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For the first time since President Obama took office in 2009, Congress has overridden his veto.
The U.S. Senate voted 97-1 to override President Obama's veto of the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, which would allow victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks to sue Saudi Arabia. The lone dissenting vote was Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada), who has "always had the president's back":
In a letter Monday to House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mac Thornberry (R-Tex.) and ranking member Adam Smith (D-Wash.), Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter warned that allowing the bill to become law risked "damaging our close and effective cooperation with other countries" and "could ultimately have a chilling effect on our own counter-terrorism efforts." Thornberry and Smith both circulated letters among members in the last few days, urging them to vote against overriding the veto. CIA Director John O. Brennan also warned of the 9/11 bill's "grave implications for the national security of the United States" in a statement Wednesday.
The House of Representatives voted 348-to-77:
Congress on Wednesday voted overwhelmingly to override a veto by President Obama for the first time, passing into law a bill that would allow the families of those killed in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to sue Saudi Arabia for any role in the plot.
Democrats in large numbers joined with Republicans to deliver a remarkable rebuke to the president. The 97-to-1 vote in the Senate and the 348-to-77 vote in the House displayed the enduring power of the Sept. 11 families in Washington and the diminishing influence here of the Saudi government.
See also: The Risks of Suing the Saudis for 9/11 by the New York Times Editorial Board and this article in the Saudi Gazette.
Previously: President Obama to Veto Bill Allowing September 11 Victims to Sue Saudi Arabia
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Thursday September 29 2016, @01:48PM
It is remarkable because for the last 50 years Saudi Arabia has had almost as tight a secret lock on the US government as Israel does. The winds of change are blowing, and the Age of Oil must surely be on its way out. It will be interesting to see if the end of that age will also cost Israel its stranglehold, because their relevance too only ever stemmed from their proximity to oil-producing nations. If the entire Middle East falls off the American geopolitical radar because they're no longer relevant to the energy economy, then how relevant could a country of 8 million people that doesn't do anything useful continue to be?
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Snotnose on Thursday September 29 2016, @02:29PM
Doubtful. Israel just wants to be a peaceful democracy. Too bad it's surrounded by nutjobs who dedicate their lives to it's destruction. And yeah, I'm including the Palestinians in that group.
I understand Israel takes a hard line on Palestinians, but IMHO it's well deserved. When you have a bunch of nutjobs in your midst who want to shoot Israeli citizens for no reason when they aren't lobbing missiles towards cites, and you vote their leaders to be your leaders, well, fuck you.
Saudi Arabia on the other hand is a bunch of sadistic barbarians who happened to be sitting on something we needed for 50 years.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 29 2016, @02:56PM
no reason? the land is occupied and disputed. I don't know for sure but from what i've seen it seems palestine is actually the true "owner". Just because the controlled media wants to act like god gave it to his chosen people and some terrorists are killing his children doesn't meanm you have to believe it.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by jmorris on Thursday September 29 2016, @03:30PM
Disputed how? The entire Arab world declared war and lost, when you lose wars you tend to lose lands. By every law we recognize that regulates how Nation States behave, that land is now Israeli. Because the U.N. is an anti-Semetic Parliament of Tyrants with more than a few allies in the Democratic Party here in the U.S. we are required by P.C. to pretend there are two legitimate sides because they are still butthurt over the outcome of that war. They have every right to do like all of those Arab states did at time when they forcibly ejected every Jew they could lay hands on from their lands without compensation and simply toss the so called "Palestinians" out, thus ending this long festering low level war. Which is the solution I recommend since it is pretty obvious this thing won't end until one side is gone and genocide is so out of fashion these days. Since the Jews are currently pretty rich, they could even offer a fair price for the developments on the land.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by JNCF on Thursday September 29 2016, @04:03PM
Because the U.N. is an anti-Semetic Parliament of Tyrants with more than a few allies in the Democratic Party here in the U.S.
