meanwhile, back in arizona

Psst! Bush raises money for McCain in quick AZ visit
Daniel Scarpinato, Arizona Daily Star, May 28, 2008 (extracts)

The prime goal of President Bush’s visit to Arizona on Tuesday, May 27 was to raise money for John McCain. The second was to do it quietly. By the end of the day, it appeared he’d succeeded at both. A private fundraiser attended by nearly 500 people was expected to have generated millions for the campaign, possibly more than $3.5m, said Tucsonan Mike Hellon, a co-chair of McCain’s Arizona campaign. And unlike Bush’s previous visits to the state, arranged to highlight new policies or his support for fellow Republicans in the full glow of the media spotlight, this four-hour stop was a relatively guarded one. The president’s tour of a local manufacturing company was fast, and access was limited, even to the news media. And the McCain fundraiser was completely closed.

The visit began at around 2:15 p.m., when Bush landed at Sky Harbor International Airport and was greeted by US Sen. Jon Kyl, US Rep. Trent Franks and state Senate President Tim Bee, a Tucson Republican and congressional candidate. McCain was not present at the landing, or at a subsequent tour Bush took of a Mesa manufacturing firm, Silverado Cable Co., according to the pool reporter from the East Valley Tribune, one of the small number of Arizona journalists selected to attend. From there, Bush went to host the McCain fundraiser at the Phoenix home of Jack and Dodie Londen. Dodie Londen was the first chairwoman of the Arizona Republican Party. Jack Londen, a real estate and insurance mogul, served as a GOP National Committee member.

The basic price for the event was $1,000. For a couple to attend a VIP reception with the president, the cost was $25,000. The money is to be split among the McCain campaign, the Republican National Committee and possibly Republican organizations in four other states. Attendees described the event as “low-key,” with Bush and McCain telling stories from the 2000 election. By 6:10 p.m., Air Force One was in the air over Phoenix.

gamla – striking looking place

Speaking at a Likud conference in the northern territory on Thursday, Netanyahu called for new elections “where the public will decide” the Golan’s future.

The Golan is a strategic place for our security, and for there to be peace there must be security. If someone tells us we must leave the Golan for the sake of the peace process, I say : We shall not withdraw. Whoever defends Gamla defends the whole of Israel. Gamla shall not fall again.

beer7 : my mum killed the punk

Dafna Arad (the singer) – a light unto the nations!

and (if you can stand the TV team)

cluster bombs (with the small print)

British turnabout key to cluster bomb ban
Kim Murphy, Los Angeles Times, May 29, 2008

In a major diplomatic defeat for the US, Britain broke ranks Wednesday and joined more than 100 nations in agreeing in principle to an international ban on cluster bombs, the small, insidious weapons that have killed thousands of civilians in the aftermath of battle. Though the Bush administration has lobbied hard against the treaty and many US and British officials consider cluster bombs valuable weapons, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown overruled elements of his own military and threw his support behind the prohibition. Brown’s decision cleared the way for an agreement that supporters said would lead to the removal of cluster munitions from arsenals around the world. The pact, to be formally endorsed Friday by the nations gathered in Dublin for negotiations and signed in December, creates a new international convention prohibiting the use, production, stockpiling and transfer of cluster munitions. It requires nations that conduct joint military operations with countries not party to the agreement to actively discourage use of the weapons.

The immediate impact of the draft agreement is limited because none of the major producers and users of cluster munitions, including the US, Russia and China, are participating. Russia has said it would not support an international ban. But advocates have said they believe the pact will result in sufficient international pressure to prevent any nation from deploying the weapons. “From our perspective, this is quite an amazing result. Only a year and a half ago, countries would have said you were mad to think the world could turn around and ban cluster munitions with an international treaty, but what we’ve achieved here in Dublin is exactly that,” said Thomas Nash, international coordinator for the Cluster Munition Coalition, a network of about 200 organizations promoting the ban.

