Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category
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Israel’s beleaguered prime minister, Ehud Olmert, threw his country and the Middle East into political turmoil last night when he announced he was resigning after months of mounting pressure over corruption allegations.
Olmert said he would step down in September after his Kadima party has chosen a new leader. The main candidates are Tzipi Livni, the foreign minister, a pragmatic centrist, and Shaul Mofaz, transport minister but a hawk on national security issues, including Iran’s nuclear ambitions and the ongoing, though faltering, negotiations with the Palestinians.
Last night’s announcement came as a surprise but hardly a shock, given the accumulating weight of comment that he could not go on in the face of a slew of police and judicial inquiries.
“I will step aside properly in an honourable and responsible way, and afterwards I will prove my innocence,” Olmert told reporters from a podium outside his Jerusalem office. “I want to make it clear – I am proud to be a citizen of a country where the prime minister can be investigated like a regular citizen. It is the duty of the police to investigate, and the duty of the prosecution to instruct the police. The prime minister is not above the law.”
Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, deeply pessimistic about peace since talks were relaunched at Annapolis in the US last November, are likely to be indifferent to his departure, though Olmert forged personal ties with Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president and Fatah leader. Riad Malki, the Palestinian foreign minister, said: “It’s true that Olmert was enthusiastic about the peace process, and he spoke about this process with great attention but this process has not achieved any progress or breakthrough.”
A spokesman for Abbas said last night that the Palestinian president considered Olmert’s decision an “internal Israeli matter”, adding: “The Palestinian Authority deals with the prime minister of Israel, regardless if he is Olmert or somebody else.”
Senator: Obama Has Dozens Of Secret Superdelegates Lined Up – Politics on The Huffington Post
Posted on: May 4, 2008
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Capitol Hill insiders say the battle for congressional superdelegates is over, and one Senate supporter of Barack Obama is hinting strongly that he has prevailed over Hillary Rodham Clinton.
While more than 80 Democrats in the House and Senate have yet to state their preferences in the race for the Democratic nomination, sources said Tuesday that most of them have already made up their minds and have told the campaigns where they stand.
“The majority of superdelegates I’ve talked to are committed, but it is a matter of timing,” said Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.). “They’re just preferring to make their decision public after the primaries are over. … They would like someone else to act for them before they talk about it in the cold light of day.”
Obama currently holds an 18-13 lead among committed superdelegates in the Senate, while Clinton holds a 77-74 lead in the House. Asked which way the committed-but-unannounced superdelegates are leaning, McCaskill — who has endorsed Obama — said: “James Brown would say, ‘I Feel Good.'”
Just this morning, Iowa Rep. Bruce Braley announced he would be supporting Obama, while Bill George, president of the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO, came out for Clinton.
UPDATE: More superdelegates declare. Rep. Lois Capps (D-CA) has announced her support for Obama right here on HuffPost, and Indiana Rep. Baron Hill will endorse Obama tonight.
Meanwhile, Marc Ambinder reports:
Chelsea Clinton just bagged a superdelegate for her mother. The youngest Clinton is campaigning today in San Juan, Puerto Rico. A few moments ago, at the Universidad del Sagrado Corazon, Luisette Cabanas, an unpledged superdelegate, announced her support for Clinton, giving the campaign the majority of automatic** delegates on the island.
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When it comes to power, the Bush Administration has always firmly believed two things: first, the President should have more of it; and second, international institutions like the U.N. should have less of it. In that respect, the landmark ruling on U.S. treaty commitments handed down by the Supreme Court Tuesday seems to be both good news and bad news for Bush and his hard-line colleagues in the office of the Vice President. The court slammed the door on a provocative power grab by the White House, but it also potentially undercut a whole category of treaties, in the process exposing America’s weak system for complying with international law.
From the start, the case turned conventional wisdom on its head. The Administration had argued that Jose Medellin, a Mexican national convicted of rape and murder in Texas but denied access to Mexican consular officials after his arrest, should get a retrial as ordered by the International Court of Justice in the Hague. The idea of Bush and Cheney arguing to take a foreigner off death row because the U.N. court ordered it had baffled right-wingers and internationalists alike. John Bolton, Bush’s former U.N. ambassador, called the Administration’s position “ridiculous,” “crazy,” and a “cave-in” to the State Department. But the big brains at the White House were working with an ingenious plan, or so they thought.
Back in 1969, the U.S. had joined the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, part of which requires countries to give arrested foreigners access to consular officials, as in the movies when a pin-striped diplomat soothes a worried American in some Third World dungeon. The Administration renounced that part of the treaty after the ICJ ruled Medellin should get a retrial. (The U.S. still abides by the parts of the Treaty governing immunity for embassy officials and sovereignty of embassy buildings.) Yet Bush told Texas to retry Medellin anyway — since the ICJ ruling came before the U.S. backed away from the treaty. In essence it was a double power grab: Bush wanted the right to unilaterally leave a treaty — and still order state courts to comply with obligations while the treaty was in effect. The move was supported by, among others, David Addington, Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, a proponent of expanded presidential powers.
