The Department of Veterans Affairs has received a subpoena that was issued by a House panel on Wednesday.
According to the Associate Press, the House panel is insisting on explanations for a cost overrun of $1 billion and they want documents to back it up.
The Denver VA hospital in question spent millions of dollars on artwork and furnishings and spent almost three times what their earlier estimates were.
But the Denver VA is not the only VA under the spotlight. Nationwide the VA has spent a staggering amount of money on sprucing up their offices, “including more than $6.4 million spent on the Palo Alto, California, health care system.”
“We will not accept VA trying to pull the wool over the eyes of this committee and the American people for poor decision-making and waste of funds,” stated the chairman of the veteran’s panel, Rep. Jeff Miller, R-Fla.
Miller went on to say that it was “unfortunate that VA’s continued lack of transparency has led us to this decision” to issue the subpoena, but contended that lawmakers had little choice.”
It seems unimaginable that over 40 veterans died on waiting lists waiting to be seen by a doctor, according to a VA inspector general investigation, while monies that could have been spent saving their lives was used to buy artwork and statues.
This is the fourth subpoena issued by the House panel since 2014 “amid continuing frustration over the VA’s performance following the wait-time scandal that led to the ouster of the VA secretary and a $16 billion overhaul approved by Congress,” according to the AP.
The Denver VA hospital has been dodging the committee’s request for documents by providing only “a summary of an internal inquiry, but not the supporting documents, despite repeated requests from lawmakers.”
Miller has been after the documents related to the art contracts for well over a year. He said he is trying to get to the bottom of why the Palo Alto VA spent almost $500, 000 on two sculptures and a total of more than $6.4 million on furnishings and artwork on that facility alone.
The subpoena, however, is seeking nationwide information on purchases since 2010.
In A move that has raged the GOP, President Obama has made secret side deals with Iran.
According to theAssociated Press, a side deal was made between Iran and the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency allowing Iran to use its own inspectors to inspect a location accused of building nuclear arms. It is usually the U.N. who inspects such sites, so why not this site?
“International inspections should be done by international inspectors,” stated Ed Royce, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman. “Period.”
It was a document seen by AP that brought this issue to light and that has the Republican lawmakers angered. Already very critical of Obama’s Iran Deal because it is basically built recklessly on trust alone with the Iranians, the GOP finds this new development imprudent.
It was the Obama Administration who insisted it would depend on reliable scrutiny over the Iranian sites in question. Not only the GOP but many of us want to know why, then, are the Iranians inspecting their own sites?
House Speaker John Boehner stated, “President Obama boasts his deal includes ‘unprecedented verification.’ He claims it’s not built on trust. But the administration’s briefings on these side deals have been totally insufficient—and it still isn’t clear whether anyone at the White House has seen the final documents.”
“Worse,” according toESHRAF, “Obama didn’t even reveal the existence of these secret side deals to Congress when he transmitted the nuclear accord to Capitol Hill. The agreements were uncovered, completely by chance, by two members of Congress — Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.) and Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) — who were in Vienna meeting with the U.N.-releated agency.”
It was President Obama who signed into law The Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act. This law unequivocally states that all materials and ‘annexes’ associated with the Iran Deal must be transmitted by the president to Congress. Well, it seems that the president has broken the law, one in which he wrote.
All of this aside, House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi is not sure what the disclosure has to do with the Iran Deal because, according to her, the disclosure relates to pastmilitary efforts and not any nuclear efforts moving ahead.
Pelosi stated, “I truly believe in this agreement.” If there were a vote today “the president’s veto would be sustained. But I feel very confident about it…We will sustain the veto.”
Before voting on the Iran deal Congress should be adamant about seeing the side deals. How many of us would buy a piece of land site unseen and just take the sellers word for it that the land was fertile, especially when that seller has a bit of a track-record for embellishments?
It will take a two-thirds vote in both houses to override the president’s veto, 45 House Democrats and 13 Senate Democrats.
