Dan Fanelli, a “former Navy and commercial airline pilot” who is competing in the GOP congressional primary for the chance to run against Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) in the general election, has begun airing a new ad in which he seems to endorse racial profiling of darker-skinned Americans to detect terrorists. Fanelli implies that all terrorists look alike.

In the ad, Fanelli stands in front of an elderly white man dressed in a business suit and asks, “Does this look like a terrorist?” He then holds out his hands to his other side and a burly, swarthy-skinned man emerges, prompting Fanelli to say, “Or this?” The candidate continues, “It’s time to stop this political correctness and the invasion of our privacy. Let’s face it, if the good looking rich guy without much hair was flying airplanes into the twin towers, I’d have no problem being pulled out of line at the airport.” Watch it:

The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent asked Fanelli if “the message of the spot was that darker people are more likely to be terrorists.” Sargent writes that Fanelli “said it wasn’t, claiming that the ad’s point was that people from countries like Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Syria ‘require a higher level of security.’”

While Fanelli’s suggestion of placing special security emphasis on people who look a certain way or come only from certain countries is offensive, it’s also wildly ineffective in actually combating terrorism. A study released last year by the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science conducted a mathematical analysis to compare random screenings to racial profiling. It found that racial profiling is “no more effective” than using the random method in detecting terrorists.

Indeed, terrorists come in all shapes, sizes, and colors, and do not simply belong to one religion, ethnicity, or nationality. The “shoe bomber,” Richard Reid, was Jamaican and British. Al Qaeda recruit Adam Pearlman was a white American. Germaine Lindsay, one of London’s 7/7 bombers, was Afro-Caribbean. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was a black African.

As ThinkProgress noted yesterday, after alleged Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad was arrested late Monday at JFK International Airport, conservatives began following the political playbook they used to criticize the Obama administration’s handling of the attempted Christmas day bombing: complaining that authorities might read him his Miranda rights. “Don’t give this guy his Miranda rights until we find out what it’s all about,” said Sen. John McCain (R-AZ).

McCain’s close ally, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT), even suggested that Congress should create a process to strip “American citizens who choose to become affiliated with foreign terrorists” of their citizenship and, therefore, their Miranda rights. Lieberman explained to reporters that he believes “that any time we arrest somebody we suspect to be a terrorist the first thing that ought to happen with them is they ought to be interviewed without Miranda Rights being given to them”:

LIEBERMAN: My own feeling about this is that any time we arrest somebody we suspect to be a terrorist the first thing that ought to happen with them is they ought to be interviewed without Miranda Rights being given to them by law enforcement officials to extract from them every piece of information that might help us stop an ongoing terrorist threat. My own feeling is that anybody who we decide there is reasonable possibility that they’ve committed a terrorist act ought to be turned over to our military justice system because though it’s an unconventional war, they are prisoners of a war. A war that Islamic extremists declared against the United States, certainly, on 9/11/01. So, bottom line, I don’t believe somebody like Faisal Shahzad should receive Miranda rights. I don’t believe he’s entitled to them.

Shahzad, a naturalized U.S. citizen, did eventually have his rights read to him, but not until after he was questioned extensively under a “public safety exception” to the Miranda rule. Fox News’ Jamie Colby reported today that “a source on the Homeland Security Committee” told her that Shahzad was read his rights “nine and a half hours after questioning.” Watch it:

Colby added that she was told that once Shahzad was Mirandized, “he waved his right to counsel, he waved his right to an appearance.” Indeed, Deputy FBI director John Pistole said yesterday that Shahzad continued to cooperate after hearing his rights:

Shahzad was not immediately Mirandized after authorities yanked him off a Dubai-bound flight from New York Monday night. John Pistole, deputy FBI director, said Tuesday that agents interviewed him under the “public safety exception” to determine whether there was an imminent threat.

He was later read his rights and waived them, according to the White House. Officials have described the suspect as cooperative and talkative ever since.

“He was … cooperative and provided valuable intelligence and evidence. He was eventually transported to another location, mirandized and continued talking,” Pistole said.

So, despite conservative complaints, reading a U.S. citizen his Miranda rights has not impeded information-gathering. But this hasn’t stopped conservatives from complaining. Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey told Fox News that despite claims that Shahzad “kept spilling the beans, the question is how many beans he spilled.”

