Bush Installs Pentagon Official Peter Flory

Bush Installs Pentagon Official: "Bush Installs Pentagon Official

The Associated Press
Tuesday, August 2, 2005; 7:56 PM

WASHINGTON -- President Bush again invoked a constitutional provision enabling him to bypass the Senate and install directly a nominee who had been blocked in the Senate. This time, he named Peter Flory to be an assistant secretary of defense.

The move on Tuesday came a day after Bush used the same powers to install John Bolton as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

President Bush gives a thumbs up as he departs the South Lawn of the White House Tuesday, August 2, 2005. He was heading to his ranch in Crawford, Texas where he will spend the month for his annual vacation. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert) (Gerald Herbert - AP)
The Constitution gives the president the authority to put an official on the job without waiting for Senate confirmation when Congress is in recess. The official then can serve until the end of the current Congress, which in this case is January 2007.

Flory was first nominated to the post on June 1, 2004, but the nomination was blocked by Michigan Sen. Carl Levin, the senior Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, in a dispute over release of intelligence-related documents that Levin sought from Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy.

Flory has been the principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs. His new assignment is as the assistant secretary of defense for international security policy.

He would replace J.D. Crouch, who left more than a year ago to take another position.

Flory was re-nominated by Bush in January 2005, at the start of the new Congress, but Levin continued to block it. The Senate Armed Services Committee reported the nomination to the full Senate last Thursday. A Pentagon spokesman, Bryan Whitman, said Levin blocked consideration of the nomination by the full Senate.

"The Senate has had ample time to consider his nomination and hold an up or down vote," Whitman said. "This is an individual that is well qualified for this position, it's an important policy position. We're a nation at war. We're fully engaged in that effort."
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My best wishes go out to Glenn Ivey

My best wishes go out to Glenn Ivey "My best wishes go out to Glenn Ivey "Martin O'Malley Picks Glen Ivey:

My best wishes go out to Glenn Ivey as rumors swirl around that he will run as Martin O'Malley's pick for Lieutenant Governor of Maryland. I have known Glenn for over 5 years. We met when I got a phone call from Glenn Ivey inviting my two boys (now the older two) to come down to play with Glenn's children. I knew him first as a neighborhood father and only later as a man in politics. He is a good and decent man. I notice that even with 5 young sons Glenn and Jolene Ivey get their children to Church. I notice that a baseball and soccer games I can expect to see one or both rooting their sons on. To do that with 5 children is something not to mention with the pressure that Glenn is under fighting crime in a county with too many murders and too few cops. I also notice that Glenn drives himself even though his predecessor had a full time police chauffeur. Glenn is about as straight and honest as they come. I am proud to have Glenn as a friend.
Barry O'Connell""

My best wishes go out to Glenn Ivey

My best wishes go out to Glenn Ivey "Martin O'Malley Picks Glen Ivey:

My best wishes go out to Glenn Ivey as rumors swirl around that he will run as Martin O'Malley's pick for Lieutenant Governor of Maryland. I have known Glenn for over 5 years. We met when I got a phone call from Glenn Ivey inviting my two boys (now the older two) to come down to play with Glenn's children. I knew him first as a neighborhood father and only later as a man in politics. He is a good and decent man. I notice that even with 5 young sons Glenn and Jolene Ivey get their children to Church. I notice that a baseball and soccer games I can expect to see one or both rooting their sons on. To do that with 5 children is something not to mention with the pressure that Glenn is under fighting crime in a county with too many murders and too few cops. I also notice that Glenn drives himself even though his predecessor had a full time police chauffeur. Glenn is about as straight and honest as they come. I am proud to have Glenn as a friend.
Barry O'Connell"

Saudi officials and Peter CW Flory review issues of joint interest

Saudi, US defence officials review issues of joint interest: "Media Monitor

Saudi, US defence officials review issues of joint interest
Jun 25, 2005, 12:35 GMT
Text of report in English by Saudi News Agency SPA
Riyadh, 25 June: Prince Khalid Bin-Sultan Bin-Abd-al-Aziz, the assistant minister of defence and aviation for military affairs, received here today Peter CW Flory Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Security Affairs at the US Department of Defence and the accompanying delegation.
They reviewed issues of mutual interest.
Source: Saudi News Agency SPA, Riyadh, in English 1133 gmt 25 Jun 05
BBC Mon ME1 MEPol smb
Copyright 2005 BBC Monitoring Service "

Spin of the Week - Myron Ebell defended the editing as necessary for “consistency.”

