About a month ago, Utah’s governor signed off on a set of bills that include provisions similar to Arizona’s SB-1070 immigration law, in addition to language that would allow undocumented immigrants to live and work in the state of Utah and create a migrant worker partnership with Mexico. I recently reported that House Judiciary Chairman and immigration hardliner Lamar Smith (R-TX) was chiding the Department of Justice (DOJ) for going after Arizona’s immigration law but not pursuing a similar case against Utah.

Today, Smith got the chance to ask DOJ Secretary Eric Holder himself what his department is planning along those lines. Both Smith and Rep. Steve King (R-IA) appeared to be pretty irate about the supposed hypocrisy. Yet, after hearing Holder’s response, Smith ultimately was forced to concede “fair enough”:

SMITH: It seems to me that the Department should probably be consistent in its application of the law. [...] This does give the appearance of a pattern of selectively enforcing the law and I wanted to seek your comment as to whether that experience is accurate or not. [...]

HOLDER: That’s a law that doesn’t go into effect until 2013. It has always been the Department of Justice’s policy to try to work with states to see if there’s a way in which we can reach an agreement without us having to file suit. So we will look at the law and if it’s not changed to our satisfaction by 2013, we will take all the necessary steps.

SMITH: What were you referring to when you said “trying to work something out with Utah?” [...] That seems to be a clear violation of current immigration law.

HOLDER: Well it might be. The law as it exists in 2011 — that could be a violation that we would sue. By 2013 we might be in a different place.

SMITH: If they change the law, it would take something like that? Okay, fair enough.

Watch it:

The major difference between Arizona’s law — SB-1070 — and the set of laws passed by Utah is that SB-1070 was set to go into effect just a couple of months after it passed while Utah’s new immigration laws won’t be enforced for another two years. My guess is that Arizona also didn’t display any interest in “trying to work something out” with the federal government before the lawsuit against the state was filed.

Meanwhile, a lot could happen between now and 2013. The Supreme Court could strike down Arizona’s law, which would have serious implications for Utah’s approach. A new administration could decide to drop the case altogether. Or Congress could actually take it upon themselves to fix the nation’s broken immigration system. In fact, Smith’s fellow Republicans — Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff and Gov. Gary Herbert have suggested the Judiciary chairman do just that. One thing is for sure though — the 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the U.S. aren’t going anywhere.

Yesterday during an interview with ThinkProgress, Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) predicted that calls for withdrawing U.S. forces from Afghanistan will increase in the wake of Osama bin Laden’s death. “I think that takes a lot of the pressure away — a lot of the punch away from the argument that ‘oh, it will look like we walked away,’” he said.

And it appears that sentiment is spreading across the aisle. Today at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Afghanistan, Sen. Dick Lugar (R-IN) — who has been a growing skeptic of the war in Afghanistan — offered four observations of the war there and based on those observations, concluded that the U.S. presence in Afghanistan doesn’t appear to be “rational”:

LUGAR: First, we are spending enormous resources in a single country. … Second, although threats to the United States national security do emanate from within Afghanistan’s borders, these may not be the most serious threats in the region and Afghanistan may not be the most likely source of a major terrorist attack. … [W]e should know by now that such grand nation-building ambitions in Afghanistan are beyond our powers. … Fourth, although alliance help in Afghanistan is significant and appreciated, the heaviest burden will continue to fall on the United States. [...]

If one accepts these four observations, it’s exceedingly difficult to conclude that our vast expenditures in Afghanistan represent a rational allocation of our military and financial assets.

Even Afghan President Hamid Karzai threw a wrench into one of the original justifications for the U.S. military to be in Afganistan. “Osama was not in Afghanistan: they found him in Pakistan,” Mr. Karzai said. “The war on terror is not in Afghan villages…but in the safe havens of terrorism outside Afghanistan.” And while opposition leader Abdullah Abdullah said that NATO forces should stay in Afghanistan, he agreed with Karzai’s sentiment. “Killing of Osama bin Laden is pleasant news for Afghans, and now it’s proven that al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations are not based in Afghanistan and Pakistan is a haven for them,” he said.

The United States has spent more than $400 billion fighting the war in Afghanistan and more than 1,500 U.S. troops have died. And while the top U.S. commander there Gen. David Petraeus said recently that NATO forces have made gains, stories about Afghan security forces killing Americans and hundreds of insurgents escaping prison through a tunnel dug by the Taliban are not encouraging. (HT: George Zornick)

Politico reports that supporters of George W. Bush are “irked” that the former president isn’t getting more credit for the killing of Osama bin Laden, despite the droves of conservatives lawmakers and pundits who have been rushing to give Bush equal credit as Obama.

