“As a member of the Armed Services Committee,” Loebsack told The Iowa Independent by phone Thursday, “I take my oversight role very seriously. So, as a member of that Committee I was invited to come and view the photos.”

Only a short time before speaking with The Iowa Independent, Loebsack had traveled to CIA headquarters to see the pictures for himself. He did not have any doubts about bin Laden’s death before seeing the photos, but felt obligated to view them as a part of his oversight duties.

President Barack Obama has decided not to release the photos publicly, a move backed by a majority of Americans, according to a recent NBC poll. Loebsack said he agrees with the decision even more after seeing the pictures firsthand.

“I will say that my initial judgment about our President’s decision and our military leaders’ recommendations not to release the photos was confirmed once I saw the photos,” he said. “Obviously, I cannot go into any details about the specifics of the photos.”

“I remained concerned about our nearly 3,000 Iowa National Guard troops stationed in Afghanistan at this time, and I worry about how potential reaction [to the release of the photos] could impact them. I worry about our American citizens who are traveling and working abroad as well. Al Qaeda has a worldwide network. So, there has to be concern if these photos were released that there would be a reaction against Americans.”

U.S. troops, he said, did “a fantastic job” carrying out the operation against bin Laden, and the intelligence community “did a wonderful job” providing military leaders the information they needed to set a plan in motion.

The ultimate decision to release any proof of bin Laden’s demise — such as DNA evidence — should be a decision made by the White House, Loebsack said.

“I’m going to leave it up to the administration,” he said. “I believe the [Obama] administration have used good judgment in all of this. I defer to our Commander in Chief and to our military leaders in deciding what will pose a threat to our country and our troops. … For me, this is about the safety of our country and the security of our troops.”

In one YouTubed radio appearance, for example, Boykin rattled off figures on the population of Islamic terrorists around the world and in the United States. He said the “best estimates” suggest there are 1.5 billion Muslims in the world and that 15 percent of them are violent jihadists. He said that there are 2.4 million Muslims in the U.S. and that 15 percent of them are also jihadists. Boykin would have listeners believe that there are 225 million radical violent Islamists around the world seeking to kill Americans and that there are 360,000 of them here in the U.S., half the population of Palin’s Alaska.

But Boykin has not only drawn heat for his provocative talks. He also drew sanction from the Army when, as a top Pentagon official in the months after 9/11, he cast the War on Terror as a religious war, in part by recruiting “Christian warriors” to fight for God’s kingdom on Earth during a speaking tour of Baptist churches.

Boykin was also a key figure in putting the torture techniques practiced at Guantanamo Bay to work at the notorious U.S. detention facility at Abu Ghraib in Baghdad.

Writing at Salon, Sydney Blumenthal in 2004 said Boykin was “at the center of the secret operation to “Gitmo-ize” Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison and details Boykin’s travels through Bush-era anti-Islamic Christian America.

Just before Boykin was put in charge of the hunt for Osama bin Laden and then inserted into Iraqi prison reform, he was a circuit rider for the religious right. He allied himself with a small group known as the Faith Force Multiplier that advocates applying military principles to evangelism. Its manifesto, “Warrior Message,” summons “warriors in this spiritual war for souls of this nation and the world … God has given us the stewardship and accountability of FAITH as our strategy for this time to mobilize an exceedingly great army.”

As the head of the Special Warfare Center and School at Fort Bragg, N.C., Boykin invited Southern Baptist ministers for prayer meetings that would be highlighted by demonstrations of Special Forces hand-to-hand combat and guided tours of the “Shoot House” and “Snake Room.”

Boykin staged a traveling slide show in which he displayed pictures of bin Laden and Saddam Hussein around the country. “Satan wants to destroy this nation, he wants to destroy us as a nation, and he wants to destroy us as a Christian army,” he preached.

Here’s Boykin on YouTube:

He said hundreds of millions of jihadists are determined to destroy our liberties and reestablish an international caliphate, that the Saudis are pouring money into our school systems and universities to undermine democratic thinking, and that radical madrasas are multiplying “right here in America.”

He refers to a terror trial in Dallas where “they determined… that almost every Islamic organization in America is a front for fundraising for Islamic extremism.”

