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Just before Netanyahu’s visit, Anne Bayefsky details how the administration has stabbed Israel in the back.
In advance of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the United States on Monday, President Obama unveiled a new strategy for throwing Israel to the wolves. It takes the form of enthusiasm for the United Nations and international interlopers of all kinds. Instead of ensuring strong American control over the course of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations or the Arab-Israeli peace process, the Obama administration is busy inserting an international mob between the U.S. and Israel. The thinking goes: If Israel doesn’t fall into an American line, Obama will step out of the way, claim his hands are tied, and let the U.N. and other international gangsters have at their prey.
It began this past Monday with the adoption of a so-called presidential statement by the U.N. Security Council. Such statements are not law, but they must be adopted unanimously — meaning that U.S. approval was essential and at any time Obama could have stopped its adoption. Instead, he agreed to this: “The Security Council supports the proposal of the Russian Federation to convene, in consultation with the Quartet and the parties, an international conference on the Middle East peace process in Moscow in 2009.”
This move is several steps beyond what the Bush administration did in approving Security Council resolutions in December and January — which said only that “The Security Council welcomes the Quartet’s consideration, in consultation with the parties, of an international meeting in Moscow in 2009.” Apparently Obama prefers a playing field with 57 members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, 22 members of the Arab League — most of whom don’t recognize the right of Israel to exist — and one Jewish state. A great idea — if the purpose is to ensure Israel comes begging for American protection. …
WSJ editors on memoirs out of China.
As the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre approaches, that history remains as relevant to China’s future as ever. The soon-to-be-released memoirs of the late Zhao Ziyang, who was secretary general of the Communist Party during the student protests, show why.
Zhao was a champion of economic liberalization and famous among China’s farmers for his agricultural reforms. In the spring of 1989, he agreed with student demands for transparency, less corruption and a freer press. As Bao Pu explains on the previous page, Zhao’s political opponents ultimately outmaneuvered him, resulting in Zhao’s ouster from the Party, the tragic events of June 4, 1989 and his 16-year house arrest. He died in 2005.
Zhao’s memoirs provide a rare insider’s view of debates among Chinese leaders, and they indict the Communist Party’s monopoly on power and the statist economic model. …
Jennifer Rubin thinks Bush must be enjoying the kid’s flips.
George W. Bush must be smiling. He’s not talking in public about the Obama administration, but he can’t be displeased: his harshest critic is adopting most of his national security policies, albeit grudgingly and with a whole lot of spin. But not even the White House spinners can conceal what has happened. …
… The Left is apoplectic about all this. And conservatives are conflicted. (Does Obama get “credit”? Is this a change of heart or political convenience?) But it doesn’t really matter what Obama’s motives are. The reality is that on one national security decision after another he has come to conclusions strikingly similar to his predecessor. That likely makes George Bush happy. But more importantly, it makes us all safer.
Jennifer also comments on what Cheney’s been doing.
… The administration and the media jointly overlooked the power of Cheney’s message which was based on a set of facts over which he has complete mastery (and which they were either indifferent to or ignorant of). So they now sit slack-jawed while Cheney has largely pinned the Obama team to the mat.
Perhaps the media would do well to start brushing up on some basic facts. What are the relevant statutes regarding “torture” that were in place at the relevant time, what’s the basis for prosecution of Bush officials, what statutes might prevent release of Guantanamo detainees, what is the record of the released Guantanamo detainees, what did the Bush military tribunals entail, etc. In other words, rather than reporting as if this were a popularity contest (Obama wins because his Q rating is triple Cheney’s!) they might examine the underlying facts bedeviling the administration. And the administration? Rather than play “pin the tail on the least popular Republican,” they might give up the Bush-Cheney vendetta and start governing like grown-ups, considering what is best for the nation’s security first and not as a last resort. If they did that, they might not miss the next pothole in their national security planning.
Mark Steyn opens a section on Pelosi.
Uh-oh. Nancy Pelosi’s performance at her press conference re: waterboarding has raised, according to The Washington Post, “troubling new questions about the Speaker’s credibility.” The dreaded T-word: “troubling.”
I doubt it will “trouble” the media for long, or at least not to the extent of bringing the Pelosi Speakership to a sudden end – and needless to say I’m all in favor of Nancy remaining the face of Congressional Democrats until November 2010. But her inconsistent statements do suggest a useful way of looking at America’s tortured “torture” debate:
Question: What does Dick Cheney think of waterboarding?
He’s in favor of it. He was in favor of it then, he’s in favor of it now. He doesn’t think it’s torture, and he supports having it on the books as a vital option. On his recent TV appearances, he sometimes gives the impression he would not be entirely averse to performing a demonstration on his interviewers, but generally he believes its use should be a tad more circumscribed. He is entirely consistent.
Question: What does Nancy Pelosi think of waterboarding? …
Krauthammer’s take from FOX. On Pelosi;
… what she said is utterly implausible. And the charge that the CIA lied to her is an extremely serious one. She is now at war with the CIA, and it has the means, by leaking selectively, of destroying her, and I suspect it will do that.
Andrew McCarthy, who has been in these pages often, and who led the prosecution team against Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and eleven others in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing case, thinks Nancy Pelosi (another terrorist type) has convicted herself with her own press conference testimony.
… In today’s news accounts, Pelosi ups the ante big-time by alleging that, in 2002, she was “told explicitly that waterboarding was not being used,” and, therefore, that the agency is lying when it claims to have told her it was. But — though I acknowledge she is confusing and at times incoherent — Pelosi does not appear to disclaim knowledge that waterboarding was at least in the CIA’s gameplan. And, indeed, she now says she learned waterboarding was being used from other lawmakers who attended other briefings in the ensuing months.
Now, back to the torture statute. I won’t rehash the now familiar provisions that explain what torture is. But I do want to focus our attention on a prong of the torture statute, Section 2340A(c), that hasn’t gotten much notice to this point:
Conspiracy.— A person who conspires to commit an offense under this section shall be subject to the same penalties (other than the penalty of death) as the penalties prescribed for the offense, the commission of which was the object of the conspiracy.
So I ask myself, “Self, what difference does it make whether Speaker Pelosi knew the CIA was waterboarding suspects or merely knew the CIA was planning to use waterboarding?” Answer: None.
Unless a victim is killed by torture such that the death penalty comes into play (which is not alleged here), American law regards conspiracy to commit torture as something exactly as serious, punished exactly as severely, as actual torture. …
WaPo’s Dana Milbank writes on Pelosi’s presser.
Nancy Pelosi is a woman of many talents. Yesterday, she performed the delicate art of backtracking while walking sideways.
The speaker of the House had just read a statement accusing the CIA of lying and was trying to beat a hasty retreat from her news conference before reporters could point out contradictions between her current position and her previous statements.
“Thank you!” an aide called out to signal an end to the session. Pelosi walked, sideways, away from the lectern and, still sidling in a sort of crab walk, was halfway to the door when a yell from CNN’s Dana Bash, rising above the rest of the shouting, froze her in the aisle.
“Madam Speaker!” the correspondent called out. “I think there’s one other question that I would like to ask, if that’s okay.”
“Sure, okay,” Pelosi said, in a way that indicated it was not okay. Pelosi had no choice but to sidle back to the lectern.
Over the next few minutes of shouted questions — “They lied to you? Were you justified? When were you first told? Did you protest? Why didn’t you tell us?” — the speaker attempted the crab-walk retreat again, returned to the lectern again and then finally skittered out of the room. …
The Sun, UK with stunning photo of the space shuttle silhouetted against the sun.
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