TIL: Palestinians aren't Semitic.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 29 2016, @04:05PM
You do realize that Jews are there in Israel because *EUROPEANS* threw them out? Something about a genocide, may be, could have been a reason, you think? You know, the actual jews are supposed to be brown people, not the fake jews of europe who think speakig yiddish gives them the right to land they have not seen in several thousand years.
In fact, jews don't think that - and that is the point. It was the Christian White Majority that told jews in clear terms - get lost and we will help you defeating the brownies, or else.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Thursday September 29 2016, @04:16PM
Your point would be? The Arab world was again on the losing side in WWII, so the victors were free to dispose of the losers territory in any way they saw fit. So to solve everyone's problem they gave the Jews a homeland, it being clear they would never be at home anywhere else. And whadda ya know, they are fleeing Europe yet again as the old hate begins to flow and the Arabs come pouring into Europe. So if not there, where exactly do you want them?
I'm a Nationalist, so why would I oppose the Jews being Nationalists in their own land? I do wish a few here in the U.S. (Soros, Bloomberg, half the staff at National Review, most of the Weekly Standard....) would go there. I don't care if the Arabs are Nationalists in their lands, they can do their thing, oppress all they want so long as they keep it in their borders. I'm all for that kind of Diversity.
(Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Thursday September 29 2016, @05:06PM
Hypocrite much? Did you just forget what I said in middle of the paragraph? What is this? Are you talking to a mirror? Arabs don't care what you "Nationalists" do in your land either. Hey hey - you can ponder the 'great question' all day long about what to do with jews, and sell the nazis all your tech while they get rid of the 'pests' too. The problem is that you think you own the world because you were on the winning side of WW2. "we won why are people not just bowing to my majestic appetite for their stuff"? Yeah and they plonked your twin towers why won't you accept that, why are you suing saudi arabia then, Mr. Judge and Jury? What are you doing in Iraq or Syria or Israel for that matter anyway?
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Thursday September 29 2016, @05:58PM
I'm assuming you were in a hurry or something? I'm the one who was agreeing with Obama.
But yea, at the end of WWII the Allies pretty much did own most of the world. That is what War is all about. Two sides enter, one side leaves and their view is then the only one that counts. After enough time passes the sides can shift as new disputes arise.
(Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Thursday September 29 2016, @07:38PM
You own up, you mess up, you lose. If you want to raise metaphysical points, you can have them and then come back to the original point. Which is this - either you debate on logic or you debate on power. There is no such thing between lit and unlit and the same way if you raise the point of power even once, you lose the argument on point of logic. That's the deal. Now you bring up the issue of Allied winning wars hence they get to chose where will their problems (jews) go and live. Great. But you can't then turn around and say Arabs are fighting Israel on a illogical basis.
No. The disputes remain same, and the kind of disputes USA has created you are going to pay for it for many hundreds of years. And so are millions of people.
And war is not a reality of life, it is a failure of foreign policy. And USA has the worst possible foreign policy because of the arrogance of power it has. Fucking Russia has better foreign policy than that and Russia is a dictatorship. Imagine that. The only country that is going to be worse than USA is China.
(Score: 2) by jasassin on Thursday September 29 2016, @10:30PM
Yeah. Maybe they just blow shit up for no reason.
jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0xE6462C68A9A3DB5A
(Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Friday September 30 2016, @08:29AM
Depends what you mean by Arabs and where they blow things up. Could we just agree than some issues are simply more complicated than easy one-liners of propaganda?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday September 29 2016, @05:36PM
So basically, all Arabs have to do to get their land back is kill and drive off the Israelis. Got it.
Maybe they should get better at doing that.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by jmorris on Thursday September 29 2016, @05:55PM
Exactly. We live in a world governed by force. Accept that. The only laws governing sovereign nation states are force and self interest. But the Arabs do not have the power to win another war with the Jews any more than they could win the several attempts made since the Allies refounded Israel. And if they try again they should be prepared to lose a lot more land and possibly have their capitals reduced to radioactive wastelands. The Jews went easy on em before because they couldn't afford to lose our support. If, just saying, a President Trump took the choker chain off em there probably isn't much in the Middle East could stop them. And when it was over there would be peace in the Middle East because the surviving Arabs would be, to borrow a line, satisfied with less.
