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

We are in day 47 of the conservative exploitation of a failed terrorist attack for partisan political purposes. The good news is that the public doesn’t appear to be buying it: A poll out today shows public support for President Obama’s handling of terrorism has increased since November. The support is merited because the Obama administration’s decisions are producing results, while the favored conservative alternative already failed when tried before.

Today’s installment is a diatribe from former Bush administration officials Dana Perino and Bill Bruck against John Brennan, which contains a number of misrepresentations and outright lies. Bear with me, it’s going to take a while to go through the whole thing.

First, Perino and Bruck attempt one of my favorite conservative attacks, going after the Obama administration for aiding the enemy by informing the public that the underwear bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, is cooperating:

“The administration has spent the past two weeks telling anyone who will listen, including our enemies overseas (whom Abdulmutallab apparently is flipping on), that Abdulmutallab’s family convinced him to start cooperating six weeks after he was Mirandized.”

So, after weeks of partisan attacks by conservatives over its handling of Abdulmutallab specifically designed to scare the American people, when the Obama administration seeks to reassure the public that its chosen path is producing results, that too becomes grounds for more attacks. Essentially, Perino and Bruck are saying, “Its fine for us to attack you but you can’t defend yourself.” Right.

And notice the clumsy lie about when Abdulmutallab began cooperating:

“Abdulmutallab’s family convinced him to start cooperating six weeks after he was Mirandized.”

We know that Abdulmutallab’s family was instrumental in securing his complete cooperation with authorities beginning on January 17. That information was made public on February 2. So, the public learned of his cooperation six weeks after the attack but he had been in full cooperation with authorities for more than two weeks at that time. Perino and Bruck repeat this lie throughout the piece.

Perino and Bruck reveal their confusion about what it means to secure the cooperation from an individual being interrogated:

“Indeed, this is when Brennan himself writes that ‘[t]he most important breakthrough occurred.’ How, then, could Abdulmutallab have been ‘thoroughly interrogated’ immediately after he was arrested if ‘the most important breakthrough’ came six weeks later, and only after his family intervened? This glaring contradiction goes unaddressed.”

It’s not addressed because there is no contradiction. As soon as he was detained, and before he went into surgery for injuries he sustained during the failed attack, Abdulmutallab was questioned and apparently gave his interrogators useful information. When Abdulmutallab emerged from surgery he decided to stop cooperating and asked for a lawyer. He was then Mirandized. The breakthrough came when FBI agents gained the assistance of his family to persuade him to cooperate fully with the government. At least since mid-January, Abdulmutallab has been providing useful information that has already resulted in one terrorist cell being rolled up.

Perino and Bruck then suggest that Brennan was lying when he claimed that senior officials in the intelligence community and military were discussing the case before Abdulmutallab was Mirandized after he came out of surgery:

“Either the heads of the intelligence community lied to Congress several weeks ago when they all testified, under oath, they were not consulted, or Brennan is fibbing now.”

The “lack of consultation” canard has been a conservative favorite for weeks now. It rests on a faulty presumption, that Mirandzing Abdulmutallab was the cause of his decision to stop cooperating. We know that is false. We also know that not only did officials across the intelligence, military, and law enforcement communities discuss the case at an early stage, but that Republican Congressional leaders were also updated on Christmas night, and none of them raised any objections. A subsequent meeting of the National Security Council, including all of the principals, discussed in detail the issue of whether to proceed with criminal charges or chose military detention, and it was unanimously decided to follow the criminal route.

Perino and Bruck blast Brennan for stating the simple truth, that Mirandizing individuals seized in the United States has never before been considered controversial and is the law and longstanding policy of administrations of either party: Read more

Local news outlets are reporting that last week, Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio disseminated a stinging letter urging Republican primary voters to support right-wing shock jock and former Congressman J.D. Hayworth over Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) in his bid for Arizona’s U.S. Senate seat. Arpaio wrote:

Senator McCain has served this country admirably but it’s time to replace his moderate or even liberal positions on taxes, the border, social causes and big bank bailouts with a consistent conservative like J.D...I just wish Senator McCain had run as hard against Barack Obama as he is against a conservative like J.D. That could have prevented the harmful, liberal agenda we are all now suffering through…[W]e must stop Senator McCain’s policies to open up our borders.

