I’m back in Washington and pretty much recovered from traveling to and from Libya for a conference on that country’s terrorist rehabilitation program. I should note that the trip would have been impossible until 2006, when the United States restored diplomatic relations with Libya after a 27-year break and following a two-and-a-half year diplomatic process. While the trip itself felt like an extended advertisement for Libya’s heir apparent, Saif al-Islam Qaddafi, it’s worth noting that the terrorists who have gone through Libya’s rehabilitation program don’t seem to have de-radicalized so much as they have simply made a deal with the Libyan government not to fight against Tripoli anymore. There was no categorical renunciation of violence, rather one limited to a renunciation of violence against the Qaddafi regime and the Libyan state.

For one, the religious scholar who oversees the rehabilitation program, Sheikh Ali Salabi, evaded questions from the assembled group of foreign scholars and think-tankers about the new religious views he had promoted among militants on the permissibility of fighting against the United States or any other “occupier” in Iraq, Afghanistan, or elsewhere.

Second, for the most part, the militants we were able to talk to did, in fact, have conditions that would lead them to take up violence against the Libyan state again. Combined with Salabi’s evasions on the question of fighting elsewhere and their own familiar criticisms of U.S. policy in the Middle East, I got the impression that these militants haven’t so much as made some sort of intellectual conversion into renouncing violence as a method of political change as they have constructed an intellectual edifice justifying a deal with the Libyan government.

This perception seemed to be confirmed by the rambling lecture given us by the head of Libya’s internal security organization, where he claimed that the militants had recognized the error of their interpretation of Islam and the truth of Qaddafi’s own interpretation. Also included in the security chief’s remarks were several gratuitous attacks on secularism, as well as bizarre claims that there were no “infidels” in Libya and that Libya had ideal religious freedom since it is governed by Qaddafi’s correct interpretation of Islam.

There’s a certain irony to the way the Libyans presented their claims to fronting a successful terrorist rehabilitation program – they were employing the very means the terrorists used to justify violence against the regime. That is, the presenters claimed that the group had an incorrect and false interpretation of Islam – which is exactly what the militant group claimed of the Libyan government to justify rebelling against it. So the program remains stuck in a narrow and futile debate of what is or is not “true Islam.”

This view was confirmed, to me at least, by the press conference marking the release of some 200-plus prisoners from Libyan prisons we were trucked off to following the security chief’s presentation. Both Saif al-Islam Qaddafi’s opening remarks and the militants’ were conducted in the same narrow space of religion, and the militants included some remarks on the Danish Mohammad cartoon controversy that could only be interpreted as blackmail – i.e., don’t offend us or we’ll start blowing things up again.

Combined, these remarks signaled to me a narrowing of the ideological distance between the regime and the militants. It’d be wrong to say the regime is “giving in” in some sense to the religious ideology of the militants since Qaddafi has always incorporated religion into his eccentric and idiosyncratic ideology, but I did get the sense both the government and militants were determined to keep acceptable political discourse in the narrow confines of religion.

Finally, the next day we went to the Libyan prison where a large number of these prisoners were being held to witness their release. Of the 200-plus prisoners released, an official told us, some 85 had been detained either in Iraq or in transit to fight there. Combined with the previous day’s experiences and evasiveness we received on the question of Libyans fighting abroad, I came to the conclusion that these prisoners haven’t been de-radicalized at all; rather, they have simply been induced by means unknown to give up (at least for now) violence in Libya and against the Qaddafi regime. (As Human Rights Watch noted, a number of the prisoners released had been held arbitrarily by the Libyan regime even after formal acquittal by the court system.) They still hold radical political views but have decided, temporarily at least, not to implement those views by violence domestically.

Labeling this rehabilitation program a “deradicalization” program is a misnomer that plays upon the faulty and quite frankly bigoted division of people of Muslim religious background into “radicals” (people who blow stuff up) and “moderates” (people who don’t blow stuff up). Either way, if you’re born into a Muslim religious background, this view implies, we view you as intrinsically and essentially conservative and concerned above all else with your presumed religion.

