President Obama today called King Abdullah of Jordan and together agreed on the need to quickly launch Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. Obama said he’d dispatch special envoy George Mitchell would follow up in coming weeks to try to set the stage for jumpstarting the long abandoned talks.

“The president and the king agreed on the need to launch Israeli-Palestinian negotiations as soon as possible,” White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said Thursday.

“They also agreed that all parties _ Israel, the Palestinians and Arab states should take steps simultaneously to create a context in which these negotiations can succeed.”

Obama’s call to Abdullah and joint plea to resume peace talks comes just two days after Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak visited the White House and urged resuming peace talks that would cover the whole breadth of issues in the region, without waiting for interim steps such as the Arab and U.S. demand that Israel stop adding to its settlements in the occupied West Bank.

That came as Israel said this week it would stop new construction, though not existing construction.
Taken together, the actions suggested a simultaneous press for efforts to build confidence and trust _ including Arab concessions _ as well as final status peace talks.

“The president is hopeful that the meetings that he's had here this week and the phone call, the Mubarak meeting and the Abdullah phone call today, that we are continuing to make progress on the path toward Middle East peace,” Gibbs said.

“The optimism continues to rise. We're hopeful and understand that the road ahead will not be easy. It's a complex and emotional set of issues that we look forward to working through.”

While Gibbs refused to characterize Abdullah’s remarks on the phone conversation between the two leaders, he said that Obama lauded Jordan’s efforts to prod Arab states to reach out to Israel.

“The president underscored his strong support for Jordan's efforts to work with other Arab states to reach out to Israel and undertake gestures that would demonstrate the meaning of the Arab Peace Initiative,” Gibbs said.

As President Barack Obama meets with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs says the U.S. and Israel are making headway on negotiations to end the construction of new Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.

"Both sides believe we are making progress on the settlement issue," Gibbs said Tuesday morning.

Obama was meeting later at the White House with Mubarak, who said on Monday that it's time to move past the old demand that Israel halt settlement construction before further talks can take place.

"Instead of saying stopping more settlements, and we heard this many times now for over ten years and never come to a stop," he said. "What I can say is that we have to consider the whole issue holistically, to negotiate on the final resolution."

A couple of weeks ago, the United States, without explanation, released five Iranian diplomats that the U.S. military had been holding in Iraq for more than two years. The official statement offered nothing about why. What U.S. officials would say privately is that the U.S. military really didn't want to let the Iranians go.

That leaves you with the suggestion that there was good reason to hold the Iranians in the first place, but the new Status of Forces Agreement required that we turn them over to the Iraqis, who let them go. Now, from an unexpected source, comes word that in fact there wasn't any good reason for holding them in the first place.

Barbara Slavin of The Washington Times, the capital's conservative news organ, reported last week that the U.S. actually had no evidence that the Iranians had been involved in attacks on U.S. forces. The Iranians were essentially hostages, she wrote, held as potential "leverage."

Slavin, who used to cover the State Department for USA Today and wrote a book on Iran (Bitter Friends, Bosom Enemies: Iran, the U.S., and the Twisted Path to Confrontation), cited two unnamed sources in her report, one a current official and the other a former official. Slavin's report focused on the three Iranians who American officials had said were member the Quds Force. She quoted a current White House official as sticking up for the original version of why they were held but also acknowledging that he didn't know of any specific anti-U.S. actions the three had been involved in.

Actually, her story sounded a lot like what Iraqi officials were saying at the time. To quote then and now Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, the U.S. raids that led to the detentions were "very, very embarrassing."

But Slavin's account really ticked off Gen. David Petraeus, who was commander of U.S. forces in Iraq when the Iranians were arrested and happened to be in Washington the morning Slavin's piece appeared.

 Petraeus and Slavin were both at a conference on Iran sponsored by the U.S. Central Command, which Petraeus now heads, and the Brookings Institution. According to The Washington Post's Al Kamen, Petraeus was livid and gave Slavin a very public dressing down, even accusing her of "irresponsible journalism." Kamen described her as "unflappable."

