentagon indicated that the relatively new terrorist group named al Qaeda, formed eight years before, was responsible for the Khobar Towers attack on U. S. military personnel. In 1998 U.S. Embassies in Tanzania and Kenya were bombed, killing 224, and wounding over 4,000. On October 12, 2000, the USS Cole was attacked, killing 56. On September 11, 2001, al Qaeda terrorists hijacked four U.S. commercial aircraft, bringing down both World Trade Center Towers, and crashing into the Pentagon, with the fourth assumed to be headed for either the U.S. Capitol or the White House, brought down by passengers in Pennsylvania. 3,000 died. America’s innocence regarding Jihadists’ plan to conquer the world for Allah also died at the same time.

Given the novelty of this organization, lines of authority were confused. Although Bremer nominally worked for and reported to Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, he increasingly dealt directly with the White House staff and bypassed the Pentagon bureaucracy. Relationships with the local U.S. military command were reportedly both strained and confused. The massive U.S. military presence and its role in providing law and order were regarded as increasingly oppressive by the Iraqi people, and this perception played a role in stimulating violent resistance. And then, with the transfer of sovereignty in June 2004, this entire, large bureaucracy had to be dismantled and its functions handed back either to Iraqi ministries or to the new embassy/ country team. This once again created substantial confusion as roles and missions were reassigned to a different bureaucracy.

Carol Rodley was deputy chief of mission in the U.S. Embassy during the late 1990s. Back then, just a few years after the UN occupation, “I heard a lot of distress about the state of the education system,” she said. “They talked about the corruption in schools. It was shocking and really, really distressing to the middle class.” She returned to Cambodia as U.S. ambassador in 2008 and quickly discerned a change. The anger had faded. In fact, it had disappeared. Instead of being upset, people were now simply dispirited. “They don’t talk about it anymore. Now it’s the status quo.

Rather than inserting more Marines and engineers to harden and defend the American Embassy—thus sending an unequivocal message that such an assault against American sovereign territory in the heart of Tehran would never be tolerated again—the bureaucrats back at the White House and State Department had panicked. They’d reduced the embassy’s staff from nearly a thousand to barely sixty. The Pentagon had shown a similar lack of resolve. The number of U.S. military forces in-country had been drawn down from about ten thousand active-duty troops to almost none. The only reason Charlie had been sent in—especially as green as he was—was because he happened to be one of the few men in the entire U.S. diplomatic corps who was actually fluent in Farsi. None of the three CIA guys on site even spoke the language.

Ten minutes later, Charlie eased their black Buick Skylark onto Ferdowsi Avenue, dubbed “Embassy Row” by local diplomats. Were other Western missions under siege, he wondered, or just his own? The boulevard was as congested as ever, but he saw nothing out of the ordinary. No protests. No demonstrations. No presidents or prime ministers being burned in effigy here, even though hideous mock-ups of President Carter were being torched just a few blocks away. It was odd. They were so close to the student mob, but here he could detect no hostilities of any kind. Still, Charlie could tell Claire was getting anxious. If they were going to get out of this city, they needed to do it quickly. “Where will we go?” she asked her husband. “I’m not sure,” Charlie conceded. “Even if we could make it to the airport, they’d never let us out of the country. Especially not with U.S. diplomatic passports.

Every year on “Death to America Day”—yes, that’s an actual day—the Iranian government celebrates the anniversary of the hostage-taking at the U.S. embassy in Tehran. Iran has also functioned as a leading state sponsor of terrorism, overseeing deadly attacks from Beirut to Buenos Aires. And even under severe economic sanctions that crippled the economy, the mullahs have been pursuing both nuclear weapons and the short- and long-range missiles to deliver them against such sworn enemies as Israel, which the Iranians have vowed to erase from the earth.