Pompeo stated, “My mission in the next 45 days is to convince 45 House Democrats to override the veto. It’s a long climb, but this is important.”
Iran is getting ready to come into $150 billion dollars in sanctions relief. These relief moneys are based on negotiated agreements between Iran and IAEA that not one U.S. representative has viewed.
Is this wise, Mr. President? You may very well be putting our national security at great risk. “We need to see these documents in order to evaluate whether or not verification is ample to make such a big concession to the Iranians,” Pompeo said.
“No member of Congress should be asked to vote on an agreement of this historic importance absent knowing what the terms of the verification process are.”
Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey, the senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is the second of perhaps a growing list of Democrats to openly appose President Obama’s Iran Nuclear Deal which would grant Iran liberation from economic sanctions in exchange for Iran tightening its belt on their nuclear agenda.
Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York was the first Democrat to openly oppose Obama on the deal.
Like many Americans, Menendez is troubled by Iran’s past record of violating a variety of different U.N. Security Council resolutions while at the same time moving forward with their nuclear agenda.
Menendez “says that he is concerned that the agreement doesn’t require Iran to dismantle its nuclear infrastructure,” reports theAssociated Press. “He says it’s not an issue of whether he supports or opposes President Barack Obama, who has pledged to veto a congressional resolution of disapproval.”
In a speech on Tuesday, Menendez stated, “Let’s remind ourselves of the stated purpose of our negotiations with Iran: Simply put, it was to dismantle all—or significant parts—of Iran’s illicit nuclear infrastructure to ensure that it would not have nuclear weapons capability at any time. Not shrink its infrastructure.”
Menendez went on to say, “We must send a message to Iran that neither their regional behavior nor nuclear ambitions are permissible. If we push back regionally, they will be less likely to test the limits of our tolerance towards any violation of a nuclear agreement.”
Unlike California’sNancy Pelosi, who is certain of the ability to pull in all the votes needed to pass this deal, Menendez and Schumer are openly striving to convince others that this Iran deal is not the way to go.
President Obama uses a message of hope to convince Americans of the Iran deal and Menendez isn’t having any of that message.
“Whether or not the supporters of the agreement admit it, this deal is based on ‘hope’—hope that when the nuclear sunset clause expires, Iran will have succumbed to the benefits of commerce and global integration,” stated Menendez. Hope is part of human nature, but unfortunately it is not a national security strategy.”
DOUGLAS, Ariz. (AP) — An Iraqi pilot who has been training in the United States for four years was flying an F-16 Fighting Falcon aircraft that crashed in southern Arizona, a spokesman for the Iraqi defense minister said Thursday.
“We have no word yet on his fate or the reason behind the crash,” Brig. Gen. Tahseen Ibrahim told The Associated Press. “We are in contact with the Americans to get more details.”
The Arizona Air National Guard did not release information about the pilot, who was the only person aboard when the plane went down during a Wednesday night training mission with the Guard’s 162nd Wing.
Rescuers were sent to the crash site 5 miles east of Douglas Municipal Airport, according to a Guard statement. Douglas is about 120 miles southeast of Tucson.
The plane ruptured a gas line and sparked a fire that covered about 400 yards, Cochise County sheriff’s spokeswoman Carol Capas told the Arizona Daily Star (http://bit.ly/1GJtFCv ). Once the flames are extinguished, officials will assess the damage.
The Guard’s 162nd Wing conducts international F-16 pilot training from Tucson International Airport as well as reconnaissance missions from Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, according to its website.
Base officials did not immediately have more information.
___
Associated Press writer Sinan Salaheddin contributed to this report from Baghdad.
The victims “professed the Christian faith while the aggressors were Muslim.” It will be interesting to see how the mainstream media and Western government officials explain to us that this had nothing to do with Islam.
“Police: Muslims threw Christians overboard during Med voyage,”Associated Press, April 16, 2015:
ROME (AP) — Italy’s migration crisis took on a deadly new twist Thursday as police in Sicily reported that Muslim migrants had thrown 12 Christians overboard during a recent crossing from Libya, and an aid group said another 41 were feared drowned in a separate incident.