Momentum for a comprehensive ban similar to that adopted for land mines in 1997 grew after the 2006 war in Lebanon, when Israel deployed large quantities of cluster munitions, which release a spray of more than 200 small, harmless-looking bomblets that often don’t explode until long after a conflict is over. International investigators said that at least 200 civilians were killed or injured in Lebanon as a result of cluster bombs after the war. Thousands of other deaths and injuries have been recorded in Kosovo, Kuwait, Chechnya, Iraq, Southeast Asia and elsewhere.

Advocates of the ban said Britain’s turnabout Wednesday broke open the doors and led to several other nations’ dropping significant objections to the agreement. “In order to secure as strong a convention as possible in the last hours of negotiation, we have issued instructions that we should support a ban on all cluster bombs, including those currently in service by the UK,” Brown said in a statement in London. Brown said Britain would deploy its diplomatic efforts to ensure the “widest possible international support” for the new agreement. “The whole tenor of the negotiations just abruptly changed when the UK made their statement,” said Marc Garlasco, senior military analyst for Human Rights Watch, which is working to win approval of the convention. “This has completely and totally isolated the US, and represents a real failure of US foreign policy. Britain has stood up to the US,” Garlasco said.

US officials have acknowledged there are significant humanitarian concerns over cluster munitions but have called for addressing the problem in an alternative forum that includes the countries most likely to use them, in order to achieve meaningful controls. “We decided not to go to [an earlier conference on cluster bombs in] Oslo because we don’t want to give weight to a process that we think is ultimately flawed, because we don’t think that any international effort is going to succeed unless you get the major producers and the users of these weapons at the table,” Stephen D. Mull, acting assistant secretary of State for political-military affairs, told reporters in Washington last week at the start of the conference in Dublin, the Irish capital. He said cluster bombs represented only a small portion of unexploded ordnance left behind in war, which also includes land mines, other kinds of bombs and grenades.

Of 15,000 casualties from these kinds of unexploded weapons recorded in 2006, no more than 5% were attributable to cluster bombs, US officials say. The Bush administration is also supporting technological improvements, now legally required for US-deployed and -exported weapons, which make it much more certain that cluster munitions will explode when deployed, and not later when they may come into contact with civilians. But US and British military officials and analysts have said cluster munitions remain an important part of the arsenal when it is necessary to halt hostile forces’ advance across defined territory. “We’ve used them recently in battle, certainly in Iraq, and for the British military, if you’re facing hostile land forces, then obviously a means of dealing with them is important,” said Lawrence Freedman, professor of war studies at King’s College London and author of A Choice of Enemies: America Confronts the Middle East. “With cluster bombs, they can take out a lot of your enemy at once. And they can deny and make it hard for enemy ground forces to operate.”

In response to US lobbying outside the conference, and also concerns raised by British diplomats, the agreement does not prohibit nations party to the ban from conducting joint military operations, including NATO maneuvers and international peacekeeping deployments, with countries that are not, such as the US. “The most important thing, I’m sure Brown would say, is to be able to work inter-operatively with the Americans. You can’t allow this to be a bar to joint operations,” Freedman said. The agreement requires its signatories to “discourage” the use of the weapons by joint operations partners who have not participated in the agreement. The pact also does not specifically prohibit non-treaty nations from stockpiling cluster munitions on bases they control within the territory of nations that have signed the pact. But Nash, the Cluster Munition Coalition coordinator, said advocates of the ban would work in the next few days to get signatory nations to announce unilaterally that they will not allow these foreign stockpiles.