More Boykin quotes from the radio appearance:

Law enforcement has been unwilling to address the issue to do what was necessary in terms of arresting and incarcerating these people…

These activist judges, there’s a history of leniency with these people, and many of [the alleged terrorists] have been released after committing crimes only to be rearrested later for being involved in some sort of terrorist activity…

There exist 35 Muslim compounds scattered across America, and the activities that are going on inside those compounds I think it’s safe to say are not in the best interest of our liberties and our freedoms and, in many cases when people have tried to get into these compounds to see what is going on, they’ve been held away at gunpoint…

I’m afraid the attitude of Americans is one of capitulation. There seems to be an attitude that, if we just allow them to worship as they please under the concept of freedom of religion, they will enjoy their life in America, when the fact of the matter is the jihadists have every intention of destroying the nation as we know it and establishing it as a Muslim nation… It is time for America to awaken… What we need to do as Christians and as Americans, we need to do what God’s called us to do, and that is get our armor on and get into battle.

In the weeks after Rep. Gabriel Gifford was shot in Arizona, Palin defended herself for targeting Gifford with gun-sight cross-hairs on a midterm election map. News that Palin was coming to Colorado to talk sparked some controversy. That she will share a stage with Boykin has always been more controversial news.

Got a tip? Story pitch? Send us an e-mail. Follow The Colorado Independent on Twitter.

The initiative is a move to ask Americans to help local law enforcement by keeping their eyes peeled for “suspicious activity,” DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano and NBA Commissioner David Stern told press at the Verizon Center in Washington, D.C. The emphasis toward civilian “suspicious activity reporting” has surged in recent years, but advertising campaigns and high-profile partnerships have really begun to take off.

In December, DHS joined forces with Wal-Mart, launching the ‘If You See Something, Say Something’ campaign initially in 230 Wal-Mart stores, with a target of 588 sites in 27 states. A short video plays at select checkout stations, telling shoppers to call local police if they see something suspicious. (The term “suspicious,” by the way, is rarely elaborated on or defined by DHS in campaign messages.)

Moving on to sports, DHS partnered with the NFL with its campaign at the Super Bowl in Dallas early this month. And now the NBA.

“We hope that this partnership will emphasize basically that security is a shared responsibility,” said NBA Commissioner David Stern at yesterday’s press event. “We think that sports is a terrific way to send messages, and to get people who go to events to focus on this very important message.”

Or maybe Napolitano is just a big sports fan.

“Our partnership with the NBA to bring the ‘If You See Something, Say Something’ campaign to professional basketball events throughout the nation is a vital part of our efforts to ensure the safety of players, employees and fans,” she told the press.

Inquiries have begun over how effective these campaigns are at protecting the country from terrorism. With sports fans and budget-conscious shoppers reporting “suspicious” activities every 10 minutes, does that help the security agencies or overwhelm the system?

David Rittgers, a legal policy analyst for the Cato Institute, said he thinks the national security agencies are overwhelmed with information.

“While there is value in getting a person on the street to be aware and report suspicious activities, you can also create too many false positives,” Rittgers said.

Rittgers said the Federal Bureau of Investigations receives about 700 messages a day, and the National Counterterrorism Center receives about 10,000 pieces of information daily. Clogging the system with even more reports of indiscriminate “suspicious activities” won’t necessarily bring these agencies closer to the information they need to prevent terrorist plots.

“People talk about connecting dots,” he said. “But it’s knowing which dots to connect that has value. …. The commitment to simply collect all the dots might not be as useful as a lot of people would propose.”

For example: “It’s not illegal to purchase a ski mask, it’s not illegal to purchase a gun, it’s not illegal to sit outside a bank. But it’s when you put those all together.”

The measure of success is still to be seen, but meanwhile the money is flowing.

“If You See Something, Say Something” are now being posted all over the country, according the DHS: on 9,000 federal buildings nationwide, at the Mall Of America, the American Hotel & Lodging Association, Amtrak, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority and the general aviation industry.

DHS allocated $2.9 million for the campaign in 2009, but an official told CNSNews.com that the agency has only spent $500,000 on the campaign to date, saying it is focusing its efforts on partnerships –- outsourcing security, if you will. And while Napolitano told the network the campaign has resulted in the launch of several investigations, she said it’s still difficult to measure whether it will effectively deter would-be terrorists.

In a somewhat heated exchange with Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) — Petraeus at one point told Graham that he preferred “more nuance” than Graham was willing to provide when describing the state of governance in Afghanistan — Petraeus said there are “probably very small numbers, certainly” of al-Qaeda in the country, somewhere in the “double digits.” Asked to assess the numerical strength of al-Qaeda in its safe havens across the border in the tribal areas of Pakistan, Petraeus answered, “Now we’re into the hundreds.”

He qualified: “This is a question of how you talk about symbiotic relationships.” When factoring in those “symbiotic relationships” between al-Qaeda and the Afghan or Pakistani Taliban, the Haqqani network and other extremist forces — considering that al-Qaeda operatives marry into families and tribes of other extremist groups to entrench alliances, etc. — the total falls in the “thousands.”