Palermo police said they had detained 15 people suspected in the high seas assault, which they learned of while interviewing tearful survivors from Nigeria and Ghana who had arrived in Palermo Wednesday morning after being rescued at sea by the ship Ellensborg.
The 15 were accused of multiple homicide aggravated by religious hatred, police said in a statement.
The survivors said they had boarded a rubber boat April 14 on the Libyan coast with 105 passengers aboard, part of the wave of migrants taking advantage of calm seas and warm weather to make the risky crossing from Libya, where most smuggling operations originate.
During the crossing, the migrants from Nigeria and Ghana — believed to be Christians — were threatened with being abandoned at sea by some 15 other passengers from the Ivory Coast, Senegal, Mali and Guinea-Bissau.
Eventually the threat was carried out and 12 were pushed overboard. The statement said the motive was that the victims “professed the Christian faith while the aggressors were Muslim.”
The surviving Christians, the statement said, only managed to stay on board by forming a “human chain” to resist the assault.
Oh, the Islamophobia!
Disclaimer: This article was not written by Lorra B.
FAYETTEVILLE, N.C. — A year after Americans recoiled at new revelations that sick veterans were getting sicker while languishing on waiting lists — and months after the Department of Veterans Affairs instituted major reforms costing billions of dollars — government data show that the number of patients facing long waits at VA facilities has not dropped at all.
No one expected that the VA mess could be fixed overnight. But the Associated Press has found that since the summer, the number of vets waiting more than 30 or 60 days for non-emergency care has largely stayed flat. The number of medical appointments that take longer than 90 days to complete has nearly doubled.
Nearly 894,000 appointments completed at VA medical facilities from Aug. 1 to Feb. 28 failed to meet the health system’s timeliness goal, which calls for patients to be seen within 30 days.
That means roughly one in 36 patient visits to a caregiver involved a delay of at least a month. Nearly 232,000 of those appointments involved a delay of longer than 60 days — a figure that doesn’t include cancellations, patient no-shows, or instances where veterans gave up and sought care elsewhere.
A closer look reveals deep geographic disparities.
Many delay-prone facilities are clustered within a few hours’ drive of each other in a handful of Southern states, often in areas with a strong military presence, a partly rural population and patient growth that has outpaced the VA’s sluggish planning process.
Of the 75 clinics and hospitals with the highest percentage of patients waiting more than 30 days for care, 12 are in Tennessee or Kentucky, 11 are in eastern North Carolina and the Hampton Roads area of Virginia, 11 more are in Georgia and southern Alabama, and six are in north Florida.
Seven more were clustered in the region between Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Colorado Springs, Colorado.
Those 47 clinics and hospitals represent just a fraction of the more than 1,000 VA facilities nationwide, but they were responsible for more than one in five of the appointments that took longer than 60 days to complete, even though they accounted for less than 6 percent of patient visits.
That has meant big headaches for veterans like Rosie Noel, a retired Marine gunnery sergeant who was awarded the Purple Heart in Iraq after rocket shrapnel slashed open her cheek and broke her jaw.
Noel, 47, said it took 10 months for the VA to successfully schedule her for a follow-up exam and biopsy after an abnormal cervical cancer screening test in June 2013.
First, she said, her physician failed to mention she needed the exam at all. Then, her first scheduled appointment in February 2014 was postponed due to another medical provider’s “family emergency.” She said her make-up appointment at the VA hospital in Fayetteville, one of the most backed-up facilities in the country, was abruptly canceled when she was nearly two hours into the drive from her home in Sneads Ferry on the coast.
Noel said she was so enraged, she warned the caller that she had post-traumatic stress disorder, she wasn’t going to turn around — and they better have security meet her in the lobby.
“I served my country. I’m combat wounded. And to be treated like I’m nothing is unconscionable,” she said.
