Senators Distance Themselves from Saying Kerry Wants to Arm Syrian Rebels - East Idaho News
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Senators Distance Themselves from Saying Kerry Wants to Arm Syrian Rebels

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GETTY 020314 JohnKerry?  SQUARESPACE CACHEVERSION=1391497280287Win McNamee/Getty Images(WASHINGTON) — Hours after they were quoted as saying Secretary of State John Kerry told them he lost faith in the United States’ Syria strategy and wanted to arm the rebels there, two Republican senators backtracked a bit to ABC’s Arlette Saenz.
 
Asked by Saenz if the Secretary had himself proposed new strategies like arming the loosely-affiliated rebels during a closed-door meeting Sunday, Sen. John McCain, one of the senators in the meeting, responded, “No, but I think that was obviously a conclusion you could draw. I mean how else…I don’t know how you could do more without increasing assistance to the rebels, but he didn’t say it specifically.”
 
McCain, along with Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., gave his impressions of the meeting, which took place on the margins of the Munich Security Conference, to three reporters traveling back on the plane with them. In several of the articles, Graham is quoted as saying of Kerry, “He openly talked about supporting arming the rebels. He openly talked about forming a coalition against al Qaeda because it’s a direct threat.”
 
When Graham was asked again Monday evening about his recollections of the Sunday meeting, Graham did not mention arming the rebels, but noted several other factors in Syria that Kerry mentioned, some of which Kerry has addressed publicly: “The things that stood out to me is he said the Russians are not being helpful when it comes to the chemical weapons issue, and the Syrians are slow rolling the chemical weapons agreement and the Russians are still supplying them arms and they’re not being helpful and that al Qaeda is becoming a threat to us.”
 
“He confirmed basically what Clapper had said about al Qaeda,” Graham continued, referring to a Senate hearing last week in which Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said al Qaeda groups in Syria were an emerging threat to homeland security.
 
Two Democratic senators in the meeting, Sheldon Whitehouse and Chris Murphy, said in a statement that McCain and Graham’s recounting of the meetings were inaccurate. “Neither of us recall the Secretary saying the policy of the Administration in Syria was failing, nor proposing new lethal assistance for Syrian opposition groups.”
 
Earlier Monday, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki denied that Kerry said that he wanted to arm the Syrian rebels, saying that might have been senators “projecting” their desires onto him.

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