A bipartisan group of senators sent a letter to President Obama in September asking him to “mount a diplomatic offensive” against Turkey in the aftermath of souring Israeli-Turkish relations last summer. Now House Democrats are throwing their weight behind the anti-Turkey campaign. A round-up of weekly news from Americans for Peace Now highlights two Democratic-led efforts to re-evaluate the U.S. relationship with Turkey, long since a close U.S. ally and partner in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

The first is a letter from seven congressional Democrats to Obama calling for an “an urgent review of our relations with Turkey”:

It is our hope that an intensified and frank dialogue with Turkey can convince Ankara to deescalate some of its rhetoric and roll-back its increasingly destabilizing policies. However, if that cannot be achieved, we look forward to working with your Administration to review the changed environment and develop an approach which better suits the situation.

Spearheaded by Rep. Eliot Engel (D-NY) and signed by Democratic Reps. Howard Berman (CA), Nita Lowey (NY), Shelley Berkley (NV), Brad Sherman (CA), Steve Israel (NY), and Adam Schiff (CA), the letter — in language reminiscent of Islamophobic attempts to portray Turkey as in the U.S.’s “enemy camp” — decries Turkish “confrontation with our closest friends and allies.”

Following up on the letter, Engel and Berkeley introduced legislation that would block a proposed $111 million sale of helicopters and support equipment to Turkey. A release from Engel’s office helpfully explains that during a 15-day notification period, Congress can try to pass legislation blocking arms sales. “The resolution introduced by Berkley and Engel would prohibit this sale,” the release said.

The lawmakers justified the block with the same rhetoric as the letter. “The U.S. should be busy raising these very serious concerns with Turkey, rather than selling arms to them,” they said in the release.

After a hyperventilating neoconservative proclaimed last week that Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was an “enemy” of the U.S., Foreign Policy’s Dan Drezner pointed out that Turkey bankrolled the U.S.-supported Libyan revolution and is “now creating an enclave for the Free Syrian Army.” He didn’t mention that Turkey also recently agreed to host a radar for a U.S. missile defense system designed as a bulwark against Iran (which criticized the move). Drezner went on:

Erdogan has clearly made life difficult for another ally — Israel. On the other hand, lots of America’s allies make life difficult for other American allies (see: Gibraltar).

Turkey’s relations with Israel went south after unheeded Turkish complaints about the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip, and collapsed completely after nine Turks and an American were killed by Israeli forces on a humanitarian flotilla to the besieged Palestinian territory.

“If other countries disagree with Israel,” asks Drezner to conclude his post, “does that mean… that they no longer qualify as either friend or ally? Are there any other of America’s friends that fall into this super-special status? I really want to know.”

On Oct. 27, a 16-year-old Pakistani named Tariq Aziz traveled to Islamabad from his home in North Waziristan to attend a “Waziristan Grand Jirga,” an official meeting the following day to discuss the impact of drone strikes on local communities in Pakistan. According to Pratap Chatterjee at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, Aziz “had come after he received a phone call from a lawyer in Islamabad offering him an opportunity to learn basic photography to help document these strikes.” Three days later, Aziz and his cousin were killed, Chatterjee reports:

The next day, Tariq and the other Waziris returned to their homes, eight hours drive away.

On Monday, October 31, Tariq took his cousin Waheed Khan to pick up his newly wed aunt, to take her back to Norak. When the two boys were just 200 yards from the house, two missiles slammed into their car, killing them both instantly.

‘I don’t see the logic and reasoning in killing two young boys,’ [Human rights lawyer] Shahzad Akbar told the Bureau. ‘We wanted to work with the youth, to include them in the search for accountability.’

Akbar is suing the CIA for killing innocent civilians through drone attacks in Pakistan. And Tariq’s father is reportedly in discussions to join the lawsuit. Akbar wondered why the CIA didn’t apprehend Tariq while he was in Islamabad. “If they were terrorists, why weren’t they arrested in Islamabad, interrogated, charged or tried?” he asked. Writing for the Guardian today, Chatterjee, who photographed and videotaped Tariq Aziz at the meeting in Islamabad, had a similar question:

The question I would pose to the jury is this: would a terrorist suspect come to a public meeting and converse openly with foreign lawyers and reporters, and allow himself to be photographed and interviewed? More importantly, since he was so easily available, why could Tariq not have been detained in Islamabad, when we spent 48 hours together? Neither Tariq Aziz nor the lawyers attending this meeting had a highly trained private security detail that could have put up resistance.

