leader mustafa abdel-jalil. he is representing libya at the 65th u.n. general assembly. he has been meeting with president obama the last hour as well as ban ki moon. in a few minutes, president obama will sit down with afghan president happened karzai. this is their first meeting since the u.s. spelled out a plan to leave afghanistan by the end of 2014. today, for the first time, gays and lesbians can openly serve in the united states military. the law known as don t ask, don t tell has been around for 18 years. it officially ended at midnight. since 1993, more than 14,000 servicemen and women were kicked out of the military after they were outed as gay. some want back in but it is not automatic. i have talked to people who wanted to go in and they started to make phone calls to recruiters and found out their set of circumstances wouldn t allow it. and there s let down. pentagon says 97% of the military has had training on the new rules which replace don t ask don t tell
d.c., huge and beautiful and i think video out of the nation s capital as well. and all kinds of pictures. i cannot believe how many people are taking pictures of the moon of the hard to tell how big it is. the and there s a lot of skyscrapers in manhattan and i lost my view. i tried to mind the moon. and imagine how jealous the other stars in the galaxy are of our moon. and pluto, jupiter. ali: thank you for the update of your homelands. steve: straight ahead on this sunday telecast the so-called no-fly zone over libya is in place and what does it really mean, no-fly zone? where will our military go from here? updates from ralph peters coming up. ali: and sarah palin, the conflict in the middle east, she s sending back a message for the president. we make meeting times, lunch times and conference times.
regime? well, what we re seeing for instance just a little while ago, i was watching state tv and it certainly has a shrill tone to it, a tone almost of panic, as if they realize that their days may be numbered. they re very threatening and very scathing when speaking of the united states, for instance, and its policy in the middle east. as far as the military go, i had a chance to speak with some soldiers who were captured by the anti-gadhafi forces in the eastern part of the country and what s obvious is that morale within the libyan army collapsing rapidly and we had this one officer who made an appeal through cnn to his fellow officers who are still loyal to moammar gadhafi to join the
the chinese are not going to stop buying the oil. it s a world market. they put the product out. it s hard to imagine that we could boycott them to have the asset, they have the cash for right now. but looking at what s going on internal to libya, there seems to be civil war in tripoli. other regions of the country seem to be under the control of the revolutionaries. how does where does the military go and who s allegiance do they remain who do they remain loyal to? i think this is different from egypt. this is not a professional military. it is a tribal military with strange loyalties or divided loyalties. so the crucial question will be, you know, what is the critical mass, then, who controls it? and i think, ultimately, what s going to happen is somebody in the military, somebody powerful in the military is going to decide, is it worthwhile to side with gadhafi, or throw him overboard. because i do wonder with all this violence we re seeing, at the end of the day, the regime
set of examples. in turkey they do seek power and algeria they have clung to power. it was because the european union forced them to. they didn t voluntarily go back. they have begun a transition to democracy not because of the generals but despite the generals. the european union created a whole range of constraints on the ability of the military go in and intervene. that s why some of the discussion about a turkish model for egypt seems misplaced. the military in egypt is going to have to deal with as richard said, an opposition that is splitting, an opposition that has different demands. if you look at the military s five statements thus far, they haven t tracked too far from when president mubarak said in his three statements to the country. i want to talk about when we come back, what all of this means for the rest of the arab world. and we ll get to that in a moment with our great panel looking at egypt s future.