Justin Raimondo asks the obvious question today regarding President Obama’s speech in Cairo – he talks the talk – but will he walk the walk? Given the embarrassing contradiction served up yesterday regarding plans to contradict SOFA while the President was claiming that it would be observed, it’s a fair question.
Israel responded to the speech by claiming that they would not halt settlement expansion in the West Bank because of a secret agreement struck with the Bush Administration allowing them to continue – a deal that former Bush Administration officials claim was never made. Given the parties involved, who knows who’s telling the truth. After all, it’s taken the Israelis three years to even announce to the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations that it would provide them with maps detailing where the IDF used cluster bomb ordinance in South Lebanon in 2006. The United Nations Mine Action Coordination Center of South Lebanon, the UN branch that is responsible for the defusing and removal of such ordinance, currently estimates that there are half a million to a million unexploded cluster bomblets in Southern Lebanon, and that since 2006 they have killed 30 civilians and injured a further 203.