On July 20, 2000, Karzai testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations about the terrorist organizations flourishing in Afghanistan. He warned that the Clinton administration’s response to the August 7, 1998, suicide car bombings of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania—firing cruise missiles at terrorist training camps—was not enough. “Bombings or the threat of bombings,” he said, “will not remove terrorist bases from Afghanistan. Such actions will only add to the problems and prolong the suffering of our people and, worst of all, solidify the presence of terrorist groups. I call upon the international community, and particularly upon the government of the United States…. [T]he time to watch is over and the responsibility to act is long overdue.

Through his approach, Donald Trump removed the veneer of even-handedness that prior administrations worked hard to maintain. For example, cutting funds to UNRWA was an idea that had been floated in Washington for years, dating back at least to the George W. Bush administration. Trump’s decision to move the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem caused enormous controversy in the U.S. In so doing, he fulfilled a promise that one presidential candidate after another, Democrat and Republican, had campaigned on, only to backtrack once in office. By recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s undivided capital, Trump altered the status quo on which the international community based its support for a two-state solution. To accomplish this, however, he did not need to fight for new legislation. Rather, he merely invoked a law that was created in 1995, with overwhelming bipartisan support, during the presidency of liberal Democrat Bill Clinton.

John Wilkerson put away his broom and sat down in the little janitorial office. Most janitors found their offices in the basement, but John, head janitor for the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, had an office on the very top floor. The reason for this was simple; John Wilkerson was a janitor only when he was not performing his less official function of being a very special agent of the CIA.

For security reasons, he wrote in longhand and kept the sheaf of paper with him at all times: U.S. officials presumed that the KGB bugged all embassy property and could reconstruct, from electronic impulses, anything typed out on an electric typewriter.

At those airfields, cocaine was reportedly loaded onto planes to be later dropped near an “Atlantic coast port,” where it was concealed on shrimp boats and ultimately unloaded in Miami. U.S. officials who monitored drug traffic from Colombia to the United States through Central America told the AP that they began receiving “reliable” reports of the operation as early as November 1984 after a Contra leader named Sebastian Gonzalez Mendiola was arrested and indicted in Costa Rica for drug trafficking. Another Contra leader, unnamed in the AP’s investigation, reportedly informed U.S. authorities that he had been approached by Colombian traffickers and offered $50,000 to guard a one-hundred-kilo cocaine shipment. In exchange for turning in the Colombian smugglers, he asked for $50,000 from the U.S. Embassy. When the request was rejected, he reportedly went forward with the smuggling arrangement and faced no consequences from U.S. authorities.

The operation to silence the country, directed from the U.S. embassy, was precise and efficient. Censorship began at once.

Setting aside embassies, consulates and military bases, Rose Atoll of American Samoa is the southernmost point of U.S. controlled territory. Guam, Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, and half a dozen other islands are all further south than Ka Lae. While Ka Lae is not the southermost point of the United States, it is the southernmosr point of the fifty states.

President Truman’s message to Stalin could not have been clearer if written in blood. It was a warning not to contemplate starting a new war in Europe trusting in the Red Army’s old-fashioned strength in numbers. And it signaled more concisely than any speech that Truman had accepted the central argument of George Kennan’s famous “Long Telegram,” sent from the U.S. embassy in Moscow six months before the tests: the Soviet Union had to be contained. As Truman himself put it: “If we could just have Stalin and his boys see one of these things, there wouldn’t be any question about another war.

This is a president who to this day cannot bring himself to identify the enemy as radical Islam. Explaining the U.S. embassy closures across the Muslim world, he cited the threat from 'violent extremism.' The word 'extremism' is meaningless. People don't devote themselves to being extreme. Extremism has no content. The extreme of what? In this war, an extreme devotion to the supremacy of a radically fundamentalist vision of Islam and its murderous quest for dominion over all others. But for President Obama, the word 'Islamist' may not be uttered.

