“You’re talking about others who may have said various things about this, let me tell you what I think about it. It’s clear there was inadequate security out there and it’s very clear that it was inconvenient within six weeks of the election, for the administration to in effect announce, that it was a terrorist attack,” McConnell said. “I think that’s worth examining, it is going to be examined.”

But asked repeatedly if Republicans should tone down their attacks against the administration, McConnell demurred, saying only that Obama should allow for an investigation. He also couldn’t identify specific evidence of an administration cover-up:

DAVID GREGORY (HOST): But you have specific evidence that they made up a tale, or was it based on information they had at the time?

MCCONNELL: Well, the talking points clearly were not accurate. I think getting to the bottom of this is an important investigation.

Watch it:

E-mails between the White House, CIA, State Department, Justice Department, and the FBI show that Rice’s remarks reflect the early view of the intelligence community and were produced with few changes from the White House. On Thursday, CBS’ Major Garrett reported that Republican sources misquoted or significantly embellished the emails officials used to draft Rice’s remarks in order to implicate the administration in a conspiracy to mislead the public about Benghazi.

Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) and Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) have both argued that Obama could be impeached for his handling of the attacks in Benghazi.

On February 6, a number of detainees at the Guantanamo Bay prison started a hunger strike after guards there allegedly searched their Qurans, an act the detainees viewed as mistreating Islam’s holy book and saw as violating a long-standing agreement with authorities at Gitmo. But now the hunger strike is 100 days old with no end in sight. Dozens more prisoners have joined the protest (102 of the 166 detainees by the military’s count, but detainee lawyers say the number is closer to 130) and the military says 30 hunger strikers are being force-fed, mostly against their will.

While the hunger strike has had the benefit of sparking wider media attention to the detainees’ predicament and renewing interest in closing the Guantanamo Bay prison, particularly from President Obama, the situation in and of itself is looking more like a lose-lose proposition for all sides involved: a public relations disaster for the U.S. military and the Obama administration and, for the detainees, many of whom have been cleared for release, malnutrition, the possibility of being force-fed — which experts and rights groups say violates international law and could be viewed as torture — or perhaps even death.

Ultimately, the problems at Guantanamo Bay won’t end until the prison is closed. But lawyers for hunger striking detainees have said that, at the very least, there are seemingly non-complicated ways to end this hunger strike. Listed below are some ways, they said, to achieve that result. And indeed, one possible prescription for beginning to end the hunger strike could also serve as one step in the process of closing the Gitmo prison all together:

1. Begin A Dialogue With The Detainees And Detainee Lawyers.

Gitmo authorities appear to have taken a more forceful approach to trying to end the hunger strike. A Joint Task Force Guantanamo Bay Standard Operation Procedure for medical management of detainees on hunger strike obtained by Al-Jazeera says “in the event of a mass strike, isolating hunger striking patients from each other is vital to prevent them from achieving solidarity.”

“The military is under a command now that is determined not to compromise — determined not to blink first, so to speak, and it’s not going to do anything about the men’s demands, not even talk to them until the men break their hunger strike,” David Remes, a lawyer representing some detainees on hunger strike, said last week on CBC’s As It Happens.

U.S. Army Captain Jason Wright, a Pentagon lawyer representing Gitmo detainees, including alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed, said that approach is making the situation worse and that those in command so far refuse to work for a negotiated settlement. “They can engage in a constructive dialogue with the detainees and the lawyers for the detainees about how to end the hunger strike,” he said in an interview with ThinkProgress. “That hasn’t happened.”

Remes said dialogue has proved successful to mitigate previous hunger strikes. Before the new command took over last summer, he says, “whenever there was an issue of importance to the men, the detention operations people would sit down with them and work out some kind of solution that satisfied everybody.” But now, he added, the new command is “determined to show who’s boss … by doing things that provoke the men.”

Wright added, “We have reached out to the administration and to the camp administration and they are not interested in speaking with us.”

2. Deal With The Quran Issue.

Detainee lawyers said that Gitmo command could reduce those on hunger strike by either ending the practice of searching detainee Qurans or, alternatively, allowing the detainees to give them up. Detainee lawyer Carlos Warner explained in an interview with ThinkProgress:

WARNER: [Detainees could] voluntary surrender them. The first time this happened was in 2006 during that hunger strike which was pretty massive in its own right, I think 140 people reported by the military, and that strike was sparked because of these alleged suicides and a Quran search. And the accommodation that was made was that the military agreed to allow the men by their own volition to voluntarily surrender the Qurans to them. And they could obviously ask for them back at any point but the men would rather provide the Quran than have it searched by the military in the manner that it was being searched.

“They hadn’t searched the Qurans in this manner in four or five years,” Warner added, “They started searching it again in the same way they did in 2006 and the demand was, again, allow us to voluntarily surrender the Qurans. So I took this to the military and I said this is the demand that you have to resolve the strike and they said, ‘we would never ever do this.’”

3. Start Releasing Detainees.

“What I know from talking to the people down there,” Carol Rosenberg, a Miami Herald reporter covering Guantanamo, said on NPR earlier this month, is the hunger strikers “need somebody to leave, for the prisoners to regain the hope of the possibility of departure. And that could be — I’m not saying it will be — but it could be the mechanism that ends this hunger strike.”

In his interview with ThinkProgress, Wright agreed. “I think a more strategic way to end the hunger strike could possibly be for the administration to take immediate steps to start releasing some of the detainees,” he said, “I think that would bring an added element of hope to their plight.”

Warner said that while some hunger strikers will still hold out because they may be concerned about different issues, he added that “they ultimately could be resolved too in pretty short order just by starting to release the men.”

But how? CAP expert Ken Gude recently explained. “The 2012 National Defense Authorization Act made important changes to previous restrictions granting the Secretary of Defense more discretion in making determinations to transfer Guantanamo detainees,” Gude says, adding: “President Obama should instruct Secretary of Defense Hagel to use that authority.”

Who should the U.S. release? “Of the 86 prisoners approved by a presidential task force four years ago for transfer out of Gitmo,” the Los Angeles Times reported on Friday, “59 are Yemenis — and their new government wants them back.”

Sparked by this most recent hunger strike, and perhaps by some internal bureaucratic wrangling, President Obama announced last month that he’ll restart efforts to close Gitmo.

“I am more optimistic this time around, because he’s no longer naive about the politics,” David Cole, a professor of constitutional law and national security at Georgetown, told the Daily Beast in a piece published this week. “He’s lived through four years of stalemate on this, so the fact that he was nonetheless as strong and passionate about his concerns suggests to me that he really has made a renewed commitment to take it on.”

Indeed, and by exercising his authority to transfer detainees cleared for release, particularly the Yemenis, the President could help end the hunger strike and begin the long process of finally closing Gitmo for good.

CBS News’ Major Garrett confirmed that it was a GOP source who leaked the altered emails.

The miscast quotes affect at least two emails that include a State Department spokesperson and a White House deputy adviser — the two parties GOP lawmakers insist were trying to engage a cover-up on behalf of the Obama administration to protect the president’s chances of re-election.