But this praise for Bush relies on rewriting history to obscure the fact Obama re-prioritized the hunt for Bin Laden after Bush had largely abandoned the effort to focus on Iraq.

While many conservatives are triumphantly replaying Bush’s September 2001 declaration that he would find Bin Laden, just months later, by Bush’s own account, he was unconcerned about the terrorist mastermind. Asked about the hunt for Bin Laden at a March, 2002 press conference, Bush said, “I truly am not that concerned about him. I am deeply concerned about Iraq.” “I really just don’t spend that much time on him, to be honest with you,” Bush added.

By 2006, the trail for Bin Laden had gone “stone cold” and Weekly Standard editor Fred Barnes said Bush told him that hunting Bin Laden was “not a top priority use of American resources.” (Indeed, there was a flailing war in Iraq to fight.)

That year, it was revealed that the administration had shuttered the CIA’s Bin Laden unit in late 2005. As the New York Times reported at the time, the move reflected a shift in resources to Iraq:

In recent years, the war in Iraq has stretched the resources of the intelligence agencies and the Pentagon, generating new priorities for American officials. For instance, much of the military’s counterterrorism units, like the Army’s Delta Force, had been redirected from the hunt for Mr. bin Laden to the search for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was killed last month in Iraq.

But Bush’s biggest misstep in the Bin Laden hunt occurred years before, in the early days of the war in Afghanistan. As a 2009 Senate Foreign Relations Committee report found, the Bush administration blew a critical opportunity to capture Bin Laden in 2001. Bin Laden was wounded and on the run, but top Bush national security officials rejected repeated pleas for reinforcements from commanders and intelligence officials fighting the terrorist leader in the caves of Tora Bora, despite the availability of resources:

Fewer than 100 American commandos were on the scene with their Afghan allies and calls for reinforcements to launch an assault were rejected. Requests were also turned down for U.S. troops to block the mountain paths leading to sanctuary a few miles away in Pakistan. The vast array of American military power, from sniper teams to the most mobile divisions of the Marine Corps and the Army, was kept on the sidelines. Instead, the U.S. command chose to rely on airstrikes and untrained Afghan militias. [...]

Even when his own commanders and senior intelligence officials in Afghanistan and Washington argued for dispatching more U.S. troops, [Commanding Gen. Tommy] Franks refused to deviate from the plan.

The report “removes any lingering doubts and makes it clear that Osama bin Laden was within our grasp at Tora Bora,” but that decisions made by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, his deputies, and other top administration officials allowed Bin Laden to escape.

The consequence of this missed ooportunity are tremendous. As Lt. Col. Reid Sawyer, the director of the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, told NPR yesterday, “if bin Laden had been killed in Afghanistan eight years ago in the caves of Tora Bora, al-Qaida might well have died with him. Now the organization is diversified enough it could weather bin Laden’s death — and hardly miss a beat.”

Moreover, as Rumsfeld himself acknowledged, Bush’s extra-legal torture and rendition policies did not help capture Bin Laden. Enhanced interrogation techniques did not work. Bush ordered one final push to capture Bin laden shortly before he left office, but this effort too was unsuccessful.

The death of Osama bin Laden in the Pakistani town of Abbottabad has sparked a wave of reactions on the short- and long-term goals of the American mission in Afghanistan. After the President reported Bin Laden’s death Sunday night, congressional Republicans, who have opposed the administration’s plans to begin withdrawing troops in July, took strides to persuade Americans that the mission was not over simply because Bin Laden was dead.

Florida Rep. Cliff Stearns (R), however, took the opposite position Monday, saying Bin Laden’s death should signal the end of the Afghanistan campaign. The Florida Times-Union reports:

“Most people I talk to say that we need to address our nation’s budget deficit, and we are spending a lot of money in Afghanistan,” he said. “Now that bin Laden has been executed we must go home.”

There were indications before Bin Laden’s death that the July troop drawdown may be larger than expected, with as many as 10,000 troops leaving Afghanistan. With the primary target of the original invasion now dead, the Obama administration could choose to bring even more troops home, especially as it hears calls from Afghan President Hamid Karzai to speed up the withdrawal.

