ian kelly

Just two days ago, State Department spokesman Ian Kelly cautioned reporters not to jump to any conclusions about who won the Afghan presidential election just because “preliminary results” have been certified in Hamid Karzai’s favor. “I want to reemphasize that these are just preliminary, they’re not final, and we’re still waiting for the certified results,” [...]

As an addendum to this post, I see Ian Kelly, a spokesman for the State Department, had this exchange with a reporter today over the propriety of the department’s response to the Project on Government Oversight, which gave State a welter of information about contractor ArmorGroup’s abuses in Kabul:

The Project on Government Oversight has just learned that one of its sources for exposing apparent acts of physical and sexual harassment by a State Department security contractor has been fired in an act of retaliation. A just-issued press release:
One of the whistleblowers who helped expose the guard scandal at the U.S. Embassy in [...]

State Department spokesman Ian Kelly came out of the box yesterday with a strong statement. The State Department takes the allegations of impropriety on the part of ArmorGroup, the security company State hired to protect the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, so seriously that the Office of the Inspector General has opened an investigation. In fact, [...]

These documents about the behavior of ArmorGroup, a security company hired by the State Department to protect the U.S. embassy in Kabul, have to be seen to be believed. The Project on Government Oversight released them in a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Here’s a sample:
Numerous emails, photographs, and videos portray a [...]

Helene Cooper has a good piece in The New York Times about the Obama administration’s evolving stance on Iran, but it leaves out something that’s going to be an increasingly relevant concern if the regime weathers the opposition’s challenge to its authority: when negotiations with Iran can or ought to proceed. Cooper does a good [...]

Robert Gibbs says the Iranian diplomats are no longer invited to July 4 U.S. embassy cookouts. Good. Did anyone but Jason Zengerle think the invites were some cunning scheme to collect intelligence? I hardly see the value in diplomatic snubbing, but there are tasteful and tasteless ways to engage in outreach to unsavory regimes, and [...]