United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon (Photo: Flickr/World Economic Forum)

The tea party has added another item to its list of reasons to fear the United Nations: Some in the movement say the U.N. is planning to intervene in the United States’ upcoming elections.

This week, when Attorney General Eric Holder announced his speech on voting rights, the Texas group True the Vote called for a protest of the event because “Holder is for NAACP Plans to involve the United Nations in US Elections.” [Their emphasis.]

True the Vote, a voter integrity initiative launched by the Houston tea party group King Street Patriots, held a national summit this year featuring some of the right’s most incendiary speakers, such as Andrew Breitbart, The Texas Independent reported. According to the Independent, “representatives from more than 25 states attended the two-day national summit in Houston to receive training and information about the conservative organization’s efforts to combat voter fraud.”

The Independent reported back in March that the group was a 501(c)4 nonprofit and had applied for 501(c)3 nonprofit status.

Catherine Engelbrecht, the president of King Street Patriots, said during the group’s summit that she was hoping to mobilize teams of three people to oversee each voting precinct in the country. That would add up to roughly 1 million right-wing tea party volunteers nationwide by the 2012 general election, the Independent reported.

Tea Party Manatee, based in Southwest Florida, sent out an email newsletter this week, echoing the King Street Patriots’ latest fight and warning that the U.N. is “trying to Intervene in 2012 Elections.”

According to group’s email:

• In November 2012 Foreign bureaucrats will appear at your polling station to ensure you adhere to their vision of a ‘fair’ election.
• Local polling officials who dare to enforce state clean election laws will be subject to lawsuits and arrest.
• Conservative political speech will be deemed hateful and be suppressed.
• Just enough voter fraud will be allowed to ensure a second term for Barack Hussein Obama.

This is not a fantasy – next week it will start to become reality when a delegation of leftist Obama supporters will meet with the United Nations High Commissioner on Human Rights in Geneva, Switzerland. And there they will lay the groundwork to ensure the United Nations takes action in time to save Barack Obama.

You see, the Democratic Left is terrified of the new clean election laws being passed across America. These laws have cleared our voter lists of the dead and the ineligible, require voter identification for everyone and insist that our military be allowed to vote.

And clean elections are the single greatest weapon we have to ensure an honest vote in 2012 and a single term for Barack Obama. And the Left can’t allow that to happen.

So they will make their case for action to the UN Human Rights Council – an international government origination so biased that even Hillary Clinton has denounced it.

Council members like Saudi Arabia, Cuba, Mexico and China will review your election laws and judge if you measure up to their idea of democracy. How can we accomplish any of our goals, like repealing health care rationing, securing the borders and balancing our budget if we can’t even control our own elections?

That’s why we need to send a clear message to the UN – stay out of America’s elections and abandon Barack Obama to the judgment of the American people. I need you to tell the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to send that very message to the United Nations – by any means necessary.

It’s difficult to trace the exact origin of this particular hysteria, but one of the earliest mentions of the NAACP’s plan to involve the U.N. came in a report by Fox News.

According to Fox:

The NAACP is calling on the United Nations to intervene as it claims state governments are colluding to “block the vote” for minority communities ahead of the 2012 election — a charge those governments vehemently deny.

The nation’s biggest civil rights organization this week released a report that claimed a raft of new voting laws at the state level would disenfranchise minority voters. The report said 14 states passed 25 measures “designed to restrict or limit the ballot access of voters of color.”

…

Supporters of the laws describe them as common-sense measures meant to ensure the integrity of elections. In Tennessee, which is implementing a new photo ID law, elections coordinator Mark Goins dismissed the criticism and questioned why the NAACP would flag the United Nations over its concerns, calling that effort “a bit extreme.”

“I don’t know what the benefit of going to the U.N. would be,” he said. “I can’t imagine any authority whatsoever that they would have here in Tennessee.”

But the NAACP described the new measures as part of a “concerted” effort to drive down minority turnout and is planning a multi-stage campaign to attract international attention.