Spin of the Week: "Oil lobbyist becomes White House climate science editor
In a lengthy memo Rick S. Piltz, a former senior associate in the Climate Change Science Program, revealed that U.S. government climate research reports had been edited by a White House official, American Petroleum Institute, changed one 2002 document to “create an enhanced sense of scientific uncertainty about climate change and its implications.” In March this year Piltz resigned and subsequently contacted the Government Accountability Project, a whistleblower protection organization. A white House spokeswoman, Michele St. Martin, told _The New York Times that Cooney would not be available to speak to reporters. “He’s not a cleared spokesman,” she said. Myron Ebell from the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a corporate-funded think tank, defended the editing as necessary for “consistency.”"

Bloomberg.com: ``Name calling only begets name calling, further loss of face, more stubborn posturing and less talking,'' said Wendy Sherman

Bloomberg.com: Japan: " Japan

U.S. Is Urged by Former N. Korea Envoy to Accept Two-Way Talks
May 24 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. government should hold direct talks with North Korea and avoid name calling to break an impasse in getting the communist nation to stop its development of nuclear weapons, a former American envoy involved in the issue said.

North Korea's government has asked for direct talks with the U.S. as a condition for returning to the wider discussions involving Russia, China, South Korea and Japan that it withdrew from earlier this year when it said it had built nuclear weapons. The U.S. has said the six-party talks are the only framework.

``The US ought to indicate that it's time for serious negotiations that include bilateral discussions within the context of six party talks as all other parties have done,'' Wendy Sherman, former North Korea Policy Coordinator under President Bill Clinton's administration, said in a speech in Seoul today.

The fractious North Korea, U.S. relationship has been punctuated with threats of reporting the communist country to the United Nations Security Council if it carries out a nuclear weapons test. President George W. Bush has referred to North Korea as part of an ``Axis of Evil'' and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has called it a ``terrible regime.'' The North has resorted to personal insults directed at American leaders.

``Name calling only begets name calling, further loss of face, more stubborn posturing and less talking,'' said Sherman who accompanied then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to Pyongyang in 2000 where she met North Korea Leader Kim Jong Il. ``The US should remember that we are the big country and the North is the little country.''

Responding to Overtures

North Korea's government will respond to the U.S. stance toward the communist nation expressed at a meeting on May 13 in New York at ``an appropriate time,'' the official Korea Central News Agency said yesterday.

U.S. officials met North Korean representatives at the United Nations last week, the first such meeting in six months, as part of efforts to restart the talks on dismantling the country's nuclear weapons program.

``The DPRK will continue to closely follow the U.S. attitude and its stand will be officially conveyed to the U.S. side through the contact channel in New York when an appropriate time comes,'' the agency said.

The meeting was the first between North Korea and the U.S. in six months. North Korea is refusing to return to six-nation talks to end its nuclear arms program without promises of economic aid and an assurance the U.S. won't take military action against it.

Stephen Hadley, President George W. Bush's national security adviser, on May 15 said the U.S. has ``seen some evidence'' North Korea may be preparing to test its first nuclear weapon. Other countries involved in the talks are South Korea, Japan, China and Russia. The last round of talks took place in Beijing in June 2004.

Creating Confusion

North Korea said comments by other administration officials since the meeting in New York ``creates confusion in guessing the U.S. stand.''