Recent statements from Vice-President Joe Biden, General David Petraeus, and Defense Secretary Robert Gates on how how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the perception of U.S. favoritism toward Israel, negatively affect U.S. interests in the Middle East have generated a number of frantic and strained responses from Israel hawks who insist that the U.S.-Israel relationship, unlike every other relationship that has ever existed between two states in human history, exists in a kind of special bubble that magically only ever generates positive things for both states, and that suggesting otherwise means that you hate Israel and love Osama bin Hitlernejad.

The best one of these yet comes from the Hudson Institute’s Lee Smith, who is fast overtaking Michael Ledeen as my favorite unintentionally comic writer on the Middle East. Acknowledging that the “linkage” argument “has won the support of a broad consensus of U.S. congressmen, senators, diplomats, former presidents, and their foreign-policy advisers, seconded by journalists, Washington policy analysts, almost every American who has ever watched a Sunday morning news roundtable, and the Obama Administration, from National Security Adviser James Jones to the president himself,” Smith insists that all of these people are wrong. Why? “Having written a book that describes the Middle East in terms of a clash of Arab civilizations,” Smith informs us, “I give no credence to the notion that the Arab-Israeli arena is the region’s defining issue.” Do you hear? Smith has written a book that argues something different! (I hate to break it to Smith, but many of the people whose views he dismisses have written books, too.)

Smith lists a number of other conflicts in the Middle East, cleverly showing that… there are a number of other conflicts in the Middle East. “Nonetheless,” writes Smith, “I can hardly help but recognize the central role that U.S. Middle East policy has given to the belief that, from the Persian Gulf all the way to Western North Africa, a region encompassing many thousands of tribes and clans, dozens of languages and dialects, ethnicities and religious confessions, the Arab-Israeli issue is the key factor in determining the happiness of over 300 million Arabs and an additional 1.3 billion Muslims outside of the Arabic-speaking regions.” Typical of linkage deniers, Smith has to rely on caricature in order to make his argument. No one has ever suggested that “the Arab-Israeli issue is the key factor in determining the happiness” of anyone, other than the nearly 4 million Palestinians who continue to suffer under Israeli occupation and siege. But it’s simply a fact that Arabs themselves report the Palestinian issue as one that is very important to them, and one that negatively affects their view of the United States.

How to get around this inconvenience? Smith has an idea:

Where does such an extraordinary idea come from? The answer is the Arabs — who might be expected, in the U.S. view of the world, to give us an honest account of what is bothering them. However, this would ignore the fact that interested parties do not always disclose the entire truth of their situation, especially when they have a stake in doing otherwise.

Ah yes, those wily Arabs, always fudging the truth. It’s part of their culture, you see. On the other hand, lobbying groups and think tanks closely aligned with the Israeli right wing, such as the one that pays Lee Smith to write books full of anecdata about how Arabs are inherently violent and untrustworthy, can always be counted on to be completely truthful about Middle East issues.

There’s quite a bit more hilarity to be mined from Smith’s piece — such as his inclusion of Dennis Ross among those who endorse the linkage argument, which links to an article about how Dennis Ross rejects the linkage argument, or his contention that the linkage argument is essentially a game of telephone begun by Ibn Saud in an attempt to gain advantage over the Hashemites — but I’ll just say that, if you were to judge an argument solely by the wild pitches it prompts from critics, linkage would appear to be an impressively strong one.

Shortly after the media broke the news that authorities had arrested Faisal Shahzad as a suspect in the May 1 Times Square bombing attempt, conservative lawmakers began complaining that even though he’s an American citizen, authorities should deprive him of his Miranda rights. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) said that Mirandizing Shahzad would be “a serious mistake,” and Rep. Peter King (R-NY) said, “Did they Mirandize him? I know he’s an American citizen but still.” Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) suggested that Congress should perhaps create a process to strip “American citizens who choose to become affiliated with foreign terrorists” of their citizenship.

In today’s Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing on “Terrorists and Guns,” and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said he wholeheartedly agreed with his colleagues and wanted to write legislation that would allow authorities to deprive them of their rights:

GRAHAM: I want to stop reading these guys their Miranda rights. Me and Peter are so much on board here. … Nobody in their right mind would expect a Marine to read someone caught on the battlefield their rights. You catch them and you interrogate them lawfully to gather intelligence. Your special unit is probably the best in the world at this, but I don’t think it’s smart for us to say the homeland is not part of the battlefield.