A leaked email adds new language to State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland’s email, including a specific reference to al-Qaeda:

“The penultimate point is a paragraph talking about all the previous warnings provided by the Agency (CIA) about al-Qaeda’s presence and activities of al-Qaeda.“

The actual email read:

“The penultimate point could be abused by members to beat the State Department for not paying attention to Agency warnings.“

A leaked email written by deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes suggests that he asked for the final draft to remove references to warnings about specific attacks, a demand made by the State Department:

“We must make sure that the talking points reflect all agency equities, including those of the State Department, and we don’t want to undermine the FBI investigation.”

But the actual email did not mention the State Department:

“We need to resolve this in a way that respects all of the relevant equities, particularly the investigation.”

Since the congressional hearings last week, the White House on Wednesday released a hundred pages of emails from after the consulate attack. The full version undermines already-thin accusations that this is a White House scandal.

(Credit: AP)

The military’s sexual assault crisis has been in the headlines consistently for the past two weeks, leading two members of Congress to call on President Obama to take executive action and fix it.

Sen. John Tester (D-MT) and Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-ME) introduced the Ruth Moore Act of 2013 earlier this year to help the victims of sexual assault receive benefits once they leave the military. At present, the burden of proof for victims of rape and sexual assault to qualify for disability benefits for conditions related to their trauma, including treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder, is shockingly high, leaving many men and women unable to receive the care they need. A scheduled hearing on the bill was meant to take place on Wednesday, but has instead been delayed until June 3.

Rather than waiting for the Ruth Moore Act to pass, the bill’s sponsors sent Obama a letter on Thursday calling on him to use his authority as president to act now:

We commend your willingness to work with Congress to address the prevalence of sexual assault in the military. However, given the increasing rate of these assaults and the dramatic implications they are having on our service members, veterans, and their families, we strongly urge you to take further action to confront this crisis. In particular, you have the ability to provide justice for thousands of survivors of service-related sexual trauma by calling for more fairness in the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) disability claims process, and increasing their ability to access the benefits they desperately need. [...]

Our legislation continues to garner support in Congress and has been endorsed by every major veterans’ service organization. Legislation, however, is not necessary to keep faith with these veterans. In 2010, the VA relaxed evidentiary standards to make it easier for combat veterans suffering from PTSD to get the disability benefits they need. It is past time the VA make a similar regulatory change for MST survivors. And you can direct them to do so.

Sexual assault and rape culture in the military has reached a tipping point in the last two weeks, with multiple stories about officials in positions to prevent assaults being charged or investigated for sexual assault themselves. “We’re losing the confidence of the women who serve that we can solve this problem,” Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey said on Thursday. “That’s a crisis.”

Obama invited Dempsey, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, and several other military officials to the White House on Thursday to discuss the crisis. “The issue of sexual assault in our armed forces undermines that trust,” Obama said following the meeting. “So not only is it a crime, not only is it shameful and disgraceful, but it also is going to make and has made the military less effective than it can be. And as such, it is dangerous to our national security.” However, Obama warned, “there’s no silver bullet to solving this problem.”

Along with the Ruth More Act, several other pieces of legislation meant to address sexual assault in the armed services are pending on the Hill. Members of both parties and from both Houses of Congress signed on to co-sponsor the Military Justice Improvement Act, a bill seeking to revise the convening authority that officers previously used to overturn juries’ sexual assault convictions against their subordinates. The likewise bipartisan Combating Military Sexual Assault (MSA) Act of 2013 would reorganize the military’s support system for sexual assault victims, providing Special Victims Counsel to all victims.

In its most recent report, the Pentagon estimated 26,000 instances of sexual assault occurred against servicemembers last year, a twenty-seven percent increase over the previous year. Several polling experts, however, recently warned that the estimate may be off, as in their view it may be, as Bloomberg reported, “based on scanty response rates, questionable data and broad definitions of what constitutes abuse.”

“The fact that more than 1.5 million have registered or have appointments with UNHCR sadly means the actual number is much higher,” the agency said in a statement.

“Refugees tell us the increased fighting and changing of control of towns and villages, in particular in conflict areas, results in more and more civilians deciding to leave. Over the past four months we have seen a rapid deterioration when compared to the previous 20 months of this conflict,” UNHCR spokesman Dan McNorton said at a press conference.

Reuters notes that “[m]ost of the refugees have fled to neighboring Lebanon and Jordan where UNHCR said it had counted 470,457 and 473,587 respectively this week.”

The president of the U.N. General Assembly said on Wednesday that at least 80,000 have died so far in Syria’s two-year long civil war, 20,000 more since January.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post reports that the “Syrian opposition is demanding access to arms before planned peace talks next month, amid a growing consensus that it may take a shift in the balance of power on the battlefield before any meaningful negotiations can take place.”

In other news:

USA Today reports: The Pentagon has cyberattack capabilities that allow the U.S. military to help blind Syrian air defenses without firing a shot, according to military analysts.

The Los Angeles Times reports: Disclosure of a highly classified intelligence operation in Yemen last year compromised an exceedingly rare and valuable espionage achievement: an informant who had earned the trust of hardened terrorists, according to U.S. officials.

Reuters reports: U.S. military instructors in Niger will train African forces participating in a U.N.-backed offensive against al Qaeda-linked Islamist militants in neighboring Mali, senior military officers said on Thursday.

(Credit: AP)

Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) serves as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a role he inherited as the “scandal” over the Obama administration’s response to the attack in Benghazi, Libya was reaching one of its many peaks in January. Today on the Senate floor, Menendez castigated his colleagues who believed that the Senate had not done enough to investigate Benghazi, reminding them that there have been 11 hearings in Congress on the matter since September. “We have fully vetted this issue,” Menendez said.

The focus “should not be to score political points at the expense of the families of the four victims,” he went on to say. “It should be on doing all we can to protect our personnel serving overseas and provide the necessary oversight and legislative authority to carry out the administrative review board’s recommendations.” With that in mind, Menendez introduced the Embassy Security and Personnel Protection Act of 2013, a bill he hoped would be “able to count on the support of all of our colleagues to enact this crucial, time-sensitive legislation without delay, without obstruction, without political grandstanding.”

The bill would provide further funding to the Capital Security Cost-Sharing Program, first instituted in 1998 to boost security to “high-risk, high-threat” diplomatic posts and has since been chronically underfunded. Under the new legislation, the program would be able to build far more than the two to three facilities a year for the two dozen posts that fall into the high-risk, high-threat category. It would also provide funding for implementing a shift in the mission of Marine Corps security guards posted at U.S. embassies to protect staffers as well as classified assets. The bill would also require the State Department to provide verification to Congress of it fully putting into place its Accountability Review Board (ARB) on Benghazi’s recommendations for improvement.

Diplomatic security has been given a short-shrift in the aftermath of Benghazi. During her appearance before the Senate in January, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton attempted to persuade Congress to shift $1.3 billion in funding bookmarked for warfighting in Iraq towards providing for greater diplomatic security. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) shepherded legislation through the Senate fulfilling Clinton’s request, but the bill died in the House. Since then, most of the conversation surrounding Benghazi has focused almost exclusively on the Obama administration’ss supposed cover-up, no matter how many documents are released debunking the claim.