The agents of imperial demise would certainly be backed up by military power—the Chinese have never wavered in that view—but the agents would be many and varied: economic, legal, public relations—and electronic sabotage. The success of George Soros’s then recent speculative attack on the currencies of several East Asian nations impressed but appalled the Chinese (who have pegged their own currency to the dollar in part to discourage such tactics). Soros and his traders had driven down the value of these currencies, forcing them into line with their true worth! But that point was lost on Qiao and Wang, as it was lost on noncapitalists (i.e., most people) around the world, who saw only economic chaos in Asia created by Western capitalists. To the authors of Unrestricted Warfare, these attacks were a form of economic terrorism on par with bin Laden’s bombings of U.S. embassies in East Africa, Aum Shinrikyo’s sarin gas attack in the Tokyo subway, and the depredations of malicious hackers on the Internet. They “represent semi-warfare, quasi-warfare, and sub-warfare, that is, the embryonic form of another kind of warfare.” Such warfare knows no boundaries, and against it, borders have no meaning.

U.S. occupying forces in Panama were quickly ordered to arrest most political activists and union leaders, because they are "bad guys of some sort," the U.S. Embassy told reporters. The "good guys" to be restored to power are the bankers who were happily laundering drug money in the early 1980s. Then Noriega was also a "good guy,"running drugs, killing and torturing and stealing elections -- and, crucially, following American orders. He had not yet shown the dangerous streak of independence that transferred him to the category of demon. Apart from tactics, nothing changes over the years, including the ability of educated opinion to perceive that 2 and 2 is 4.

Russia’s embassy in Mexico City, was one of the most famous places in the history of espionage. For at least two decades, the embassy served as a haven for spies, with an estimated 150 of them working undercover as diplomats, journalists, clerks, chauffeurs and other positions at the height of the Cold War. Some of America’s most famous spies sold U.S. secrets there, including two men who had served time at Sheridan with Jim. Christopher Boyce, of Falcon and the Snowman fame, had passed messages to the KGB through the embassy, sending Andrew Daulton Lee, his boyhood best friend, as his courier. James Harper Jr. sold U.S. missile documents to Polish spies inside the embassy, and in other spots in Mexico, in the early 1980s.

Stone 1   Edward Durell (1902-78), U.S. architect. His notable designs include the Museum of Modern Art in New York City 1937-39; the U.S. embassy in New Delhi, India 1954-58; and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. 1964-69.

Jews have grown so obsessed with Israel that the overt and covert signals of anti-Semitism beamed from the interior of the Trump campaign appeared to be disregarded by people like Adelson and Bernie Marcus, the Home Depot co-founder and Republican mega-donor who seemed wowed by candidate Trump’s solemn promise to immediately move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and to back Likud’s expansive settlement policy on the West Bank. Never mind that both moves were purely symbolic: Netanyahu was going to do what he was going to do regardless of Washington’s feckless policies or the location of its ambassador. What mattered was Israel, pure and simple. It was something of a comeuppance when President Trump immediately backed off his promise of an embassy move, swiftly sent a letter to Prime Minister Netanyahu scolding him on settlements, and promised a new push for Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. But beyond leaked word that Adelson was really, really, really angry, no apologies or mea culpas were forthcoming from American Jewry. Trump did make Israel a stop on his first trip abroad—the earliest visit to the Jewish state by any American president. But before his arrival, his White House made no comment on the two Israeli-American journalists who were denied visas to follow the president into Saudi Arabia, where he happily danced with swords and his commerce secretary boasted that there had been no protestors. Once he had landed in Jerusalem, Trump did note that he “just got back from the Middle East,” a moment memorialized by Ron Dermer, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, covering his face with his hand in frustration or amazement. Trump scheduled all of fifteen minutes for a stop at Yad Vashem, Israel’s revered Holocaust memorial and museum, and in his brief remarks there—from 1:27 to 1:34 p.m.—he managed both to extol the Jewish people and let slip his cherished stereotypes: “Through persecution, oppression, death, and destruction, the Jewish people have persevered. They have thrived. They’ve become so successful in so many places.” Ever solicitous, Netanyahu thanked the president, who “in so few words said so much.” No one took note of the irony that the Holocaust survivor who greeted Trump, Margot Herschenbaum, had been rescued in 1939 by the Kindertransport, which had whisked her out of Germany and had saved thousands of other Jewish children. Refugees like Herschenbaum had been denied entry to the United States during World War II, just as Trump has steadfastly denied the entry of Syrian children fleeing war and death in their own country.

debacle in Lebanon was also ignored, even when in mid-September terrorists drove a truck carrying explosives into the U.S. Embassy in Beirut and blew it up, killing twenty-three people. Reagan responded to critics by charging that the blame for the disaster lay with “previous administrations” for the “near destruction of our intelligence capabilities.” By this time, Reagan had been in office three and a half years!

