WASHINGTON (AFP) - US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Thursday deplored the hatred shown by the gunman who killed a guard at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and hoped Americans are united against such acts.

"It's a terrible tragedy. And the kind of hatred that the killer evidenced over many years toward different groups in our society is deplorable," Clinton told reporters at the State Department.

"And I hope that we will be able to send out a clear, unmistakable message that hateful rhetoric, violence based on any kind of discriminatory attitude toward any group in the United States is not acceptable," she said.

She added that those "who foment that kind of rhetoric, that unfortunately we see on the Internet, or here on broadcast media, or shows up in pamphlets need to think very hard about the consequences of that kind of incitement."

The chief US diplomat concluded: "I hope all of America will stand united against that kind of terrible action on the part of anyone who harbors those feelings and attitudes."

An 88-year-old white supremacist with a history of anti-Semitic tirades sent frantic tourists scrambling when he opened fire Wednesday at the museum fatally wounding a guard before being shot himself.

The attack alarmed Washingtonians and visitors alike, and drew reactions of shock and sadness from President Barack Obama, US lawmakers, Israel, and a US Muslim organization.

The gunman was identified as James von Brunn, a Maryland resident who has done time in prison for taking a gun into the US Federal Reserve in an apparently botched anti-Semitic attack, a federal law enforcement official said.

The museum flew its flags at half mast on Thursday as the FBI and Washington police were investigating any leads into the attack which came without any prior warning, officials said.

Von Brunn, 88, remained in critical condition in an area hospital.

AFP, June 11, 2009

Hillary Clinton Has Settled Into A Supporting Role As The Top Diplomat For The President

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton won a small diplomatic victory here recently. Few Americans are likely to have heard about it.

The issue was Cuba, and the details were arcane. Clinton and her team, in negotiations on the sidelines of the Organization of American States assembly, persuaded 33 other governments not to allow Cuba back into the OAS without a process that respects the group's charter language on democracy.

It wasn't easy. Most of the assembly, frustrated with the USA's desire to isolate Cuba, wanted to lift the 1962 suspension without conditions. Ted Piccone, a Latin America expert at the Brookings Institution, called it "a great win for the State Department."

Clinton wasn't around to mark the occasion, however. She left before the deal was reached for Cairo, where she sat in the audience applauding President Obama's address to the Muslim world. Media coverage of that speech eclipsed the few news accounts about Clinton's efforts in Latin America.

If that sort of dynamic bothers Clinton, she hasn't let it show. A year after conceding the Democratic nomination to Obama, and four months after becoming his secretary of State, the former first lady and New York senator has settled into her next act: a supporting role as the top diplomat for a president who is his own global ambassador.

"I feel very much in the center of helping to devise the policies, carry out the policies, pick the people who will implement the policies," Clinton tells USA TODAY during an interview in El Salvador. "I see the president every week. We spend a lot of time talking."

Clinton says she had no inkling Obama would ask her to be secretary of State. She resisted, "but the president is very persuasive." The decision was "a difficult transition in some respects, because I never even dreamed of it."

She took the job in challenging times, to say the least: Among her tasks is to stop Iran's nuclear program, curb Pakistan's Islamic insurgency, preserve post-war Iraq as U.S. troops leave there, and help new U.S. forces in Afghanistan with civilian projects. Clinton also has to deal with an unpredictable, nuclear-armed regime in North Korea, which sentenced two U.S. journalists to 12 years hard labor this week and continued saber-rattling in the face of new U.N. sanctions.

How Clinton and the Obama administration will fare in dealing with those thorny problems is unclear. But so far, even Republicans give Clinton high marks for tackling management challenges at the State Department, using her political skills to boost the USA's image abroad and avoiding signs of tension between her circle and the White House. The "team of rivals" story line, much discussed when Clinton was first appointed, hasn't played out.

Clinton One of the Less Visible Secretaries of State

In Washington, Clinton has been "one of the less visible secretaries of State in recent history," says Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi of the Israel Project, a pro-Israel advocacy group. Obama has been his own foreign policy spokesman, sometimes with Clinton standing quietly behind him. Some days, one of the many special envoys gets more attention than she does. Clinton made her first Sunday morning news show appearance as secretary of State just a week ago.

Don't be fooled by appearances, Vice President Biden says: Clinton is making a difference behind the scenes.

"I think (the president) listens to her as much or more than anybody," Biden tells USA TODAY. "She's the main player ... the one he looks to give the last wind-up pitch about what should be done."

