Author: Spencer Ackerman

Josh Rogin has an explosive story about retired Lt. Gen. David Barno, a former Afghanistan-war commander and darling of the counterinsurgency community, coming under Pentagon inspector-general investigation for mismanaging a wing of the National Defense University under his care. Check it out.

McClatchy’s Nancy Youssef has a big story: as a dividend for leaving Iraq, the Marines will spend twice as much time at home as deployed in a combat zone, reaching the desired two-to-one so-called “dwell to deployment” ratio that the Army won’t see until at least 2012. As the Marines are engaged in an arduous fight in southern Afghanistan, it’s surely a welcome change.

When the Pentagon’s leadership announced a process to end the military’s ban on open gay service before Congress, Defense Secretary Robert Gates played the cautionary role. Gates told senators that he would put together a study group, led by Army Lt. Gen. Carter Ham and Pentagon general counsel Jeh Johnson, to study the least-disruptive ways to end “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”

That study hasn’t concluded. Nor has the Senate taken up Joe Lieberman’s (I-Conn.) bill to repeal the ban. But Gates has some unilateral tools at his disposal, and this week he intends to use them.

“He will announce changes to the way the current law is being enforced that make it more difficult to begin investigations and kick people out,” said a defense source who would not speak for the record ahead of Gates’s announcement. Spokesman Geoff Morrell hinted in his briefing yesterday that Gates would make some changes, but did not specify any.

Gates has speculated for at least a year that he was considering unilateral steps, ahead of a congressional repeal, to ease the burden “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” places on gay servicemembers. Civil-rights groups have urged him to take such steps, particularly on the process for beginning investigations of servicemembers’ sexual orientation that can drive people out of the military. It’s not clear yet when this week Gates will make the announcement, nor is it clear yet just how enforcement will change. But those who worried that there would be no movement on “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” in 2010 while the study commences, despite President Obama’s call for repeal this year in his State of the Union, can probably take heart.

Air Force Col. Morris Davis was the chief prosecutor for the military commissions before his 2006 resignation in protest over what he considered to be the injustice of the system. And he has nothing but commendations for Adm. Bruce MacDonald, who’s reportedly about to become the new “convening authority” leading the commissions this year.

“If it’s true that the administration has selected retired Admiral Bruce MacDonald to replace Susan Crawford as the convening authority for the military commissions then they’ve made an excellent choice,” Davis said in an email. Davis continued:

Admiral MacDonald was The Judge Advocate General of the Navy during most of my two years as the chief prosecutor, and I met with him and the other TJAGs regularly. He was always personable, reasonable in his views, and a very bright lawyer. He was also supportive of me after I chose to resign and become a vocal critic of torture and the politicization of the military commissions, while many others treated me like a pariah. If the decision is to go forward with military commissions, it’s good to see that the person in charge of the process, the convening authority, will once again be a career military officer, particularly one as well-suited for the job as Admiral MacDonald. I haven’t had much good to say about the way the Obama administration has handled detainee issues, but I have to give them credit on this one.

Here I was thinking I had missed the readout of yesterday’s White House meeting between President Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when Politico reports that the meeting has emerged to “deafening silence“:

The Obama administration shifted this week from red hot anger at Benjamin Netanyahu to an icier suspicion toward the Israeli Prime Minister, who made clear in a marathon of meetings with U.S. officials that he would give ground only grudgingly on their goal of stopping the continued construction of new Israeli housing units on disputed territory.

Netanyahu met with President Barack Obama in the Oval Office Tuesday evening for an unexpectedly-long 89-minutes until about 7:00, then stayed to consult with his own staff in the Roosevelt Room, according to a source briefed on the meeting. The two then met again for 35 minutes at 8:20 at Netanyahu’s request, the source said. But the meetings were shrouded in unusual secrecy, in part because U.S. officials, who just ten days earlier called the surprise announcement of new housing in East Jerusalem an “insult” and an “affront,” made sure to reward Netanyahu with a series of small snubs: There were no photographs released from the meeting, and no briefing for the press.

Just before the meeting, a Jerusalem council announced another new settlement past the portion of the city that the international community accepts as Israeli territory.

Mike Isikoff scoops the world that retired Vice Adm. Bruce MacDonald is going to be appointed new chief “convening authority” of the revamped military commissions — basically the guy who decides if prospective detainees will receive the military-commissions version of indictments — a sign that the new commissions are about to resume. Where have we heard that name before?