“I am intent on making sure that we do everything we can to prevent another tragedy like this from happening,” President Obama said about Benghazi at a press conference earlier today alongside Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. “But that means we owe it to them and all who serve to do everything in our power to protect our personnel serving overseas.” Obama also called on Congress to implement the ARB’s suggestions and to “work with us to support and fully fund our budget requests to improve the security of our embassies around the world.”

CAP experts also agree that the real scandal of Benghazi is that more hasn’t been done to discuss improvements diplomatic security in the weeks and months after the attack. In ignoring the actual security risks that diplomats face, Brian Katulis and Peter Juul warn that as a result of the political turmoil over Benghazi, “the default policy may be to retrench behind the walls of so-called fortress embassies, take few if any risks with nonmilitary personnel, and surrender potential American influence on the ground in dangerous parts of the world.”

“Although packaged as an effort to protect American values and democracy, the bans spring from a movement whose goal is the demonization of the Islamic faith,” write CAP’s Matt Duss and the Brennan Center’s Fazia Patel and Amos Toh. “Beyond that, however, many foreign law bans are so broadly phrased as to cast doubt on the validity of a whole host of personal and business arrangements.” The authors explain how the campaign originally began as an “anti-Sharia” movement and then evolved into a more focused push to ban foreign law:

On Election Day 2010 Oklahoma voters overwhelmingly approved the Save Our State referendum, a ballot initiative that banned the use of Sharia in the state’s courts. While the Oklahoma measure was immediately challenged in court, and ultimately struck down as unconstitutionally discriminatory toward American Muslims, its proponents launched a nationwide movement to recast anti-Sharia measures as bans on foreign and international law. This involved removing specific references to Islam in order to help the measures pass legal muster and successfully tapping into deep-rooted suspicions about the influence of foreign laws over the American legal system. While the intent of foreign law bans is clear, proponents of these bans hope that the foreign law veneer will save the measures from being invalidated on constitutional grounds.

The report maps out where the bans have been enacted and are being considered:

The report recommends that these states considering foreign law bans should reject them and those that have passed foreign law bans should repeal them. “The bans set out to cure an illusory problem but could create a myriad of unintended real ones,” the report says, adding that they “send a message that a state is unreceptive to foreign businesses and minority groups, particularly Muslims” and “sow confusion about a variety of personal and business arrangements.”

“The issues raised by foreign law bans,” the author note, “may lead to decades of litigation as state courts examine their consequences and struggle to interpret them in ways that avoid constitutional concerns and discrimination against all minority faiths.”

(Credit: SOCOM)

The Senate Armed Services Committee today held its first hearing on whether or not to revise or rewrite the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF). Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) questioned one of the witnesses, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations Michael Sheehan, about how long he foresaw the war against Al Qaeda will extend for. The answer was much longer than the twelve years that the AUMF has already been in place:

GRAHAM: Do you agree with me the war against radical Islam, or terror, or whatever description you like to provide, will go on after the second term of President Obama?

SHEEHAN: Senator, in my judgement, this is going to go on for quite awhile, yes, beyond the second term of the President.

GRAHAM: And beyond this term of Congress?

SHEEHAN: Yes, sir. I think it’s at least ten to twenty years.

GRAHAM: I think you’re absolutely right. I think we’re involved in a generational struggle.

That response appears to contradict former Pentagon lawyer Jeh Johnson’s comments in January. At the time, Johnson said the fight against Al Qaeda “shouldn’t be regarded as a perpetual war without any sort of end.” Likewise, former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta said in January that the targeted killing program authorized under the AUMF is “not something that we’re going to have to continue to use forever.” While Sheehan’s comments today put a more definite end date on the AUMF’s authority, they are far further in the future than Johnson and Panetta’s comments would lead one to believe.

Passed in the aftermath of 9/11, the law gave the President broad authority to target “those nations, organizations, or persons” who “planned, authorized, committed, or aided” the 2001 attack. Since then, that authority has been used as the basis for conducting military actions around the world, including not only in Afghanistan, but also in Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan. At present, the AUMF is criticized for being overly broad in its wording and used to target individuals who had nothing to do with the Sept. 11 attacks, leading to conflicting moves in Congress to either narrow or expand its scope.

The Obama administration does have some say, however, in when the AUMF’s authority expires. Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) asked the panel what, other than Congress revoking the AUMF, could shut down the battle against Al Qaeda. “If the President were to issue a declaration stating that the conflict against Al Qaeda has been concluded, I would think that would constitute an end,” the Pentagon’s acting general counsel Robert Taylor said, opening the door to just such a move from President Obama or some future administration.

Issa and former review board co-chairs Ambassador Thomas Pickering and former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Adm. Mike Mullen have been engaged in a recent back and forth over whether Issa invited them to testify at his hearing on Benghazi last week. Pickering and Mullen said they’d be willing to testify but Issa refused their participation. Issa has also challenged the credibility of the review board’s findings, which blame State Department officials for lack of diplomatic security in Benghazi last September.

Pickering has called claims of an Obama administration cover-up on Benghazi “Pulitzer Prize fiction.”

“Recently, you seem to have changed your position on the terms of our appearance, apparently asking for a transcribed interview behind closed doors,” Pickering and Mullen wrote in a letter to Issa, which was obtained by CNN. “In our view, requiring such a closed-door proceeding before we testify publicly is an inappropriate precondition.

“Having taken liberal license to call into question the Board’s work, it is surprising that you now maintain that members of the committee need a closed-door proceeding before being able to ask informed questions’ at a public hearing,” they said. “The public deserves to hear your questions and our answers.”

Meanwhile, McClatchy reports that in the month before the Benghazi attacks, Ambassador Chris Stevens, who was killed in assault, “twice turned down offers of security assistance made by the senior U.S. military official in the region in response to concerns that Stevens had raised in a still secret memorandum.”

In other news:

The AP reports: With no broader budget deal in sight, a key House panel responsible for implementing sweeping cuts to agency budgets moved Wednesday to exempt veterans and largely protect spending on border safety and other homeland security programs in the coming year.

The New York Times reports: As the bloodletting continued unabated in Syria, the 193-member General Assembly passed a nonbinding resolution on Wednesday calling for a political transition to end the civil war there, putting the onus on the government of President Bashar al-Assad to stop the killing.

Reuters reports: The death toll in Syria from the country’s two-year civil war is at least 80,000, an increase of about 20,000 since the start of the year, the president of the U.N. General Assembly, Vuk Jeremic, said on Wednesday.

Foreign Policy reports: Sens. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) and Bob Corker (R-TN) introduced a bill Wednesday to arm the Syrian rebels, the latest piece of legislation aimed at pressuring the Obama administration to intervene more aggressively in the protracted civil war. The bill provides lethal weapons to vetted members of the Syrian opposition and beefs up sanctions on weapons sales and petroleum sales to President Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

(U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice delivers the infamous "talking points")

On Wednesday, just days after Congress held hearings claiming that the Obama administration misled the public in the aftermath of the Sep. 11, 2012 attack on an American consulate in Benghazi, Libya, the White House released 100 pages of emails that seem to undermine GOP claims that the White House orchestrated a “cover-up.”