Today, it was Slavin's turn. In a followup that the Times didn't exactly trumpet (Page A9 in print) Slavin quotes former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker as saying he knows of no evidence that links the three Iranian Quds Force officials to specific acts against U.S.forces. "I was not aware of any specific information linking (the three Iranians) to specific acts against coalition personnel," was the precise quote.

That is an amazing statement coming from Crocker. Petraeus and Crocker were the yin and yang of Bush administration Iraq policy, the Abbott and Costello, the Bogart and Bacall, or, for the younger set, Harold and Kumar, so tightly spooned that an assessment of embassy operations released today made a special point of noting that "the relationship between the embassy and the military is remarkably good. Ambassador Crocker and the military commanders insisted on 'one team, one mission,'and their subordinates followed suit." (Another part of that report was the finding that the huge U.S. embassy in Baghdad is way overstaffed.)

The two jogged together every Sunday, according to this story by McClatchy's Leila Fadel, and met at least five other times a week to mull over events in the country.

Such tight cooperation surely meant Crocker and Petraeus shared information on why the Iranians had been picked up — especially since Crocker actually met with the Iranian ambassador five months after the three had been seized.

But maybe there wasn't all that much to share. As Foreign Minister Zebari told Slavin for today's story: "Really, they were doing some consular work."

Vice President Joe Biden has landed in Baghdad on a surprise visit to Iraq.

The White House reports that Biden will meet with President Jalal Talabani, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and Ayad al-Samarrai, Sspeaker of the Council of Reprsentatives.

Biden will stress anew the U.S. commitment to carry out President Obama's pledge to draw down U.S. troops.

His two-day trip is his second visit to Iraq this year, his first since taking office as vice president.

 

The New York Times, whose reporting on detainee recidivism rates, merited an Editor's Note skinback (here's Planet Washington's summary) two weeks late, is once again being accused of carrying Bush administration water on detainee policy -- in a leaky bucket.

The latest offense, says Glenn Greenwald, writing at Salon, is the Times's assertion that, whatever the ongoing controversy, all the Justice Department lawyers agreed the harsh interrogation techniques were legal. Greenwald asserts that the Times again is guilty at least of sloppy reporting. He notes that if you read the e-mails on which the Times piece is built, it's clear that 1) not everyone agreed with the conclusions that were about to be set forth in one of the Stephen Bradbury memos approving of harsh interrogation and 2) that in any case, all the pressure to do so was coming from the White House.

I'll let you decide for yourself if you agree with Greenwald's conclusions. The debate, if nothing else, seems to provide one more reason for the Obama administration to get on board the calls in Congress for an independent investigation of what took place.

Meanwhile, Seton Hall has released a fairly thorough debunking of the detainee recidivism report that came out of the Pentagon and led to the Editor's Note above. You can read it here.

That's what the president told the press pool that accompanied him earlier today to the Pyramids of Giza, where he spent more than an hour and a half before leaving Egypt for Germany. Another nugget of wisdom from the president at the base of the first one: "This thing's huge." Per WSJ's Laura Meckler, the print pooler, Obama also teased repoters that they were the only reason he wasn't going to ride a camel, a popular tourist attraction there. "I don't want to give you guys the satisfaction," he said. He'd switched from his suit to khakis, a golf shirt and shades.

Obama's tour guide was famed pyramid expert Zahi Hawass. Four top Obama advisers tagged along. Chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and adviser Valerie Jarrett did take camel rides. So did Obama's body man, Reggie Love.

Here's more directly from the pool report:

"POTUS then climbed down a narrow set of stairs to an underground tomb, where the walls were covered with hieroglyphics. There was not enough room there for writers as well as photos so your pooler was not in the tomb when Obama was down there. But according to the TV pool producer, Obama looked at an etching on the wall of a face with large ears and said, “Hey that looks like me. Look at those ears!” A photograph of the image indicates that the president actually does, in fact, look a lot like him.