The AP examined wait times at 940 individual VA facilities from Sept. 1 through Feb 28 to gauge any changes since a scandal over delays and attempts to cover them up led to the resignation of VA Secretary Eric Shinseki in May and prompted lawmakers to pass the Veterans Access, Choice and Accountability Act in August. The analysis included all VA hospitals and outpatient clinics for which consistent wait time data was available. It excluded residential treatment centers, homeless dormitories and disability evaluation centers. Data for individual facilities were not available for August.
It is difficult to quantify exactly how things have changed because the VA introduced a new method for measuring wait times at the end of the summer. VA officials say the new methodology is more accurate, but its adoption also meant that about half of all patient appointments previously considered delayed are now being classified as meeting VA timeliness standards. That means published wait times now can’t be directly compared with data the VA released last spring.
The trend, however, is clear: Under the VA’s old method for calculating delays, the percentage of appointments that took longer than 30 days to complete had been steadily ticking up, from 4.2 percent in May to nearly 5 percent in September. Under the new method — the one that counts half as many appointments as delayed — the percentage went from 2.4 percent in August to 2.9 percent in February.
The number of appointments delayed by more than 90 days abruptly jumped to nearly 13,000 in January and more than 10,000 in February, compared to an average of around 5,900 the previous five months. That’s not a change that can simply be blamed on bad winter weather; many of the places reporting the largest gains are warm year-round.
VA officials say they are aware of the trouble spots in the system. They cite numerous efforts to ramp up capacity by building new health centers and hiring more staff. And they say that in at least one statistical category, the VA has improved: The number of appointments handled by VA facilities between May and February was up about 4.5 percent compared to the same period a year earlier.
But they also readily acknowledge that in some parts of the country, the VA is perpetually a step behind rising demand.
“I think what we are seeing is that as we improve access, more veterans are coming,” Deputy Secretary of Veterans Affairs Sloan Gibson told the AP.
He also acknowledged that the VA has historically been “not very adroit as a bureaucracy” in responding to those changes. It takes too long to plan and build new clinics when they are needed, he said, and the VA isn’t flexible in its ability to reallocate resources to places that need them most.
“We are doing a whole series of things — the right things, I believe — to deal with the immediate issue,” Gibson said. “But we need an intermediate term plan that moves us ahead a quantum leap, so that we don’t continue over the next three or four years just trying to stay up. We’ve got to get ahead of demand.”
He also asked for patience. President Obama signed legislation in August giving the VA an additional $16.3 billion to hire doctors, open more clinics and build the new Choice program that allows vets facing long delays or long drives to get care from a private-sector doctor.
It will take time to get some of those initiatives expanded to the point where they “move the needle,” Gibson said.
Between Nov. 5 and March 17, according to VA officials, only about 46,000 patients had made appointments for private-sector care through Choice — a drop in the bucket for a system that averages about 4.7 million appointments per month.
Disparities abound
In many parts of the country, the VA can boast of being able to deliver care that is just as fast, or even faster, than patients would get in the private sector. Relatively few VA facilities in the Northeast, Midwest and Pacific Coast states reported having significant numbers of patients waiting extended periods for care.
Of the 940 hospitals and outpatient centers included in the AP analysis, 376 met the VA’s timeliness standard better than 99 percent of the time. A little less than half of all VA hospitals and clinics reported averaging fewer than two appointments per month that involved a wait of more than 60 days.
The difference between the haves and have-nots can be stark.
The Minneapolis VA, one of the system’s busiest medical centers, completed 276,094 medical appointments between Sept. 1 and Feb. 28. Only 424 of them involved a wait of more than 60 days.
At the VA’s outpatient clinic in Jacksonville, Florida, a facility handling a third of the volume, 7,117 appointments involved a wait of more than 60 days.
That means there were more vets experiencing extended delays at that one clinic than in the states of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut combined.