The e-mails between the White House, CIA, State Department, Justice Department, and the FBI were part of an effort to draft unclassified talking points for lawmakers to use during media appearances and formed the basis of U.N. Ambassador’s Susan Rice’s prep for the Sunday morning talk shows. The CIA wrote the first draft of the talking points, before sending it out to the rest of the government. Click the pictures to view larger versions of the emails that debunk the basis many of the Republican’s claims of a conspiracy.

GOP Claim: The Obama administration struck references about Al Qaeda for political reasons.

In the very first of the declassified emails in the set, the CIA is revealed to have willingly struck references to Al Qaeda’s involvement in the attack, a deletion that conservatives have previously slammed as political in nature. A CIA official, responding to an inquiry about whether or not the Agency was sure that Al Qaeda took part in the attack, noted that the initial draft “could be interpreted that way,” suggesting that the document be revised to say that terrorist group took part in the protests instead. The CIA was also under “express instructions” to avoid naming perpetrators so to not to undermine the FBI’s investigation, according to an email from Sept. 14.

GOP Claim: Obama lied about there being a protest in Benghazi to hide that it was a terrorist attack.

The addition of references to “demonstrations,” another email shows, was completed before the document was sent out to the rest of the government, as was that the attack was “spontaneously inspired by the protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo.” The fact that no protest actually occurred in Benghazi prior to the attack was used as another data point that the Obama administration was hiding something about its response to the attack. Rather than being political, however, it appears the CIA made the changes to make the talking points more accurate based on what information was currently available, a situation that is often the case when dealing with intelligence.

GOP Claim: The White House directed the intelligence agency to lie about whether Islamic terrorists were involved.

John Brennan, then the White House Advisor on Homeland Security and Counterterrorism and now the CIA Director, reviewed the talking points as well, but didn’t perform the scrubbing many conservatives have suggested the White House enacted. Instead, Brennan left in place a reference to “Islamic extremists” in his suggested edit, undercutting the notion that the administration wanted to hide the nature of the attack. In fact, the White House, according to an email to then-CIA Director “cleared [the document] quickly.” Over the course of the next day, after State and Justice were looped in, the turf war that has been previously reported played out.

GOP Claim: Susan Rice had access to the classified information and lied about it on television.

On Sept. 15, the talking points were finally sent to Congress after multiple edits and provided to Rice to prepare for her Sunday show appearances the next morning. We now know that Saturday evening the intelligence community received new information related to whether or not a demonstration took place, not in time to change the points. Instead, Rice gave the much shortened talking points as provided, setting off the firestorm that eventually ensued.

Read all of the emails here.

At a roundtable interview for reporters on Wednesday, ThinkProgress asked Reid whether or not President Obama could impose a no-fly zone — that is, use military force against Syrian air assets to prevent them from bombing rebel forces and civilians — without explicit Congressional permission, meaning either a declaration of war or explicit authorization for the use of military force. The Senator strongly cautioned against getting more deeply involved in Syria, but implied it was ultimately the President’s call:

We have about 80,000 people dead, Assad’s a war criminal – and if there is this peace conference, and I hope it works, part of the deal has to be that he’s gone. I don’t think at this stage [pause] less than ten percent of the deaths caused by the non-regime forces are caused by helicopters and missiles. That’s still a lot of people, but I’m not going to run the President’s foreign policy, we know that there are a lot of countries, a significant number of countries providing weapons there, and we’re doing a lot of food, medical supplies, and things of those [sic] nature. We have to be very careful about how we proceed down the next step.

A Senate Democratic aide clarified to ThinkProgress that Reid would defer to the President on both the advisability of a no-fly zone and what legal authorization would be required for the President to lawfully implement one:

The decision on whether a no-fly zone would be advisable, and under what authorities it might be established, is best placed in the hands of the commander-in-chief. Without question, should President Obama decide on such a course, it would be imprudent for him to proceed without first consulting Congress.

The phrase “under what authorities it might be established” is a reference to legal authority for the use of force; suggesting a decision on this issue “is best placed in the hands of the commander-in-chief” amounts to saying that the President is free to make a decision on whether he has the legal authority to establish a no-fly zone, though it would be “imprudent” to make such a decision without discussing it with Congress first.

This stance is consistent with the Senator’s position during the Libya intervention, the last major U.S. military engagement initiated without Congressional approval. While the War Powers Resolution requires the President to end unauthorized military options 60 or 90 days after they begin, U.S. troops remained involved in operations against Libyan forces beyond that window.

The Obama administration argued that these operations mainly involved logistical and technical support for other NATO and local forces, meaning that they were not “hostilities” in the technical legal sense used in the War Powers Act despite the fact that some U.S. forces were still engaged in direct combat. Reid backed this position, arguing that “The War Powers Act has no application to what’s going on in Libya.”

Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel has confirmed that the administration is weighing the direct provision of weapons to Syrian rebels. As the situation in Syria deteriorates, regional powers and U.S. lawmakers are attempting to pressure the administration into taking a more direct military role in the conflict.

(Photo: Rep. Larry Buschon, Credit: Indiana Public Media)

Earlier this month, Rep. Larry Bucshon (R-IN) gave a sit-down interview with local television station WJTS, and when sequestration came up, Buchson was saddened by the grounding of the Navy’s Blue Angels stunt flying group.

Luckily, Bucshon knows where to cut the federal budget to make room for the Angels to take to the sky again — the U.S.’ foreign aid overseas:

BUSCHON: Well, it costs about $37 million for the Blue Angels to fly for an entire year. Okay. The President just went overseas and offered some — Jordan, $150 million in more aid. We just offered other countries millions of dollars in more foreign aid. Yet we can’t continue to fund one of the biggest promoters of the military that helps them with recruiting and also has such a big impact on local economies when they show up for their airshows. That we have to not do that yet we can give millions of dollars in foreign aid when we’re holding back on our own citizens.

Watch the interview here:

The funding Buschon describes serves an important purpose. During his trip to Jordan in March, President Obama announced an increase in U.S. funding to Syrian refugees who fled the ongoing conflict in their country. Over 500,000 Syrian refugees currently make their home in Jordan, with the 175,000 in the Zartarri refugee camp making it the 5th largest city in the country. Even with the Obama administration’s pledge, the funding request for humanitarian aid to Syrian refugees remains more than $500 million short of what’s needed.

Buschon, unfortunately, isn’t alone in his desire to cut out crucial foreign aid to reduce federal spending. The already treacherous ground for increasing foreign aid has only grown more fraught since the impact of sequestration kicked in. His fellow Republicans — often citing foreign aid as a much greater percentage of the budget than the less than 1 percent it currently makes up — have been seeking to reduce international funding since retaking the House of Representatives in 2011.

Force-feeding equipment for Gitmo detainees, including feed tube and liquid nutrients

The American Civil Liberties Union, Center for Victims of Torture, Human Rights Watch and 17 other groups wrote the Pentagon on Monday … [calling] Guantánamo’s force-feeding process “inherently cruel, inhuman, and degrading.”

