Mitt Romney announced in a speech today in New Hampshire that he is running for president. On foreign policy, the former Massachusetts governor hit all the silly Fox News-inspired, attack-Obama talking points, such as the claim that the president went around the world apologizing for America. And he even threw out some of the false attacks of Obama on Israel. Interestingly though, he also mocked the administration’s so-called “leading from behind” strategy on Libya:

ROMNEY: A few months into office, he traveled around the globe to apologize for America. At a time of historic change and great opportunity in the Arab world, he’s hesitant and uncertain. He hesitated to speak out for the dissidents in Iran. His administration boasts that he is leading from behind in Libya. He speaks with firmness and clarity however, when it comes to Israel. He seems firmly and clearly determined to undermine our long-time friend and ally. He’s treating Israel the same way so many European countries have, with suspicion and distrust and an assumption that Israel is somehow at fault.

Watch it:

Neocons first got wind of this strategy after a New Yorker article quoted an anonymous Obama adviser describing the President’s actions in Libya as “leading from behind.” The right-wing thought they’d stumbled upon a real gem. Among the trove of mockery, Commentary’s John Podhoretz claimed it damages Obama’s “chances for reelection” because it will be “thrown in his face.” This seems to be exactly what Romney was trying to do. But as this blog has documented, Romney seems to be unaware that he’s taking a shot at Nelson Mandela, who has also advocated this kind of leadership style:

“It is better to lead from behind and to put others in front, especially when you celebrate victory when nice things occur. You take the front line when there is danger. Then people will appreciate your leadership.”

And as the President’s decision to take out Osama bin Laden demonstrates, sometimes he’s out front when it’s dangerous, but lets others take the lead when its appropriate — precisely what Mandela was talking about.

Even Condoleezza Rice thought Obama’s strategy on Libya was a good one. “I think it’s good that others can take lead like the British and French,” she said on CNN last month.

But for Romney and those on the right that want to score political points in bad faith, reflexive attacks appear to be preferable over thoughtful discourse.

The Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI) has launched another YouTube ad sensation which is getting picked up by all the regular outlets who will publicize whatever talking points the Bill Kristol-Gary Bauer-Rachel Abrams-Michael Goldfarb-conceived organization put out.

Their latest ad attempts to make the case that Obama, in his decision to endorse 1967 borders as the baseline for future Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, “sided with the Palestinians,” but has been rebuffed by members of his own party. Watch it:

 

The ad is clearly attempting to play up the baseless narrative that Democratic Jewish donors are abandoning the president because of his endorsement of 1967 borders, a position taken by the George W. Bush and Clinton administrations. Democrats did attack the concept of pushing Israel to return to 1949 or 1967 borders but Obama never actually endorsed that idea. What he clearly laid out at his AIPAC speech was his support for negotiations based on 1967 borders with mutually agreed land swaps.

As Matt Duss noted earlier on this blog, ECI executive director Noah Pollak tweeted during Obama’s speech that his lines about 1967 borders were no big deal. But seeing that ECI is getting some attention today, it’s worth digging a bit deeper into the group’s origins and looking at benefactors to the group’s PAC. An examination of ECI’s Political Action Committee’s disclosures show that a former Obama supporter has donated to ECIPAC, but the Israel-Palestine issue doesn’t appear to have had anything to do with his shift from fundraising for Obama to supporting a group which runs misleading YouTube ads portraying the President as anti-Israel.

Two-thirds of ECIPAC’s contributions in the past election cycle came from Daniel S. Loeb, CEO of Third Point Management, a New York based hedge fund.

Loeb’s $100,000 in support for ECI follow his track record of falling out of love with Obama after the White House pushed for financial regulatory reforms.

On April 26, the Wall Street Journal reported on Loeb’s change of heart and quoted from an email Loeb wrote and circulated in late 2010.

“I am sure, if we are really nice and stay quiet, everything will be alright and the president will become more centrist and that all his tough talk is just words,” Mr. Loeb wrote in an email about four months ago expressing frustration with the president’s posture toward Wall Street. “I mean, he really loves us and when he beats us, he doesn’t mean it.” The email, sent to eight friends, was widely circulated on Wall Street.

Loeb raised $200,000 for Obama in 2008. Along with his wife they donated $250,000 to Democrats in the past decade and contributed $75,000 to Media Matters in June 2009 (PDF). Since his falling out with Obama, Loeb has put his money where his mouth is, giving $468,000 to Republican candidates and the GOP.

ECIPAC looks like they identified a potential source of fundraising with disgruntled hedge fund managers and rounded out their fundraising with $50,000 from Highfield Capital’s co-founder, Jonathon Jacobson.

While ECI is clearly trying to drive a wedge between American Jews and the White House, it’s interesting to note that their funders seem far more concerned about financial regulatory reforms than 1967 borders.

But none of this should come as any big surprise. For those who don’t remember, ECI was first based at Orion Strategies, a consultancy run by Randy Scheunemann — Sarah Palin’s chief foreign policy advisor until last month. ECI’s domain name was mysteriously registered by Margaret Hoover, a GOP strategist whose credentials include being Herbert Hoover’s great-granddaughter and making regular appearances on Fox News’ O’Reilly Factor.

In the end, ECI appears to be just another partisan astroturf group financed by anti-regulatory interests and advised by Republican strategists hoping to peel away Jewish support from a president who continues to receive overwhelming support from the Jewish community.

Shortly after President Obama announced that U.S. military forces killed Osama bin Laden, former CIA Director Michael Hayden tried to downplay Obama’s achievement, saying that “any American president” would’ve made the same choice. However, the evidence doesn’t necessarily support this theory and even Defense Secretary Robert Gates — who has worked for numerous American presidents since LBJ — called Obama’s decision to get bin Landen “one of the most courageous calls I’ve ever seen a president make.”