The CIA’s drone campaign has expanded significantly during the Obama administration. U.S. government officials say 1,500 suspected militants have been killed since President Obama took office while the Bureau of Investigative Journalism has examined every recorded drone attack in Pakistan and said at least 175 civilians have been killed.

The CIA “has had freedom to decide who to target and when to strike” and the White House is usually notified after the fact. However the Wall Street Journal reported last week that the Agency has tightened rules after State Department officials and military leaders “demanded more-selective strikes.” “The bar has been raised. Inside CIA, there is a recognition you need to be damn sure it’s worth it,” a senior official said.

In 2010, for the second year in a row, the U.S. military lost more troops to suicide than in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. Half took place with personally owned weapons. Yet military commanders who want to intervene have their hands tied by an NRA-backed law that bars them from discussing gun ownership with at-risk troops.

A new report recommends that Congress repeal this rule, setting the stage for a fight between the National Rifle Association and troop advocates trying to stop the suicide epidemic:

America is losing the battle against service member and veteran suicides, a new report warned Monday, which could set up a political showdown between two perhaps unlikely opponents: Troop advocates and the national gun-rights lobby.

The report, issued by the Center for a New American Security, recommends that Congress repeal a provision in last year’s National Defense Authorization Act that bars military commanders from talking with troops about troops’ personally owned firearms — a factor in nearly half of soldier suicides last year. [...]

The National Rifle Association pushed for the ban on personal gun restrictions earlier this year after learning these kinds of rules were being put in place locally at posts around the U.S. Chris Cox, director of the NRA’s lobbying arm, said in a message to members earlier this year that it was “preposterous” that commanders at Fort Riley, Kan., wanted troops to register privately owned weapons kept on and off base.

More than 462 troops took their own lives in 2010, and suicide rates have only gotten worse: July 2011 marked the highest monthly total on record. The report estimates that “from 2005 to 2010, service members took their own lives at a rate of approximately one every 36 hours,” while Veterans Affairs says that a veteran dies by suicide every 80 minutes. According to the CNAS report, 48 percent of military suicides in 2010 took place with personally owned weapons.

“Multiple studies indicate that preventing easy access to lethal means, such as firearms, is an effective form of suicide prevention,” the authors note. Rescinding the provision would allow military commanders to have open discussions with soldiers so they can “suggest to service members exhibiting high-risk behavior, acting erratically or struggling with depression that they use gunlocks or store their guns temporarily at the unit armory.”

Media Matters notes that Gen. Peter Chiarelli, the Army’s second-highest-ranking officer, agrees that the law stops commanders from having important gun safety discussions with troops, putting them at increased risk of suicide. “If you can separate the individual from the weapon, you can lower the incidences of suicide,” he said.

Congress could use this year’s defense bill to repeal the measure, but the NRA had made it clear that they will fight any change tooth and nail. In fact, they collaborated with Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) to insert language into the defense bill that would prohibit the Defense Department from “issuing any requirement, or collecting or recording any information relating to the otherwise lawful acquisition, possession, ownership, carrying, or other use of a privately owned firearm.”

The NRA has also backed legislation that prohibits pediatricians from inquiring about guns in homes with young children, once again illustrating that it will always prioritize unbridled gun ownership over public safety and the lives of service members.

Last night, news broke that the International Atomic Energy Agency had intelligence showing that Iran is closer to developing a nuclear weapon. That news may be enough for GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum to support an Israeli preemptive strike on Iran. Speaking with Florida conservative blog the Shark Tank at a stop in Palm Beach this weekend, Santorum explained that such a strike would be necessary because Iran is to Israel as Honduras is to the United States:

SANTORUM: If we are in a position where Iran is close to getting a nuclear weapon, then action needs to be taken. It simply can’t be ignored. I mean, Imagine this. Imagine if Honduras has been making noise about trying to destroy the United States and that they were developing a nuclear weapon, and we had a report saying they were in a few months of developing a nuclear weapon. Would we just sit there knowing that they had made comments that they would destroy our country and they were about to get a nuclear weapon? Would we sit there and allow them do that? I don’t think any Americans would let that happen. In fact, the president would be impeached for letting that happen. So what would we say to the state of Israel, that has been threatened to be wiped out?