“We urgently request that you order the immediate and permanent cessation of all force-feeding of Guantánamo prisoners who are competent and capable of forming a rational judgment as to the consequences of refusing food,” they wrote.

The letter also asked Hagel to allow “independent medical professionals” access to the prison to “review and monitor the status of hunger-striking prisoners in a manner consistent with international ethical standards.”

While other groups like the American Medical Association and the Constitution Project’s task force on terror detainees have also condemned force-feeding at Gitmo, the rights groups’ letter comes after Al-Jazeera reported on Monday the contents of the Guantanamo Bay Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) for managing hunger strikes at the prison. The documents illustrate “a brutal and dehumanising medical procedure that requires [detainees] to wear masks over their mouths while they sit shackled in a restraint chair for as long as two hours.”

A lawyer representing several Gitmo prisoners said last week that “detainees have described the experience of having the tube snaked down your throat as being like having a razor blade pulled down.” The lawyer, David Remes, said the military uses force-feeding to prevent detainees from becoming martyrs.

The SOP makes clear that the prison commander, not doctors and nurses, has the final authority regarding whether a detainee is to be force-fed and that only “reasonable efforts” are needed to get consent from a hunger striking detainee to begin force-feeding.

Leonard Rubenstein, a lawyer at the Center for Public Health and Human Rights at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Heath and the Berman Institute of Bioethics, told Al-Jazeera that the SOP is “Orwellian.”

“It is a very frightening idea that the medical staff is an adjunct of the security force,” Rubenstein said. “The clinical judgment of a doctor or a nurse is basically trumped by this policy and protocol. Doctors are not acting with the kind of professional medical independence [they should]. It’s clear that, notwithstanding references to preservation of detainee health in the policy, the first interest is in ending the protests.”

While the military says that 100 detainees are currently on hunger strike, their lawyers say the number is closer to 120. The Herald’s Rosenberg said on Twitter on Wednesday that a record 30 hunger strikers are being force fed and three are currently in the hospital.

President Obama said late last month that he will renew efforts to close Gitmo. Attorney General Eric Holder announced on Tuesday that the administration is looking at filling a vacant position that focuses on coordinating Gitmo policy. “We’re in the process of working on that now. We’re looking at candidates,” he said. However, the Obama administration probably won’t get much help from Republicans in Congress, as many have made clear that they will resist Obama’s renewed efforts to close Guantanamo.

Traffic to Google Services in Syria on May 15th, 2013

A Syrian communications department official speaking on the condition of anonymity to the Associated Press claimed the outage was the result of a an internet cable cut in a Damascus suburb and would take around four hours to restore. However, internet outages in Syria have historically come at tactically significant times for the regime — for example when it was rumored that government forces were mixing chemical weapons last November or during a rare public address by Assad in January.

Experts say the outage resembles the one that occurred around this time last week, with James Cowe, chief technology officer at internet research firm Renesys telling the AP:

It looks like a replay of what happened on the seventh and eighth [...] It’s entirely consistent with a technical fault at a central facility; it’s also completely consistent with a decision to use an Internet kill switch.

Other regimes facing upheaval have shut down the internet using a “kill switch” before to stunt the organizing ability of opposition forces — most notably Egyptian revolution, where 20 million users were essentially cut off from the global Internet by the Mubarak government. If the Assad regime intentionally took down the internet, it likely did so to make it more difficult for opposition groups to communicate within their organizations and share information about regime actions with the outside world.

While Syrian opposition leaders have relied on the internet for a number of communication needs, the frequency of internet outages and regime surveillance has forced them to build up alternative communications channels — sometimes with technological help from the U.S, which as of last November “provided some 2,000 communications kits, pieces of equipment” to opposition forces since the civil war broke out.

(Credit: Getty)

Ahead of possible major actions from the Pentagon and Congress on sexual assault in the military, the U.S. Army is forced to confront yet another instance of a member of the armed forces involved in a shocking sexual assault scandal.

In the latest incident, the Department of Defense revealed on Tuesday a sergeant first class in the U.S. Army stationed at the Ft. Hood, TX military base is under investigation for sexual assault. Along with allegedly sexually assaulting two of his peers, the the sergeant is being investigated for possibly forcing a subordinate into prostitution. Making matters even worse, the soldier under investigation was assigned as the Sexual Harassment/Assault Response and Prevention (SHARP) program coordinator for an eight-hundred person battalion stationed at the base.

The investigation draws a parallel to a case just last week in which the head of the entire Air Force’s sexual assault response program was himself charged with sexual battery in Arlington, VA. No charges have yet been filed against the individual at Ft. Hood, but Pentagon spokesman George Little issued a statement about DOD’s response to yet another alleged instance of rape culture in the military:

I cannot convey strongly enough [Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel's] frustration, anger, and disappointment over these troubling allegations and the breakdown in discipline and standards they imply.

Secretary Hagel met with Army Secretary McHugh this morning and directed him to fully investigate this matter rapidly, to discover the extent of these allegations, and to ensure that all of those who might be involved are dealt with appropriately.

To address the broader concerns that have arisen out of these allegations and other recent events, Secretary Hagel is directing all the services to re-train, re-credential, and re-screen all sexual assault prevention and response personnel and military recruiters.

Lawmakers quickly lined up to add their voices to the long list of those condemning the latest outrage and sexual assault in the military writ large. “These allegations only add to the mounting evidence of the need to change our military justice system to better hold perpetrators accountable and protect survivors of sexual assault,” Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) said in a statement. Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon (R-CA) head of the House Armed Services Committee, said in a statement he was “outraged and disgusted” by the latest reports from Ft. Hood, pointing to his own granddaughter in the Army and the “feelings of worry and doubt” many feel when family members join the service.

Much as last week’s case came just days ahead of the Pentagon releasing its annual report on sexual assault in the armed services, Tuesday’s story broke with major implications for the military on the horizon. Wednesday is the deadline for branches of the armed services to provide their plans for how to integrate women into combat units to the Pentagon. Last year, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey told reporters that the move could help reduce the number of sexual assaults in the military in the long-run as “the more we treat people equally, the more likely they are to treat each other equally.”

The Senate Veteran Affairs Committee is also holding hearings Wednesday morning on the Ruth Moore Act of 2013, which passed the House Veteran Affairs Committee last week. The Act is named for a former Navy enlistee who was raped twice during her service and later developed post-traumatic stress disorder from the experience. According to the ACLU’s statement to the Senate, the bill “would remove current barriers that far too often prove insurmountable for sexual assault survivors who apply for disability compensation for post traumatic stress disorder and other mental health conditions.”

According to the most recent report, an estimated 26,000 instances of sexual assault took place in the military last year. President Obama at a press conference last week called the epidemic “an outrage” and said soldiers who rape are “betraying the uniform that they’re wearing.” “When you engage in this kind of behavior that’s not patriotic — it’s a crime,” Obama went on to say. “And we have to do everything we can to root this out.”

(Credit: AFP/Getty)

Reuters reports that according to a confidential report by a U.N. panel of experts, financial sanctions, an arms embargo and other international restrictions have inhibited the North Koreans’ nuclear progress.