Biden says Clinton's view prevailed over his own during a policy debate about sending additional troops to Afghanistan. Biden declined to go into details, but Rep. Mark Kirk, R-Ill., a Naval Reserve officer with contacts at the State Department and Pentagon, says Biden opposed sending 21,000 additional troops and Clinton favored it.

"It turned into Biden vs. Hillary, and she crushed him," Kirk says.

Biden calls that an exaggeration and says their differences were small. "It is true that Hillary was very forceful, I had some disagreement in degree with her ... and the president ended up landing on a spot that was where she was."

Kirk, who is on the subcommittee that oversees the State Department, calls Clinton "the superstar of the Cabinet. Everything she touches is well run."

Grunt work and budgets

Much as she did in 2001, when she first entered the U.S. Senate and was establishing herself in that position, Clinton is spending part of her time on what amounts to grunt work. Though traveling frequently, she's also focused on securing a big budget increase to hire more diplomats and pushing to overhaul the way the USA distributes foreign aid, a subject full of pitfalls.

"The fact she is not in the headlines every day not only doesn't seem to be bothering her. She looks maybe the happiest she's seemed in her entire career," says Kristen Lord, a fellow at the Center for a New American Security, a Washington think tank with ties to the Obama administration.

During her Senate confirmation hearings, Clinton promised to harness what foreign policy wonks call "smart power" - U.S. economic and cultural influence - to make diplomacy "the vanguard of our foreign policy."

She assembled a senior team at State that is a mix of political aides and career diplomats. Her chief of staff is Cheryl Mills, a longtime confidante who defended President Clinton during his impeachment trial. She kept Russia specialist Bill Burns as undersecretary for political affairs.

Clinton Very Popular Among State Employees

With the help of Jack Lew, a one-time budget director under President Bill Clinton whom she brought on as deputy secretary for management, Clinton got the administration to seek a 10% increase in the foreign affairs budget, enough to boost aid and hire thousands more diplomats. That could end up being her biggest legacy, Lord and others say.

It's also made Clinton very popular among State's 57,000 employees, says John Naland, head of the union for diplomats.

Despite their differences in the primary, Clinton hasn't hesitated to adopt the positions of her boss. When a Republican congressman reminded her during an April hearing that she had criticized Obama for pledging to meet with rogue leaders - the context was Obama shaking hands with Venezuela president Hugo Chavez - she replied, "President Obama won the election. He beat me in a primary in which he put forth a different approach."

The big picture

Clinton says it was her idea to appoint special envoys for Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Middle East peace process, Iran and North Korea. They didn't have to be confirmed by the Senate, so they could get to work immediately. The envoys free Clinton to focus on the big picture - and also on different parts of the world.

"She doesn't feel in any way squeezed or threatened by them," says Strobe Talbott, president of the Brookings Institution and a Clinton friend. "She understands that these are monster problems, and while she has not shied away from being involved in them, it's just plain smart for her not to role up her sleeves and do the week-in, week-out work that's required there."

Says Biden: "It's clear to everybody that the envoys work for her." With the envoys in the hottest spots, Clinton has focused some of her travel in overlooked areas such as Latin American and East Asia.

On those trips, she has set a new tone. She often acknowledges what she sees as past mistakes by the United States - to the delight of her audience. And she's booked a series of campaign-style public appearances that she calls "people-to-people" diplomacy, an effort to shore up the flagging U.S. image.

On her first trip to Asia, for example, she held town hall meetings with students in Tokyo and Seoul and appeared on a popular Indonesian teen television show called "Awesome."

"There is a hunger for the United States to be present again," Clinton told reporters during the trip. "Showing up is not all of life - but it counts for a lot."

Fixing foreign aid

After spending eight years as a senator, Clinton has been unusually blunt for a diplomat.

She made headlines in April when she said Pakistan had "abdicated" to the Taliban (she now praises the government's military assault on the radical group), drawing criticism from the Pakistani author Ahmed Rashid, who wrote that her remark "provoked increasing anti-Americanism in the Pakistani army and public."

Clinton says her comment, designed to send a message, spurred Pakistan to action.

Clinton has also spoken frankly about what Talbott and others say could become a major focus of her tenure: Her desire to overhaul the uncoordinated and often ineffective American foreign assistance programs, many of which are delivered through private contractors.

During the campaign, Obama promised to double foreign aid to $50 billion a year by 2012. But Clinton acknowledges that the main aid agency, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) - which she oversees - is straining to manage the huge contracts it administers.

On her plane to Europe in March, she told reporters that aid programs in Afghanistan spent billions with little to show for it. Among her entourage on the aircraft were two top USAID officials who had worked as Afghanistan country directors during the Bush administration.

