They made a call to Spain yesterday:
A day after a Spanish court ordered an investigation into an assassination of a Palestinian militant in 2002, the Spanish government has said it will cancel the investigation, and change the law to prevent such investigations being undertaken in the future.
The moves came after Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni telephoned the Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Moratinos on Friday. Livni said after the call Moratinos told her he 'would fix it.'
The Spanish judge on Thursday ruled the assassination of Salah Shehadeh by an F-16 air strike on a home on July 22 2002, which resulted in fifteen people killed, including nine children, and more than 100 wounded, should be investigated as a war crime. He placed seven current and former Israeli government and military officials, including two current ministers, under investigation. They are Infrastructure Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, who was defense minister at the time, Public Security Minister Avi Dichter, who was then heading the Shin Bet agency, Likud Knesset candidate Moshe Ya'alon, who was chief of General Staff, Dan Halutz, the then commander of the Israel Air Force, Doron Almog, who was OC Southern Command, then-National Security Council chief Giora Eiland, and the defense minister's military secretary, Mike Herzog.
Moratinos, according to Israel Radio, has since told Livni his government will amend the authority of the Spanish courts to prevent such investigations from being launched in the future and limit the courts' jurisdiction.
Livni told Moratinos, "This is very important news for the Israeli public. Unfortunately, the legal systems in the free world are used by parties with interests who have no connection whatsoever to the rule of law or the values of the free world."
"It's a good thing that the Spanish government has decided to stop this phenomenon. Israel will continue to work with other governments in the world in a bid to stop similar groundless prosecutions."
Continue.
And don't you wish you could have listened in on the call from Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to then-President G. W. Bush a couple weeks ago?
On Monday Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, told a group of local government officials in Ashkelon in a speech that he had demanded U.S. President George W. Bush interrupt a speech he was giving, and telephone Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and instruct her to abstain on the UN Security Council resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, a resolution Rice had largely put together in conjunction with other foreign ministers.
"In the night between Thursday and Friday, when the secretary of state wanted to lead the vote on a ceasefire at the Security Council, we did not want her to vote in favor,” Olmert said in his speech which was in Hebrew but was translated and reported by several news organizations, including The Associated Press.
"I said, ‘Get me President Bush on the phone.’ They said he was in the middle of giving a speech in Philadelphia. I said I didn’t care. ‘I need to talk to him now.’ He got off the podium and spoke to me."
Bush, said Olmert, was unfamiliar with the resolution.
"He said: ‘Listen. I don’t know about it. I didn’t see it. I’m not familiar with the phrasing," said Olmert.
"I told him the United States could not vote in favor. It cannot vote in favor of such a resolution. He immediately called the secretary of state and told her not to vote in favor."
"She was left shamed. A resolution that she prepared and arranged, and in the end she did not vote in favor. He (Bush) gave an order to the secretary of state, and she did not vote in favor of it — a resolution she cooked up, phrased, organized and maneuvered for. She was left pretty shamed," said the Israeli prime minister, whose office on Tuesday confirmed reports of the conversation were accurate.
A White House spokesman said the comments as they were reported did have “some inaccuracies,” but did not deny the reports. The State Department said the notion that Olmert altered the vote was “100%” untrue.
State Department spokesman Sean McCormack however confirmed Rice spoke to President Bush in the lead-up to the vote, and received a call from him after he had spoken to Prime Minister Olmert.
Full story at Big News Network.
No comments:
Post a Comment