“While the imposition of sanctions has not halted the development of nuclear and ballistic missile programs, it has in all likelihood considerably delayed (North Korea’s) timetable and, through the imposition of financial sanctions and the bans on the trade in weapons, has choked off significant funding which would have been channeled into its prohibited activities,” the report said, according to Reuters.

Meanwhile, Agence France-Presse reports that a top U.S. official said the North Koreans have yet to develop a nuclear weapons small enough to fit on a missile. “I don’t believe they have the capability to miniaturise the nuclear warhead, put it on top of the missile, work the launch and re-entry problem, and target,” the official said.

In other news:

The Washington Times reports: The justification that U.S. officials cite in international law for killing terrorism suspects with drones is not accepted outside the United States, not even by America’s allies, the U.N. official investigating the program said Tuesday.

Reuters reports: The top U.S. general in charge of cyber security warned on Tuesday that the United States is increasingly vulnerable to attacks like those that destroyed data on tens of thousands of computers in Saudi Arabia and South Korea in the past year.

Reuters also reports: The U.N. General Assembly is set to vote on Wednesday on a draft resolution that condemns Syrian authorities and accepts the opposition Syrian National Coalition as party to a potential political transition. Russia, a close ally of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, is opposed to the resolution, which was drafted by Qatar and other Arab nations and circulated among the 193 U.N. member states

(Credit: Getty)

Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-TX) introduced the Oversight of Sensitive Military Operations Act, which requires the Secretary of Defense to notify the House and Senate Armed Services committees, and their subcommittees, of kill or capture operations (or a “sensitive military operation”) aimed at suspected al-Qaeda militants after the operation in question has taken place.

The bill defines a “sensitive military operation” as “a lethal operation or capture operation conducted by the armed forces outside the United States” and outside of Afghanistan, as the measure assumes that military operations there fall under the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force. Thornberry clarified to Breaking Defense that his measure does not limit oversight “to any part of the military or to any particular technology,” including the use of drones.

Currently, the bill has mostly Republican co-sponsors but the Texas Republican said that’s likely due to lobbying logistics. It “is solely a function of how fast the emails got around,” he said, adding that now that he has the support from House Armed Services Committee Ranking Member Adam Smith (D-WA) and Rep. James Langevin (D-RI), a subcommittee ranking member, more Democrats will likely sign on. “The numbers don’t reflect the opinion about it,” Thornberry said.

He also said that he is not intending to hamstring the military. “Congress will never be in position, nor should it be, to make operational decisions — ‘OK, you should capture that person, you should kill that person’ — that’s not our role,” he said. “If it’s a larger scale military conflict,” Thornberry added, “we understand the military can’t come running over to us over every few seconds.”

But, he said, his bill would give Members of Congress “the opportunity to complain about it if we don’t think that it’s justified, or if we believe that some operations are outside the bounds or even [just] a bad idea….Then we have opportunities to restrict funding or to change the authorization or to have a closed hearing on the matter. If [we] have the information, then Congress has a number of tools to use.”

Harold Koh, the former top State Department in the Obama administration, recently criticized the lack of transparency in the White House’s targeted killing program — one that has included a ramped up use of drones throughout the last four years. “It has not been sufficiently transparent to the media, to Congress, and to our allies,” he said last week, adding that it is “fostering a growing perception that the program is not lawful and necessary, but illegal, unnecessary and out of control.”

Another former Obama administration official, former DOD counsel Jeh Johnson, similarly criticized the secrecy surrounding Obama’s counterterrorism polices. “The problem is that the American public is suspicious of executive power shrouded in secrecy,” he said.

Thornberry told Breaking Defense that this is what his bill is trying to address. “Under this framework, it lets Congress push back,” he said.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder

Attorney General Eric Holder told reporters on Tuesday that he recused himself early on in the Department of Justice’s investigation of the Associated Press and possible national security leaks.

Holder was speaking at what was meant to be a Health and Human Services announcement of stricter rules on going after Medicare fraud. Instead, Holder found himself answering a slew of questions related to the DOJ’s subpoena of multiple phone records belonging to the AP. In sum, twenty phone lines were pulled, including the home phone numbers of several reporters. Asked about his role in the matter, Holder told the assembled crowd that he had recused himself early on “to avoid a potential conflict of interest” as the FBI had previously interviewed him in relation to the case.

Holder also identified Deputy Attorney General James M. Cole as the Justice Department official who originally signed off on the subpoena of AP’s phone records, in conjunction with the U.S. Attorney in Washington, DC. Holder referred several questions about the investigation to a letter the Deputy Attorney General sent to AP in response to the scathing letter the wire agency released yesterday. In the letter, Cole sought to reassure the AP that their records “have not and will not be provided for use in any other investigations.” However, the Justice Department will not return the records to the AP as requested.

The Attorney General insisted that he was a strong advocate of protecting the First Amendment rights of the press, saying that sweeping, overbroad subpoenas are not a matter of administration policy:

HOLDER: That is certainly not the policy of this administration. If you will remember in 2009 when I was — my confirmation hearings, I testified in favor of a reporter shield law. We as an administration took a position in favor of such a law. It didn’t get the necessary support up on the Hill. It’s something this administration still thinks would be appropriate. We have investigated cases on the basis of the facts. Not as a result of a policy to get the press or to do anything of that nature. The facts and the law have dictated our actions in that regard.

While refusing to say exactly what was leaked to prompt the investigation into the AP, Holder lent credence to the idea that it was national security related, calling the subject matter a “very, very serious leak.” The lead “put the American people at risk,” Holder said. “That is not hyperbole. It put the American people at risk.” The Associated Press in 2009 published a story on a foiled terrorist plot in Yemen, which gave details related to a double agent planted among Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and is likely the cause of the investigation.

“I’m proud of what we have done,” Holder said of the administration’s civil rights policies on the whole. “We have been, I think, very aggressive in our enforcement of the civil rights laws.” Despite that pride, the administration has been forced to confront a slew of troubling civil liberties issues in the recent weeks, including the use of actions deemed torture at Guantanamo Bay, the ongoing targeted killing program, the IRS possibly improperly targeting conservative groups, and now the possible curtailing of the free press.

(Credit: AP)

Security issues have defined the U.S.-Turkish bilateral relationship since the upheavals that swept the Arab world in 2010-2011, leaving Turkey and the United States searching for stable, democratic partners. The Obama administration had wisely cultivated Prime Minister Erdoğan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) since 2009, when the President visited Ankara on his first trip abroad. This policy made sense — Turkey is a NATO ally, and legitimate electoral success and impressive economic growth had made Erdoğan one of the most influential leaders in the Middle East, a key interlocutor between that region and the West.

But, despite the pressing security concerns shared by the two countries, U.S. officials should ensure that important issues of democratic governance and freedom of expression don’t fall off the agenda. As a new brief by the Center for American Progress outlines, press freedom in Turkey has come under increasing threat. Dozens of journalists critical of the government have been jailed, and hefty fines have been levied against media outlets seen as opposing Erdoğan and the AKP.