Stearns isn’t alone, as Democratic congressmen and Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer have called for an end to the war. Aside from Stearns, however, Republicans have largely continued to resist the possibility of withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, choosing to ignore both the war’s costliness and Americans’ weariness of it while trumpeting widespread budget cuts at home. Despite GOP opposition, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) announced that the timetable for beginning the withdrawal will not change in the wake of Bin Laden’s death.

The war in Afghanistan continues to grow costlier, hampering efforts to deal with budget deficits here at home. Stearns is right: with Bin Laden dead, al Qaeda critically weakened in Afghanistan, and Americans focusing on domestic economic problems, it’s time for America begin a significant redeployment.

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Bush loyalists have been “irked” over the past 24 hours that they are not getting credit for the killing of Osama bin Laden, arguing that their torture program helped bring about intelligence that led to the mission. Karl Rove said “the tools that President Bush put into place –- GITMO, rendition, enhanced interrogation” led to the successful operation. Similarly, former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said the mission “rested heavily on some of those controversial policies” from the Bush era.

Today, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) rejected these assertions. She was asked by a reporter whether the intelligence that led to the killing was the result of waterboarding and other harsh treatment of detainees. She responded:

We are in the process of a big study on the detention and interrogation of the detainees on the Intelligence Committee. The Republicans have pulled out of the study. So this has been carried out by the Democratic staff essentially. They have gone through more than 3 million emails, cables, pieces of paper looking for this.

To date, the answer to your question is no. Nothing has been found to indicate this came out of Guantanamo. And people were questioned, but there were no positive answers as to the identity of this number one courier.

Asked a few minutes later whether she considers the Bin Laden killing any kind of “vindication” of the Bush-era torture program, Feinstein said, “Absolutely not. I do not.” She continued, “I happen to know a good deal about how those interrogations were conducted, and in my view, nothing justifies the kind of procedures that were used.” Watch it:

The Navy SEAL’s successful mission, authorized by President Obama, to get Osama bin Laden sent the right-wing into a tizzy over giving credit where due. While many Republicans praised Obama’s leadership, others contorted bin Laden’s death into praise and justification of the Bush administration methods, most notably waterboarding. After learning that information regarding bin Laden’s courier came from detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Bush torture apologists immediately insisted that waterboarding was a key technique in securing the vital information. Rep. Steve King (R-IA) quipped, “Wonder what President Obama thinks of water boarding now?”

On Fox’s O’Reilly Factor yesterday, House Homeland Security Chairman Peter King (R-NY) jumped on the waterboarding bandwagon. When host Bill O’Reilly asked for him to “tell us something new,” King immediately that the courier information was obtained through waterboarding, adding that those “who say it should be stopped and never used again, we got vital information which directly led us to bin Laden”:

KING: Well I don’t know if everyone knows this or not, but you mentioned the fact that we obtained information several years ago, vital information about the courier for Obama [sic]. We obtained that information through waterboarding. So for those who say that waterboarding doesn’t work, who say it should be stopped and never used again, we got vital information which directly led us to bin Laden.

O’REILLY: Wow! Let me stop you there. I did not know that and I’m sure most of my audience didn’t know that. Explain how that went down. How did we get that information, where did it come from, was it from Guantanamo Bay?

KING: It came from an overseas prison where Khaled Sheik Mohammed was being interrogated. Waterboarding was used, and it was during the interrogation of Khaled Sheik Mohammed, through waterboarding, that this information was learned.

O’REILLY: KSM gave it up? Mohammed himself gave it up?

KING: KSM gave us the first lead.

Watch it:

“That is absolutely fascinating,” O’Reilly later responded. “You’re not going to hear that on other networks.” There’s a good reason. According to former Bush officials, Mohammed, in fact, “did not reveal the names while being subjected to the simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding.” He identified the names months later under “standard interrogation, they said.” The C.I.A actually obtained the courier’s name by placing “more agents in the field” in 2005 and “intercepting telephone calls and e-mail messages between the [courier's] family and anyone inside Pakistan. From there they got his full name.”

Bush’s Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld also threw cold water on the GOP’s waterboarding logic, flatly stating yesterday that “it was not harsh treatment and it was not waterboarding” that secured the information. Former Rep. Pete Hoektsra, the ranking member of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence during the Bush administration and a fan of waterboarding, even said that “I am skeptical that [waterboarding] was the ‘the critical info’ to our weekend success,” noting that it “ended years ago.”

This morning on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Obama’s counter-terrorism adviser John Brennan confirmed that the information acquired over nine years did not come from waterboarding but was pieced together from multiple sources.