Paul’s isolationist message sets him apart from the rest of the Republican field, and many candidates have attacked his stances on dealing with Iran in particular. He’s in third place in the latest Iowa Poll, at 12 percent support, a level of backing that’s remained fairly steady over the last several months.

Paul said whistle blowers like Daniel Ellsberg – who released the Pentagon Papers in 1971 – and groups like WikiLeaks often aren’t considered heroic but are very important in a free society. Without Ellsberg, he said, people wouldn’t have known the Vietnam War “was all rigged.”

“In the same way we get information from groups like WikiLeaks confirming the fact that we actually went into Iraq and there was no Al Qaeda, no weapons of mass destruction, it was all a gimmick to get us into a war that we didn’t need to be in,” Paul said.

Politicians in Washington are generally in favor of protecting whistle blowers, but not on all topics, Paul said. In those cases “they come down very hard on the whistle blower.” The head of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, is under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice for publishing diplomatic cables.

“The area where neither the Democrats or Republican leadership seems to welcome any whistle blowing is when there’s an exposure on our foreign policy, the fallacies of why we go to war and what we do,” he said.

But Paul said that information is important, and the American people should know about those things prior to going to war.

“As a matter of fact, the best way to prevent this kind of dilemma for us getting the information after the fact, is we should have the information before the fact,” he said. “That is we should never go to war without a full examination and a declaration of war.”

Paul called U.S. foreign policy “deeply flawed” and said “it’s time for us to come home and mind our own business.” He particularly questioned the use of drone missile strikes and a new policy allowing assassinations of American citizens, like Anwar al-Awlaki and his son.

“You know that when the innocent get killed, because we go after one guy and some extras get killed, don’t you think they have a right to be a little bit annoyed with us?” he asked. “But here we are dropping drones on a daily basis.”

Paul said killing an American without charges, a trial or conviction is a dangerous precedent that throws out the whole system of protecting citizens’ rights.

“How intimidated do we have to be, how insecure do we have to be that we would assassinate a 16-year-old kid that is an American citizen because what is he going to do, is he going to launch a missile against us or something?” Paul said. “I fear much more the erosion of the protection of our liberties here at home and the erosion of our economy than I do from any foreign adversary.”

Paul made the comments at the National Federation of Republican Assemblies Straw Poll, which he won handily.

“My position is that the United States should not have gone into Libya because again the last chapter isn’t written. This is a snapshot in time,” Bachmann told Christiane Amanpour of ABC’s ‘This Week.’ “Clearly this was about regime change. That is the precursor for the United States’ involvement in another nation’s affairs.”

Bachmann said the result of Gaddafi’s overthrow was a “mess.”

“We don’t know who the next leader will be,” she said, “It could be a radical element. We knew who the devil was that was running. We don’t know that next one.”

She said Libya’s oil revenues could finance a “global caliphate and extremist elements.”

On Iran, Amanpour pressed Bachmann. She had earlier called the plot to assassinate the United States’ ambassador to Saudi Arabia an “act of war.” Iran has denied any involvement in the foiled plot.

Amanpour asked how she would retaliate against Iran if she were elected president.

“I think the one thing that I would do that is very different than President Obama is I wouldn’t take my eye off the fundamental problem in the Middle East and that is an Iran that is seeking to gain a nuclear weapon,” said Bachmann.

Amanpour pressed Bachmann again about what types of force she would use considering Bachmann had already declared the plot an act of war, but Bachmann dodged.

“I would consider the use of everything we need to do,” she said.

Here’s a full clip of Bachmann’s interview:

Rod Blagojevich is not corrupt; he’s just not the “sharpest knife in the drawer.”

Now it’s Republicans who need to “support our men in uniform.”

Massachusetts approves a plan to bypass the electoral college.

Voters don’t like self-financed campaigns.

Most Beautiful Person Scott Brown will model for Playboy, but not for the Hill.

Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio says he’ll jail protesters of the new immigration law.

More than 6,000 graves in Arlington Cemetery could be unmarked or mislabeled.

This Thursday in Wilmington, N.C., officials from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the government agency responsible for overseeing the country’s nuclear energy activities, are slated to present a report laying out the environmental impacts of a proposed uranium enrichment facility, a key step in approving the facility’s license. While NRC staff will spend nearly five hours in Ballroom 5 of the Warwick Center at the University of North Carolina going over the details of their report, it is what they won’t discuss that has arms control advocates worried.

[Security1] Advocates are focusing their attention on the proposed General Electric Hitachi uranium enrichment plant in Wilmington to shine a spotlight on what they see as a systemic flaw at the NRC: The commission does not conduct broad assessments of the proliferation concerns associated with licensing projects.