Equally surprising: The Jacksonville clinic is practically brand new. It opened in 2013 with the express intent of improving access to care in a fast-growing city with a lot of military retirees and a close relationship with three Navy bases: Naval Air Station Jacksonville, Naval Station Mayport and the Kings Bay Naval Base.
But like other VA facilities built recently in spots now struggling with long waits, the clinic took so long to plan and build — 12 years — that it was too small the day it opened, despite late design changes that added significantly more space.
“Even our best demographic models didn’t anticipate the rate at which the growth would occur,” said Nick Ross, the assistant director for outpatient clinics at the VA’s North Florida/South Georgia Veterans Health System.
In recent months, the clinic has been enrolling another 25 new patients per day — a growth rate that would require the VA to hire another doctor, nurse and medical support assistant every 10 weeks to keep up with demand, said Thomas Wisnieski, the health system’s director.
Officials are hoping to lease 20,000 square feet of additional clinic space while they begin the planning process for yet another new building.
Clinic construction is also underway in an attempt to ease chronic delays in care in the Florida panhandle. A new outpatient VA clinic is scheduled to open in Tallahassee in 2016, and a groundbreaking ceremony was held in August for a new clinic in Panama City.
A slow pace of change
The Fayetteville VA hopes to celebrate its 75th anniversary this fall with the opening of a huge new outpatient health care center that could ease the types of chronic delays that caused Rosie Noel so much anxiety. (After her canceled exam, the VA paid for Noel to get care at a private-sector clinic; she doesn’t have cervical cancer.)
With 250,000 square feet of usable space, the center will be almost as large as the main hospital building. The new campus will have 1,800 parking spots, a women’s clinic and scores of new treatment rooms. It is sorely needed for a region that is home to two of America’s largest military bases, the Army’s Fort Bragg and the Marines’ Camp Lejeune, and one of the highest concentrations of vets in the country. In two core counties, one in five adults is a veteran.
Yet the new building is also emblematic of the slow pace of change at the VA.
Read more at Rare
Disclaimer: This article was not written by Lorra B.
WASHINGTON — Congress can get so busy that senators and their staffs don’t always have time to scrutinize bills they pass and letters they sign — or so it seemed this week, anyway.
Two episodes left Democrats blushing, some Republicans muttering under their breath, and taxpayers perhaps wondering what those well-educated people do on Capitol Hill.
First, Republicans ridiculed Democrats for claiming they somehow missed a key provision in a bill filed two months ago. The bill, unanimously approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee, would combat human sex trafficking.
Democrats suddenly blocked it this week because it would bar the use of fines, paid by convicted traffickers, to pay for abortions in most cases.
Congress has attached similar language to spending bills for years. But Senate Democrats say this provision goes further, and they didn’t realize it was in the trafficking bill.
Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid said some think it got there by “sleight of hand.” He blamed Republicans for not flagging it.
“Democratic senators who had been working in good faith on this critical legislation for years assumed that their Republican partners were being forthright when they provided a list of changes” that didn’t include the abortion language, Reid said. “Republicans are now saying that trusting them was a mistake.”
Republicans could hardly suppress their laughter.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said it was astonishing to see Democrats balk at a provision “they claim somehow they missed, after it being in there for two months.”
Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas suggested Democrats knew about the abortion language long ago, but decided only this week to oppose it.
To buy the Democrats’ argument, Cornyn said, “you’d have to suppose that all of the professional staff for all the Senate Judiciary Committee didn’t read the bill” and “didn’t advise their senators” of its contents.
“I don’t believe that Senate Democrats didn’t read the legislation,” Cornyn said. The abortion provision, he said, “was as plain as the nose on your face.”
Democrats preferred to change the subject Thursday. Sen. Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota discussed the trafficking bill with reporters, but when asked if she knew about the abortion language, she said, “I’ve got to get going.”
Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, a member of the Judiciary Committee, said top Democratic staffers read the bill, but the abortion language was “obscure,” and “we missed it.”