You get to America, you get a much better deal, you get rewarded. If you can be caught in Pakistan, intelligence-gathering can happen with intelligence agencies without your Miranda warnings being given. Why should you get a better deal when you get here? Even if you’re an American citizen helping the enemy, you should be viewed as a potential military threat, not some guy who tried to commit a crime in Times Square.

So I look forward to working with the New York City Police Department, the mayor of New York, Peter King, to devise a law that recognizes we’re at war. … [T]hat you would have the opportunity to hold this suspect, because they represent a military threat to our country even though they’re a citizen, and be able to gather intelligence before you did anything else. … So we need a law that would allow you to go to a judge somewhere — like a FISA judge — and hold a suspect like this and working with the intelligence officials of this country, to gather intelligence, and then make a good prosecutorial decision.

Watch it:

Graham was on active duty in the Air Force as a Judge Advocate General, the corps that acts as legal advisers to the U.S. military. He is now in the Reserves and serves as a Senior Instructor at the Air Force JAG School. In light of his role, it’s disturbing that he would be so willing to distort what Miranda rights are and call for getting rid of them in certain instances. Graham and his conservative counterparts are under the mistaken impression that Mirandizing a suspect grants special rights, when all it does is inform someone of existing rights. As Matt Yglesias adds, “And the whole reason cops mirandize suspects is that if you don’t, you risk having your evidence thrown out of court. If you gather all the information before mirandizing, you could be throwing the whole thing into doubt.”

The record also doesn’t show any evidence of Miranda rights being counterproductive to gathering intelligence. Authorities Mirandized Shahzad, who is reportedly continuing to cooperate and provide information.

It’s important to remember that Shahzad has not yet been convicted of anything. People like Graham want to strip a suspect of all his rights as a U.S. citizen. As Yglesias notes, “You can’t have a system where a cop comes up to me and says ‘you’re a terrorist, therefore you have no citizenship rights, therefore I’m putting you under arrest and you don’t get any due process and now it’s off to jail with you — no rights, no warning.’” Does Graham really want to make all of the United States into the equivalent of a battlefield in Pakistan?

The vital signs had been ominous for a long while. Hard-line Cold War-era realist hawks, who once dominated the conservative Republican foreign policy establishment, had been seeing their influence rapidly fade over conservative political leaders. After Congressman Eric Cantor’s (R-VA) speech at the Heritage Foundation yesterday, we can now declare their influence dead.

There is nothing conservative about Cantor’s foreign policy. His speech, seen as the opening political salvo of the 2010 campaign on foreign policy, laid out the right’s political battle plan on foreign policy. Pulling together the lines of attack that conservatives in the House and Senate had peddled against the Administration for the past year, Cantor – the second ranking House Republican – created an overall narrative that is not only untethered from reality, but demonstrates a radicalism that fully embraces the radical neoconservatives of the early years of the Bush administration.

While Cantor’s speech may have been largely motivated by partisan calculations and blind opposition to Obama, his speech still exposes the total loss of influence of traditional and notable Republican foreign policy officials. This is no longer the party of Kissinger, Scowcroft, and Powell, it is the party of Frank Gaffney and John Bolton.

Despite his address being highly vacuous and short on specifics, about the only thing Cantor did specifically promise that:

A Republican Congress will turn back harmful treaties like START.

Cantor’s opposition to the START treaty, as well as the opposition of other right wing members of the Senate, is counter the overwhelming majority of the traditional Republican foreign policy establishment. For instance, last week and in a huge boost to the treaty, James Schlesinger came out in support of the START treaty. Schlesinger was Nixon’s former Secretary of Defense, he is a nuclear hawk that led the intellectual fight against the ratification of the test ban treaty in 1999, was picked by Republicans to represent the conservative view on the Strategic Posture Commission that assessed nuclear strategy, and is such a conservative heavy weight that he was profiled by the Wall Street Journal as the conservative’s nuclear yoda.