you may not see this widely cited

UN envoy Tutu calls Gaza blockade illegal
Reuters Africa, 28 May 2008

UN envoy Archbishop Desmond Tutu on Wednesday called the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip illegal and urged Palestinian militants to halt cross-border rocket attacks from the Hamas-controlled territory. Tutu said the blockade was “a siege” and a “gross violation to Human Rights”, echoing rights groups which accuse Israel of collective punishment. Former US President Jimmy Carter last month referred to the blockade as an atrocity. Tutu, in the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanoun, said he was also sympathetic to “the people of Sderot those who suffer from the Qassam rockets, we care about them too”, a reference to a southern Israeli town frequently targeted by Gaza militants. The South African cleric, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985 over his non-violent struggle against apartheid, heads a UN fact-finding commission investigating the deaths of nineteen Palestinians in a 2006 Israeli artillery attack. Israel has said a technical problem caused shells to mistakenly hit two homes in an area used by militants to fire rockets at the Jewish state. The investigative team will present a report to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva. Israel, which regards the group as biased against it, denied Tutu a visa, forcing him to cross into the Gaza Strip through Egypt. Israel tightened its restrictions at Gaza border crossings after Hamas took over the territory last June.

quote of the day

The Democratic majority in the next Senate is almost certain to be big enough that it will not have to depend on Joe Lieberman continuing to call himself a Democrat.

— Mark Schmitt, American Prospect, May 27, 2008

interesting

Livni : We need to be a light unto ourselves
Herb Keinon, JPost, May 28, 2008

While Defense Minister Ehud Barak explicitly called for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to step down on Wednesday, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni—Olmert’s chief rival inside Kadima—was more subtle, saying at a small memorial service for former Irgun commander David Raziel that the country is not only about physical survival, but also about values. “Before we can be a ‘light unto the nations,’ as we would want, it is fitting for us first to work inside our home to show the light,” she said at the service at Raziel’s graveside on Mount Herzl, without making any reference to Olmert by name. A year ago, Livni—after the publication of the Winograd Committee’s interim report—called on Olmert to resign at a press conference, but refrained from quitting the government herself. This time she chose to deliver her message at a memorial service attended by some fifty people, and opted to send it indirectly, through broad hints. “The state is not just a technical matter of border and citizens, it is not just symbols, a flag, and an anthem,” she said. “The state has a vision and values that obligate its citizens and its leaders.”

israel’s “wonderful free press” myth

My comment to Yoav Stern: Iran may attack Israeli targets abroad

Talkback
Title: The idea that Israel’s press is freer than US’s Name: Rowan City: London State: England
This is a myth. Even Finkelstein repeated it in an interview yesterday (when he was prompted to do so by Glenn Greenwald). It’s a shibboleth of the Jewish diaspora liberals, that Israel’s press (by which they mean Haaretz) is so freeeeee, and why can’t the US’s be equally so? It’s actually an idiotic myth. Israel is a police state, whose security and intelligence services have communications interception powers the White House would envy. I should know : someone is snooping one of my own accounts currently, as I discovered yesterday. Presumably all they have to do is claim there is undisclosable evidence that I “cavort with terr’ists,” or something like that.

more denials

Senators say report of planned US strikes on Iran untrue
Nick Juliano, RawStory, May 28, 2008

An anonymously sourced report that emerged Wednesday claims President Bush plans to launch an attack against Iran before summer’s end, but aides to two Senators who were supposedly told of the plan tell RawStory that the report is absolutely untrue. Asia Times correspondent Muhammad Cohen, reporting from New York, writes that an “informed source” has clued him in to plans from the Bush administration “to launch an air strike against Iran within the next two months.” Cohen’s source told him that Sens. Diane Feinstein (D-CA), who is on the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Richard Lugar (R-IN), the ranking member of the Foreign Relations Committee, were secretly briefed on the administration’s plans and were prepared to write a New York Times op-ed condemning Bush. Aides to the two senators were quick to deny the report.

“That story was inaccurate. Senator Feinstein has not received any briefing—classified or unclassified—from the Administration involving any plans to strike Iran,” Philip J. Lavelle, the California Democrat’s press secretary, wrote in an e-mail to RawStory Wednesday. “In addition, she has not submitted an op-ed to the NYT, or any other paper, on this subject in recent days. She has been a strong advocate for diplomacy with Iran, and will continue to be one.” Lugar spokesman Andy Fisher was more succinct: “No briefing. No op-ed. No conversations. No story.” Speculation that the US might launch an attack on Iran has fluctuated over the last year or so, as the Bush administration and its allies on Capitol Hill have accused the regime of seeking to build a nuclear weapons arsenal and aiding insurgents in Iraq. Back in September, onetime Democrat Sen. Joe Lieberman asked US Gen. David Petraeus whether Iran should be invaded as part of an extension of the Iraq war.