Why, we heard it back in September, when the Senate Armed Services Committee held a big hearing into the scope of the new commissions, featuring the top Justice Department and Pentagon lawyers responsible for both the commissions and the balance between them and civilian trials. MacDonald testified alongside Defense’s Jeh Johnson and Justice’s David Kris, and he tended to resist their inclinations to make the commissions as much like civilian trials as possible. From a piece I filed after the meeting:

Both Kris and Johnson said that they believed the commissions ought to premise the admissibility of statements from terrorism suspects captured on the battlefield on whether the statements were voluntarily provided, in order to prevent the commissions from accepting coerced testimony — a standard the committee’s legislation does not employ, although it does reject evidence obtained through torture or duress. But Vice Adm. Bruce MacDonald, the Navy’s judge advocate general, told the panel that battlefield captures are “inherently coercive,” as soldiers do not read Miranda rights to their detainees, and so predicating admissibility on voluntariness creates too restrictive a standard. “This is an area where I do disagree with the administration and I think the [Senate Armed Services] committee got it right,” MacDonald said.

Kris and Johnson both argued that the courts are more likely to invalidate the commissions — which would be the third time since their creation, if you’re keeping score — the more the commissions deviate from the process rights allotted in civilian courts.

We’ll see if being involved with the commissions changes MacDonald’s perspectives. Those involved tend to either quit in disgust or emerge disillusioned.

Remember Michael D. Furlong, the Pentagon official under investigation for allegedly using a government information program to launder money for an off-the-books spying operation? His case has led Defense Secretary Robert Gates to open a wide-ranging review of all Pentagon information-operations programs. Here’s Geoff Morrell, the chief Pentagon spokesman, in his press briefing yesterday:

[T]he secretary has directed a small team of senior military and Defense officials to conduct a quick-look assessment of DOD information operations programs, operations and procedures. The results of this assessment are designed to provide the secretary with a factual baseline from which to determine whether or not systemic problems exist, and if so proper scope and focus of subsequent corrective action.

This survey phase he has mandated be complete within 15 days. So they have embarked on their work and are due to report back to him — I guess that would be early the second week of April.

Information operations bedeviled Gates’ predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, whose efforts to create an “Office of Strategic Influence” crashed and burned — leading him to hire a contract firm to plant stories in Iraqi newspapers. The U.S. continues to spend nearly half a trillion dollars annually on Defense Department information-operations programs, though Morrell said the current budget request for next year is a relatively low $384 million.

Morrell added that the new review’s focus is going to cover both the programs themselves and “whether or not there is proper oversight, guidelines and that sort of thing.”

If the Israelis’ announcement of new settlement construction in Jerusalem during Vice President Biden’s Israel trip was “insulting,” what’s this?

The Jerusalem municipality has given final approval to a group of settlers construct 20 apartments in a controversial hotel in East Jerusalem, Haaretz learned on Tuesday.

The announcement comes as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was in Washington smoothing over ties with the United States over the latest settlement-related tensions, and hours before the premier was to meet with President Barack Obama in Washington.

Apparently Netanyahu’s fiery speech last night was only a prologue of how disinterested the Israeli PM is in mending fences with the Obama administration. Marc Lynch of George Washington University tweets that Obama should cancel his meeting with Netanyahu at the White House, scheduled to begin in just a couple of minutes.

The Wall Street Journal reports ahead of tomorrow’s U.S.-Pakistani foreign ministerial talks:

Pakistan sent a 56-page document to the U.S. ahead of strategic talks scheduled for Wednesday, seeking expanded military and economic aid in what some American officials believe is an implicit offer to crack down in return on the Afghan Taliban.

The previously undisclosed document includes requests ranging from U.S. help to alleviate Pakistan’s chronic water and power shortages to pleas for surveillance aircraft and support in developing the country’s civilian nuclear program.

As it happens, Richard Holbrooke, the administration’s special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, signaled his support for such an aid package in December, so as to convince the Pakistanis that the U.S. desires more than just a transactional counterterrorism relationship with Pakistan.

The chief of staff of the Pakistani Army, Gen. Ashfaq Pervez Kayani, arrived in Washington already and I understand met with Defense Secretary Robert Gates yesterday.