To start, the group is planning a “Stand 4 Freedom” rally this Saturday across from the U.N. headquarters. Supporters are being asked to sign an online pledge which, among other demands, calls on the United Nations to “investigate and condemn voter suppression tactics in the United States.”

Copies of the latest report are being sent to the United Nations, as well as attorneys general across the country and the Department of Justice. According to one newspaper report, the NAACP will follow up in March when it sends a delegation to Geneva, Switzerland, to present its case before the U.N. Human Rights Council — a group known more for its sustained criticism of Israel than its attention to voting rights.

An NAACP spokesman says the organization is just doing its duty as one of the 3,500 groups that “has consulting status” with the U.N. The group simply works with the international organization to make sure the United States is “living up to its commitment” to an initiative to eliminate discrimination, the spokesperson says.

He also says that the U.N. does not have the power to actually intervene in state matters, and can only interview people and create reports through the Human Rights Council.

“We are just working to make sure the U.S. remains a beacon of democracy,” the NAACP spokesperson says.

The NAACP will be giving a presentation in Geneva to the Human Rights Council in March 2012 as part of its consulting status.

“We are for human dignity and justice and freedom from oppression for all of mankind,” CMS President Talib Syed told The Colorado Independent. “It doesn’t matter whether it’s here in the United States or in Africa or in Europe or the Middle East. Anything that happens that restores human dignity and gives rights to every human being throughout the world, we embrace it.”

Syed, who is of Indian descent, points out that only 20 percent of the world’s 1.2 billion Muslims worldwide live in the Middle East. He said no single country of origin dominates Colorado’s estimated 10,000 to 15,000-strong Muslim community, although in recent years a growing number of refugees from war-torn nations such as Somalia, Sudan, Afghanistan and Iraq have come to comprise the congregation of 2,000 to 2,500 at the society’s mosque on Parker Road in Denver.

Syed said the United States must support the spread of freedom and human dignity around the globe, even if it sometimes runs counter to the nation’s strategic interests.

“Sometimes we embrace this if it suits us and sometimes we just shut up and try to pretend that no, it doesn’t apply to us, because it may have some negative consequences for us,” Syed said. “What it means is democracy is good if it suits me and it’s bad if it doesn’t suit me. I’m free and I’m not free.”

In the wake of popular uprisings starting last month that toppled autocratic regimes in Tunisia and Egypt and threatened hard-line rulers backed by the United States in Yemen and Bahrain, the unprecedented wave of democratic protest sparked bloody confrontation in Libya over the weekend, where strongman Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi reportedly ordered the slaughter of demonstrators.

The unrest and crackdown sent oil prices sharply higher Tuesday and also touched off ripples of nervousness throughout the region, where Israel reacted coolly to Iranian warships passing through the Suez Canal and Saudi leaders took measures to appease people in the world’s largest oil-exporting nation.

Syed said he and the Colorado Muslim Society’s membership, made up of Muslims from all around the world, appreciate the tricky position the Obama administration is in. It is difficult to only selectively support democracy when it is in the national interest, he said.

“I think that’s what our administration is also faced with because we are realizing now that if we want to push democracy throughout the world and then suddenly we find out that certain decisions that are made might not suit us, then we look bad,” Syed said.

In the small gulf nation of Bahrain, home to the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet, U.S. policy on human rights and a lack of support for the nation’s repressed Shiite majority is being called into question. But some on the American right, including Tea Party stalwarts like Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck, have expressed fear that Islamic fundamentalists will fill the leadership void in the Middle East and stop the flow of oil to the United States.

Members of Colorado’s congressional delegation have remained relatively quiet on developments in the Middle East, with Democratic Sen. Mark Udall expressing support for democracy in Egypt after 30 years of oppression under President Hosni Mubarak. Republican U.S. Rep. Doug Lamborn last month posted a statement calling for greater domestic energy production.

“With the recent turmoil in Egypt, speculation has ensued over the possible shutdown of the Suez Canal, which ferries through about 1.8 million barrels of oil every day,” Lamborn said. “Events of recent days underscore our need to reduce our dependence on foreign oil so our economy is not dependent on volatile foreign issues. America needs American-made energy.”