Hayden is back at it today in the Wall Street Journal’s op-ed pages, this time weighing in on whether torturing terror detainees is responsible for getting info on bin Laden’s whereabouts. Of course he thinks this is the case, but this time he went a step further in the hyperbole, claiming than those who deny that torture “yielded useful intelligence” are no different than those who think 9/11 was in inside job or that Obama wasn’t born in the U.S.:

For all of its well-deserved reputation for pragmatism, American popular culture frequently nurtures or at least tolerates preposterous views and theories. Witness the 9/11 “truthers” who, lacking any evidence whatsoever, claim that 9/11 was a Bush administration plot. And then we have the “birthers” who, even in the face of clear contrary evidence, take as an article of faith that President Obama was not born in the United States and hence is not eligible to hold his current office.

Let me add a third denomination to this faith-based constellation: interrogation deniers, i.e., individuals who hold that the enhanced interrogation techniques used against CIA detainees have never yielded useful intelligence.

This is a strawman. No one is saying that torture won’t at least lead to some information. Indeed, Glenn Carle — a former CIA Directorate of Operations who for a time led the interrogation of a high value detainee — said “it is possible that a specific piece of information from time to time would come from” using these so-called enhanced interrogation techniques. But, “Does it justify using them?” he asked, “A categorical flat no.”

But while torture and EITs may yield something useful, they’re more trouble than they’re worth as Matthew Alexander, the interrogator responsible for getting information that led to al Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarkawi, noted recently:

What torture has proven is exactly what experienced interrogators have said all along: First, when tortured, detainees will give only the minimum amount of information necessary to stop the pain. No interrogator should ever be hoping to extract the least amount of information. Second, under coercion, detainees give misleading information that wastes time and resources.

Carle agrees with this sentiment. “Almost all the information obtained from EITs was recalled…because it was viewed as unreliable,” he said in an interview with ThinkProgress last month.

But halfway through his op-ed, Hayden shifts his argument from *torture gets information* to *torture led to bin Laden.* What’s his proof? That detainees who were waterboarded in CIA custody gave up false information.

Putting that odd reasoning aside, there is no evidence to support the claim that torture or EITs were responsible for getting bin Laden. Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey tried to go down this road too but his arguments were thoroughly debunked. “The people who say ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ directly led to catching Bin Laden are wrong,” said one unnamed former high-level CIA official recently.

And finally, there’s that whole issue of moral superiority. While “it’s impossible to know what information the detainee would have disclosed under non-coercive interrogations,” as Alexander noted, he asked, “Why are we having a discussion about efficacy?” “Torture is wrong,” he said, adding that “it’s a moral issue…and it’s a legal issue.”

This past winter, the Bahrain Formula One Grand Prix was cancelled, following the brutal crackdown by the monarchy against pro-democracy protesters. “At the present time the country’s entire attention is focussed on building a new national dialogue for Bahrain,” the nation’s crown prince told the press.

Since then, the regime has continued to torture, detain, and kill protesters, despite officially lifting its “state of emergency.” Tomorrow, Formula One will decide if it will reschedule the cancelled grand prix or whether it will simply not hold the races in the Arab kingdom this year.

International human rights and democracy promotion group Avaaz is calling on one of the teams participating in the race, represented by energy drink Red Bull, to pull out of the race. Avaaz says that if a high-profile team like Red Bull pulls out, it could dissuade Formula One from participating in any races at all and send a message to Bahrain condemning the crackdown:

Red Bull has built a reputation as a sporty, fun drink — but by this Friday, it and other leading F1 teams may become better known for endorsing government torture and murder. Formula One has 24 hours to decide whether to hold its already-delayed race in Bahrain, site of one of the most brutal crackdowns in the Middle East. If Red Bull refuses to race in Bahrain, other teams will pull back as well — and the Formula One race could be taken off the schedule, sending shock waves through Bahrain’s brutal government and sending an unmistakeable message that the world will not ignore state brutality. Sports boycotts have piled pressure on other regimes such as apartheid South Africa — we can do it again.

By invoking the South African example, the human rights group is noting an interesting parallel. Over the course of several decades, South Africa faced a number of major sporting boycotts, including being expelled from the International Olympic Committee, being denied access to the Golf World Cup, and repeatedly being kicked out of rugby competitions. These boycotts helped undermine the government’s legitimacy and eventually led to the collapse of apartheid.

Avaaz is aiming to garner 200,000 signatures to its petition by Friday. You can sign on here.

The Washington Post’s blogger Jennifer Rubin reports that the neoconservative Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI) has a new ad accusing President Obama of “siding with the Palestinians” in his May 19 speech, where he stated that “the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states.” Check out the ad here:

Asked about the ad, ECI board member Bill Kristol told Rubin, “We’re the Emergency Committee for Israel. So it’s appropriate for us to thank friends of Israel for stepping up for the Jewish state at this time of testing — even when a president of their own party is unfortunately stepping away.”

Yet here’s what ECI’s own executive director Noah Pollak tweeted about the speech as it was happening:

So, first Pollak thought the line about the ’67 borders was no big deal, and said so. But then, when there was an opportunity to attack President Obama, the line about the ’67 borders magically became a dangerous betrayal of Israel. You really couldn’t ask for a better demonstration of bad faith.

One shouldn’t, of course, expect Jennifer Rubin herself to report any of this. In addition to being Pollak’s former colleague at Commentary, back in February Rubin took a trip to Israel, courtesy of the Emergency Committee for Israel.