With this, Operation Hypocrisy reached a high-water mark. On October 3, 2015, when Obama was president and You-Know-Who was vice president, American warplanes accidentally bombed a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Afghanistan, killing forty-two aid workers and patients. The idea that, as a result of this tragedy, the United States had to agree to a ceasefire and hand the Taliban a victory was never entertained in the media or anywhere else, just as it was never entertained when NATO planes accidentally bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade during the air war in Yugoslavia, or when U.S. troops massacred hundreds in My Lai during the Vietnam War. Indeed, Israel is the only country in history fighting under Progressive Rules of Engagement: civilians are accidentally killed, so therefore there must be a ceasefire.

The Most Common Immigration Problems and How Lawyers Solve Them Immigration law is notoriously complex and can be fraught with unexpected challenges. Whether you’re seeking a visa, green card, citizenship, or trying to navigate through deportation proceedings, you may encounter numerous obstacles along the way. The good news is that immigration lawyers are specifically trained to tackle these challenges and provide solutions that give you the best chance for success. Below are some of the most common immigration problems people face and how lawyers can help resolve them. 1. Visa Denials Problem: One of the most common issues in immigration cases is visa denials. U.S. embassies and consulates around the world deny visa applications for a variety of reasons, including missing documents, failure to prove ties to your home country, or issues with your immigration history. For instance, someone might apply for a tourist visa, but the consular officer might believe that the applicant intends to overstay their visa, leading to a denial. How Lawyers Solve It: An experienced immigration lawyer will review your case thoroughly and advise you on how to address the reasons for the denial. They will help you gather the necessary documentation, strengthen your case, and file an appeal if necessary. If the denial is based on a perceived lack of strong ties to your home country, your lawyer might help you present more compelling evidence to demonstrate that you will return after your visit. In some cases, they may recommend applying for a different type of visa that better suits your circumstances. 2. Green Card Delays Problem: Green card applications often face significant delays, sometimes lasting several months or even years. These delays are typically due to backlogs in the immigration system, issues with documentation, or administrative errors. Some applicants may also experience delays if their priority date is not current, especially in family-based or employment-based green card categories. How Lawyers Solve It: Immigration lawyers can help expedite the process by ensuring that all paperwork is completed correctly and filed on time. They can also track your case and follow up with USCIS if there are unnecessary delays. In certain situations, they may request expedited processing or appeal delays based on specific circumstances (e.g., medical emergencies or military deployment). Additionally, lawyers can help you understand the visa bulletin and priority date system, ensuring that you're aware of when your case is likely to be processed. 3. Requests for Evidence (RFEs) Problem: Immigration applications are often delayed or denied because of Requests for Evidence (RFEs). These are issued when the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) or other authorities require additional documentation or clarification to process your case. For example, if you’re applying for a green card based on marriage, USCIS might request more proof that the marriage is bona fide (genuine). How Lawyers Solve It: Immigration lawyers are experts at responding to RFEs. They know what additional evidence will satisfy USCIS's concerns and can help you gather and submit the required documents in a timely manner. Lawyers will ensure that your response to the RFE is complete, clear, and well-organized. Their experience in handling RFEs increases the likelihood of a favorable outcome by addressing the request in a way that meets all of USCIS's requirements. 4. Inadmissibility Issues Problem: Some individuals may be inadmissible to the U.S. due to certain legal issues, such as criminal convictions, prior immigration violations (e.g., overstaying a visa), or health-related grounds (e.g., communicable diseases). Inadmissibility can prevent individuals from obtaining visas or entering the country.