"The group proceeded next to a building that houses the Solar Boat, a 43-meter vessel whose original purpose is unknown. According to information supplied by Embassy staff, there is a scholarly debate as to whether this boat and five others found nearby were meant for the deceased king’s transportation in the afterlife or to represent the “solar boat,” used by the sun god, to travel across the sky. Either way, the boat is strikingly long and in excellent shape, having been reassembled by the Egyptians after pieces were found in 1954.

"The touring group then proceeded down a hill to see the looming Sphinx. No word on whether any riddles were posed."

Obama described the Pyramids stop as "awe-inspiring," but concluded, “I guess we’ve got to go back to work.”

He addressed U.S. embassy employees, then was off to Germany.

 

President Obama’s demands that Israel stop adding to settlements in the West Bank – repeated forcefully in his speech Cairo today - is drawing protests in Israel.

The Jerusalem Post reports that about 200 people demonstrated outside the U.S. Consulate in Jerusalem, chanting “No, you can’t,” in a barbed response to his campaign slogan, “Yes, we can.”

"We decided to launch a campaign against the president of the United States and to say that Barack Hussein Obama is bad for the Jews,” the Jewish National Front said in a statement to the paper.

“From the moment that he entered the White House, we have been feeling anti-Semitism and hatred toward Israel. We have a number of plans, among which are demonstrations in the US and protests in front of the consulate and homes of the ambassadors."

The protests featured a poster making it appear that Obama is shaking hands with a smiling Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in front of a mushroom cloud.

The streets of Cairo were eerily empty this morning – at least that was the case on the major roads the first of two press buses traveled en route to Cairo University about 8:30 a.m. local time, from Heliopolis, a modern swath of greater Cairo. Hundreds upon hundreds of armed Egyptian forces lined the streets, and dozens could be spotted atop tall buildings. This ride can normally take an hour, but this morning it was less than half that _ and that’s with no motorcade, because President Obama was not with us. Similarly, the pool report of President Obama’s drive from the airport, where he landed a little while ago, to his meeting with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, describes soldiers lining the sidewalks, some facing walls, while police directed traffic. On the press’ ride in, there were no endless horn-honkings, no abrupt stops, no people walking down the middle of the street, no taxis cramming four or five to a three-lane passage and other norms I've seen since arriving around midnight Tuesday. Just a light flow of cars ahead and behind and a glistening view as we passed over the Nile. Some roads are being closed, local reporters said. Also, many workplaces closed today anticipating the trouble associated with road closures for Obama’s visit. Arriving at Cairo University about 9 a.m., American journalists passed through two security checks, one run by the Egyptians and another by the U.S. The 3,600-seat auditorium (today’s capacity will be a little less than that) has been filling up steadily for hours now.

President Obama has arrived in Cairo and is meeting with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. Laura Meckler of the Wall Street Journal, the pool reporter for this portion of the trip, said Air Force One landed in Cairo at 9:04 a.m. local time (the press plane touched down earlier) and arrived at Qubba Palace about 9:27 a.m. Meanwhile, the auditorium at Cairo University is filling up as guests make their way through an elaborate security system, and the loudspeakers just began blaring Middle Eastern music. It's 3:20 a.m. on the East Coast for anyone keeping track. More to come.....

Guards mounted on horses greeted President Obama’s motorcade as he arrived at the ranch of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia earlier today. Pool reporter Christi Parsons described a long driveway, and a palatial meeting room where Obama and King Abdullah sat down in arm chairs under a portrait of King Abdul Aziz al Saud to chat. The king placed around Obama’s neck a large gold medallion, which he wore for a few photos and handed off for “safekeeping.” Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau and Reggie Love, the president’s body man, were on hand, as were several Saudi ministers in white robes and red-checked ghutra.

Obama and King Abdullah made a few brief remarks as they went into a smaller meeting at the ranch. Obama said that before he arrives for Thursday’s speech in Cairo, “I thought it was very important to come to the place where Islam began and to seek his majesty’s counsel.” The king expressed his “best wishes to the friendly American people who are represented by a distinguished man who deserves to be in this position."