The Supreme Court had different ideas. In Tuesday’s 6-3 decision, the justices rejected outright Bush’s assertion that he could tell state courts what to do. But instead of issuing the final word themselves on whether Texas should retry Medellin, the justices said that was Congress’s job. Most treaties, the Court ruled, don’t automatically apply domestically unless the full Congress passes a separate law specifying how and when the treaty should be implemented.
Some liberals saw this double-tracking of treaty approval as an erosion of America’s respect for international law. Law professor Marty Lederman of Georgetown University, writing on the widely read Scotusblog after the decision was handed down, called the majority opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts “an implausible interpretation” that was “potentially very troubling for construction of treaty obligations going forward.” He worried that by letting states ignore treaties unless Congress ordered them to abide by them, the Supreme Court had opened the door for chaos in compliance with all international law.
Others worry about America’s standing abroad. Though the U.S. abides by most treaty obligations, its reputation has been seriously damaged after eight years of high profile snubs by the Bush Administration — starting with the abrogation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty, and peaking with Bush’s war on terror end-runs around the Geneva Conventions and the Convention Against Torture. In fact, Bush’s attempts to expand presidential power, and now the Medellin ruling, have exposed to Americans and foreigners alike the real problem: the weakness of the U.S. system for complying with international law.
America approves formal international treaties differently from almost all other countries, requiring the President and two-thirds of the Senate, but not the House, to sign off on them. Oona Hathaway, a professor at Yale Law School, surveyed countries around the world and found that only the U.S. and Tajikistan allow just one part of their legislature to approve a treaty and make it the law of the land. “Most countries make international law the same way they make domestic law,” Hathaway says. The discrepancy has led American conservatives to argue that international law is anti-democratic and an abdication of sovereignty — and raises questions about when and whether Congress really intends Americans to comply with treaties.
Partly for that reason, most of America’s international agreements no longer go through the cumbersome constitutional process anyway, Hathaway found. Between 5 and 20 formal treaties a year have been enacted by the Senate and the President for the last century. More often, international agreements are passed by votes in both chambers of Congress and signed by the President — like a regular law. Treaties approved that way have multiplied from 11 in 1930 to over 300 in 2006. The most famous example is NAFTA, which was passed by both chambers — including the Senate with less than two-thirds supporting it — and was signed by the President.
With the Medellin case, the Supreme Court may have accelerated that trend. By ruling that most traditional treaties only become the law of the land if the full Congress “implements” them, the justices made it more likely that political leaders will opt to pass them as if they were a domestic law. (The Court has previously upheld the full enforceability of treaties passed in that manner.)
That may produce concern abroad in the short term, as foreigners worry any U.S. state can now ignore existing traditional treaties that haven’t been “implemented” by Congress. But by regulariziing American treaty approval in the future, the Court may clarify and even strengthen the force of international law at home. In that sense, the Bush Administration may have lost twice in the Medellin case ruling.
- In: Baghdad | Five Years In | Iraqi Government | Politics | Saddam Hussein | Safety | Violence
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Iraqis trampled on a statue of Saddam Hussein, seconds after U.S. forces in Baghdad pulled it down. (Photo: James Hill/The New York Times)
At the outset, for me, the approach of American troops to Baghdad was an issue of intense personal concern, as much as professional. The Army and Marine units that arrived at the outskirts of Baghdad in the first days of April 2003 were viewed, then, by an overwhelming majority of Iraqis as liberators from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein. But they were my liberators, too.
Ten days earlier, Saddam’s thugs had come for me in the middle of the night in my room at the Palestine Hotel beside the Tigris River in the heart of the Iraqi capital, during a lull in the American bombing. I had been expecting them; in the last weeks before the invasion, the menacing character who acted as ringmaster for the foreign press in Baghdad in his capacity as the regime’s information director, Uday al-Tai’ee, had taken to mocking me as “the most dangerous man in Iraq” for stories I had writtenabout Saddam’s merciless terror on his own people, and I had understood the code.
“Brave fellow, aren’t you?” al-Tai’ee seemed to be saying. “But just wait. You can insult Saddam with impunity now, because you know we won’t kill a reporter for The New York Times as long as there’s a chance of avoiding this war. So you’re shooting from behind a blind, and that doesn’t take so much courage. But once the war starts, and we’re free to do what we please, that’ll be a different matter. Then we’ll see how tough you really are.”
The practitioners of Saddam’s miseries were brutal, but they were also cowardly and venal, and the plug-uglies who stormed into my hotel room were true to form. I told the lead thug, a man assigned to me by al-Tai’ee a few days before the war as my “minder,” and whom I knew to be from the Mukhabarat, Saddam’s secret police, that his name was known to my editors in New York (true) and that if anything happened to me, they’d pass his name to the Pentagon and he’d end up in front of an American firing squad (pure fiction). With frontline American units advancing rapidly on Baghdad, I thought it might catch his attention. “You’re threatening me,” he said.
“Yes, I am,” I said, “just as you’re threatening me.”
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