The Turkish government’s increasingly hard line towards critics in the press has raised doubts about the course of Turkey’s democratic development. Erdoğan and Turkey’s joint popularity, and the country’s economic success, had sparked talk of a “Turkish model” of democratic development, secular government compatible with Islamic conservatism, and economic growth.

For the wider region, this narrative provided an example to moderates seeking to shape new political cultures in the wake of the uprisings. But the suppression of certain forms of political discourse and imprisonment or intimidation of journalists undermines the persuasive power of this example. For this reason, along with the United States’ desire to promote freedom of the press and expression, President Obama should raise the issue with Prime Minister Erdoğan on Thursday.

The U.S. is right to cultivate Turkey as a secure democratic partner with whom it can engage the broader Middle East, and therefore should clearly voice concerns about the deterioration of press freedom. Given the wave of popular mobilization in the region, it is more important than ever to preserve the democratic nature of the “Turkish model” and allow political dissent.

Max Hoffman is a research associate at the Center for American Progress. Michael Werz is a senior fellow at CAP.

(Photo: Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes, Credit: Reuters)

Much of the controversy surrounding the Obama administration’s response to the Sept. 11, 2012 attack on a diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya has focused on a set of unclassified talking points provided to U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice. Rice delivered those points five days after the attack, appearing on all five major Sunday news shows. Rice subsequently came under attack for not mentioning Al Qaeda and referencing an anti-Islamic video as the impetus for the attacks, becoming the symbol of the White House’s supposed goal of misleading the American public about what happened.

In recent days, the talking points have come back to the forefront of conservative outrage, as several outlets have released the full edits made to the document, along with the original version the CIA drafted. Alongside those edits were emails that these outlets claimed showed the White House engaging in a flurry of activity that would help President Obama gain reelection. One such email from Deputy National Security Director Ben Rhodes allegedly showed the White House insisting that State Department requests that references to terrorism and Al Qaeda be “scrubbed” from the draft be discussed more fully.

CNN’s Jake Tapper, however, obtained the full text of the email Rhodes sent to the email thread of officials across the government providing their input on the document. Viewed in full, the document shows a distinct lack of intent to maliciously change the narrative compared to paraphrased versions:

All –

Sorry to be late to this discussion. We need to resolve this in a way that respects all of the relevant equities, particularly the investigation.

There is a ton of wrong information getting out into the public domain from Congress and people who are not particularly informed. Insofar as we have firmed up assessments that don’t compromise intel or the investigation, we need to have the capability to correct the record, as there are significant policy and messaging ramifications that would flow from a hardened mis-impression.

We can take this up tomorrow morning at deputies.

Previously, the Weekly Standard and ABC News had reported that Rhodes intervened on behalf of the State Department, urging that the talking points be changed to scrub al-Qaeda references at Nuland’s request. The Standard paraphrased the email as Rhodes “respond[ing] to the group, explaining that [State Department spokeswoman Victoria] Nuland had raised valid concerns and advising that the issues would be resolved at a meeting of the National Security Council’s Deputies Committee the following morning.” Likewise, ABC paraphrased the email’s content as saying “[w]e must make sure that the talking points reflect all agency equities, including those of the State Department, and we don’t want to undermine the FBI investigation. We thus will work through the talking points tomorrow morning at the Deputies Committee meeting.”

The elevation of the talking points to infamy has seemingly instead helped to undercut the Republican case that a cover-up occurred. In actuality, the only thing to be revealed during this latest round of investigation seems to be a turf war between the CIA and State Department to avoid further blame for the attack, one that played out in the editing process of the talking points. In the end, contrary to Republican claims, the intelligence community did have the last say in what went into the talking points, including that the attacks “were spontaneously inspired by the protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo,” and immediately preceded by a demonstration.

(Credit: CNAS)

The Center for New American Security (CNAS) report — titled “If All Else Fails: The Challenges of Containing a Nuclear-Armed Iran” [PDF] — doesn’t advocate the Obama administration leaving its current policy of preventing Iran from developing a nuclear weapon. It does, however, question the logic of not preparing for such an eventuality. “In the absence of a well thought-out strategy for the ‘day after’ Iran gets the bomb, strategic improvisation could produce policy responses that are ineffective or even counterproductive,” the report argues.

In response, authors Colin Kahl, Raj Pattani and Jacob Stokes develop a set of eleven policies they believe should be put into place should prevention efforts — up to and including the use of force — fail. In such an event, the White House should pursue five “key components” to achieve those goals:

• Deterrence: attempt to prevent Iranian nuclear use and aggression through credible threats of retaliation;
• Defense: deny Iran the ability to benefit from its nuclear weapons and to protect U.S. partners and allies from aggression;
• Disruption: shape a regional environment resistant to Iranian influence and to thwart and diminish Iran’s destabilizing activities;
• De-escalation: prevent Iran-related crises from spiraling to nuclear war; and
• Denuclearization: constrain Iran’s nuclear weapons program and limit broader damage to the nonproliferation regime

Having such a plan in place is necessary, the authors argue, given the possibility that even a military strike on Iran — which the Obama administration says remains on the table as a last resort to prevent a nuclear-armed Iran — may not cause Tehran to waver. “Even an operationally effective strike would not, in and of itself, permanently end Iran’s program,” Kahl, the former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East, said in an interview with Al-Monitor. “A strike might substantially degrade Iran’s near-term capability to produce nuclear weapons, but it would almost certainly increase Tehran’s motivation to eventually acquire nuclear weapons to deter future attacks.”

Kahl’s statement tracks with previous reports’ conclusions regarding the use of force against Iran. A Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Federation of American Scientists report issued last month warned that Iran’s nuclear program cannot be “bombed away.” While Tehran still has not decided to pursue nuclear weapons, according to intelligence from the United States and Israel, U.S. and Israeli officials alike fear that a strike on Iran’s nuclear program could in fact spur them onward to produce a nuclear weapon.

Unfortunately, “containment” has all too often become synonymous with “capitulation” in the current discourse about Iran’s nuclear program, as seen during Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel’s confirmation hearings. However, even the conservative American Enterprise Institute came to the conclusion that the Obama administration should at least consider the possibility of containment. In a 2011 article, the authors noted that containment, while likely difficult, may wind up being the “least-bad choice” on Iran.

(Credit: AP)

President Obama on Monday defended the actions he and the rest of the Executive Branch took in the days and weeks after the assault that took the lives of four Americans, directly questioning those who claim that he orchestrated a cover-up.

But on Fox News last night, Cheney attacked Obama’s response, claiming (without evidence) that the Obama administration “lied” about Benghazi:

CHENEY: I watched the Benghazi thing with great interest, Sean [Hannity]. I think it’s one of the worst incidences, frankly, that I can recall in my career. It put the whole capability claiming the terrorist problem solved once we got Bin Laden, that Al Qaeda was over with. If they told the truth about Benghazi, that it was a terrorist attack by an al-Qaeda-affiliated group, it would destroy the confidence that was the basis of his campaign for re-election.

They lied. They claimed it was because of a demonstration video, that they wouldn’t have to admit it was really all about their incompetence. They ignored repeated warnings from the CIA about the threat. They ignored messages from their own people on the ground that they need more security. They reduced what was already there.

