The Bush administration has long justified its use of torture by claiming that it obtained valuable information from torturing 9-11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Late last year, former Vice President Dick Cheney said, “Did it produce the desire results? I think it did.” He explained:

I think, for example, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was the number three man in al Qaeda, the man who planned the attacks of 9/11, provided us with a wealth of information.

But according to documents released by the Obama administration in response to a lawsuit brought by the ACLU, Cheney was lying. Mohammed told U.S. military officials that he gave false information to the CIA after withstanding torture:

“I make up stories,” Mohammed said, describing in broken English an interrogation probably administered by the CIA that concerned the location of Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

“Where is he? I don’t know. Then he torture me,” Mohammed said. “Then I said, ‘Yes, he is in this area.’”

The torture of Mohammed, who we know was waterboarded 183 times in one month, “underscores the unreliability of statements obtained by torture.”

In an interview with Fox News’ Brit Hume earlier this year, President Bush admitted that he personally authorized the torture of Mohammed. He said he personally asked “what tools” were available to use on him, and sought legal approval for waterboarding him:

BUSH: One such person who gave us information was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. … And I’m in the Oval Office and I am told that we have captured Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the professionals believe he has information necessary to secure the country. So I ask what tools are available for us to find information from him and they gave me a list of tools, and I said are these tools deemed to be legal? And so we got legal opinions before any decision was made.

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This weekend, Shawna Forde, 41, leader of the Minuteman American Defense (M.A.D.) group and two of her associates were arrested in connection with the murder of a 9-year-old girl, Brisenia Flores, and her father, Raul, in Arivaca, AZ. Local police are reporting that Forde and her posse broke into the Flores home dressed as law enforcement officers looking for money and drugs to finance her border watch group with the intention of leaving no witnesses behind.

Much like Jim Gilchrist’s Minuteman Project and Chris Simcox’s Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, Forde’s group is an extreme nativist organization made up of volunteer border vigilantes. M.A.D. has gone into damage control, posting a statement expressing condolences for the Flores family and distancing itself from Forde’s violent crime. Yet directly below its offering of “deepest regrets,” the website boasts a message from Shawna Forde, Executive Director:

“I would like to let everyone know that we are in full operation we have people coming from Florida and other parts of the country to assist in gathering exclusive footage of drug cartel drug smuggling and humane trafficking…We will expose and report what we know and find, we will recruit the serious and train the revolutionist, time for words have passed the time for bravery and conviction are now. I shall lead you to challenge yourself and your American heart into the future of what was once a great country and will be again but at what price?“

Other border vigilante groups are disassociating themselves from Forde and M.A.D. However, the Anti-Defamation League points out that many of them have publicly supported her anti-immigrant statements in the past. On three different occasions, Forde claimed to have been shot, raped, and beaten by Spanish-speaking assailants. Most inside her own anti-immigrant community questioned her credibility and accused her of faking the attack, but some, like Minuteman Project Executive Director Stephen Eichler stood by her, saying:

“I believe what I have been told, and the reports I have read in the newspaper, to be factual and accurate…I may be called gullible, sucker, and naïve, but it is of little consequence to me if I am right and the victims were comforted.”

Laine Lawless, an anti-immigration activist who started the group Border Guardians, praised Forde’s border activities and argued that Forde’s alleged attack was “obvious proof that the reach of the Mexican cartels extends way beyond the borders of Mexico deep into the United States.” After the Flores family murder, Minuteman in-fighting has lead the San Diego Minuteman to blame The Minuteman Project’s Jim Gilchrist for continuing to support Forde, who served as Gilchrist’s 2008-2009 Border Director, “despite warnings.”

Finger pointing aside, what all of these groups have in common is that they target individual immigrants rather than immigration policies. Their mission and rhetoric consistently fits the description of “rightwing extremist groups” that the DHS report warned have “the potential to incite individuals or small groups toward violence” in part due to pent-up “frustration over a perceived lack of government action on illegal immigration.” Forde’s alleged murder comes shortly after a white supremacist shooting rampage in Pittsburgh, an abortion doctor murder in Kansas, and a racially-motivated shooting at the Holocaust Museum that have caused some to “herald a disturbing surge in U.S. hate crimes.”