Sooner or later somebody will figure out that intractable problems can only be solved when one side loses badly enough that they can't afford to care about the problem anymore. Sometimes you just have to give war a chance.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Thursday September 29 2016, @11:34PM
Heinlein was, as usual, correct in his assessment [goodreads.com] that "violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor.”
That said, just because it's true, that doesn't mean that violence is a positive or desirable thing.
As Salvor Hardin [wikipedia.org] pointed out, "violence is the last refuge of the incompetent." With all due respect to the memory of Mr. Asimov, I'll go the same way as Ambrose Bierce [bartleby.com] did with Samuel Johnson [samueljohnson.com] regarding patriotism, and submit that it is the first.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 29 2016, @03:19PM
If Israel didn't want to have kids throwing rocks, molotovs, and occasional mortars at them perhaps they should stop stealing Palestinian land and cluster bombing the hell out of the West Bank every four years...
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday September 29 2016, @07:12PM
Wouldn't work. The troubles go back to before the Israelis were powerful enough to steal Palestinian land. The original Israeli settlers bought the land, but that didn't keep violence from happening. The neighbors didn't want them there.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 29 2016, @05:03PM
Israel is rather stupid for being established in that area to begin with but then religious people do lots of stupid things for "holy reasons". One wishes they'd be like the Martians in Futurama when they discover how rich they really are "You keep Mars, we'll just go buy a new planet and call that our holy land."
(Score: 3, Troll) by Phoenix666 on Thursday September 29 2016, @07:49PM
They want the Palestinians to peacefully submit to being ethnically cleansed, that's what the Israelis want. But even now with pushback from the Whitehouse on Jewish settlements in the West Bank, Jerusalem still builds more there. Personally, I think the real mistake the Israelis made was to choose the US as their patron instead of the USSR. They could have accomplished complete eradication of the Palestinians in a handful of years without having to worry about namby-pamby American public opinion. As it is they've had to go to enormous trouble to subvert DC and said American public opinion over years, and go mega-slow-mo with the eradication campaign. Russians, on the other hand, don't give a crap about such niceties.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 3, Informative) by julian on Thursday September 29 2016, @11:00PM
In 1990 the population of Gaza and the West Bank was 2M. Today it's 4.3M.
It's a strange sort of genocide that sees the target population more than double in a generation.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Thursday September 29 2016, @11:53PM
I think the real mistake the Israelis made was to choose the US as their patron instead of the USSR. They could have accomplished complete eradication of the Palestinians in a handful of years without having to worry about namby-pamby American public opinion.
That would have been quite unlikely, given the history between the USSR and the Jews, and most of that was Stalin's doing [wikipedia.org]. As such, I suspect that BenGurion, Begin and the others were deeply suspicious of Stalin and would not have sought to ally themselves with the USSR.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 30 2016, @12:43AM
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Snotnose on Friday September 30 2016, @01:37AM
Flamebait, huh? Every-farking-state in what will become Israel lost in WW2, so Israel got some land. Get over it, that's what happens when you lose.
20 some odd years later every-farking-state within 1,000 miles decides Israel is evil and must be destroyed. They lost.
Continuously, since the '67 war, the arabs have not only maintained their goal is to wipe Israel off the map, but have done everything in their power to do so.
They've lost each time.
Now Israel has a bunch of proven violent asshats on the other side of a wall that are pissed at being on the other side of the wall. How pissed? Every chance they get they kill an Israeli citizen. Every chance they get they launch rockets into Israeli cities. Every chance they get they vote for the terrorists in charge of this BS to be the leaders of their disgruntled group.
