House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) has been putting pressure on the White House to explain the legal basis for participating in the UN-backed NATO campaign in Libya. This week Boehner wrote a letter to President Obama warning that he will be in violation of the War Powers Resolution which requires a president to explain to Congress his or her legal reasoning for taking the country to war.

However, Boehner hasn’t always been a big supporter of the President coming to Congress for war authorization. Today during his press briefing, White House spokesperson Jay Carney pointed out that in 1999, Boehner called the War Powers Resolution “constitutionally suspect,” and warned Congress to “resist the temptation to take any action that would do further damage to the institution of the presidency.”

The AP reports that Boehner’s spokesman, Brendan Buck, dismissed Carney’s reference to a “decade-old statement,” and added that, “As speaker, it is Boehner’s responsibility to see that the law is followed, whether or not he agrees with it,” Buck said.

But Boehner hasn’t always been a fan of seeing that the law is followed either, whether or not he agrees with it. In fact, the Speaker has made it very clear that he does not support the Affordable Car Act the President signed into law last year. And 7 months after the ACA became the law of the land, Boehner promised to make sure it isn’t followed:

BAIER: You criticized the president for spending too much time on healthcare. If you spend a lot of time trying to repeal it when it’s not a reality in a Democratic Senate or in a presidential veto, won’t you get criticized for that?

BOEHNER: Well, there’s a lot of tricks up our sleeves in terms of how we can dent this, kick it, slow it down to make sure it never happens. And trust me, I’m going to make sure this healthcare bill never ever, ever is implemented.

Given also that Boehner said two weeks ago that Obama has already met the requirements of the War Powers Act, it’s becoming more and more clear that the Speaker’s stunt is nothing more than political gamesmanship.

 

The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin has been working hard to keep alive her allegations that the White House is pressuring Israeli Prime Minister Bejamin Netanyahu to negotiate with Hamas and adopt 1967 borders with swaps as the basis for peace talks. But new reports from the call by the Jewish Telegraph Agency’s Ron Kampeas casts even more doubt over the veracity of Rubin’s claims.

Kampeas, who listened to the call, dismantled Rubin’s version of the phone conference.

Rubin wrote:

What happened to the statements in President Obama’s speech to AIPAC that Israel could not be expected to sit down with those who want to destroy it? After all Hamas has not yet agreed to the Quartet principles (recognize Israel, renounce terrorism and abide by past agreements), nor has [Palestinian Authority President] Mahmoud Abbas separated himself from the unity government.

But Kampeas reports, word for word, what Steve Simon, the White House National Security Council senior director for the Middle East and North Africa, told the conference call of Jewish leaders and it simply doesn’t match up with Rubin’s reporting. Simon said:

We don’t expect Israel to negotiate with a Hamas government. If they [the Palestinian Authority] go to a power sharing arrangement where Hamas’ position has not shifted, then we’re obligated to cut off our support.

Rubin claimed that the White House is pressuring Israel “to give up prior understandings that the Western Wall and the Jerusalem suburbs, for example, would never be part of a Palestinian state.”

But on May 19th, Obama said:

These principles provide a foundation for negotiations. Palestinians should know the territorial outlines of their state; Israelis should know that their basic security concerns will be met. I’m aware that these steps alone will not resolve the conflict, because two wrenching and emotional issues will remain: the future of Jerusalem, and the fate of Palestinian refugees. But moving forward now on the basis of territory and security provides a foundation to resolve those two issues in a way that is just and fair, and that respects the rights and aspirations of both Israelis and Palestinians.

Rubin, predictably, has continued to stand by her original allegations — she’s even attacked her Washington Post colleague Greg Sargent’s reporting as “spinning” for the White House — even when the evidence has now thoroughly discredited her.

Rubin has at least four times endorsed Rachel Abrams’s words that Jewish Americans have a “sick addiction” to the Democratic Party, so it should come as no surprise that the Post’s ”Right Turn” blogger has made it her mission to defend Benjamin Netanyahu and try – unsuccessfully — to split Jewish Democrats away from the White House. Whether she, or the Washington Post, will issue a correction remains to be seen.

A Bahraini journalist and blogger spoke at the Netroots Nation conference today about how her country’s protest movement has been beaten back, the personal costs of supporting the uprising, and how the U.S. State Department remained silent.

Lamees Dhaif said that she supported the protest movement that became widespread in Bahrain following the initial outburst of the Arab Spring. “It was very simple,” she said. “Those people have rights.” But her outspoken support cost her jobs at three newspapers in one day and her family was targeted. “As bloggers, as journalist,” she said

we pay [very high] price of speaking loud. I don’t think any American citizen can understand what I’m saying. If we say one word that they consider wrong, they can punish you in every possible way. They can punish you, they can punish your family, they can hunt you everywhere. [They] tried to burned my house with family in, attacked my house. My brothers were hunted in their jobs; they were punished because of their sister. My sister [was] arrested for fifty days as a punishment to me, to force me to stop writing.

Dhaif is in the U.S. as part of a State Department-sponsored tour for foreign journalists. She said she was excited about the opportunity to meet with State and to share her stories so that people would understand what she and her colleagues were going through in Bahrain. But her information sharing was unnecessary: State already knew all she had to say, and explained that they were restrained because of the U.S. relationship with Bahrain, which has vast supplies of natural gas and, more importantly, houses the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet:

They actually knew about it. They know all the details: the doctors and writers. But they said, ‘The Bahrain government, we have layers of relationship with them. We can’t conflict with them.’

The irony — that Dhaif recognizes — is that U.S. is itself based on the values she espouses, and has considerable pull with Bahrain, but refuses to exercise it:

I come from a country that the government thinks that the U.S.A. is their god. So if the U.S.A. gave them a very harsh recommendation about what they can do, they will do it. But still the U.S.A. doesn’t want to say something… [They] concentrate on the other revolutions.