Today, thousands of Iranians took to the streets to protest the election results declaring Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the winner — results Vice President Biden said yesterday he had “doubts” about. Speaking on Fox News this morning, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) condemned the Iranian election as a “sham,” declaring, “I hope that we will act“:

MCCAIN: It really is a sham that they’ve pulled off, and I hope that we will act. [...]

CARLSON: How will the Obama administration react to this? Will they come out directly and say that this is unconscionable, that this can go on when they claim to be a democracy, or will they take an easier tact [sic] on it?

MCCAIN: Well, initial reports by, quote, administration officials, are that they say that they’re not going to change their policy of dialogue, et cetera, et cetera. I think they should be condemned, and it’s obvious that this was a rigged election and depriving the people of their democratic rights. We are for human rights all over the world.

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As with McCain’s impetuous response to the Georgia crisis last summer, his first reaction to the events in Iran is condemnation and a call to “act.” By contrast, the Obama administration seems to understand that knowing when not to act is just as strategically important as knowing when to do so, and that the most productive thing the United States can do for Iran’s reform movement — and human rights — at the moment is to keep itself, to the extent possible, out of the equation.

Speaking to Fox News this morning, former presidential candidate Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) condemned the Iranian elections, stating that “it’s really a sham that they’ve pulled off and I hope that we will act.”

CARLSON: Senator, let me ask you this, because you said it’s important how we react. And to me that’s the most important part of this story today. How will the Obama administration react to this? Will they come out directly and say that this is unconscionable, that this can go on when they claim to be a democracy, or will they take an easier tact (sic) on it?

MCCAIN: Well, initial reports by, quote, administration officials, are that they say that they’re not going to change their policy of dialogue, et cetera, et cetera. I think they should be condemned, and it’s obvious that this was a rigged election and depriving the people of their democratic rights. We are for human rights all over the world.

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But Trita Parsi of the National Iranian American Council told Spencer Ackerman that the Obama administration “is doing exactly the right thing.”

The framing that Ahmadinejad is presenting is one in which essentially the whole [opposition] is a Western media conspiracy…If the [Obama] administration is saying things or doing things before Moussavi and the opposition figures out what the plan is, then that’s a real problem, because then it seems like it’s between Ahmadinejad and the west and not Ahmadinejad and the opposition. So the administration is doing exactly the right thing. They’re not rushing in and they’re not playing favorites. They might prefer the democratic process to be respected, but that’s different than [supporting a] specific faction.

Were the U.S to clumsily wade into this Iranian political crisis, as McCain would have us do, it would support Ahmadinejad’s main arguments against his domestic opponents, and likely provide the perfect pretext for a more intense crackdown. In other words, the preferences of hardliners in Iran and the U.S. are pretty closely aligned here.

As with McCain’s impetuous response to the Georgia crisis last summer, his first reaction to the events in Iran is condemnation and a call to “act.” Fortunately, we have an administration in power that understands that knowing when not to act is as strategically important as knowing when to do so, and that the most productive thing the United States can do for Iran’s reform movement — and human rights — at the moment is to keep itself, to the extent possible, out of the equation.

Full transcript below. Read more

After hedging his bets and unsuccessfully campaigning for the GOP presidential bid on an anti-immigration platform, Mitt Romney announced yesterday that the Republican Party should not change its principles on immigration.