The proposed facility would, if successful, use laser technology for the first time to enrich uranium to power commercial nuclear reactors. Arms control advocates say that commercialization of the technology in the United States could lead other countries to follow suit, raising concerns about the technology falling into the wrong hands. Countries like Iran and South Korea have worked in the past to develop laser enrichment programs, and the experts fear successful commercialization of the technology in the United States would prove the technology’s viability and lead them to redouble their efforts.

There are a number of lingering questions surrounding the technology. Arms control advocates say it is unclear just how easy it would be to produce highly enriched uranium, which is used to make nuclear weapons, with the technology. And they worry that laser enrichment facilities could be difficult to detect for purposes of inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the group responsible for enforcing nuclear safeguards.

“The benefits might be worth the risks,” said James Acton of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “But the problem we have at the moment is we don’t know what the risks are. We don’t know how serious or significant they are. There’s just no way to make an informed decisions.”

The NRC and the Department of Energy have no mandatory framework for answering these questions, the arms control advocates say. While the Energy Department has conducted voluntary assessments of proliferation risk in the past, the NRC has long maintained that it does not need to conduct such an analysis.

GE Hitachi, for its part, maintains that the Energy Department and the State Department have “been tasked” with considering proliferation risks of the project, but the company could not provide any details on the results of any such assessment. The NRC, though it maintains that a separate proliferation assessment is not warranted, says that it follows a number of procedures to “guard against the unauthorized transfer of the technology.”

Responding to a Jan. 20 letter from Tom Clements, Southeast nuclear campaign coordinator for Friends of the Earth, the NRC said the commission “considers a nuclear nonproliferation impact assessment outside the scope of the agency’s statutory responsibilities.” The letter — signed by Office of Nuclear Material Safety and Safeguards Director Michael Weber — notes that the NRC already “limits the availability of special nuclear material”; “controls proliferation of sensitive technologies, both information and equipment, through physical protection, personnel security, information protection, and export controls”; and “participates in international activities to control nuclear materials, technology, facilities and equipment.”

Clements, in an interview with TWI, said the unwillingness of NRC to conduct a proliferation assessment “reveals a dangerous double standard, in my opinion, that the U.S. is more concerned about the proliferation risk of other countries and not from U.S. technology and materials which in the long run may pose global proliferation risks.” Clements, who is a staunch opponent of nuclear power, said the Energy Department has voluntarily prepared proliferation assessments in the past, but there is no requirement to do so.

“The lack of proper review of the proliferation risk of nuclear technologies is a problem endemic with both the NRC and [the Energy Department],” Clements said. “I am not aware of any requirement for the preparation of a document assessing the proliferation risk of U.S.-origin nuclear technologies.”

Miles Pomper, senior research associate at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, says that other countries are more likely to begin to adopt laser enrichment technology if GE Hitachi is able to demonstrate its success on a commercial level. The federal government needs to determine what the proliferation risks are if other countries begin commercializing this technology, he said. “What we’ve really been looking for is just someone to take this into account before moving forward with the technology,” Pomper said. “There’s no kind of studies, there’s no kind of action in terms of the government or others doing anything about this.” Pomper added that the Energy Department has no “formal responsibility” for conducting such an assessment.

Pomper, along with a number of other arms control advocates, signed on to a Sept. 30, 2009, letter to the NRC raising questions about the proposed laser enrichment facility. “Given the great difficulty of detecting laser isotope enrichment facilities, their spread could undermine U.S. nonproliferation efforts and the ability of the International Atomic Energy Agency to confirm the absence of undeclared nuclear activities,” the letter said.

Acton, of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, raised similar concerns. Although he says he is not “ideologically opposed” to laser enrichment technology, he pointed to what he calls the “follow the leader” effect. “Once one country tries to commercialize a technology like laser enrichment, if it does so successfully, it’s more or less inevitable that other countries are going to follow,” he said.

Acton laid out two main questions that need to be answered in a proliferation assessment. The first is how easily the technology can produce highly enriched uranium, which is used in nuclear weapons. The second is whether laser enrichment facilities would be difficult to detect and inspect if they were used in other countries like Iran. Acton said it is very difficult to detect the presence of nuclear centrifuge plants for the purposes of inspection.

“So, what about laser enrichment? Would a small, secret laser enrichment plant be easier to detect than a centrifuge plant? If the answer is yes, I’m not particularly worried about it,” Acton said. “If it’s harder to detect than a centrifuge plant, it would add to our problem very significantly.”

Michael Tetuan, a spokesperson for GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy, said “protecting this technology is obviously our highest concern.” He also said that both the State Department and Energy Department “have been tasked with looking at the proliferation aspects of this,” but he was not able to offer any further details on what specifically the departments considered. Tetuan also said that much of the information is likely classified, leaving little opportunity for the public to evaluate the proliferation risks.