Watch it:

Santorum has consistently beat the drums of war with Iran for his entire political career. As he said in Iowa this weekend of his time in the Senate, “I introduced the biggest restriction and sanctions on the Iranian nuclear program 8 years ago. It was unanimously opposed even by President Bush, I got no co-sponsors.”

One might suspect that in all those years of obsessing about war with Iran, he would come up with a better analogy than Honduras. Honduras is the second poorest country in Central America with a GDP of just $33 billion dollars, 1/444th the size of the U.S.’s $14 trillion economy.

A flood of reports today hinting at revelations about the Iranian nuclear program in the upcoming U.N. atomic agency’s report will surely raise the temperature in Washington for a military strike against Iran. The report from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is set to detail Iranian progress toward certain components of a nuclear weapons program that form a series of stepping stones toward full capability.

In one of the most detailed media accounts, the Washington Post describes leaks (some named) that Iran is working on a nuclear trigger that would be necessary for a bomb and that foreign experts helped Iran overcome key hurdles in the 1990s. And the Financial Times writes that the IAEA discovered, thanks to satellite images, a chamber made to contain explosive tests, with a Western diplomat commenting that “There is no smoking gun in the report but a gradual and telling accumulation of evidence of Iran’s intent.”

However, overlooked in much of the attention given to the Iranian nuclear program is that, while the IAEA report is likely to conclusively belie Iran’s claim of a peaceful nuclear energy program by pointing towards developments tied only to weapons, it doesn’t mean that the Iranians are on the verge of testing a nuclear bomb. Instead, it points toward a so-called “breakout capability.” The Central Intelligence Agency defines the term as:

Knowledge, infrastructure, and materiel, which usually lie beneath the threshold of suspicion, but which can be rapidly adapted or reorganized to allow for weaponization processes to be undertaken. Such capabilities require pre-disposed resources and often employ dual-use technology, equipment, or knowledge.

In other words, a “breakout capability” is not the same as an imminent Iranian nuclear weapon, leaving the U.S. and the West some — albeit less and less — room yet to maneuver to avoid what would be a disasterous military adventure to delay Iran’s nuclear program by one to three years.

That assessment still corresponds with comments made earlier this year by the Obama administration Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. He had this exchange with Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin (D-MI):

LEVIN: Now, relative to Iran, Director Clapper, you mentioned in your statement that you do not, we do not know, talking about the Intelligence Community, if Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons. I read into that that Iran has not made a decision as of this point to restart its nuclear weapons program. Is that correct?

CLAPPER: Yes, sir.

Clapper said he made his claims with “high level of confidence,” and they match up with what press reports indicate is the consensus opinion of U.S. intelligence agencies.

A 2007 U.S. intelligence assessment concluded Iran had halted its weapons program in 2003. While, in the Post today, nuclear expert David Albright said Iran’s “program never really stopped,” the Arms Control Association (ACA) said in a statement to ThinkProgress that “Clapper’s statement is not inconsistent with the notion that some weapons-related [research and development] has resumed which is not part of a determined, integrated weapons-development program of the type that Iran maintained prior to 2003.”

Former top intelligence analyst and now Georgetown professor Paul Pillar told ThinkProgress by email:

Major Iranian decisions still have to be made before Iran produces any nuclear weapon. Such decisions will depend heavily on U.S. and western policies toward Iran — especially how much those policies constitute a threat that Iran must deter, and conversely how much it appears that an improved relationship with the West is possible.

As CAP’s Matt Duss wrote last week, “Beating the diplomacy drums may not be as satisfying to some as beating the other kind, but it remains the most effective way to protect the U.S. and strengthen international resolve toward changing Iran’s behavior.”