“I asked my staff, the ones I was about to fire, and they said, ‘No, it didn’t say that explicitly,’” Durbin said.
While Republicans snickered at the Democrats’ trafficking jam, Democrats howled at the 47 GOP senators who warned Iran’s leaders in a letter that any nuclear agreement made with President Barack Obama might be short-lived.
Editorial writers, think tanks and some conservative pundits have denounced the letter, calling it a dangerous undermining of any president’s ability to set foreign policy.
Prominent GOP Sen. John McCain of Arizona initially laughed off the criticism, calling it “a tempest in a teapot.” But he and others were more somber Thursday, suggesting they may have acted a tad hastily.
McCain, the party’s 2008 presidential nominee, said many of the 47 senators signed the letter in a hurried gathering this month, as a major snowstorm approached Washington.
“They were in a hurry to get out,” McCain told reporters. But Obama “said that he would veto any legislation that went through Congress that required ratification, and that’s what triggered the letter, and I totally agree with it,” he said.
Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, who faces re-election next year, said Friday: “If there was any regret, tactically, it probably would have been better just to have it be an open letter addressed to no one.”
Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas defended the letter, but said he also might do things a little differently if given the chance.
“It could have been addressed to other folks and gotten the message out,” Roberts said. “But I think the message is more important than who we send it to.”
Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky introduced a bill to allow more time to scrutinize amendments and bills. “It is imperative we pay close attention to the legislation we pass,” he said.
Now that’s a goal the 114th Congress can aspire to.
___
Associated Press writers Alan Fram, Erica Werner and Laurie Kellman contributed to this report.
Huma you recall allegedly has a “Special Relationship,” with Hillary which could have made her a great target for State Department secrets.
Associated Press
By STEVE PEOPLES Mar. 11, 2015
Hillary Rodham Clinton
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Associated Press filed a lawsuit Wednesday against the State Department to force the release of email correspondence and government documents from Hillary Rodham Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state.
The legal action comes after repeated requests filed under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act have gone unfulfilled. They include one request AP made five years ago and others pending since the summer of 2013.
The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, comes a day after Clinton broke her silence about her use of a private email account while secretary of state. The FOIA requests and lawsuit seek materials related to her public and private calendars, correspondence involving longtime aides likely to play key roles in her expected campaign for president, and Clinton-related emails about the Osama bin Laden raid and National Security Agency surveillance practices.
“After careful deliberation and exhausting our other options, The Associated Press is taking the necessary legal steps to gain access to these important documents, which will shed light on actions by the State Department and former Secretary Clinton, a presumptive 2016 presidential candidate, during some of the most significant issues of our time,” said Karen Kaiser, AP’s general counsel.
In what has been described as an “unprecedented” decision, the Nobel Committee has chosen to replace its chair, Thorbjoern Jagland, after a six-year tenure—and his role in giving President Obama the Nobel Peace Prize back in 2009 is a big reason why.
Jagland will remain a member of the voting panel but was a contentious leader, attracting criticism for his dual role as committee chairman and head of the European Council when the prize was awarded to the European Union in 2012. His leadership also was clouded by the decision to give the prize to Barack Obama in 2009 after he had just been elected president, and the 2010 prize to the jailed dissident Liu Xiabo drew fury from China. (Emphasis added.)
As the Zero Hedge blog notes, this move seems inevitably connected to the Committee’s regret over giving the Peace Prize to Obama, who “has since the aware become a neo-con warhawk, who has put some of the most bloodthirsty [R]epublicans to shame, and whose actions (and lack thereof) have led to not only global conflict intensity spiking to a 7-year high, but have generated untold riches to the shareholders of the military industrial complex.”
Read more Rare:
WASHINGTON (AP) — In a speech that stirred political controversy in two countries, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Congress on Tuesday that negotiations underway between Iran and the United States would “all but guarantee” that Tehran gets nuclear weapons to the detriment of the entire world.
“And lots of them,” he added in an appearance before a packed House chamber that drew loud applause from Republicans and a more restrained reaction from Democrats.