IMHO, Israel needs to deport every fucking Palestinian to Syria, tear down the walls, let the wanna be peaceful Jews move into the contested areas, and be done with it.
tldr; went to high school in the 70s, learned about this shit, for 40 years the palestinians have been the bad guys and the jews the good guys.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Bot on Thursday September 29 2016, @02:54PM
I tend to agree.
Or, possibly, they want the next POTUS to start his term with a hot potato like a terrorism trial against Saudis. A bit far fetched but I am used to Italian politics where all blows are low like that.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Friday September 30 2016, @02:35AM
I tend to agree.
Or, possibly, they want the next POTUS to start his term with a hot potato like a terrorism trial against Saudis. A bit far fetched but I am used to Italian politics where all blows are low like that.
Note that the new law allows *American citizens* (those affected by the events of 9/11/2001) to sue the Saudi government (and certain government officials individually) in *civil court* for damages (loss of life, pain and suffering, medical expenses, the usual stuff).
The US government will not be holding criminal trials against the Saudi government or its officials.
The upshot is that you're talking out of your ass and it smells that way too.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 29 2016, @04:17PM
Because MUH SIX MILLION!!!
(Score: 1, Troll) by LoRdTAW on Thursday September 29 2016, @06:48PM
I wouldn't say they don't do anything useful. Intel's Haifa lab is the team that designed the core architecture which put Intel firmly back on top of the x86 heap. There are also numerous other companies there like Galil Motion and ACS motion.
Though, I agree, I don't support their continued occupation of land that hasn't been theirs for 1500 years. They used terrorist tactics to get their way and after Israel became a state, the terrorists were given medals. Ironic, isn't it? Everyone felt bad for them after the holocaust and now they can do no wrong. Just saying you don't support Israel is enough to get you labeled an antisemitic and/or Nazi. It's amazing how such a smart group of people can be so fucking stupid.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday September 29 2016, @07:29PM
They learned some bad lessons from the Nazis. One was lebensraum, which they have rebranded as "Eretz Israel [wikipedia.org]." Another was ethnic cleansing (the curious can google maps of Palestinian land in the West Bank over the last 30 years). Still another was propaganda, and how effective it is in getting smart people to do dumb things.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Thursday September 29 2016, @07:07PM
Israel does many useful things. They are the source of numerous technical advances. Unfortunately, they also have a severe social problem that they seem unwilling to address. In their defense, I don't see how they could address it. They are a very small country surrounded by hostile foreigners. This has more than once lead to "captivity" or "diaspora". And you can't really blame it on their being Jews, because the folk calling themselves Jews today have only moderate connection with the historical Hebrews. Many of them became Jews by an act of government. (S.a. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/01/130116195333.htm [sciencedaily.com] , but I believe the Khazar theory.), and their cultural connection is also indirect.
However, they are a small ethnically distinct group with a different culture than any of their neighbors, and the neighbors have been hostile to them since the days of the British protectorate. This tends to breed militarism and intolerance as a matter of survival.
FWIW, Israel is smaller than New Jersey, and less fertile. And it's surrounded by neighbors who, before they concentrated on Israel, spent much of their time fighting with each other. This is common in areas with lots of small independent nations, and what constitutes a small nation depends on speed of transportation and communication, so the governmental territories have been getting "smaller". With modern communications and transport I expect that North America is the proper size of a nation to reduce friction. (N.B.: Everywhere here where I used "nation", I originally used the term "government", but people misunderstand "large government" in a different way that they misunderstand "large nation"...I'm talking about a government controlling a large or small ares. The size of the bureaucracy is almost irrelevant to this point.)
I don't see a good answer. I expect that Israel will eventually collapse, with many refugees. And I trace the roots of this back to some stupid (or, possibly, evil) decisions made at the end of WWII.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 29 2016, @10:47PM
"You mean i could have killed whoever i wanted if i just screamed 'help i'm being oppressed!' the entire time?!?!?"
Well shit.