Muhammad Ali Hasan, a former Colorado Republican political figure who helped found Muslims for America, told TCI that fears of a fundamentalist takeover are overblown.

“It is wrong for anyone to state that the protests in the Middle East are a bad thing, because ultimately the Muslim world should be given a chance,” Hasan said from California, where he is joining the Democratic Party in Orange County. Hasan said that in 2008, 53 of the 56 Muslim nations worldwide were working with the United States to combat terrorist groups like al-Qaeda.

“During these changing times, we should naturally expect the political climate in the Muslim world to change, and based on data by Terror Free Tomorrow, we should expect that change to be charged by pro-liberty agents who are sympathetic to America, not al-Qaeda,” Hasan said.

However, Hasan agrees with Lamborn that there could be interruptions of the flow of oil to the United States and therefore impacts to the global economy.

“I do think that Congressman Lamborn brings up a good point about finding alternatives to oil or pushing domestic production, because in the short term oil sales could be disrupted,” Hasan said. “However, even the harshest dictator, including [Venezuela’s] Hugo Chavez and [Iran’s] Mahmoud Ahmadinejad loves to sell oil. If anything, over the long term, this will bode well for oil prices because there’s less unity now in OPEC price fixing, so the natural course should be more competition and lower prices.

“However, oil prices aside, our motivations should not be dictated by oil,” Hasan added. “The Muslim world needs an injection of liberty, and these protests give this world that chance. It is an encouraging sign.”

President Obama meeting with Michael Leiter, center right, and other intelligence officials at the National Counterterrorism Center in October (UPPA/ZUMApress.com)

President Obama is scheduled to meet on Tuesday afternoon with 20 of his security advisers to receive the results of two inquiries into how Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab snuck a bomb onto Northwest Airlines Flight 253 on Christmas Day. One of those advisers is Michael Leiter, the Bush-appointed director of the National Counterterrorism Center, a hub created after 9/11 for the intelligence community’s voluminous data about terrorist plots and ambitions. While NCTC, as it’s known, has taken much criticism in the media over the past two weeks for failing to flag Abdulmutallab as a threat, NCTC has so far evaded criticism over a structural problem it still faces five years after its creation: of the 300 analysts working at the center, fewer than a dozen focus full-time on the Middle East.

[Security1] According to NCTC veterans, the NCTC’s Middle East Branch consists of eight to nine analysts at any given time. Those analysts are responsible for integrating and analyzing millions of pieces of fragmentary data relevant to terrorism in the Middle East provided by partner intelligence agencies like the CIA and the National Security Agency. They disseminate their synthesis throughout the intelligence community and into the law-enforcement and policymaking worlds, to ensure officials perceive previously hidden connections that might reveal the next al-Qaeda plot and act accordingly. And they’re responsible for analysis of a region central to the organization: Saudi Arabia, birthplace of Osama bin Laden and ancestral home of most 9/11 hijackers; Iraq, rocked by years of war and occupation; the restive Levant, Israel and the Palestinian territories, a decades-long hotbed of extremism; and Yemen, where the Nigeria-born Abdulmutallab received his explosive device from a growing al-Qaeda presence.

“There’s limited manpower and finite resources,” said a former NCTC analyst who, like several colleagues in the intelligence community, described the state of the Middle East Branch on condition of anonymity. Longstanding and government-wide shortfalls in language resources afflict the branch as well, the analyst said: “Very few people speak Arabic, and very few have ever been to the region.”

An individual familiar with NCTC’s current operations did not dispute the number of Middle East Branch analysts. But the individual said focusing on the number was misleading, because NCTC can shift analysts around from across the center to surge attention and resources to deal with an emerging problem. “There might be eight or nine people that are deemed those particular experts, but across the Center, there’s a heck of a lot more that can be drawn upon,” the individual said, citing more-experienced supervisors and additional NCTC branches and groups working on related issues that can contribute as needed.