Cheney’s choice of words is interesting, given the numerous security lapses and misleading narratives that took place during his multiple periods in power in Washington. One would think that the former vice president would regard the 9/11 attacks as the “worst incident” that he could recall. Or perhaps the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, in which he and other members of the administration repeatedly misled the American people about Iraq’s WMDs and the war’s difficulty and costs. Or the Abu Gharib prison scandal, in which Iraqis were tortured under the watchful eyes of American soldiers and prompted more and greater attacks on U.S. forces. Or perhaps the thirteen attacks on U.S. diplomatic compounds that occurred during the Bush administration’s two terms, in which nearly a dozen Americans died.

“Well, they tried to cover it up by constructing a false story, claiming there was confusion about what happened in the Benghazi compound,” Cheney went on to tell Hannity, joining the chorus of those who believe a conspiracy took place to hide the truth about the attack. “The cover up included several officials up to and including President Obama and the cover up is still ongoing.”

Former Ambassador Thomas Pickering, co-chair of the State Department’s Accountability Review Board report on Benghazi, referred to claims that a cover-up occurred as “Pulitzer Prize fiction.” Likewise, the CIA’s original draft of the infamous talking points, which Republicans, including Cheney, point to as evidence of a conspiracy, mentioned that the attacks “were spontaneously inspired by the protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo,” with the next draft showing the intelligence community’s belief that a demonstration had occurred prior to the attacks.

It’s also worth noting that during his time as a Congressman from Wyoming, Cheney was the ranking member of the panel investigating the Iran-Contra scandal, during which an actual cover-up occurred. At the time, Cheney viewed the Congressional investigation as being an overreach into executive prerogative. Apparently the Iran-Contra scandal doesn’t fall under “one of the worst incidences” that he can recall.

Forty-nine percent trust Clinton, versus 39 percent for Republicans. Meanwhile, PPP finds, “Congressional Republicans remain very unpopular with a 36/57 favorability rating.” Americans also think Congress should be focusing on more pressing issues such as immigration reform and gun control:

Voters think Congress should be more focused on other major issues right now rather than Benghazi. By a 56/38 margin they say passing a comprehensive immigration reform bill is more important than continuing to focus on Benghazi, and by a 52/43 spread they think passing a bill requiring background checks for all gun sales should be a higher priority.

A whopping 41 percent of Republicans polled think the Obama administration’s handling of Benghazi is the greatest scandal in U.S. history. “One interesting thing about the voters who think Benghazi is the biggest political scandal in American history,” PPP adds, “is that 39% of them don’t actually know where it is. 10% think it’s in Egypt, 9% in Iran, 6% in Cuba, 5% in Syria, 4% in Iraq, and 1% each in North Korea and Liberia with 4% not willing to venture a guess.”

In other news:

Reuters reports: A video of a Syrian rebel commander cutting the heart out of a soldier and biting into is emblematic of a civil war that has rapidly descended into sectarian hatred and revenge killings, Human Rights Watch said on Monday. The BBC has more.

The Henry L. Stimson Center, a Washington-based think tank, said in a report released on Monday that the Pentagon could save $1 trillion over the next ten years without eroding combat capabilities — or double the amount of cuts mandated under sequestration.

The Washington Post reports: After failing to halt Iran’s nuclear advances with harsh economic sanctions, a group of U.S. lawmakers and analysts is proposing a more drastic remedy: cutting off Iran entirely from world oil markets.

McClatchy reports: Disagreements among the countries backing the rebels in Syria have led to a drop in weapons shipments, leaving rebels vulnerable to a government military offensive.

Attorney General Eric Holder

Last year, the Associated Press reported that an Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) plot had been foiled, thanks to a timely intervention on the part of the United States. The plan, according to the AP’s March 2012 story, involved an upgrade of the “underwear bomb” used in the failed Christmas Day 2009 bomb plot that was meant to take down a passenger airplane in Detroit, MI.

Why that drew the attention of the Justice Department, however, is that the CIA was the one who foiled the plot, which the AP report made clear:

The FBI is examining the latest bomb to see whether it could have passed through airport security and brought down an airplane, officials said. They said the device did not contain metal, meaning it probably could have passed through an airport metal detector. But it was not clear whether new body scanners used in many airports would have detected it.

The would-be suicide bomber, based in Yemen, had not yet picked a target or bought a plane ticket when the CIA stepped in and seized the bomb, officials said. It’s not immediately clear what happened to the alleged bomber.

AP learned of the plot a week before publishing, but “agreed to White House and CIA requests not to publish it immediately” due to national security concerns. But, by reporting the CIA’s involvement in foiling the plot, they put AQAP on notice that the CIA had a window into their activities. The AP’s reporting also led to other stories involving an operative in place within AQAP, and details of the operations he was involved in. That operative, it was feared, would be exposed and targeted by AQAP as retribution for siding with the United States.

John Brennan, who is now the head of the CIA, said at his confirmation hearing that the release of information to AP was an “unauthorized and dangerous disclosure of classified information.” That the Department of Justice would be pursuing information on these leaks is also not new, given Attorney General Eric Holder’s appointment of federal prosecutors to look into the disclosures last year. What is surprising is the large amount of information the Justice Department seems to have acquired in its pursuit:

In all, the government seized those records for more than 20 separate telephone lines assigned to AP and its journalists in April and May of 2012. The exact number of journalists who used the phone lines during that period is unknown but more than 100 journalists work in the offices whose phone records were targeted on a wide array of stories about government and other matters.

The Associated Press released its letter to Holder denouncing the invasion of their records without their consent, calling it an “unprecedented step” and “a serious interference with AP’s constitutional rights to gather and report the news.”

In a statement on the case, the U.S. Attorney’s D.C. office claimed that “because we value the freedom of the press, we are always careful and deliberative in seeking to strike the right balance between the free flow of information and the public interest” in carrying out those laws. Despite that, this investigation appears unusually broad. And the full extent of the Department of Justice investigation, and whether other news outlets were targeted in the course of their inquiries, remains unclear.

In the day following the Benghazi attacks, Obama appeared at the White House Rose Garden alongside then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. In his remarks, Obama referred to the incident as an “act of terror” and used the phrase again at a campaign rally the day after in Denver, CO. “I want people around the world to hear me: To all those who would do us harm, no act of terror will go unpunished,” he said.

But Issa claimed that Obama relied on the “act of terror” formulation to dissuade Americans from thinking it was a terror attack, thus improving his chances of re-election.

“The president sent a letter to the President of Libya where he didn’t call it a terrorist attack even when at the time the President of Libya was calling it pre-planned Sept. 11 terrorist attack,” Issa told Fox News’ Megyn Kelly. “The words that are being used carefully — like you just said, ‘act of terror’ — an ‘act of terror’ is different than a ‘terrorist attack.’ The truth is, this was a terrorist attack, this had Al Qaeda at it.” Watch it:

Seven days after Obama’s comments at the Rose Garden, National Counterterrorism Center Director Matthew Olsen called the the assault in Benghazi an “opportunistic attack” in testimony before the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee. “I would say yes, they were killed in the course of a terrorist attack on our embassy,” he said, presumably pleasing Issa.