Responding to the concerns, David McIntyre, an NRC spokesperson, said, “The idea that U.S. development of laser enrichment technology would set an example that other countries would follow presupposes that other countries would be able to procure or develop the technology.”

NRC’s current procedures ensure against proliferation, McIntye said. “NRC limits the availability of special nuclear material; controls proliferation of sensitive technologies, both information and equipment, through physical protection, personnel security, information protection, and export controls; and participates in international activities to control nuclear materials, technology, facilities and equipment,” McIntyre said. He also noted that the government conducted an assessment of the proliferation risks of laser enrichment technology when it negotiated an agreement with Australia to allow use of the technology in the United States.

“As to whether U.S. development of laser enrichment capacity will set an example for other countries to follow, that is a policy question for the president, other federal agencies such as the Department of State, and the Congress,” McIntyre said.

A spokesperson for the Nuclear Energy Institute, the nuclear industry’s trade association, directed requests for comment to GE Hitachi. An Energy Department spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment.

Here’s what Crocker said yesterday:

That [diplomatic channel over Afghanistan with Iran in 2001] actually did produce some modest results. More importantly, it was the beginning of a process of sitting down away from the klieg lights and bounce things back and forth. I was in Kabul at the time of the ‘Axis of Evil’ [speech] and I can tell you it was a very interesting meeting in [U.N. official] Lakhdar Brahimi’s office after that with my Iranian counterpart.

It did not end the channel. But it certainly changed the tone. And the key Iranian response to the ‘Axis of Evil’ was to send Gulbuddin Hekmatyar back into Afghanistan. We had been talking to the Iranians up to that point about the possibility of Hekmatyar, who was under house arrest, being transferred to the Karzai government.

So in response to one rhetorical move — co-authored by David Frum, no less — that created an arbitrary category for Iran, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and North Korea, the Iranian leadership hedged its bets on cooperating with with the U.S. on post-Taliban Afghanistan and released a murderer back into the war zone.

Crocker, as best I can tell, has told this story before, to Newsweek, but it hasn’t gotten much attention. He told the CNAS crowd that he thinks there’s still a chance for re-engagement with Iran over Afghanistan, but it will take the auspices of a United Nations process to restart that channel. And that’s with a far more hardline Iranian government in power and new U.N.-approved sanctions on the regime. “A lot of blood is under the bridge for both of us,” Crocker said.

This will not be the last effort at sanctioning Iran. U.S. and European officials have talked for months about pivoting off a successful Security Council vote to cobble together a coalition of major Iranian trading partners to tighten the economic screws on the Iranian leadership. Those include the United Arab Emirates, South Korea, Japan, the European Union, China and Russia. But expect conservative voices to continue a push for a total oil embargo on Iran, as a congressional measure to impose additional gas sanctions was deferred for the vote.

Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas will ask President Barack Obama Wednesday for “bold decisions” on the Middle East but US-led peace moves face a torrid climate after Israel’s Gaza flotilla raid.

Obama will welcome Abbas to the White House seeking to ensure regional fury over the May 31 Israeli commando strike does not doom indirect Israel-Palestinian talks that took months for Washington to organize.

He will also discuss American efforts to break through a “status-quo” on the blockaded Gaza Strip, which his administration describes as “untenable” following the deadly Israeli maritime raid, which killed nine Turks.

“Bold moves.” Breaking through the Gaza “status quo.” If all of that sounds vague and tentative, some Mideast watchers think that’s because the post-flotilla atmosphere between Israel, the West Bank-only Palestinian Authority and the Obama administration is marked primarily by confusion. Even after the raid, Obama may want Abbas to show an openness to moving beyond the indirect “proximity talks” — whereby George Mitchell, the administration’s envoy for Mideast peace, plays a game of telephone to convey messages between the Israelis, the Palestinians and the Americans — and to direct negotiations. And in this op-ed for The Hill, Abbas loudly proclaims his desire for dialogue — without specifics about the form that dialogue should take. But after the raid, can Abbas really sell his people on the idea of moving more aggressively in the direction of talks with the Israelis?

“I’m not so sure that any of the actors here is exactly sure what they want, or what they can go in expecting,” said Lucy Kurtzer-Ellenbogen, an Arab-Israeli conflict specialist at the U.S. Institute of Peace who just returned from a trip last week to Israel and the West Bank. “You have that with [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu, where I don’t think he knows what he wants or what his next move is, I’m not sure the Obama administration does, and I don’t think Abbas does. And partly everyone is hoping the other side is going to come in and provide the solution.” She described the diplomatic climate ahead of Abbas’s visit as “collective breathholding.”