But several NCTC veterans, none of whom would agree to be identified because of their ongoing involvement with the intelligence community, discussed chronic shortfalls of manpower at the agency. One NCTC veteran described a single analyst — “yes, singular,” a different former NCTC analyst emphasized — who until recently was responsible for analysis of terrorism on the entire Arabian Peninsula, apparently during the time when al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula has emerged as what Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Monday termed a “global threat.”

A different U.S. intelligence official pushed back on the importance of that seeming shortfall. “Yemen has been an area of significant focus by this organization and others around the government,” the intelligence official said. Pointing to the eight or nine analysts on the Branch is “wholly misleading,” because others in NCTC work on aspects of terrorism analysis for al-Qaeda not specifically related to Yemen or the Middle East that assist understanding al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. But the official continued, “Now, there may be one primary person who’s looking at a particular area or has particular expertise or is a regional expert or is a country expert, OK, let’s say that’s ‘The Person.’ But with all that’s been going on in that country” — a reference to U.S. intelligence-assisted strikes on the terrorist organization — “it is totally wrong to think that there is just one person that’s watching Yemen.”

Since passengers and crew aboard Northwest Flight 253 prevented Abdulmutallab from detonating a device hidden in his underwear, overwhelming media and political attention has focused on how NCTC synthesized fragmentary bits of data acquired about Abdulmutallab and the organization that outfitted him, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the Yemen-based franchise of the terrorist network. The most specific piece of information NCTC received came from officials at the U.S. embassy in Abuja, Nigeria, after the would-be bomber’s father told embassy staff on Nov. 19 that Abdulmutallab might be an extremist. An interagency process led by NCTC determined that the information did not meet an agreed-upon standard of “specific derogatory information leading to reasonable suspicion” necessary to place Abdulmutallab on a terrorist database maintained by the FBI, a precursor to placement on the no-fly list. Frustrated intelligence officials have wondered what they were really supposed to do with those data fragments, and have expressed bitterness over becoming a media scapegoat — and having other government departments blame them for the Christmas Day near-attack.

John Brennan, Obama’s senior White House counterterrorism adviser and the first director of NCTC, said on ABC’s “This Week” that a positive sign in the Abdulmutallab case was that unlike before 9/11, there was “no evidence whatsoever” that the various intelligence agencies with information on Abdulmutallab or al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula were “reluctant to share” with each other. The trouble, Brennan said — and will likely report to Obama on Tuesday afternoon — was that “there are millions upon millions of bits of data that come in on a regular basis. What we need to do is make sure the system is robust enough that we can bring that information to the surface that really is a threat concern.”

Yet some experts question NCTC’s organizational configuration for such synthesis. Staffing the Middle East Branch with eight or nine full-time analysts is “a baffling management decision” said Steven Aftergood, an intelligence-policy analyst with the Federation of American Scientists. “Other than South Asia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, what is more important than the Middle East from a counterterrorism point of view? Where are the other several hundred [NCTC] analysts focused?”

Much of NCTC remains outside public view. Its budget is classified, a component of the budget allocated to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence — which is also not publicly disclosed.

NCTC veterans described a situation where the requirements of preventing terrorist attacks outweighed the resources provided to NCTC. “The sheer volume of intel is amazing,” one said. “The word ‘jihad’ is on the Internet every single day, it’s like [several] billion hits. And there’s no way you can track every email or cellphone conversation.”

Compounding the challenge is the questionable experience of many NCTC analysts, about 60 percent of whom are on loan from other intelligence organizations on two-year rotations. One of the former NCTC analysts described eager and dedicated colleagues being assigned to areas of expertise they did not come to NCTC possessing; as well as analysts reassigned from their areas of focus to assist with the latest crisis.

“You’re assigned to Yemen? Great, but you don’t know who the players are, what the [country's] resources are, and you don’t know where al-Qaeda fits into the whole process,” the former analyst said. Analysts will often be asked to be brought up to speed by their colleagues or predecessors. The two-year rotations are meant to encourage a culture of intelligence sharing within the 16 intelligence agencies of the U.S. government. Some intelligence professionals believe that those rotations ultimately give CIA or Defense Department analysts a broader perspective about an intelligence question. Others lament that their acquired expertise rotates back from NCTC to their partner agencies. “The nature of this organization is that people leave their jobs every two years,” the ex-NCTC analyst said.