Tzipi Livni (left) and Benjamin Netanyahu (right)(photos: World Economic Forum via Flickr)

Maybe this will clarify my earlier point about Tzipi Livni. She’s a right-of-center Israeli politician who speaks about peace as the fulfillment of a Zionist dream and the maintenance of a democratic state — with its demographically correlative obligation to divest Israel of Palestine — as central to the Zionist project. She does so without prompting, at least in English. She goes to AIPAC and she builds a constituency for a peace deal.

Netanyahu goes to AIPAC and gives a fiery speech about how the burden is all on the Palestinians and how he’ll never compromise on Jerusalem and how he’ll keep Israeli troops on the eastern border of any Palestinian state. Then he calls on the Palestinians to negotiate with him! If there was a Palestinian AIPAC, you could see a Palestinian Netanyahu telling it, “See? They want to leave us a rump state with no control over our destiny! It’s their fault! I say to them, why don’t you really negotiate without preconditions! We have been patiently building our state, thanks to the bravery and leadership of Salam Fayyad, giving the Israelis quiet from the West Bank for years, and what do they give us? I call on them them them them them to take the hard steps first!”

And you can see how counterproductive it is to lay out objections to final status negotiations and then call on the other fellow to make the first move. Not once did Netanyahu speak about the preservation of Israeli democracy. It’s not necessarily that he doesn’t want peace. It’s that he really wants peace on his terms, which is what others call “victory.” And that will encourage the Palestinians to seek the same thing — which in their case will eventually be a binational state. Doing nothing will inexorably mean the Palestinians get their way.

Tags: Benjamin Netanyahu, preconditions, Tzipi Livni

A terse account from the White House press shop:

Last evening, the Vice President and General Jones had a working dinner with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and Israeli Defense Minister Barak at the Vice President’s residence at the Naval Observatory, together with their delegations. They had a productive, candid discussion on the full range of issues in the bilateral relationship, in preparation for the meeting later today between the President and the Prime Minister.

I suppose the timeline is such that after dinner, Netanyahu went to AIPAC and gave his rather defiant speech.

So reports Jeff Stein on his brand-new Washington Post intelligence blog:

The Justice Department and Warren’s Florida-based attorney, Mark David Hunter, confirmed independently that the erstwhile covert operator is heading for a Washington trial, scheduled now for sometime in June. Hunter otherwise declined to comment.

As soon as Jeff gets his RSS fixed, you should add his blog to your subscriptions.

The Washington Post reports that Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) has submitted draft legislation to restrict the substantive and procedural rights of terrorism suspects to the White House as part of a deal for closing the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay. Graham’s antipathy to civilian trials for at least some of those suspects may have dubious merit, but it hasn’t stopped the White House from working with him, nor has stated GOP opposition for any Guantanamo-closure deal proven to be an obstacle to a deal taking shape. While the terms of the draft legislation are unclear, I reported on March 9 that Graham wanted some system for indefinite detention.

Notice that this is all far beyond simply trading Khalid Shaikh Mohammed being tried in a military commission for closing Guantanamo. Once Graham saw the White House was interested in dealing, he raised the stakes. The Post:

The talks are now much broader, participants said. It appears unlikely that Graham would settle for the narrower deal, and officials said the White House and the senator would prefer to reach what some have termed a “grand bargain.”

What’s to stop Graham from raising them again if he sees initial indications among Senate Democrats for such a bargain?

An aide to Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), the majority whip and a member of Judiciary Committee, told me on Friday that the discussions were just beginning and were “weeks away from the end of the process.” The aide gave no indication of how Senate Democrats would view Graham’s proposal, only that they would give it its due study.

If Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s message to the AIPAC conference was one of reconciliation with Israel while nudging it toward the peace process, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s was one of praise for the U.S.-Israel relationship while embracing the peace process in only the vaguest terms.

After a slow warm-up, Netanyahu threw some elbows at the Obama administration over the Jerusalem settlements dust-up. “Jerusalem is not a settlement, it’s our capitol,” Netanyahu said, to thunderous applause, causing him to chuckle. “All these neighborhoods are within five minutes of the Knesset. They are an inextricable part of modern Jerusalem. Everyone knows these neighborhoods will be part … of a final peace settlement.”