Dhaif said she felt “betrayed” by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton:

The [U.S.] give us the oldest idea: All the people should be equal, all the people should have human rights. [But] Hillary Clinton [went] out and say, ‘The other armies have the right to go to Bahrain.’

This, of course, referred to the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), a consortium of Gulf monarchies that has been at the forefront of countering the Arab Spring. As the protest movement in Bahrain grew, the GCC, with Saudi Arabia leading the way, moved forces in and aided the royal family in a violent crackdown. But as Dhaif notes, despite its silence, the State Department already knew that.

Our guest blogger is Ken Sofer, Special Assistant with the National Security and International Policy team at the Center for American Progress

Yemen used to be an afterthought in the Middle East for most Americans. But that changed when the gathering threat from Al Qaeda emerged there in recent years and anti-government protests erupted this Spring. Indeed, the Washington Post reported last weekend that the terror network is taking advantage of the fact that the Yemeni military is tied up fighting anti-government forces:

Islamist extremists, many suspected of links to al-Qaeda, are engaged in an intensifying struggle against government forces for control of southern Yemen, taking advantage of a growing power vacuum to create a stronghold near vital oil-shipping lanes.

The Post article on al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP, correctly highlights some of the key U.S. concerns in Yemen resulting from the political crisis and now, tribal war. Unfortunately, this story and most reporting on Yemen from the mainstream press ignores the fact that Yemenis by and large aren’t concerned about al-Qaeda taking over their towns. They’re worried about access to water.

While President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s autocratic rule and al-Qaeda’s violent acts make Yemen a difficult place to live, the devastating lack of water supplies for most Yemenis towers over al-Qaeda as the single greatest threat to their livelihood.

Yemen is already the most water poor country in the Middle East, but the problem is exacerbated by the country’s highly rural population, the fact that its most populous cities sit over a mile above sea level and the population’s addiction to the water-intensive drug khat, which consumes 37 percent of Yemen’s water supply each year. In 2007, Yemen’s Minister for Water and the Environment claimed the capital city of Sana’a was using water “ten times faster than nature is replenishing it.” This rapid rate of consumption puts Sana’a at risk of becoming the first world capital to completely run out of water.

The political turmoil consuming Yemen isn’t helping. Most of the country receives water from massive diesel-powered drills that pump water from wells over 1,000 feet deep, but many of the drills shut down once opposition tribes attacked domestic oil and diesel production facilities.

Tying our relationship with Yemen strictly to the threat of AQAP and increasing the number of drone strikes on terrorists while the vast majority of the population suffers from a humanitarian crisis makes us look completely out of touch with realities on the ground and, in the long run, puts our national security interests at greater risk. If you want to know what’s on the minds of most Yemenis, it’s worth bringing to mind the phrase that defined President Clinton’s campaign for the White House in 1992: It’s not AQAP, it’s the water, stupid.

 

Reports that an Obama adviser told top Jewish leaders that the administration is applying pressure to Israel to negotiate with the Palestinians is coming under new scrutiny after the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent talked to two individuals who were on the conference call.

On Friday, the Washington Times’s Eli Lake reported that the White House told Jewish leaders it was pressuring Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to adopt Obama’s position that 1967 border lines, with mutually agreed swaps, should be the basis for peace talks. But it turns out that Lake’s report of the call might have been less than completely accurate.

Sargent spoke with Alan Solow, former head of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, and Stuart Eizenstat, a former Clinton administration official. He reports:

Both tell me that there was no discussion whatsoever of pressuring Israel to come to the table absent a recognition by Hamas of the Quartet Principles — which demand recognition of Israel, renouncing terrorism, and abiding by past agreements. They both asserted that on the call, [Steven Simon,White House National Security Council senior director for the Middle East and North Africa] merely restated Obama’s public position on these issues.

Sargent questioned Eizenstat about if the White House had made any shift in policy and found a very clear answer. He writes:

“I don’t know how anyone in their wildest imagination got the idea that there was any implication of any additional pressure on Israel,” Eizenstat told me. “Quite the contrary — the call was meant as reassurance of the President’s position on not negotiating with Hamas” if they don’t accept the Quartet principles.

While this seems like an easy enough story to have fact checked–as Sargent’s good journalism shows–right wing critics of the White House have gotten plenty of traction out of misreporting the White House’s message to Jewish leaders.

The Council on Foreign Relation’s Elliot Abrams told the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin:

If the reports are right, the U.S. is now abandoning the Quartet Principles — and asking Israel to negotiate with a Palestinian side that includes Hamas without Hamas taking one single step away from terror.

And Rubin quipped:

Is the U.S. president pressuring Israel to adopt a position that is not its own and diminishes its bargaining position? And what happened to the statements in President Obama’s speech to AIPAC that Israel could not be expected to sit down with those who want to destroy it?

Having being called out on her hyping of a fabricated controversy, Rubin bizarrely lashed out at Sargent for having the nerve to fact check her. With no real evidence to back her claim, Rubin asserts “…the administration apparently dispensed two friendly voices to say everything was fine, perfectly fine.” She goes on to complain that “the denseness of American Jewish leaders is always disturbing,” and concludes that Sargent’s post is “all about domestic damage-control for the administration.”

Rubin’s misrepresentation of an AIPAC memo (see our post yesterday) and her role in hyping the nonexistent controversy about the White House call should drive home the point that the Post’s “Right Turn” blogger, who “[reports] opinion from a conservative perspective,” is deeply invested in creating a rift between Jewish Democrats and the White House, even when the facts don’t bear her out.