“Iran has proven time and again that it cannot be trusted,” no matter what it says about permitting verification of the terms of any accord designed to prevent it from getting such weapons, he said. “The greatest danger facing our world is the marriage of militant Islam with nuclear weapons.”
Netanyahu spoke in English shortly after Secretary of State John Kerry met for more than two hours in Switzerland with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif in hopes of completing an international framework agreement later this month to curb Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.
The Israeli leader’s appeal also came two weeks before tight elections in which he is seeking a new term — and after the invitation to address Congress extended by House Speaker John Boehner, a Republican, triggered a political furor in the United States. More than four dozen House and Senate Democrats said in advance they would not attend the event, a highly unusual move given historically close ties between the two allies.
Many of Netanyahu’s comments were greeted by loud applause from U.S. lawmakers, but not everyone was persuaded by his rhetoric.
House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi of California conspicuously refrained from applauding on several occasions. And when the Israeli leader called for holding out for a better deal with Iran, she held her hands wide and shook her head in disagreement.
The White House expressed its displeasure with Netanyahu’s appearance by word and deed, dispatching Vice President Joe Biden on an overseas trip that meant he did not fill his customary seat behind the House rostrum during the speech. Nor did the Israeli leader meet at the White House with Obama on his trip to the United States.
The prime minister was greeted with a roaring welcome as he walked down the same center aisle of the House chamber that presidents tread before their annual State of the Union speeches.
He also sought to smooth over any political unpleasantness, thanking Obama lavishly for the help he has given Israel since he became president. In a grace note, he took a moment to mention Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid, who is back at work after suffering an eye injury in an accident at home.
At the same time, Netanyahu was unrelenting in his condemnation of the negotiations the administration is conducting with Tehran.
He said that with the concessions the United States was prepared to make Iran would not only gain nuclear weapons, but also eventually would become free of international economic sanctions. As a result, he said, it would be emboldened to finance even more terrorism around the Middle East and the world.
The result for Iran, he said, would be “aggression abroad and prosperity at home.”
Instead, he said that if Iran wants to be “treated like a normal country, it ought to behave like a normal country.”
“We’ve been told that no deal is better than a bad deal. Well this is a bad deal, a very bad deal,” he said.
He said the deal being discussed offered two major concessions to Iran. One would leave intact the country’s vast nuclear infrastructure, and the other would lift restrictions on that program in about a decade, the “blink of an eye in the life of a nation,” he said.
He also said that the world needs to insist that no restrictions are lifted on Iran’s nuclear program until the country stops aggressive actions against its neighbors in the Mideast, stops supporting terrorism around the world and stops threatening to annihilate Israel.
Netanyahu singled out Holocaust Survivor Elie Wiesel, a world-renowned author.
“I wish I could promise you, Elie, that the lessons of history have been learned,” he said in a reference to the Nazis, who killed 6 million Jews.
A few moments later, he added, applause swelling, “The days when the Jewish people remained passive in the face of genocidal enemies are over.”
“Even if Israel has to stand alone, Israel will stand,” he vowed, although he quickly added that it does not, and “American stands with Israel.”
The Obama administration has complained that congressional Republicans injected destructive partisanship into the U.S.-Israel alliance by inviting Netanyahu to speak. But the White House played down the controversy in the hours before the address.
Senior adviser Valerie Jarrett called it “a bit of a distraction” but told MSNBC the dispute wouldn’t undermine Obama’s commitment to Israel.
“We share a common goal of ensuring that Iran does not develop nuclear weapons,” Jarrett said, and disagree with Netanyahu only over “the tactics of how to get there.”
The U.S. and Iranian sides met for two hours on Tuesday morning in the Swiss resort of Montreux, according to U.S. officials.
“We’re working away, productively,” Kerry told reporters.
Copyright 2015 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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from Libya, and an aid group said another 41 were feared drowned in a separate incident.
The Silent Soldier 