What about the Palestinians? “We don’t want to rule them. … We want them as neighbors. … Israel is unjustly accused of not wanting peace with the Palestinians. Nothing could be further from the truth. My government has consistently shown its commitment to peace.” He reiterated his call for precondition-less negotiations: “President Abbas, come and negotiate peace.” Yet Mahmoud Abbas and other moderate Palestinians have frequently cited Israel’s settlement construction as a bad-faith action hindering the process.

“Peace requires reciprocity. It cannot be a one-way street in which Israel makes all the concessions and the Palestinians make none,” Netanyahu said. “Israel stands ready to make the compromises for peace, but we expect the Palestinians to compromise as well, to do their part. But there’s one thing I will never compromise on, and that one thing is Israel’s security.” Accordingly, Netanyahu vowed to retain “an Israeli presence on the eastern border of a future Palestinian state,” a condition Palestinian leaders have never accepted.

Netanyahu hopes Israel’s technological advancement can benefit the rest of the world, including by helping it coming up with a substitute for gasoline. “I am confident than in pursuing these goals, we have the support of the United States of America, the greatest nation on earth,” Netanyahu said, commending Obama for his continuing military support to Israel. “I am certain that Israel and America will always stand together.”

If you were hoping for any sort of detail about what exactly Netanyahu offered Clinton as a signal of his commitment to peace, you didn’t get that from this speech.

More on the Arab-American Institute’s forthcoming poll about U.S. attitudes toward Israel. I still haven’t seen the full poll, but I’ve gotten one detail of it. According to its findings, not only has the partisan gap between Democratic and Republican views on Israel widened, but the Democratic drop-off in support has been severe over the past year. From the poll, which won’t be fully released until Thursday:

2009 attitudes towards Israel among…
Dems: Favorable: 55% Unfavorable: 32 %
GOP: Favorable: 91% Unfavorable: 6%

2010 attitudes towards Israel among…
Dems: Favorable: 42% Unfavorable: 49%
GOP: Favorable: 92% Unfavorable: 7%

So there’s practically no change among Republicans, but a 13-point drop in favorability and a 17-point rise in unfavorability among Democrats. I think I’ll refrain from offering analysis until I see the full poll results, but the first explanation that jumps into my mind is that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s rough interactions with President Obama would stand a good chance of rubbing some Democrats the wrong way.

On a related note, J Street released its annual poll of American Jewish attitudes, and according to a press release, this is part of what it found:

American Jews by a four-to-one margin, 82-18 percent, support the United States playing an active role in helping the parties to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict, with 73 percent of American Jews supporting this active role even if it means that the United States were to publicly state its disagreements with both the Israelis and the Arabs.

And by a 71-29 percent margin, American Jews support the United States “exerting pressure” on both the Israelis and the Arabs to make the necessary compromises to achieve peace. An earlier J Street poll last March found a similar level of support.

The full poll is here.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

A suspected al Qaeda organizer once called “the highest value detainee” at Guantánamo Bay was ordered released by a federal judge in an order issued Monday.

Mohamedou Ould Slahi was accused in the 9/11 Commission report of helping recruit Mohammed Atta and other members of the al Qaeda cell in Hamburg, Germany, that took part in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

That doesn’t mean Slahi’s release from Guantanamo Bay is imminent, or even definite, said Nancy Hollander, the Albuquerque-based attorney who argued Slahi’s habeas case. “There’s figuring out where he can go, and if the government is going to move for a stay or an appeal,” Hollander said, adding that Slahi “doesn’t even know yet” that he won his case. Nor has Hollander read it: The ruling, by Judge James Robertson, is classified. Hollander or an associate will have to travel to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia just to have a hope of reading it.

For a sampling of what Slahi experienced at Guantanamo, check out page 139 of the Senate Armed Services Committee’s 2008 report into the abuse of detainees in the custody of the Department of Defense:

The memoranda indicate that, on several occasions from July 8 through July 17, Slahi was interrogated by a masked interrogator called “Mr. X.” On July 8, 2003 Slahi was interrogated by Mr. X and was “exposed to various lighting patterns and rock music, to the tune of Drowning Pool’s ‘Let The Bodies Hit [the] Floor.’” On July 10, 2003 Slahi was placed in an interrogation room handcuffed and standing while the air conditioning was turned off until the room became “quite warm.” The next day, Slahi was brought into the interrogation booth and again remained standing and handcuffed while the air conditioning was again turned off. After allowing Slahi to sit, the interrogator later “took [Slahi’s] chair and left him standing for several hours.” According to the memo, Slahi was “visibly uncomfortable and showed signs of fatigue. This was 4th day of long duration interrogations.”