The center’s hundreds of analysts are organized into units looking at extremist groups, various regions of the world where they operate, and questions about the groups’ capabilities and intentions. “There’s staffing that’s re-prioritized all the time. None of this is set in stone,” said a U.S. intelligence official. “People are put on particular groups and task forces that examine issues closely as they emerge. The numbers themselves are not really telling you the story of how much can be put against a particular issue or topic or threat that’s emerging.”

But with Brennan talking about an accelerated need to “bring [terrorism] information together so when a father comes in with information and we have intelligence, we can map that,” some in the intelligence community are concerned that the already overtaxed NCTC will be asked to synthesize even more fragmentary data from its contributing intelligence agencies. “What you’ll end up doing is opening up the firehose to full blast,” said one. “They’re barely able to handle what they have right now.” Indeed, Marc Ambinder of the Atlantic reported Tuesday that before the attempted Christmas attack, Leiter and the NCTC’s leadership were preparing for 2010 budget cuts. The U.S. intelligence official who defended NCTC added, “Clearly, if people believe more resources have to be applied against something, it’ll be identified” for Congress to approve, although the official said that conclusion was premature.

Aftergood, however, questioned whether NCTC’s performance merited giving the center additional funding or manpower. “There’s a tendency to say if organization fails in its mission we should give it more resources, and if it succeeds in mission we should give it more resources,” he said. “There are some other questions we need to examine first, such as: is this organization properly structured to accomplish its mission? Maybe there’s an explanation for the surprisingly small allocation of Mideast analysts, but it’s not at all obvious.”

Some Gitmo prisoners, particularly Yemenis with ties to Saudi Arabia, have been sent there to participate in the terrorist rehabilitation program run by the Saudi government. The effectiveness of that program has been the subject of controversy.

Although Holder and Defense Secretary Robert Gates have defended the program, Sessions today wrote that 11 of Saudi Arabia’s 85 most wanted terrorists are “graduates” of the country’s rehabilitation program.

“The list of failed participants in the Saudi program reads like a ‘who’s who’ of Al Qaeda terrorists on the Arabian Peninsula,” Sessions wrote. Sessions said participants in the program have included Said Ali al Shiri, the deputy leader of al-Qaeda in Yemen; Ibrahim Suleiman al Rubaish, al-Qaeda’s mufti, or theological leader, in the Arabian Peninsula; Abu Hareth Muhammad al-Awfi, who appeared in an al-Qaeda video in January 2009; Yousef Mohammed al Shihri, who was shot by Saudi security forces in October 2009 while trying to pass through a security checkpoint wearing women’s clothing and an explosives belt.

Sessions cited a May 2009 New York Times report which said that “the Pentagon believes that 74 prisoners released from Guantánamo have returned to terrorism or militant activity.” If true, that would mean about 1 in 7 of the 534 detainees that had been released by last May had subsequently engaged in terrorist activity.

“If the administration continues to rely on the Saudi program, I fear this number will only increase,” wrote Sessions.

The Saudi rehabilitation program reportedly includes a mix of religious, psychological and social programs that ultimately aim to give participants a stable social network and financial opportunities so that they won’t have to rely on terrorists. Family and tribal leaders then take responsibility for their their future behavior.

The Obama administration has sent some Yemenis to Saudi Arabia rather than return them to Yemen because the U.S. government has less confidence in Yemeni officials’ ability to prevent the men from joining local terrorist organizations. Because nearly 100 Yemenis remain in detention at Guantanamo, however, the administration is under serious pressure to find someplace to send them in order to fulfill its promise of closing the prison camp next year.

President Obama has already acknowledged that Guantanamo will not be closed by his original January 2010 deadline.