Graham didn’t draw out the strategy implications of those numbers. And “single digits” could mean ten or it could mean 99. But given that there was a brief shock when it was reported in December that President Obama was raising U.S. troop levels to 98,000 to secure Afghanistan against merely 100 al-Qaeda operatives in the country, it’s possible that Petraeus’s assessment will provoke some reconsideration of the administration’s strategy.

“Already we’re not using the term ‘operation’ or ‘major operation,’” McChrystal said, so as not to give the impression of a clear “D-Day” or “H-Hour” like there was in February’s Marja invasion. This isn’t an operation to “recapture an area under enemy control, as Marja was.” Accordingly, McChrystal described it as “a process, not an event.”

That raised the question of how much local appetite there is for the, uh, process. “Their participation helps shape how we go forward,” McChrystal said. But, as his spokesman has said earlier, it’s not a matter of taking a sort of plebiscite to determine that local buy-in. “We’re really talking about engagement over time,” McChrystal said. “It’s not going to tribes to say, ‘Do you approve of all the following.’ It’s inclusive. They participate over time and continue to shape it.”

A big lesson of Operation Moshtarek in Marja — where the governance efforts critical to the operation have far lagged behind security operations — is to involve President Karzai in the process, McChrystal said. I’m off to an event with Karzai now to gain his perspective.

“America is not at war,” reads a handwritten note at a U.S. facility in Ramadi. “The Marine Corps is at war; America is at the mall.”

It’s a message worth noting as half the country is gearing up to celebrate Memorial Day drinking beer on the beach.

Update: An alert reader just noted that this episode is at least nine months old. Four weeks before Memorial Day, though, the message remains relevant.

Yoo’s being pretty disingenuous here. The August 1, 2002 OLC memo on torture isn’t about perishable circumstances shortly after 9/11. It’s about the scope of executive power — and exclusive, inherent executive power. Yoo tells Stewart that Congress or the courts could rein in a rogue president on his conduct of a war. Yet his consistent view, as expressed in the memo, is that there’s pretty much nothing Congress can do during wartime short of cutting off funding, a politically extreme step.

Maybe people should give Yoo credit for picking his speaking venues.

But how about former Bush CIA and National Security Agency chief Mike Hayden? Asked on the same program about Obama’s counterterrorism record, Hayden replied, “I am heartened by the fact that the president consistently says we are at war with al-Qaeda its affiliates.” Former Bush secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff echoed Hayden. Expect neither Cheney’s behavior nor Politico’s to change even slightly.

The only problem: those six detainees have already been returned to Yemen.

According to a Department of Justice announcement on Dec. 20, six Yemeni detainees — Jamal Muhammad Alawi Mari, Farouq Ali Ahmed, Ayman Saeed Abdullah Batarfi, Muhammaed Yasir Ahmed Taher, Fayad Yahya Ahmed al Rami and Riyad Atiq Ali Abdu al Haf — were transferred to the government of Yemen more than ten days ago.

Still, the senators wrote today, in the wake of the Christmas Day averted disaster, “to express our deep concern” about the plans to transfer them. “Given the security situation in Yemen and the failure of the Yemeni government to secure high-value prisoners in the past, we believe that any such transfers would be highly unwise and ill-considered.”

In fact, concerns about terrorist activity in Yemen date back years, not just to last week. That’s why the Obama administration has stepped up its support for the Yemeni government’s attacks on terrorist targets there, and has refrained from sending Yemenis home until just recently. (President George W. Bush, on the other hand, sent 14 Yemenis home from Guantanamo during his tenure.) It’s interesting that these three senators are only now discovering the problem, and somehow didn’t know that the six men in question had already been sent home.

Update 6:30 pm: Graham’s office just responded with this explanation: “They’re trying to stop the transfer of a number of detainees back to Yemen until we are certain these detainees will not make their way back to the battlefield. Media reports have said there were at least 34 Yemeni detainees in the pipeline set to be sent back.”

But this still doesn’t explain the “six Yemeni detainees” referenced in the letter. I’ve asked Graham’s office for clarification. I’m also expecting confirmation shortly from the Justice Department. Stay tuned.

It’s a matter of money. You know, security is an issue, but as we struggle with this economy, there’s only so much money we can dedicate to this particular issue. There are a lot of other issues we’re dealing with. And what we have to do is have a well-planned, well-coordinated approach to the problem.

Thompson’s comments come just a few weeks after Congress passed a $1.1 trillion bill for defense and homeland security in 2010 alone. Which begs the question: How much more than that do lawmakers need to spend before they get this thing right?