During the 2007-2008 election cycle, Romney was said to have been taking cues from anti-immigration zealot, Pat Buchanan, who warned Republicans that “pandering to Hispanics has cost them white votes.” Romney spent upwards of $1.5 million on harsh immigration ads and is now saying that repairing the GOP’s relationship with Hispanic voters is simply a matter of “messaging”:

MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: But you’re also facing a demographic problem. Mike Murphy, the Republican strategist, points this out in Time magazine this week. He says the Republicans are facing an ice age. And what he points to is the fact that in the last election and if you look at polling today, the Republican Party is losing young people. It is losing Latinos. It is losing well-educated Americans. That this really is a time, that if the Republican Party doesn’t reform, Mike Murphy says, it will die. How specifically should the Republican Party expand its outreach right now, become a more inclusive party for those voter groups that it is now losing?

MR. ROMNEY: Well, what you don’t do is try and change your principles. But what you do is make sure that you’re communicating your principles in an effective way to the audiences of America that are listening…You got to make sure that you fight very hard to get your message through. And you’re right, George, in many cases, the people on the opposition said that Republicans were anti-immigrant, which – nothing could be further from the truth. Republicans celebrate immigrants coming legally into this country, even becoming citizens…We’re a party that loves legal immigration.

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Romney’s new messaging also involves flip-flopping on immigration reform for the second time. After conveniently changing his stance from favoring a path to citizenship to outright opposing comprehensive immigration reform in an attempt to drive a wedge between himself and his opponent John McCain, Romney recently suggested that “one way to attract more minorities to the GOP is to pass immigration reform before the next election.”

Romney was labeled the “hypocrite of the week” in late 2006 when it was discovered that not only did his family flee to Mexico and stay there for three generations, he also hired undocumented Guatemalan workers to clean up his yard.

The Washington Post’s Al Kamen reports this morning that former Bush flack Ari Fleischer emailed fellow Post reporter Glenn Kessler before any results had been issued in Iran’s hotly-contested presidential election to give credit to his former boss for the “reformists’ surge” there. “[O]ne of the reasons there is a substantial reform movement in Iran — particularly among its young people — is because of George W. Bush’s tough policies,” Fleischer wrote. He continued:

“A big push for reform is because of the desire of Iranians to get out from sanctions, to put an end to the country’s international ostracism,” Fleischer wrote and, most interestingly, “because Shiites in particular see Shiites in Iraq having more freedoms than they do. Bush’s tough policies have helped give rise to the reformists and I think we’re witnessing that today.” [...]

So “I think it’s fair to say the George Bush’s Freedom Agenda planted seeds that have started to grow in the Middle East,” Fleischer concluded.

Aside from the fact that Fleischer’s claim cannot really ever be verified (a tactic former Bush administration officials use when defending their failed policies), it’s clear that Iran’s power in the region has grown significantly in the region since 2001 — a point one wonders if Fleischer will also give Bush credit for.

The Shiites’ “freedom” in Iraq has actually emboldened Iran’s standing and created a key new ally in the region. Iran has emerged as the chief beneficiary of Bush’s fool’s errand in Iraq. As journalist Robert Dreyfuss noted, “Washington’s decision to topple Saddam’s government has put in place a ruling elite that is far closer to Iran than it is to the United States.” But also, Iran’s nuclear program has progressed greatly during the Bush years. Despite his “tough” policies, Iran has inched closer to a nuclear weapon, raising the possibility of greater instability in the region and even perhaps a new war.

It is also worth noting that hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad became Iran’s president in 2005 (during Bush’s presidency), supplanting a former moderate who held the office. In fact, reformers there said at the time that they wanted the Bush administration to tone down the harsh rhetoric:

“You are harmful for us. We try to tell politicians in Washington, D.C., please don’t do anything in favor of reform or to promote democracy in Iran. Because in 100% of the cases, it benefits the right wing,” said Saeed Leylaz, a business consultant and advocate of economic reform and greater dialogue with the West.

Steve Benen notes of Flesicher, “[W]hat’s a ‘veteran spinmeister’ to do? Tell reporters on Friday that before anyone looks favorably on the current American leadership, it’s more important to extol the previous American leadership — you know, the one who was widely reviled throughout the Middle East.”