Gawker reported today that Andrew Adler, the owner and publisher of the weekly newspaper the Atlanta Jewish Times, wrote in a January 13 column about what options Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Neyanyahu might have if he receives a report that Hezbollah is about to attack with thousands of rockets and Iran has “reached nuclear launch capabilities.” In this hypothetical scenario, Adler says that an Israeli diplomat will have informed Nethanyahu that he “cannot expect much help from the United States due to its newly implemented military budget and the administration’s never ending ‘Alice in Wonderland’ belief that diplomacy is the answer.”

One option (Option three), according to Adler, would be for U.S.-based Mossad agents to assassinate the President of the United States:

Three, give the go-ahead for U.S.-based Mossad agents to take out a president deemed unfriendly to Israel in order for the current vice president to take his place, and forcefully dictate that the United States’ policy includes its helping the Jewish state obliterate its enemies.

“Yes, you read ‘three’ correctly,” Adler says, “Order a hit on a president in order to preserve Israel’s existence. Think about it. If I have thought of this Tom Clancy-type scenario, don’t you think that this almost unfathomable idea has been discussed in Israel’s most inner circles?”

In a statement today, the National Jewish Democratic Council (NJDC) condemned Adler’s editorial:

“It is the height of irresponsibility to make the horrific suggestion that the State of Israel should assassinate the President of the United States of America,” [NJDC President and CEO David] Harris said. “To dare to give such despicable ideas space in a newspaper — no less in the words of the paper’s owner and publisher, and a Jewish newspaper at that — is beyond the pale.”

As for Adler, Gawker caught up with him to see just what he was talking about. He said he wasn’t advocating for assassinating President Obama. “I was hoping to make clear that it’s unspeakable—god forbid this would ever happen,” Adler said, adding, “I wrote it to see what kind of reaction I was going to get from readers.”

“We’ve gotten a lot of calls and emails,” Adler told Gawker. “Nothing from the Secret Service, though. Yet,” Gawker’s John Cook adds.

The GOP primary races — and the candidates’ efforts to one-up each others’ hawkishness on Iran — often dominates the foreign policy headlines, but a growing number of U.S. and Israeli officials are expressing reservations over the possibility of a military confrontation with Iran. The latest official to add their voice is George W. Bush’s CIA director and NSA chief Gen. Michael Hayden.

Foreign Policy’s Josh Rogin reports that Hayden, while speaking yesterday at the Center for the National Interest, told a small group:

When we talked about this in the government, the consensus was that [attacking Iran] would guarantee that which we are trying to prevent — an Iran that will spare nothing to build a nuclear weapon and that would build it in secret.

Hayden, reports Rogin, told the audience that the Bush administration concluded that without a military occupation of Iran, a military campaign would be counterproductive.

Hayden’s misgivings about a airstrikes come the same week that Colin Kahl, Obama’s recently retired Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East, expressed his own reservations about attacking Iran. He wrote in Foreign Affairs:

[G]iven the high costs and inherent uncertainties of a strike, the United States should not rush to use force until all other options have been exhausted and the Iranian threat is not just growing but imminent. Until then, force is, and should remain, a last resort, not a first choice.

And on Tuesday, Former CIA acting director John McLaughlin told an audience that attacking Iran “would be a very bad option.”

Yukiya Amano, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said this week that what the IAEA knows about Iran’s nuclear program “suggests the development of nuclear weapons” and vowed to “alert the world” about program’s military dimensions. And the Chinese came out forcefully against Iran, warning that it does not tolerate a course toward nuclear weapons. “China adamantly opposes Iran developing and possessing nuclear weapons,” Chinese premier Wen Jiabao said.

Britain, China, France, Russia, Germany and the United States offered new negotiations with Iran on its nuclear program. “We are waiting for the Iranian reaction,” said a spokesperson for EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton.

At the same time, a growing number of retired U.S. defense and intelligence officials, combined with twelve of the 18 living former heads of the three Israeli security branches, are expressing reservations about the rush towards military action against Iran.

Congress and GOP presidential candidates might find short-term political benefits in hawkish rhetoric and turning the discussion “into a political debate and one -upmanship,” as Rep. Peter Welch (D-VT) warned on Wednesday, but officials in both Washington and Tel Aviv are expressing strongly worded concerns about the potential dangers of a military strike.

Tens of thousands took to the streets of Istanbul to protest a court decision not to widen the investigation into the murder of a Turkish-Armenian journalist five years ago. The court assigned guilt to several nationalists deemed responsible for the killing of Hrant Dink, but decided the prosecution did not present enough evidence that there was an illegal organization behind the murder. The investigation shied away from exploring the suspected role of some nationalist police and military officials.

Dink, the editor of a Turkish-Armenian newspaper, wrote critically about Turkey’s treatment of its Armenian ethnic minority, and particularly about the killing of more than 1 million Armenians by the Ottoman army in 1915 which he and others considered genocide, a term that is hotly contested. The advocacy group Committee to Protect Journalists’ (CPJ) research demonstrated widespread nationalist threats leading up to Dink’s murder on the front steps of his paper.

The protests were the largest in Turkey in years. Some held aloft signs in Turkish and Armenian that said, “We are all Hrant. We are all Armenian.” Here’s a photo of an Istanbul neighborhood from the Turkish newspaper Hürriyet:

The Paris-based journalism advocacy group Reporters Without Borders said the decision was “absolutely scandalous.” Nina Ognianova, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia Program Coordinator, said:

Justice for our colleague Hrant Dink will not be achieved until the commissioners of his slaying five years ago are tried and punished to the full extent of the law. We stand in solidarity with Dink’s family, colleagues, and friends in calling for a thorough and transparent investigation into the suspected involvement of military and security service officials in this brutal crime.

Turkish president Abdullah Gül and other members of the ruling AK Party expressed disappointment with the ruling: “The conclusion of this case in transparency and fairness in line with our legislation is an important test for us,” Gül reportedly said. Some, however, doubted the sincerity of the nationalist government.