John McCain has earned his Senate salary these last few months. Beating the White House is no easy feat, and yet his success and the success of others — as in the battle against John Bolton’s confirmation — is showing that the White House can be tackled and compelled to stand down.
Senator Dianne Feinstein asked the Congressional Research Service to sort out President Bush’s claim that before the Iraq invasion, his office and the Congress shared the “same intelligence.” To give you the punch line early, CRS’s answer to the President is that that is simply untrue.
The White House and various Congressional watchers are suggesting that a deal has been forged that accepts John McCain’s language that Americans and their agents will not engage in torture or inhuman treatment of prisoners.
Several people in high places, both in the State Department and in the United Nations, have commented to me that John Bolton really surprised them when he embarked on his new duties after moving into the Ambassador’s apartment at the Waldorf-Astoria.
I’m literally rushing to the gate, but check back in a few hours for a sneak peak at a major new article assessing John Bolton’s tenure thus far as the unconfirmed, recess-appointed U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. It’s not yet on the American Prospect website, but I’ve got it. More later. . .
I had one of those special, memorable-for-all-time mornings today, jumping from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem to Jericho to Ramallah. The afternoon had me back in Jerusalem, and now I’m sorting out what happened today in Tel Aviv.
Matthew Waxman has fought at the Pentagon for the last two years — unsuccessfully but heroically — to get the Department to stop condoning any form of prisoner handling that approximated “torture or inhumane treatment.” Waxman has been arguing for the spirit and law of the Geneva Conventions.
I’ve had about a dozen appointments today, all over Tel Aviv. I think I’ve learned a lot about this place but also know that I haven’t yet really scratched the surface of the Israel-Palestine dance around an eventual, permanent two-state agreement. Tomorrow is Palestinian Day, and I’ll be in Ramallah.
After a three hour lunch with Abdul Barri Atwan, an iconoclastic and important journalist who heads the Arab newspaper, Al Quds, I went to Heathrow Airport which was a mob scene because dozens of flights cancelled due to fog problems.
I just got off the phone with a prominent Arabic journalist producing a program on the politics and practice of rendition. This journalist, Yosri Fouda, has interviewed at length Khaled El-Masri, the innocent victim of American kidnapping and rendition gone very wrong.