On July 17, 2003, the masked interrogator told Slahi about a dream he had where he saw “four detainees that were chained together at the feet. They dug a hole that was six feet long, six feet deep, and four feet wide. Then he observed the detainees throw a plain, unpainted, pine casket with the number 760 [Slahi’s internment serial number (ISN)] painted on it in orange on the ground.”

On August 2, 2003 an interrogator told Slahi “to use his imagination and think up the worst possible thing that could happen to him” and asked him “what scares him more than anything else.”

Yet Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld did not approve a “special interrogation plan” for Slahi until August 12, 2003 — five days after Slahi apparently broke by the interrogation. Even after that, Slahi was “interrogated” to the point where he told a Guantanamo psychologist he was “hearing voices” in his head, and a military prosecutor assigned to his case said he was “very concerned about the allegations of detainee abuse at GTMO and Afghanistan.” That prosecutor, Lt. Col. Stuart Couch, would refuse to participate in Slahi’s prosecution after learning about what was done to Slahi during “interrogation.”

Asked to describe her reaction when she heard that she won Slahi’s habeas case, Hollander responded, “Joy.”

You wouldn’t know from the U-N-I-T-Y themes of this year’s AIPAC conference, but a big partisan gap is opening on how Americans view the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. That’s according to a soon-to-be-released poll by the Arab-American Institute.

In a capsule summary ahead of the full release of the poll on Thursday, AAI’s James Zogby finds:

42% of Democrats had a favorable rating of Israel compared to 92% of Republicans resulting in a 50% gap between the parties.

While the gap is higher in this poll, the finding is consistent with a recent Gallup poll that had 53% of Democrats with a favorable view compared to 80 % of Republicans.

That partisan gap does not translate into sympathy with the Palestinians, according to AAI. But Zogby’s summary says that a “plurality or slight majority” agree that an “inability to prevent Israel’s settlement expansion makes the U.S. less respected in the world.” In other words, it’s a poll soon to be denounced by Abraham Foxman.

“I didn’t come here to speak with you as the head of the opposition in Israel,” said Tzipi Livni, leader of Kadima, to the AIPAC annual conference. “It’s not the time and the place” to draw distinctions between herself and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, she added to applause. And then she very gently drew some.

While Livni said she was “so frustrated and angry for the fact that Israel is being seen through the distorted lenses of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” she echoed a call made by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton this morning about the need “to reach and agreement that ends the conflict and keeps the Israeli interest.” Livni articulated the “Zionist vision of a secure, Jewish democratic state in the Land of Israel and the promise that is part of the declaration of independence.” She called that struggle second only to the “fight for the existence of the state of Israel.”

We’ll see if Netanyahu echoes those priorities. Livni said a lot that Israelis across the political spectrum can embrace issues such as the need to preserve Israel’s international standing and to stop Iran’s nuclear program. But Livni drew some subtle distinctions as well. She got applause for saying the world shouldn’t view the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as the crucial problem of the Middle East, because ”Iran is the problem as well.” Expect Netanyahu to chop off that “as well” when he speaks tonight.

(On Iran, Livni drew furious laughter by saying the world ought to tell the Iranian government, “Stay in your room until you learn to behave.”)

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton addresses AIPAC on Monday. (EPA/ZUMApress.com)

Setting nearly two weeks’ worth of diplomatic acrimony behind her, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton delivered a passionate address to the U.S.’s largest pro-Israel lobbying organization, declaring the the U.S.’ bond to Israel to be “rock solid,” and gently challenging the Israeli government to commit wholeheartedly to a two-state solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Image by: Matt Mahurin

In a rhetorical flourish to play down the tension over Israel’s announcement of Jerusalem settlement expansions during a visit by Vice President Biden, Clinton said the settlement move “exposes daylight between Israel and the United States that others in the region could hope to exploit.” That line implicitly rebuked Israel’s more conservative American defenders over the fracas, who have said that Obama’s reaction — that the Israelis “insulted” the U.S. — was the problem, not the settlement expansion itself. Clinton, speaking to the America Israel Public Affairs Committee’s annual policy conference at the Washington Convention Center, effectively shifted the burden of the division onto Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who will address the conference early on Monday evening.