This view is reactionary, and cedes the political playing field to religious conservatives and regional dictators. Neither the United States nor progressives should make such a concession to the agendas of these players.

The Center for Community Change’s Fair Immigration Reform Movement (FIRM) released a statement this afternoon announcing that leaders from their group met with Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele to discuss the future of comprehensive immigration reform in the Republican Party. According to FIRM, advocates left the meeting with a “commitment from Steele to work with Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and the party’s leadership to enlist another Republican senator’s support for comprehensive and bipartisan immigration reform.” The Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (ICIRR) was one of the groups represented at the meeting and issued a separate release:

Chairman Steele understands the short- and long-term importance of the immigrant vote to the Republican Party. He expressed support for bipartisan, holistic immigration reform, and understood the need for the party to tone down the anti-immigrant rhetoric in the debate. He agreed to speak today with U.S. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) to see how he could help move immigration reform forward…We are grateful for the time Chairman Steele spent with us today—but we will judge the value of this meeting based on what the Republican Party actually does on immigration reform.

Marissa Graciosa, FIRM’s director, was more blunt. “Basically, the leaders outed the Republican strategy of trying to obstruct comprehensive immigration reform by blaming Obama,” Graciosa told Wonk Room. “They made it clear that we’re not going to let a Party who doesn’t lift a finger off the hook,” said Graciosa. Graciosa also indicated that the groups expect the RNC to issue a statement to its members in support of immigration reform.

The fact that Steele even expressed interest in pursuing immigration reform represents a welcomed turnaround. In 2007, Steele absurdly opposed giving driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants on the basis that they might register to vote. He also referred to the 2007 immigration bill as “amnesty” and affirmed in 2008 that there would be no change in the Republican Party’s enforcement-only immigration approach.

Steele’s cooperation could also signal a possible change in the RNC’s official policy. The 2008 RNC platform offered enforcement-only solutions and stated that the RNC opposed “en masse legalizations.” Since an earned path to legalization for the majority of the nation’s undocumented population is a central tenet of comprehensive immigration reform, getting an RNC chairman on-board is a critical step forward on the issue as a whole.

However, as ICIRR pointed out in its press release, actions speak louder than words. Currently, Graham has left immigration reform at the feet of the Obama administration and indicated that it’s up to the White House to do the “heavy-lifting.” However, in the end, it’s up to Congress to deliver the votes. Immigration reform has always demanded bipartisanship and that means Graham, Steele, and other GOP leaders are going to have to do some heavy lifting themselves if they are truly committed to the issue. Also, given the fact that Steele’s relationship with Republican leaders in Congress is reportedly “not good at all,” it’s mostly up to Graham to stop finger-pointing and start getting members of his own Party to come around.

President Barack Obama has made comprehensive energy reform a key issue of his presidency, with massive investments in clean energy, initial efforts to confront climate change, and a commitment to “ending our addiction to foreign oil.” Today, Obama announced a sweeping new offshore drilling policy, opening “vast expanses of water along the Atlantic coastline, the eastern Gulf of Mexico and the north coast of Alaska to oil and natural gas drilling” for the first time. This plan would also restore the ban on drilling in Alaska’s Bristol Bay and the West Coast. White House officials “pitched the changes as ways to reduce U.S. reliance on foreign oil and create jobs,” the Associated Press reports. For years, however, Obama has correctly explained that new offshore drilling would do nothing to “reduce U.S. reliance on foreign oil”:

“The days of running a 21st century economy on a 20th century fossil fuel are numbered – and we need to realize that before it’s too late.”

“The truth is, an oil future is not a secure future for America.”

