It’s not really a statement of support for nominee Rajiv Shah, who’s already got strong and eager support from Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. But here’s what the chairman and ranking member of the committee that he’ll appear before for his confirmation hearing have to say:
Senate Foreign
Laura Rozen breaks the news: Rajiv Shah, the Department of Agriculture’s undersecretary for Research, Education and Economics, is going to head the U.S. Agency for International Development, which has gone leaderless since the start of the Obama administration. They’ve got to move fast to get Shah in the post. My More…
Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, puts out this statement on today’s Iran nuclear-weapons disclosure:
“In light of Iran’s continuing deception, the international community must step up its demands that Iran halt its enrichment and reprocessing work, answer the International Atomic Energy Agency’s questions, and
Most congressional hearings bring administration officials up for a grilling. Others present interest group-backed pseudo-experts to give canned analysis. Rarely do congressional hearings present eclectic analysts who address a given policy option from a first-principle perspective to an engaged group of lawmakers. Yet that’s exactly what happened Wednesday afternoon when More…
Richard Philips, the Maersk Alabama captain who endured a week of captivity by Somali pirates before U.S. Navy SEALs freed him, testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee today about what measures ought to be taken by commercial shipping to deter or defeat pirate attacks. Here’s Philips’ statement, on the More…
Here’s Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.), senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, making a clear distinction between Somali pirates and Somali terrorists, while indicating that both scourges are rooted in the dysfunctional state of Somalia itself — a condition he says the United States should work to correct. From More…
According to knowledgeable sources, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has hired John Kiriakou, the former CIA official who assisted with the 2002 capture of al-Qaeda detainee Abu Zubaydah and who said the detainee was tortured, as an investigator. Kiriakou, a CIA counterterrorism official from 1998 to 2004, will start work More…
Hillary Rodham Clinton’s nomination to become secretary of state has cleared its most important hurdle. This morning, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee backed her, 16-1, in a vote to send her bid to become America’s top diplomat to the full Senate. The holdout was Sen. David Vitter (R-La.). No More…
Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), the Democratic nominee for president in 2004, has emerged as a leading candidate for secretary of state — should Sen. Barack Obama win the presidency Nov. 4.
Obama campaign advisers declined to comment on the record for this story. Nor would many Democratic foreign-policy experts who More…
rss