During its first three months in office, the Obama Administration has repeatedly stressed how committed it is to a new peace agreement in the Middle East.
Its special envoy to the region, George Mitchell, recently visited Israel and the West Bank. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has traveled to the region as well.
But Israel’s new conservative government is taking an altogether different approach to any peace deal with the Palestinians — an approach that diverges significantly from the Obama Administration’s approach.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has attempted to place Iran ahead of the Palestinian issue, and the new government says Israel will not move ahead with peace talks until the U.S. makes progress in stopping Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons.
Alon Ben-Meir, a senior fellow at New York University’s School of Global Affairs, joins Martin Savidge to discuss what is behind this shift in Israel’s approach and the challenges it presents for the Obama Administration and the Palestinians themselves.
Sri Lanka’s government has restricted access to the conflict zone where it is fighting the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), making it impossible to verify claims of casualties made by both sides.
But in an Al Jazeera exclusive, David Chater went on patrol with the Sri Lankan navy as it rescued civilians fleeing heavy fighting off the country’s northeastern coast.
He reports on what has been described as a “humanitarian disaster” from the government’s side of the battlefront..
The liberal advocacy group MoveOn.org is to release this 30 second spot calling on Attorney General Eric Holder to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate how the Bush Administration arrived at the decision to institute torture as an instrument of state policy.
In addition House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is pressing the case for creation of a special “truth commission” to investigate the interrogation of terror suspects during the Bush administration. While several House committees already are examining the issue, the Speaker suggested “it might be further useful to have such a commission so that it removes all doubt that how we protect the American people is in a values-based way.”
The San Francisco Democrat said she is open to holding potential witnesses, including former government officials, harmless from prosecution for cooperating with the commission, but only in a limited way. “I don’t think you take immunity off the table,” she said, suggested immunity could encourage cooperation. But Speaker Pelosi stressed immunity “should not be granted in a blanket way.”
Over on the Huffington Post, former Senator Bob Graham, a former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said that the criminal prosecution of Bush administration officials involved in implementing torture policies should not “be taken off the table.”
The former senator and longtime Florida Democrat said in an interview with the Huffington Post that he favored an inquiry into what transpired during the Bush years “so that there could be a record that is not too distant from the acts themselves for the benefit of the American people and the benefit of history.” As a rationale for such an inquiry, he noted that historical knowledge would have benefited the Bush administration officials who did not, according to a report in the New York Times on Wednesday, know about the “gruesome origins of the techniques they were approving.”
Regarding the outlines of a possible committee to investigate the Bush administration’s tactics, Graham said that it would have to be bipartisan, but could “be done within the Congress or another 9/11 commission-type citizens group.”
“As to criminal prosecution,” he added, “I don’t think that should be taken off the table. But I think it is premature with the current state of knowledge to determine if that is appropriate.”
Graham, who served as chair of the intelligence committee until 2002, was one of a handful of lawmakers who was reportedly briefed by the Bush administration about the CIA’s interrogation tactics, including the use of waterboarding. His ability to object to these practices, however, was limited do to secrecy restrictions imposed by the agency and White House.
Asked whether he saw anything new in the recently released Bush-era torture memos, Graham responded: “There has been so much in the press over the past two-plus years that there isn’t any particularly new information. There were some new details than we had from before and information on the treatment of some of the detainees that was new and I found it to be very distressing.”
I have taken the view that those who provided the intellectual underpinnings such Jay Bybee and John Yoo and those who made the political decision such Donald Rumsfeld to institute torture as an instrument of state policy should be held accountable for such.
The question is not Who’s Politicizing Intelligence Now? as Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard asks but rather who broke the law and on whose order.
For more than six centuries, the Ottoman Empire controlled Arab lands, leaving its imprint on art, language and food.
Today, Turkey is wielding influence once again in the Arab world — not militarily, but through its soap operas. More than a dozen Turkish soaps have aired on Arab television, offering an escape from the hard daily realities of life.