“We could open up every square inch of America to drilling and we still wouldn’t even make a dent in our oil dependency.” 9/15/05

“It would be nice if we could produce our way out of this problem, but it’s just not possible.” 2/28/06

“Instead of making tough political decisions about how to reduce our insatiable demand for oil, this bill continues to lull the American people into thinking that we can drill our way out of our energy problems. ” 8/1/06

“Now is the time to end this addiction, and to understand that drilling is a stop-gap measure, not a long-term solution. Not even close.” 8/28/08

This expansion in offshore drilling leases, the Energy Information Administration has found, will have no effect on gas prices or dependence on foreign oil. Nor will it increase jobs, as oil companies aren’t really interested in new drilling — they are already sitting on existing leases instead of drilling them, in order to inflate their bottom lines by claiming the value of leased oil reserves as an asset. Furthermore, a Center for American Progress study has found that money that goes into the oil sector instead of the clean energy economy means a net loss of 14 jobs per million dollars.

In the beginning of August 2008, as Newt Gingrich’s American Solutions for Winning the Future (ASWF) “Drill Here, Drill Now” campaign overlapped the presidential campaign, and oil and gas prices were skyrocketing to record levels, Obama dropped his “blanket opposition to expanded offshore drilling,” saying that he would be willing “to compromise in terms of a careful, well thought-out drilling strategy that was carefully circumscribed to avoid significant environmental damage” in order to get Republican votes for comprehensive climate and energy reform.

In 2005 and 2006, Obama talked about the “tough decisions” of “how to reduce our insatiable demand for oil” and “investing in more hybrids and renewable energy sources, raising CAFE standards and helping our auto industry transition to a fuel-efficient future,” instead of drilling. In his first year in office, Obama made tremendous down payments on the clean-energy transition, the cash-for-clunkers program, and ninety billion dollars of Recovery Act funds for hybrid cars, efficiency, and renewable energy technologies, and momentous new CAFE standards that will save 1.8 billion barrels of oil demand. That accomplished, Obama took a step back, saying in his 2010 State of the Union speech that “clean energy jobs” means “making tough decisions about opening new offshore areas for oil and gas development.” America’s oil addiction can only be broken with comprehensive climate legislation that puts a real cap on carbon pollution.

Conservatives are treating the announcement with disdain — Gingrich’s ASWF said the president’s plan “is likely to be an attempt by Obama to seduce the public (into) believing that he will do something in the future on offshore drilling,” but amounts to little more than window-dressing. Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity vice president Phil Kerpen commented that “the idea that this is a big concession in exchange for which Congress should jumpstart climate legislation is ridiculous.”

In a speech on the Senate floor in November, Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) alarmingly accused the Obama administration of failing to plan for the expiration of the original START treaty, which was due to expire on Dec. 5.

I urge my colleagues to consider what will happen on December 6, the day after the expiration of that agreement. For the first time in 15 years, an extensive set of verification, notification, elimination and other confidence building measures will expire. The U.S. will lose a significant source of information that has allowed it to have confidence in its ability to understand Russian strategic nuclear forces… The paramount object of this treaty should have been to extend the verification measure of the 1991 Agreement. But, it appears that the administration’s object was to lock in significant nuclear weapons cuts.

Kyl’s accusations were ultimately proven to be entirely off-base, as the Administration reached an agreement with the Russians to extend most of the verification and monitoring measures of Ronald Reagan’s original START treaty until a new treaty could be ratified.

But Kyl’s alarmism at the prospect of the loss of verification measures deserves to be highlighted. Should he and his Republican colleagues in the Senate work kill the treaty during the ratification process, all of Kyl’s warnings about the implications of the loss of the START verification system would in fact become a reality. The failure to ratify the new START treaty would significantly upset nuclear stability by eroding trust between the two countries — potentially spawning a new nuclear arms race, as Kyl himself argued. This would, as a result, upset the non-proliferation regime and severely upset nuclear stability around the globe. In short, if the US doesn’t ratify a treaty that largely maintains the nuclear status quo between the US and Russia, the whole nuclear non-proliferation regime, as well as US-Russian relations, could unravel.

