On September 23, one week from tomorrow, the Palestinian Authority will lead an effort to be recognized as an independent state at the United Nations. With serious peace talks stalled for years and with the Palestinians having little alternatives or leverage to force a return to negotiations, they decided that going to the UN was the best course of action. And while the US can veto the effort at the Security Council, a General Assembly petition for “observer status” is more likely to succeed.

This month, the Palestinian Authority plans to go to the United Nations and petition for statehood, against the wishes of the Israelis and the United States. It’s not entirely clear what form this statehood petition will take. The Palestinians could ask for full UN membership, which would go through the UN Security Council, or they could seek “Observer Status,” basically a first step toward eventual statehood, which would be subject to a vote at the General Assembly. The big difference here is that five Security Council states have veto power, and the US has already vowed to use it with respect to the Palestinian statehood push. So Mahmoud Abbas, who is leading the effort, may avoid the Security Council

In The Interrogator: An Education, retired CIA clandestine officer Glenn Carle tells how, in fall 2002, he was sent to the Middle East to interrogate a purportedly high level al Qaeda figure he calls CAPTUS. While Carle does not identify either the detainee or the countries in which he interrogated him, Scott Horton reports the detainee is an Afghan named Pacha Wazir who, before he was captured, ran a hawala al Qaeda used; the two locations are Morocco and Afghanistan’s Salt Pit. After some weeks of rapport-based interrogation, Carle became convinced CAPTUS wasn’t as involved in al Qaeda as CIA believed him to be.

You wouldn’t know it, but one of the most intense diplomatic efforts happening right now is the attempt by Western powers to try and get the Palestinians to abandon their effort to seek statehood from the UN General Assembly in September.

It’s a shocking historical juxtaposition. The pro-democracy movement known as the Arab Spring is in significant part a consequence of rising literacy and declining birth rates in the Mideast. Meanwhile, in the U.S., the Right is mounting a direct assault on education and a renewed war on contraception. This ought to tell us something.

President Obama told the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) today that his misinterpreted comment about a peace deal in the Middle East using the 1967 borders as a starting point, with mutually agreed swaps, was an utterly uncontroversial statement reflecting longstanding US policy.

It will be a shame if she doesn’t run for President, because no one tosses a word salad like The Quitter.

If you listen to non-Likudniks in the region, you would know that Obama’s speech was actually far more deferential to Israel, and inspired more disappointment than anything else in the Arab world. This has not been a feature of the debate in this country.

The core of Obama’s speech aims to highlight the value of ordinary citizens sparking movements for change. But this focus is deceitful on many levels.

Well, if Barack Obama thought he could wrap things up in a bow on the Middle East with his speech today, Bibi Netanyahu put an end to those hopes.