Our guest blogger is David Sullivan, a Research Associate with the ENOUGH Project.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is at the United Nations Security Council today to discuss a real weapon of mass destruction, one that is employed on a daily basis around the world: the use of rape and sexual violence as a weapon of war.

In conflicts from East Timor to Liberia, armed forces have deliberately and systematically used rape as a means of terrorizing enemy communities and maintaining control over territory and populations. The worst epidemic of sexual violence is in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where rebel movements, militias, and the Congolese army have perpetrated horrific bouts of mass rape, sexual torture, and other violence against untold thousands of women and girls. Because victims are stigmatized and shamed, the full extent of this crisis may never be known.

The Security Council resolution (pdf) that the U.S. is expected to sponsor as part of today’s meeting may finally help to elevate the political profile of this horrifying issue. It will increase information gathering on the scope of the problem, strengthen peacekeeping mission’s mandates to respond, and demand accountability for perpetrators. A similar measure related to the use of child soldiers has proven somewhat successful in requiring the UN’s elaborate bureaucracy to focus on protecting children in armed conflict.

This issue needs all the attention it can get. Just a few weeks ago the International Criminal Court, the best means of ending impunity for sexual terrorism, had to drop all charges related to sexual violence in eastern Congo. This was due to difficulty protecting potential witnesses from retribution.

Ending this crime against humanity, in Congo and beyond, will require linking efforts to protect women and girls with broader peace processes and conflict prevention. The U.S. played a key role in recent diplomatic breakthroughs, largely thanks to Tim Shortley, a State Department Senior Advisor who focused entirely on Congo and the related issue of the Lord’s Resistance Army in northern Uganda. Regrettably, his portfolio has been broadened to include Sudan, risking the sustained high-level attention that these conflicts need. Assistant Secretary of State Jendayi Frazier needs to fill his shoes quickly with a diplomat of similar stature to consolidate recent gains and connect lofty Security Council rhetoric with meaningful protection for Congolese women.

Today, Team McCain continued to try to make an issue out of Barack Obama’s wild suggestion that America can fight terrorism without discarding the U.S. Constitution. It’s now exceedingly clear that, whatever else candidate McCain has going on, every day is a national security day.

Exhibiting the sort of message discipline for which McCain’s campaign is becoming known, today’s conference call attacking Obama’s anti-terrorism policy began with a statement attacking Obama’s withdrawal from public financing. Then Randy Scheunemann turned it over to D.A. Arthur Branch former Senator Fred Thompson, who first attacked the Supreme Court’s decision in Boumediene — claiming that the Court had created a “new right,” when in fact habeas corpus is one of the oldest rights there is — and then suggested that Obama had “extrapolated” his entire anti-terrorism policy from the prosecution of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing conspirators.

The truth, of course, is that the ones who have extrapolated a position here are Team McCain and their surrogates. On Tuesday, Team McCain held a conference call with, among others, former CIA director and noted conspiracy theorist James Woolsey. Yesterday, batting for McCain was Rudy Giuliani, of whom John McCain previously said “I know of nothing in his background that indicates that he has any [national security] experience.” And then today we had Fred Thompson, who said last fall that McCain was “clearly moving away from what I consider to be the sound constitutional, traditional principles that the Reagan coalition was founded upon,” slamming Obama’s adherence to constitutional principles. In the space of three conference calls over three days, Team McCain has proffered these surrogates to construct an elaborate alternate reality version of Obama’s policy, I suppose because it’s easier for them to argue with.

And it’s easy to understand why: Like George W. Bush, John McCain thinks that the conflict with Islamic extremism is best understood as a war, a war can be won by the steady and relentless application of military force. Like George W. Bush, McCain continues to insist that an appropriate response to the 9/11 attacks was to redirect America’s attention and resources away from those responsible for the 9/11 attacks in order to invade and occupy a country that had no connection to the 9/11 attacks. And like George W. Bush, McCain believes that the effective prosecution of this war requires freeing the executive branch from such pointless legal mumbo jumbo as the Magna Carta. The fact that each of these policies have, in the years since 9/11, produced disastrous results for America’s security, its interests, and its reputation is what’s known in political lingo as a “problem” for the candidate.

Yesterday, House leaders in both parties struck a deal on a war supplemental bill that includes expanded college benefits for veterans. The GI Bill is Sen. Jim Webb’s (D-VA) version, as well as a provision allowing troops to transfer the benefits to family members. President Bush has promised to sign the legislation.

Now, however, Bush and Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) — the two most vocal opponents of Webb’s bill — are trying to take credit for it. They are claiming that they always supported the generous benefits — their main concern was just ensuring the benefits’ transferability:

McCain: That has always been my primary concern with respect to the Webb bill. … With the addition of the transferability provisions sought by Senators Graham, Burr, myself and others to give service members the right to transfer earned G.I. Bill benefits to spouses and children, we will have achieved in offering vastly improved educational benefit.