Beijing recognizes that a nuclear-armed Iran would almost certainly be detrimental to its energy security. Iran’s development of a nuclear weapons capability — and the regional nuclear arms race this might trigger — would foster instability in the Persian Gulf, jeopardizing the free flow of oil into the market. It could also strain China’s relationship with Saudi Arabia, which has been China’s top crude oil supplier for most of this decade and opposes Iran’s going nuclear. And despite appearances, China does not want to jeopardize its relationship with the United States. Not only does Beijing value its relations with Washington more than its ties to Tehran, but it relies on the U.S. Navy to protect the sea lanes between the Persian Gulf and China.

These are good reasons to believe that the Chinese would back an international effort to ensure the Iranian nuclear program doesn’t have a military dimension. They already do. But this alone doesn’t get you Chinese endorsement or acquiescence of punitive measures. If I understand FP’s point correctly, the Saudis would have to threaten to cut off Chinese oil imports to ensure China’s complicity in an oil-sanctions regime. But would they? Not only have the Saudis not stated support for such an embargo, the Saudis didn’t even support an oil embargo over the Gaza war. We’re a couple of billiard-shots away from this policy coming together. Maybe it could, but it doesn’t seem likely. We’re far from getting Russian support, on top of all this.

On his FP blog, Dan Drezner had this to say:

In fact, here’s a good time-saver:  if you read any story about a gasoline embargo [of] Iran, just scan quickly and get to the part where the reporter explains how and why Russia and China would go along.  If it’s not mentioned, the story is inconsequential.

As Dan says, quoting the ever-talented Belle Waring, this is shaping up to be quite the pony-wishing exercise.

What’s more, five days after ago, Human Rights Watch put out a statement criticizing a Saudi law for insufficiently protecting the rights of domestic workers. At Opinio Juris, Kevin Jon Heller has a post compiling a number of additional criticisms of Saudi Arabia on a variety of human rights fronts. And while in Saudia Arabia in May, Whitson says she spent much of her four day trip researching information the group acquired about women’s rights in the kingdom. Curious positions to take if Human Rights Watch is bought and paid for.

If you read closely, the Journal piece, by David Bernstein, doesn’t actually come out and accuse Human Rights Watch of raising money from the Saudi government — merely raising money from people in Saudi Arabia, as if that is itself problematic. Whitson posted a reply on that point in Bernstein’s comments:

What’s really at the heart of Mr. Bernstein’s gripe is his misconception that efforts to raise support among Saudis are unseemly because, well, if they live in a totalitarian country, they must be bad people too. Human Rights Watch accepts funding from private individuals and foundations the world over, which we never allow to affect the independence of our work. We are proud to have a Saudi on the Middle East Advisory Committee and look forward to building an even stronger support base throughout the region.
Support from citizens of Arab countries for the work of Human Rights Watch – including our vocal, public criticism of rights violations by their governments – is something to be applauded, not denigrated. Believe it or not, some Arabs believe in human rights too.

Ben Smith points out some interesting facts about the previous president’s treasonous use of Arabic, but I’ve got a bigger scoop — one surely destined to be blasted across Drudge. David Petraeus, commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East, has nefariously concealed his Muslim heritage. But now it can be told! Just look at what he told the press as he was ending his tour as U.S. commander in Iraq last September:

GEN. PETRAEUS: Well, again, As-Salamu ‘Alaykum, masa’ al-kheir, good afternoon to all of you, and shukran jaziilan for joining us for today’s roundtable.

Can we really trust military commanders who speak other languages on occasion? Everyone knows that by adopting a different language you disrespect the monolinguistic United States and effectively become a citizen of the country in which that language is uttered. Come to think of it, have we ever really seen Petraeus’s birth certificate?

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In this manner, Obama appears to have followed the same path taken by his predecessor, in creating more enmity towards Muslims, and adding on to the fighting enemies, thus paving the way for new long wars.

Let the American people prepare to continue harvesting what their White House leaders grow, in the years and decades to come.

They say the classics never go out of style. But more distressing that bin Laden’s expected bleating is the lack of rapid response from the administration’s public diplomacy infrastructure. If this were a political campaign, the pushback would have begun already. But so far there’s nothing from the State Department’s blog taking bin Laden’s message down.