This is the first presidential meeting since the flotilla crisis. Obama will meet with Netanyahu soon after, following a charm offensive by the Obama administration to publicly proclaim Netanyahu as a partner. Obama and Abbas can talk about ways to perhaps get Netanyahu to ease the Gaza siege. But what will Netanyahu say?

Henri Barkey, a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Middle East Program, had an idea for Israel to turn the diplomatic tables on Hamas for the first time since establishing the Gaza blockade. They can reiterate their call for Hamas to release captured soldier Gilad Shalit; rely on international assurances against Hamas-driven attacks from across the border in Gaza; and then lifting the blockade. “You put this as your condition, and then you put Hamas in the corner,” Barkey said at a morning meeting at the U.S. Institute of Peace. “Because then Hamas will have to decide whether to accept these things, and you completely shift the discourse.”

Speaking of the Israelis, though, Barkey said, “I don’t know why they’re not doing it. To me that’s a no-lose situation, because the onus is on the other side. And then you ask for international guarantees, so you can say that if a rocket gets fired [into Israel] then Hamas will have to live with the consequences internationally.”

“We have reached agreement on a strong draft with the cooperation of both Russia and China,” Clinton told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee today.

“We plan to circulate that draft resolution to the entire Security Council today,” Clinton said. “I think this announcement is as convincing an answer to the efforts undertaken in Tehran over the last few days as any we could provide.

Could be bluster, or it could be that Clinton has a whip count.

Q You’re not concerned at this point that this is going to unravel the whole deal?

MR. GIBBS: No. Again, I think there’s — as I said, there are certain steps that would certainly be progress. I think it’s important to understand what this proposal signifies is less than what they agreed to last October — an understanding that the words and the deeds of the Iranian leadership rarely coincide. So I think before we have — I think we have to get — the international community has to see the proposal in its detail through the IAEA before it can make a final determination.

Notice the burden shifting back to Iran. Gibbs continued:

Q Just the fact that Iran appears to be agreeing to something, even though you want more information to be sent to the IAEA, is this a step in the right direction?

MR. GIBBS: Well, again, I’m reticent to — well, even as I said — if they were to make good on this and ship out 1,200 kilograms of low-enriched uranium, yes, that would represent progress. But, again, Dan, I think it is important to understand that this is less than — this agreement is — or proposal is less than what they agreed to last October. And understand that even though they agreed to this last October, it never came to pass because they changed their mind. So that’s why I say the words and the deeds of the leadership in Iran have rarely coincided.

That’s similar to a preliminary conclusion reached by the Institute for Science and International Security, which finds “no reason to stop negotiating in the Security Council the imposition of sanctions on Iran”:

Such an exchange of LEU [Low-Enriched Uranium] today, however, would take place today under very different circumstances.  Iran has continued to enrich uranium in the intervening seven months.  Iran has also begun its own effort at the Natanz Pilot Enrichment Plant to produce 20 percent enriched uranium (the level needed for the Tehran Research Reactor), announced plans to deploy a more advanced centrifuge, and start building two more centrifuge plants without notifying the IAEA until late in the construction process.  Additional outstanding issues with the IAEA also remain.  In particular, despite repeated requests, Iran continues to be uncooperative with the IAEA on implementing more effective safeguards and answering questions about its alleged work on researching the design and delivery of nuclear warheads.

So, at first blush, nothing really ruled in or ruled out. But judge for yourself. Gibbs:

We acknowledge the efforts that have been made by Turkey and Brazil. The proposal announced in Tehran must now be conveyed clearly and authoritatively to the IAEA before it can be considered by the international community. Given Iran’s repeated failure to live up to its own commitments, and the need to address fundamental issues related to Iran’s nuclear program, the United States and international community continue to have serious concerns. While it would be a positive step for Iran to transfer low-enriched uranium off of its soil as it agreed to do last October, Iran said today that it would continue its 20% enrichment, which is a direct violation of UN Security Council resolutions and which the Iranian government originally justified by pointing to the need for fuel for the Tehran Research Reactor. Furthermore, the Joint Declaration issued in Tehran is vague about Iran’s willingness to meet with the P5+1 countries to address international concerns about its nuclear program, as it also agreed to do last October.

The United States will continue to work with our international partners, and through the United Nations Security Council, to make it clear to the Iranian government that it must demonstrate through deeds – and not simply words – its willingness to live up to international obligations or face consequences, including sanctions. Iran must take the steps necessary to assure the international community that its nuclear program is intended exclusively for peaceful purposes, including by complying with U.N. Security Council resolutions and cooperating fully with the IAEA. We remain committed to a diplomatic solution to the Iranian nuclear program, as part of the P5+1 dual track approach, and will be consulting closely with our partners on these developments going forward.