KCNA cited Hadley talking about ``a punitive measure'' against North Korea. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's comments on May 16 that the U.S. would not allow North Korea to aggravate the present stand-off and her reference to the possibility of reporting North Korea to the United Nations Security Council were also cited by the agency.

``They let loose such an endless string of balderdash at a time when (North Korea) is seriously studying the U.S. stance, which it had learned through the contact in New York,'' the agency said.

The talks in New York were ``a way for us to clarify policy,'' U.S. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said during a May 20 press briefing, according to transcripts on the State Department's Web site.

``They have not clarified their position on returning to the (six-nation) talks, even though everybody is telling them that's the best thing to do,'' Boucher said.

To contact the reporter for this story:
Heejin Koo in Seoul at hjkoo@bloomberg.net.
Last Updated: May 24, 2005 03:09 EDT
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George Kennan, Leading Cold War Diplomat, Dies

Reuters News Article: "George Kennan, Leading Cold War Diplomat, Dies
Thu Mar 17, 2005 11:56 PM ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - George Kennan, a prominent U.S. diplomat and historian who was an important architect of the containment policy designed to curb Moscow's influence after World War II, has died at age 101, according to media reports on Thursday.
Kennan died on Thursday night at his home in Princeton, New Jersey, The Washington Post and New York Times reported.

Kennan was key among U.S. diplomats in the wake of World War II in establishing the framework for policies toward Josef Stalin's Soviet Union.

While serving as counselor at the U.S. Embassy in February 1946 and sick from flu and a toothache, Kennan answered Washington's queries about Stalin by dictating a 5,542-word memo. Called by some authors the most influential cable in U.S. Foreign Service history, the "Long Telegram" outlined how the West could deal with the coming face-off with the Soviet Union.

Summoned to the State Department in Washington, Kennan wrote a highly influential article under the pseudonym "X" in Foreign Affairs quarterly in July 1947 setting out arguments for a policy of containing what he saw as Soviet expansionism.

Kennan argued the United States' former wartime ally was seeking to expand its influence at the West's expense -- to "fill every nook and cranny available to it in the basin of world power."

He urged the United States to pursue a "long-term, patient, but firm and vigilant containment" of the Soviet Union.

As the Cold War dragged on and containment became the justification for such undertakings as the Vietnam War, Kennan said his original proposal had been misunderstood.

He said he had not meant containment to entail the United States becoming a world policeman, and maintained the Soviet Union posed more of a political than a military challenge for the West.

Kennan, regarded as a foreign policy "dove" by the late 1960s, insisted Washington should vigorously pursue efforts at superpower detente and arms control.

In the 1980s, he frequently criticized the hard-line arms policy of the Reagan administration.

Kennan served in German and Baltic posts and was a member of the first U.S. diplomatic mission to Moscow in 1933. He also served in Berlin, Vienna and Prague, Czechoslovakia, in the late 1930s as Europe moved to world war.

Appointed ambassador to the Soviet Union in 1952, he served in the post only five months when he was declared persona non grata after comparing life in the U.S. Embassy to that in a Nazi internment camp.

A year later, he left the State Department to do research at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and to lecture on foreign policy.

Kennan served as adviser on foreign affairs to Secretary of State Dean Acheson in 1949 and as ambassador to Yugoslavia from 1961 to 1963.

He wrote 17 books. Two of them, "Russia Leaves the War," published in 1957, and "Memoirs: 1925-1950," published in 1967, won Pulitzer prizes.

His last book, "Sketches From A Life," compiled from his diaries, was published to enthusiastic reviews in 1989."

"Please RSVP . . . we need to know how much Australian and American wine and beer to buy."

John McCaslin: Shunning Hillary: "GRAPES OF WRATH

"Please RSVP . . . we need to know how much Australian and American wine and beer to buy."

- Myron Ebell, director of global warming and international environmental policy for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, inviting allies in the Bush administration, Congress, business, labor "and our Australian mates" to a reception this Wednesday to celebrate the United States' and Australia's not joining what's being called the "European" Kyoto Protocol, which goes into effect this week.
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