"We have to hold ourselves accountable. We owe it to the American taxpayer," Clinton tells USA TODAY. "We can't go to people who have lost their job at GM and say, 'Oh, by the way, we are going to pay money to build a road here or inoculate children there,' unless we can demonstrate that it is in America's interest. I happen to think it is. ... But we've got to make sure that it is delivered effectively and that we can justify it."

She adds: "I want to rebuild USAID. I want to see it become again the premier aid agency in the world."

If the good reviews continue, there will be inevitable speculation about another run for the White House. Clinton would be 69 in 2016 - three years younger than John McCain was last year.

"I would be real surprised if she ever ran again," political analyst Charlie Cook says. "I think that when she took this job, she chose to go a different course. This scratches a different itch."

By KEN DILANIAN, USA TODAY, June 10, 2009

WINDHOEK, Namibia (AP) - U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton says the Obama administration will put women and girls first in the fight against AIDS.

Rodham Clinton addressed an international AIDS conference in Namibia by video hookup Wednesday.

She says her government will prioritize preventing mother-to-child transmission of the virus that causes AIDS, and work to ensure girls are not forced into prostitution or early marriages.

Africans have welcomed the election of Barack Obama, who has roots in Kenya and is America's first black president. But Africans also have applauded George W. Bush, Obama's predecessor, for an AIDS campaign launched in 2003 that expanded AIDS prevention, treatment and support programs in 15 hard-hit countries, 12 of them African.

The Associated Press, June 10, 2009

In the wake of Friday's arrests of a former State Department intelligence analyst and his wife on charges of spying for Cuba, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has ordered a complete review of the agency's practices for granting security clearances.

At a press conference Monday, Mrs. Clinton pledged to "work with the Department of Justice and others within our government to make sure that any information that is needed is provided for the investigation and prosecution."

"I have directed our security personnel to review every possible security program we have, every form of vetting and clearance that we employ in the State Department, to determine what more we can do to guard against this kind of outrageous violation of the oaths that people take to serve our country here in the State Department," she said.

According to the charges, Walter Kendall Myers, 72, who worked at the department's Bureau for Intelligence and Research, and his wife, Gwendolyn Myers, 71, spied for the Cuban government for three decades. They pleaded not guilty.

Mrs. Clinton said it is important "that we look forward to make sure that we try to prevent something like this from ever happening again."

By Nicholas Kralev, The Washington Times, June 8, 2009

The United States will consider reinstating North Korea to a list of state sponsors of terrorism, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said in an interview broadcast yesterday as the Obama administration looks for ways to ratchet up pressure on Pyongyang after recent nuclear and missile tests.

"We're going to look at it," Clinton said on ABC's "This Week" when asked about a letter last week from Republican senators demanding that North Korea be put back on the list. "There's a process for it. Obviously we would want to see recent evidence of their support for international terrorism."

The administration is also pushing for a U.N. Security Council resolution that would punish the country financially and give the international community the power to interdict suspect North Korean cargo, but Clinton acknowledged that some countries have "legitimate concerns" about targeting international shipments.

"We will do everything we can to both interdict it and prevent it and shut off their flow of money," Clinton said. "If we do not take significant and effective action against the North Koreans now, we'll spark an arms race in Northeast Asia. I don't think anybody wants to see that."

The North conducted its second nuclear test last month, test-fired short-range missiles and announced that it was no longer bound by the 1953 armistice that ended hostilities on the Korean peninsula. President Obama on Saturday called North Korea's actions "extraordinarily provocative."

The Bush administration removed North Korea from the list of terrorist states last year as part of an unfulfilled commitment by the dictatorship to dismantle its nuclear weapons program. North Korea was placed on the list in 1988 after its agents were implicated in the bombing of a South Korean airliner that killed 115 people.

State Department officials have noted that the process for reinstating North Korea to the list is difficult. The United States would need to document that North Korea has engaged in terrorist acts since its removal from the list.

Newt Gingrich, appearing on CBS's "Face the Nation," welcomed Clinton's comments.

"In the long run, we're going to have to find a strategy that uses diplomatic and economic means to replace the current dictatorship," the former House speaker said. "I mean, this is an inevitably terrifying dictatorship that is desperately trying to get enough nuclear weapons."

Clinton also said the administration is trying to keep separate its efforts to secure the release of two American journalists facing trial in North Korea in connection with illegal entry into the country and "hostile acts."

"We've been very careful in what we've said, because clearly we don't want this pulled into the political issues that we have with North Korea, or the concerns that are being expressed in the United Nations Security Council," she said. "This is separate. It is a humanitarian issue, and the girls should be let go."

By Peter Finn, The Washington Post, June 8, 2009