Ironically, when it comes to immigration, neither Hayworth nor Arpaio have been the “consistent conservatives” they like to portray themselves as. During the 2006 and 2007 immigration debates, Hayworth dedicated a lot of time to lambasting immigration reform, particularly proposals for a temporary worker program. However, the website of NumbersUSA — the sort of immigration restrictionist group Hayworth is pandering to — shows that he repeatedly voted in favor of expanding temporary worker programs throughout the 1990s. Republican columnist and commentator Linda Chavez points out that Hayworth’s anti-immigrant flip flop in the proceeding decade likely cost him his House seat. Chavez writes that Hayworth switched positions as soon as he “sensed bashing immigrants was a surer ticket to re-election.” However, voters “wanted no part” in Hayworth’s hardline policies and voted him out of office in 2006.

Arpaio also is no steadfast conservative either. In 2005, Arpaio held that “being illegal is not a serious crime. You can’t go to jail for being an illegal alien.” At the time, Arpaio told the Arizona Republic’s Michael Kiefer, “I want the authority to lock up smugglers, but I am not going to lock up illegals hanging around street corners.” These days, Arpaio brags about locking up 32,000 “diseased” immigrants for smuggling themselves across the border, even though it created a $1.3 million deficit in just three months. However, polls show that Arpaio’s popularity may be waning partly due to the controversies surrounding his harsh immigration enforcement tactics.

For the past several years, McCain has been a conservative voice of reason in the immigration debate. Many speculate that he actually lost the critical support of the Latino community when he backed away from his immigration position during the 2008 presidential election. With Latinos comprising 11.7% of Arizona voters, McCain would be wise to resist the temptation of getting pushed farther to the right by a right-wing has-been and a mud-slinging Sheriff mired in controversy.

Tomorrow, February 11 (the 22nd of Bahman in the Persian calendar) marks the 31st anniversary of Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution, with both the government and the opposition preparing for another round of demonstrations.

Recent statements from two of the movement’s putative leaders, Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, indicate no intention of backing down. In an interview with Der Spiegel, Karroubi underlined the current regime’s illegitimacy and said “There is no sign of a willingness to compromise from our side — and also not from the other side either.”

SPIEGEL: What concessions do you demand from the Tehran regime in order to resolve the crisis?

Karroubi: The political prisoners must be set free, we need freedom of the press and freedom of assembly, our electoral law must be changed and a free election must take place. But then the current government would hardly be able to hold on to power.

In an interview last week, Mousavi made some of his boldest criticisms of the government yet, saying “the anniversary of the revolution, marked every year, is in fact meant for refreshing forces to confront the remnant of dictatorship.” Mousavi said the Green movement represented “the continuation of the struggles of the days and months leading to the 1979 revolution.”

Trita Parsi and Alireza Nader have a piece in Foreign Policy pushing back on the simplistic rendering of U.S. policy options as “realism” vs. “regime change” that has unfortunately defined much of the recent DC debate on Iran. (Interestingly, I made a similar point in a bloggingheads discussion yesterday with Eli Lake, recorded before I’d seen the piece.)

Parsi and Nader write that “between the extremes of doing nothing and doing everything, there is a middle ground: providing the Iranian pro-democracy movement with breathing space, rather than engaging in risky and imprecise exercises that would directly involve America as an actor on the Iranian scene.”

The authors recommend, among other things, that “the international community, including the White House and U.S. State Department, should be vocal in excoriating Iran’s human rights abuses“:

Condemning abuses should not be confused with interfering in internal Iranian affairs. As a signatory of numerous international conventions, Iran has a legal obligation to uphold its people’s human rights. When it fails to do so, the United States and the world community has a responsibility to speak up. The Iranian government is, perhaps surprisingly, very sensitive in this area, due to its ambition to be perceived as a regional leader. This sensitivity should be utilized to make advances on the human rights front in Iran.