Bush: Throughout the past five months, President Bush and members of his Administration have worked hard to ensure that an expansion of GI benefits includes transferability. … The President is pleased that Congress answered his call.

Webb said that he had been considering changing his bill to include a transferability option. But instead of working with him, McCain and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) went ahead and introduced an opposing bill. While it did have transferability, it also had less generous educational benefits.

This was never the real reason Bush and McCain opposed the legislation. Their constant complaint was that Webb’s version was too generous and would lead to a drop in military retention:

McCain: “I want to make sure that we have incentives for people to remain in the military as well as for people to join the military.”

Bush administration: “The last thing we want to do is provide a benefit — or the last thing we want to do is create a situation in which we are losing our men and women who we have worked so hard to train.”

As the CBO concluded, these claims about retention were inaccurate. The Pentagon also argued that it was too generous to confer benefits on troops after “only” two years of service, and legislation offered by McCain and his Senate allies would have reserved the most generous benefits for those who have served at least 12 years, excluding most servicemembers.

Yesterday, Fox News’s John Gibson hosted former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton on his radio show. They discussed Sen. Barack Obama’s (D-IL) foreign policy. Bolton charged that “the best outcome” of an Obama presidency would be “a replay of the Clinton administration,” meaning “more embassy bombings” and “more World Trade Center attacks”:

GIBSON: The Obama team is going back to some of the old complaints about the war and the war on terror…that the left has been articulating for a long time now, and not really coming up with anything new.

BOLTON: Yeah I think honestly that’s an optimistic view of it, that it will simply be a replay of the Clinton administration. It will simply have more embassy bombings, more bombings of our warships like the Cole, more World Trade Center attacks. That would be the best outcome from that perspective.

Listen to it:

Of course, Bolton does not mention that the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon occurred during the Bush administration, while Bolton was serving in the Department of State.

Bolton also reminded Gibson that the entire world — “from responsible democratic governments to the terrorists themselves” — is following our election closely, adding, “Everything that Obama is saying today is registering very intensely among those who wish us no good.”

Earlier this election season, Bolton declared that “the mullahs in Tehran” want a Democrat to win the presidency in 2008. What’s more, Bolton’s comments hardly exist in isolation — nor are they even the most egregious examples of right-wing fearmongering. Here are a few more examples:

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ): All I can tell you Jennifer [Rubin] is that I think it’s very clear who Hamas wants to be the next president of the United States. … If Senator Obama is favored by Hamas I think people can make judgments accordingly.”

Rep. Steve King (R-IA): “The radical Islamists, the al-Qaida … would be dancing in the streets in greater numbers than they did on Sept. 11 because they would declare victory in this war on terror” if Obama won the presidency.

Max Boot: “[T]he implication is that Iran’s top terrorist is hoping that Americans will elect Barack Obama this fall.”

Bolton’s scare tactics represent a tried-and-true election strategy for the right wing.

Our guest blogger is Ken Gude, Associate Director of the International Rights and Responsibility Program at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Last week’s Supreme Court ruling affirming the Guantanamo detainees’ constitutional right to habeas corpus further narrowed the legal distinction between holding them in Cuba and in the United States. The Bush administration picked Guantanamo precisely because it believed the American military base on the eastern tip of Cuba was beyond the reach of any court. With that notion rightly put to rest, supporters of closing Guantanamo like John McCain should be encouraged, as there is now much less of an argument against moving some of the detainees to the military prison at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas, as he proposes.

That’s why I find his reaction to the Boumediene decision so odd. McCain unleashed a full broadside at the court the day after the ruling, calling it “one of the worst decisions in the history of this country… Our first obligation is the safety and security of this nation, and the men and women who defend it. This decision will harm our ability to do that.”

At issue in Boumediene is whether habeas rights extended to Guantanamo. There has never been any doubt that any individual in the United States possesses habeas rights. McCain is on the record saying, as president, he “would immediately close Guantanamo Bay, [and] move all the prisoners to Fort Leavenworth.” That action would have exactly the same effect as the Court’s decision in Boumediene.

McCain goes on to claim that his plan to close Guantanamo the Supreme Court’s ruling is “going to have the courts flooded with so-called, quote, Habeas Corpus suits against the government, whether it be about the diet, whether it be about the reading material.” This would be silly if it wasn’t so tragic. Garden variety habeas petitions from inmates in American prisons may more often deal with diet than detention, but the detainees at Guantanamo are not asking for better food, many believe that they are wrongly imprisoned and are contesting the lawfulness of their confinement. Read more