But Eric Cantor has rejected Schlesinger and these other figures and has decided to oppose the treaty. But what makes this so radical is that failure to ratify this treaty could have horrendous consequences, as it would automatically shatter nuclear stability, as all verification and confidence measures would be eliminated possibly unleashing a new nuclear arms race. It would very likely be a death blow to the non-proliferation regime increasing the threat of proliferation and nuclear terrorism. And it would without a doubt torpedo relations with Russia, potentially endangering our troops in Afghanistan who rely on supply lines through Russia. Rejecting START has absolutely massive consequences.

Yet this is where Eric Cantor and the House GOP are.

It used to be that hardcore hawkish realism put figures like Henry Kissinger, George Schultz, James Baker, Colin Powell, and Brent Scowcroft in stark opposition to progressives. These leading lights epitomized the concept of “conservative.” In general, they feared foreign entanglements and questioned progressive efforts to emphasize the internal characteristics of countries, such as their human rights record and democratic legitimacy, as a basis for relations. National interests were narrowly defined and statecraft and diplomacy – peeling off China from the Soviets, building a huge multilateral coalition to counter Saddam – were integral tools of the trade.

But these leading Republican foreign policy figures are now either persona non-grata in the Republican party or are simply ignored. The fact is that these figures are now much closer to Democratic foreign policy leaders and progressive positions on foreign policy. In some ways, this is because of a convergence of views on how to manage the world following the collapse of the Soviet Union, in others its because the Democratic foreign policy has become more conservative. But mainly it is because the GOP has moved leaps and bounds to the right – to the point where it is clear that these figures have almost nothing in common with Eric Cantor and the conservatives that are running things on the Hill.

The chief suspect in the case of the failed Times Square car bombing is Pakistani-American Faisal Shahzad, who has confessed to the plot. Much of the media has latched onto Shahzad’s Muslim faith and his Pakistani identity, making inflammatory remarks and suggestions about Muslims and Pakistanis:

– CNN contributor and Redstate.com blogger Erick Erickson complained that the words “muslim” and “Islam” are “not mentioned” enough in stories about Shahzad. He wrote, “It really is pathetic that you’re more likely to see the words “racist” and “Republican” together in the newspaper these days than “terrorism” and “Islam.” [5/4/2010]

– Hate radio host Neal Boortz tweeted, “OMG! The Times Square Bomber is a Muslim! Shocker! Who would have believed it?” [5/4/2010]

– The cover of today’s Washington Post-published Express features a black-and-white photo of Shahzad with the sensationalist headline “MADE IN PAKISTAN” [5/5/2010]

Yet one fact being ignored in the American media’s sensationalist narrative about the failed bombing is that the man who was responsible for police finding the bomb was Muslim. The UK’s Times Online reports that Aliou Niasse, a Senagalese Muslim immigrant who works as a photograph vendor on Times Square, was the first to bring the smoking car to the police’s attention:

Aliou Niasse, a street vendor selling framed photographs of New York, said that he was the first to spot the car containing the bomb, which pulled up right in front of his cart on the corner of 45th street and Broadway next to the Marriott hotel.

“I didn’t see the car pull up or notice the driver because I was busy with customers. But when I looked up I saw that smoke appeared to be coming from the car. This would have been around 6.30pm.”

“I thought I should call 911, but my English is not very good and I had no credit left on my phone, so I walked over to Lance, who has the T-shirt stall next to mine, and told him. He said we shouldn’t call 911. Immediately he alerted a police officer near by,” said Mr Niasse, who is originally from Senegal and who has been a vendor in Times Square for about eight years.

As the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights notes, “South Asian, and Muslim communities may yield useful information to those fighting terrorism. Arabs and Arab Americans also offer the government an important source of Arabic speakers and translators. The singling out of Arabs, South Asians, Muslims, and Sikhs for investigation regardless of whether any credible evidence links them to terrorism will simply alienate these individuals and compromise the anti-terrorism effort.”

Reflecting on Niasse’s good samaritanism Muslim-American author Sumbul Ali-Karamali writes, “It’s somewhat consoling to know that the man who first noticed the smoking Nissan Pathfinder and sought help is also Muslim, a Senegalese immigrant. … I grew up Muslim in this country, with Muslim friends and non-Muslim friends, and there was very little difference between the two groups. We were all American.”