On a panel discussion on Iran and human rights hosted by CAP last week, InsideIran editor Geneive Abdo suggested that, as the nuclear issue seems to be at an impasse, the human rights issue could be a more effective area to apply pressure. Unlike the nuclear issue, where hard evidence of wrongdoing is difficult to obtain, Iran’s human rights violations are undisputed, having been broadcast to the world via YouTube and Twitter. “Human rights seems to be a logical course,” Abdo said, “because there’s overwhelming evidence“:

The nuclear issue –- everything is disputed. There’s no transparency. But it’s pretty clearly been documented that they have tortured and killed people since June. And so I think that in that sense, they have to be held accountable to something that’s fairly concrete.

The human rights issue provides a way to bolster the claims of the Green movement without providing ammunition to their domestic critics, which is really important. Though the hundreds of thousands of demonstrators indicate a significant trend, there is no evidence that the Greens yet represent a majority of Iranians. The reformers are currently locked in a battle with the regime for the allegiance of the Iranian people — they’re making the case that they, not the current government, better represent the aspirations of Iran — and could find their appeals seriously undercut by an explicit U.S. enlistment in their cause.

This is especially true if support for the Greens is justified, as it has been by regime changer Robert Kagan, specifically in terms of potential benefits to U.S. hegemony, a chance to reverse the “strategic and ideological debacle” of the 1979 Iranian revolution, as Kagan wrote recently. Given the pride that most Iranians still feel about 1979 — Iran’s reformers are, thus far, contesting the legacy of the Revolution, not rejecting it — such an approach could effectively de-legitimize the Greens in the eyes of needed allies.

Parsi and Nader also advise something that U.S. political culture is not exactly known for — patience:

Washington should exercise patience and view Iran as a long-term factor in shaping U.S. national security interests across the Middle East. The green movement will not and cannot adjust its action plan to suit the U.S. political timetable. But if patience is granted — which includes avoiding a singular focus on the nuclear issue at the expense of all other considerations — Washington will access a far greater potential for change.

Painstaking diplomacy, carefully targeted sanctions, and support for international human rights norms may not provide the satisfying purity of bombing Iran, but, unlike bombing Iran, they could actually work.

Newt Gingrich has helped lead the conservative effort to politicize the attempted terrorist attack on Christmas day. Since the failed attack, he has called for “profiling” and asserted that Republican political campaigns should get a “boost” from the incident.

Last night, in an interview with Jon Stewart on The Daily Show, Gingrich tried to skewer the Obama administration for reading Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the alleged Christmas day terrorist, his Miranda rights. Stewart noted that the Bush administration had also informed the shoe bomber Richard Reid of his Miranda rights. Gingrich justified his double standard by claiming that the circumstance was different because Reid was “an American citizen.” Stewart took the extra step of returning after commercial break to correct Gingrich — Reid was a British citizen:

GINGRICH: The American people doesn’t understand reading Miranda rights to terrorists in Detroit when its fairly obvious they’re terrorists. […]

STEWART: Didn’t they [the Bush administration] do the same with Richard Reid, the shoe bomber.

GINGRICH: Richard Reid was an American citizen.

Watch it:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
Newt Gingrich
www.thedailyshow.com
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Gingrich has a long history of twisting national security to fit his political agenda. For instance, as the Wonk Room has noted, Gingrich has based much of his fearmongering against Iran and other countries on a fictional thriller novel he read. And while he prides himself as a historical expert, Gingrich constantly gets his history wrong. Last year, he falsely claimed that U.S. Presidents don’t “smile and greet” Russian leaders. Photographic evidence suggests otherwise.

Listening to Gingrich lambaste the Obama administration over and over again as “radical,” Stewart noted that Gingrich seemed to inject great emotion into his arguments. Gingrich quickly agreed, “It’s part of my job, to reach out to the emotions of the American public.” Stewart then responded wryly, “I think that’s wise, and don’t let reality get in the way.”