Now, there have to be a number of caveats to my criticism. First, Obama’s Cairo speech tomorrow is, of course, a massive public diplomacy effort aimed at essentially refuting bin Laden’s worldview, even if the president doesn’t mention bin Laden. Second, the administration’s announced National Security Council shakeup last week is creating a White House director for interagency public diplomacy, so that represents an elevation of the importance of public diplomacy. Third, an argument that I don’t personally find persuasive but others might is that you don’t want the president of the United States in a back-and-forth with an al-Qaeda mass murderer. Fourth, Judith McHale’s testimony to the Senate last month to be the State Department’s public diplomacy chief made some gestures to treating public diplomacy as a national security issue, and embraced a series of Web 2.0 tools for rapid response. Fifth, the bin Laden tape was just released.

But I’m not going to let all that get in the way of my complaint! The longer bin Laden’s dreck is out there, the greater likelihood it’ll spread through the information bloodstream, and experience demonstrates that disinformation will be accepted if it’s not promptly confronted. The State Department has existing infrastructure set up — the DipNote blog, its Tweeting, and so forth — to get the U.S. message out, and yet it rarely spends much effort countering anti-American messages directly. Similarly, the Pentagon is getting out of the public diplomacy business for fear of edging too closely into propaganda. That’s laudable, but it contributes to an information lacuna that several administrations have failed to address.

General David Petraeus added his voice to the mix in a front page interview in the influential Saudi paper al-Hayat, saying that resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would improve American security and weaken its adversaries.  (Perhaps the imprimatur of Gen. Petraeus will sway some American skeptics as well?)

Maybe, maybe not. It’s somewhat bewildering that a figure of Petraeus’ stature would be needed to express what ought to be an uncontroversial assertion — a settled Israel-Palestinian issue is a net security positive to the United States and a net loss to its enemies — but we are where we are. In The New York Times today there’s a piece elaborating on the administration’s approach to stopping Israeli settlement expansion, which is one of several obstacles to a peace settlement, but according to the Jerusalem Post, Israeli Premier Benjamin Netanyahu rejects that American demand as “unreasonable.” Petraeus’ interview to al-Hayat will be read as a statement of American intent — though, alas, I can’t read it for its specifics, so perhaps it’s merely a generic statement — and there will be a price to pay in the Arab world if the administration backtracks on the settlement issue.

Renditions yes, “extraordinary renditions,” no, said Panetta. Usually when “moving someone outside the country for prosecution.” Panetta clarifies that his comments that extraordinary rendition and torture occurred during the Bush administration were based on the overwhelming public record, including “[Former CIA Director] Mike Hayden’s acknowledgment” that people were waterboarded, not specific CIA confessions. “It is clear there were black sites, it is clear individuals were brought there … clearly steps were taken that prompted this president to say they will not be taken anymore.” Bond just wants to say the Clinton administration is as dirty as the Bush administration.

Were there renditions that resulted in torture, either during the Clinton or Bush administrations? “I can neither affirm nor deny … my understanding there were renditions to countries that engage in behavior from what I’ve seen in the press. … I have no official information from within that those kinds of rendition took place.” Bond says that this is different from a “blanket statement” on renditions. Happy now? “I suspect that. .. we have rendered individuals to other countries that use techniques to get information … that violate our own standards,” Panetta said, arms folded across his chest.

And — following extra lines of questioning about Saudi programs to rehabilitate incarcerated jihadists, Hamas, and institutional challenges with human intelligence — we’re out for today. Bond didn’t come out and oppose Panetta’s nomination, but he insisted on having the hearing reconvene tomorrow morning for additional questioning, probably along these lines.

Politically, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the chair of the Senate intelligence committee, looks halfway canny for scheduling this hearing so late in the day. Panetta has emerged from it with no real scratches on him — pretty amazing, considering that he stepped into this nomination to the immediate objections of Feinstein. But who knows if Bond and his colleague, Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) — who apparently has questions for Panetta as well — will have more in their arsenal tomorrow.