The Kyl of November 2009 was right about the possibly dangerous and disastrous implications of START not existing. But the Kyl of 2010 seems to have forgotten the warnings made by Kyl of 2009.

While Kyl has not said that he would oppose the treaty, he and has staff have now grasped onto a petty and inconsequential issue — one that the administration has no control over and has no practical impact — as grounds for opposing the treaty. The issue is over whether Russia will unilaterally issue a statement following the START agreement that says that they will withdraw from the treaty should they feel that missile defense upsets “strategic stability.” Kyl, as well as the Wall Street Journal, are desperately trying to claim that this declaration will enable Russia will to hold us hostage by threatening missile defense. But this is a farcical argument. All treaties contain provisions that give countries the right to withdraw from a treaty for whatever reason they see fit. Therefore, it simply doesn’t matter if the Russians write anything down, since written or not they could still always withdraw from the treaty if they feel missile defense has undercut them. As former Ambassador to the Ukraine and Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution Steven Pifer noted:

Who cares? … There is a supreme interest withdrawal clause that goes back to the original START treaty and can be invoked for any reason by either side so long as they provide six months’ notice.

Michael Krepon at Arms Control Wonk goes further, noting that if successful, Kyl will be giving Russians a victory on missile defense:

Throwing mud against the wall and seeing what sticks is a time-honored approach to messing up treaty ratification… If the mud sticks in this instance, Senators will be sending a very unfortunate message abroad – that the United States of America can be spooked by unilateral statements that have no legal or practical effect. They will also be giving unintended credence to the canard that Moscow has veto rights over U.S. ballistic missile defense programs.

Kyl’s claims that such a statement is reason enough to kill the treaty, is either willfully ignorant of how treaties work or he is simply looking for an excuse to oppose it. The Kyl of 2010 needs to be reminded of the arguments made by Kyl of 2009.

Not that anyone is surprised by irresponsible pro-war journalism from the Washington Times, but yesterday’s Bill Gertz story — run under a headline screaming “CIA: IRAN CAPABLE OF PRODUCING NUKES” — was a particularly vivid shade of yellow. Gertz wrote that “Iran is poised to begin producing nuclear weapons after its uranium program expansion in 2009, even though it has had problems with thousands of its centrifuges, according to a newly released CIA report.”

“Iran continues to develop a range of capabilities that could be applied to producing nuclear weapons, if a decision is made to do so,” the annual report to Congress states.

A U.S. official involved in countering weapons proliferation said the Iranians are “keeping the door open to the possibility of building a nuclear weapon.”

Is this new or newsworthy? No, and not particularly. Gertz’s attempt to sex up the CIA’s report (pdf) through the clever deployment of the phrase “poised to begin…” notwithstanding, the report’s conclusions are precisely the same as that contained in the intelligence community’s annual threat assessment (pdf), delivered by DNI Dennis Blair to Congress in February:

We continue to assess Iran is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons in part by developing various nuclear capabilities that bring it closer to being able to produce such weapons, should it choose to do so. We do not know, however, if Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons.

Indeed, a few grafs down Gertz himself acknowledges that the report “reflects the published conclusion of a controversial 2007 National Intelligence Estimate that stated Iran had halted work on nuclear weapons in 2003.” How could the report reflect those conclusions while at the same time assert that Iran is both “capable” of producing nuclear weapons, and “poised” to do so? Simple: It couldn’t.

While the upcoming National Intelligence Estimate on Iran is expected to revise some of conclusions of the 2007 NIE, today’s news that the U.S. has had custody since last June of a key Iranian nuclear scientist suggests that those revisions might be less than the 180 degree reversal that some conservatives are hoping for. ABC reports that the scientist, Shahram Amiri “has been extensively debriefed since his defection by the CIA, according to the people briefed on the situation. They say Amiri helped to confirm U.S. intelligence assessments about the Iranian nuclear program.”