Cohen said his source for the latest report was a “retired US career diplomat and former assistant secretary of state still active in the foreign affairs community” who was an ambassador under President Bush’s father, George H.W. Bush. Few precise details about the supposed strike were offered in the Asia Times report. Lawmakers, including Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE), have said that an unauthorized strike on Iran would be grounds for impeachment. The Bush administration has not said explicitly that an Iran attack is completely out of the question, but White House officials have emphasized that they prefer to work through diplomatic channels to counteract Iran’s nuclear ambitions. The White House flatly denied a similar report last week that an Iran attack was imminent before he leaves office in January.

more undisprovable nuke accusations

Search Is Urged for Syrian Nuclear Sites:
US Presses UN on Three Alleged Facilities
Joby Warrick, Robin Wright, WaPo, May 29, 2008

The Bush administration is pressing UN inspectors to broaden their search for possible secret nuclear facilities in Syria, hinting that Damascus’s nuclear program might be bigger than the single alleged reactor destroyed by Israeli warplanes last year. At least three sites have been identified by US officials and passed along to the IAEA, which is negotiating with Syria for permission to conduct inspections in the country, according to US government officials and Western diplomats. US officials want to know if the suspect sites may have been support facilities for the alleged Al Kibar reactor destroyed in an Israeli air raid Sept. 6, the sources said. The UN nuclear watchdog, which has been seeking access to the Al Kibar site since shortly after the bombing, has acknowledged receiving requests to expand the scope of its inspections, but provided no details.

US government officials declined to describe the specific sites that have drawn interest, or to discuss how they were identified. However, the US and other Western governments have long been interested in identifying possible locations for a facility in Syria that might have supplied nuclear fuel rods for a Syrian reactor. Although the Al Kibar site was described as nearly operational at the time of the Sept. 6 bombing, it had no clear source of the uranium fuel necessary for operation, according to US intelligence officials and diplomats familiar with the site. Syria, which has denied having a nuclear weapons program, has not yet responded to IAEA requests for a firm date for inspections.

US intelligence officials contend that the Al Kibar facility was built with North Korean assistance, to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons. CIA Director Michael V. Hayden said in an interview that the intelligence community’s insight into Syria’s nuclear ambitions has deepened since the Israeli raid. Hayden said

Do not assume that Al Kibar exhausted our knowledge of Syrian efforts with regard to nuclear weapons. I am very comfortable—certainly with Al Kibar and what was there, and what the intent was. It was the highest confidence level. And nothing since the attack last September has changed our mind. In fact, events since the attack give us even greater confidence as to what it was. [Syria will] almost certainly attempt to delay and deceive [the IAEA]. We know what they did.

The absence of a clear fuel source for the reactor—as well as a fuel-reprocessing facility for extracting plutonium—has baffled experts who have studied the Syrian project. “It’s like having a car but not enough gas to run it,” said David Albright, a former UN nuclear inspector in Iraq and the president of the Institute for Science and International Security. But weapons experts also noted that Western intelligence has had a mixed record on the reliability of leads provided to UN inspectors. “US intelligence has had a serious credibility problem on weapons of mass destruction for a decade,” said John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org, adding that “they have been known to be right on occasions.” Weapons experts also noted that IAEA inspectors face a difficult task in assessing claims about Syria’s program. After the Sept. 6 bombing, Syria bulldozed the ruins of the Al Kibar facility and erected a new building on the same spot. “I think by now they’ve had enough time to cover their trail,” Pike said. In recent weeks, the Bush administration has increased diplomatic pressure on Syria. Yesterday, national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley said Syria was caught last year trying to procure equipment that could have been used to test ballistic missile components.