This morning, President-elect Obama announced his selections for top intelligence posts including Leon Panetta for CIA Director and Dennis Blair for Director of National Intelligence (DNI). Surprisingly, Obama also announced that he would at least partially rely on the guidance of the current DNI, Mike McConnell. McConnell will “continue to offer his counsel through my Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board,” Obama said.

In some instances, McConnell has shown himself to be an independent actor, such as in the case of the 2007 NIE that found that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program. In that case, McConnell resisted pressure from the White House to change the NIE’s conclusions. After the NIE’s release, McConnell actively pushed back against right-wing attacks on the intelligence community’s findings.

In other cases, however, McConnell has also been a key defender of some of the Bush administration’s most egregious violations of civil and human rights. Last night on Charlie Rose, for example, McConnell defended the Bush administration’s expanded use of extraordinary-rendition on enemy combatants. He claimed such renditions never resulted in torture:

ROSE: Let me just make one point. Some people believe that renditions are a way for Americans to send people that they want to interrogate to another place, where they will do interrogations that the Americans would not do themselves. … Including torture.

MCCONNELL: [T]hat is not consistent with our law, or our intent or our behavior. … And since 2001, until now, there have been fewer than 100 — fewer than 100 renditions. … Now, you used the word torture. I would not use that word. … I would use the word interrogation.

Watch it:

In fact, as Jane Mayer documented, McConnell cannot credibly argue that rendered terrorism suspects were not tortured. Mayer wrote for the New Yorker, “The most common destinations for rendered suspects are Egypt, Morocco, Syria, and Jordan, all of which have been cited for human-rights violations by the State Department, and are known to torture suspects.”

Human Rights Watch found that at lesat 14 individuals have been rendered to Jordan and placed in the custody the Jordanian intelligence service. The Jordanian government beat the detainees severely and threatened detainees with electrocution, dogs, and even rape. Rendered detainees are rarely charged with crimes and on several occasions have been cases of mistaken identity.

Readers of this blog are aware that Weekly Standard web editor Mike Goldfarb — whose primary task as a McCain spokesman was to make Tucker Bounds seem competent — has a history of embellishing his stories with views either wrongly attributed or simply made up out of thin air (see here, here, and here.)

Goldfarb was at it again yesterday, attacking the pro-Israel, pro-peace group J Street, laughably misrepresenting their positions and accusing them of responding to criticism by blaming a “Jewish conspiracy…a cabal apparently run out of the Israeli embassy in Washington,” based on this story in the Jewish Week. But, while the JW item does cite sources who “said they believed the campaign [against J Street] was being mounted by major pro-Israel groups and by the Israeli Embassy in Washington,” none of those sources are J Street sources, as Goldfarb claims.

Interestingly, Goldfarb, who was complaining just last week about being called a thug because of his belief in the utility of the murder of Palestinian children, had no problem comparing liberal pro-Israel activists to terrorists, writing that “J Street, like Hamas, has provoked a disproportionate response from the Jews.”

I wonder if we should expect a similar apology to the one that Goldfarb’s fellow lil’ neocon fantasist Jamie Kirchick had to issue after he wrongly attributed positions to J Street and others? Wait and see!

The Politico recently ran this rather bizarre item about “concerns” over Vice-President-elect (and current U.S. Senator) Joe Biden’s trip to Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan:

[Biden] won’t really be traveling as the vice president-elect – he’ll be traveling as the chairman of Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Only he’ll be resigning from the Senate in a few weeks. Even though he was sworn in Tuesday for his seventh term.

Got that?

Many foreign policy observers don’t, raising the concern that officials in the countries on Biden’s itinerary may hold to the quaint notion that the vice president-elect is the vice president-elect and that Biden will be sending not-very-subtle signals about U.S. policy in the Obama administration – even though George W. Bush is still in office.

“Many foreign policy observers” in this case means two: Thomas Donnelly, a resident fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, and Lisa Curtis, a senior fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation:

“This is a very delicate time,” said Thomas Donnelly… “It’s hard to see what positive he could do. On the other hand, the potential for confusions, missteps or a gaffe are greater than usual.”[...]

[Curtis] said it could be worthwhile to have Biden in the region when tensions are so high but it could also stir confusion.

“That’s kind of strange to be saying ‘I’m not coming out as a representative of the Obama administration’ even though he’s taking over as vice president in a matter of days. It may be a bit awkward for foreign officials in the region to know how to receive him,” Curtis said. “Most people he meets with are going to be thinking of him as the vice president-elect.”

So, basically, the Politico story is premised on two right-wing think tankers expressing concern that Joe Biden’s status as both U.S. Senator and Vice-President elect could so confound foreign leaders that it might cause a breakdown in protocol and possibly spark an international incident. It seems like a pretty odd concern — or a headline in search of an actual story — especially given the seriousness of the crises we face in that region.

Actually, Biden’s congressional delegation — on which he’s being accompanied by John McCain’s own favorite traveling companion, Sen. Lindsey Graham — tracks with what Biden has described as his responsibility to help bring a fresh analysis of the foreign policy challenges that the Obama administration will inherit from George W. Bush.

In December, Biden told George Stephanopoulos that one of his tasks “is to work with [Obama's foreign policy team] to come up with a baseline for the president as to what we view the circumstance we’re inheriting in Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan” independent of the analysis being handed over by the outgoing administration.

Let me give you an example in Iraq. Iraq, there is a great deal of focus and has been on the military side of the equation, very little focus on the political resolution in Iraq. One of the jobs that I’ve been asked help honcho is to get a consensus or get an agreement or disagreement…among the foreign policy team.

So we the new administration have a priority set that we’re going to start with and a baseline from which we’re going to start as to what we think we need to do

The Politico story notes that “had Biden waited two more weeks and gone to South Asia as vice president, he would have had a pool of reporters in tow catching his every word. Instead, his stops in the region as ‘Senator Biden’ will be covered by local media and news outlets with reporters already on the ground.” Which is, of course, the point. It seems like a pretty wise move for Biden to take advantage of his current status as a senator in order to do a somewhat lower-key fact-finding trip, before his future status as Vice President of the United States of America turns his every international move into an even more heavily-advanced and deeply protocolled media event.