That set the tone for the message Clinton sought to deliver on the need to reinvigorate Mideast peace talks, starting with the new indirect talks the U.S. is brokering: she said the peace process exists within the context of a strong U.S.-Israel bond, and never suggested that the U.S. views Israeli cooperation on a two-state solution as a diplomatic dealbreaker. By contrast, Clinton made a case that intransigence on a two-state solution was against the Israeli interest. “The inexorable mathematics of demography are hastening the hour at which Israelis may have to choose between preserving their democracy and staying true to the dream of a Jewish homeland,” Clinton said, a statement for which she received no applause from the assembled pro-Israel activists.

The secretary received a more fervent reception by forcefully denouncing Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the fulfillment of which AIPAC executive director Howard Kohl called an “overarching imperative” that “no other issue can be allowed to detract, distract or derail.” She called on Hamas, the terrorist organization that controls the Gaza Strip, to “renounce violence, recognize Israel, and abide by previous signed agreements” and gave no indication that it would be invited to peace talks. And she tied President Obama — about whom AIPAC maintains a somewhat skeptical view, despite 78 percent of American Jews voting for him in 2008 — to Jewish history, saying he and his family “have lived the Diaspora experience.”
With a deftness to what her audience wished to hear, Clinton said that “reaching a two-state solution will not end all these threats” to Israel’s security, an article of faith among the pro-Israel community, but immediately added that “failure to do so gives our extremist foes a pretext to spread violence, instability, and hatred.”

At the same, Clinton did not use the speech to outline additional commitments the U.S. expects Israel to fulfill, saying instead that both Israel and the Palestinians ought not to issue “unilateral statements and actions that undermine the process.” Nor did Clinton unveil any U.S. peace plan, as some advocates of a two-state solution had hoped she would, let alone chastise Israel for additional settlement activity that the Israeli peace organization Peace Now has identified as being in the planning stages. The closest she came was to urge Netanyahu to “continue” building “trust and momentum toward comprehensive peace by demonstrating respect for the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinians, stopping settlement activity, and addressing the humanitarian crisis in Gaza,” all of which fall short of new concrete responsibilities for Israel.

Hadar Susskind, the policy and strategy director for J Street, AIPAC’s younger and more progressive counterpart organization, said Clinton “obviously knows and understands intimately the room she’s in,” but praised the substance of the secretary’s message. “She did a good job of saying we’re all coming at this from the same goals,” Susskind said. “She said, look, we don’t think this [Jerusalem settlement expansion] is in the best interest of Israel, and we’re going to continue to do what we can to bring the parties to the table for direct talks.”

Clinton did not disclose any details of any diplomatic assurances Netanyahu conveyed to her before the weekend, a move that cleared Mideast envoy George Mitchell to return to the region over the weekend and for Netanyahu to receive a White House reception Tuesday. Before Netanyahu addresses AIPAC, his chief political rival, Kadima Party leader Tzipi Livni, will deliver a speech to AIPAC delegates at 2 p.m.

In case you thought Friday’s bizarre statement rebuking Gen. David Petraeus was a fluke, Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League continued his attack on the commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East and South Asia in a Sunday blog post.

Recall that all Petraeus said was that the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict set the “strategic context” for the U.S. and its allies in the Mideast and allowed extremists to exploit the decades-old tension in ways deleterious to U.S. and allied interests. But to Foxman, that’s “proven to have no validity.”

After recapping a selective presentation of Petraeus’s remarks, Foxman writes at the Jerusalem Post:

What inevitably happens if such unrealistic weight in the region is given to the Israeli-Arab conflict is that Israel comes to be seen as the problem. If only Israel would stop settlements, if only Israel would talk with Hamas, if only Israel would make concessions on refugees, if only it would share Jerusalem, everything in the region would be fine. Iraq would be fine. Afghanistan would be fine. Pakistan would be fine. Iran would be fine.  Lebanon would be fine.

You can search long and hard, but Petraeus never for a second implied he believed such a thing. If Foxman’s strawmanning is hardly news to observers of his career, it’s exceptional that he would continue to attack the most respected U.S. military figure in the country — who has indicated he has no desire to reply to Foxman, by the way. What’s more, I’m at the AIPAC conference today, and it’s notable how none of Foxman’s erstwhile allies have demonstrated any willingness to fall down the rabbit hole of attacking Petraeus.