ThinkProgress filed this report from Pella, Iowa.

Last week, newly minted Defense Secretary Leon Panetta declared that the U.S. is “within reach” of defeating al Qaeda. Two months prior, then-CIA chief Panetta played an integral role in the hunt for al Qaeda head Osama bin Laden, which culminated with bin Laden’s death in a NavySEAL raid on May 2.

His work as CIA chief earned him high praise from Democrats and Republicans alike, including House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-MI), who praised Panetta for “doing an excellent job,” and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who said President Obama was “fortunate to be able to call upon” Panetta.

But when Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich got to the subject of Leon Panetta during a speech in Iowa on Monday, he minced no words. After saying the United States is “in the biggest crisis since the 1850s,” Gingrich went on to declare that we “have a Secretary of Defense who’s living in la-la land.” If Panetta “thinks we’re winning over al Qaeda,” Gingrich continued, “what I’m really frightened of is he may actually believe it”:

GINGRICH: I believe we’re in the biggest crisis since the 1850s. You look at the spiritual collapse of America, you look at the social collapse of the American family, you look at all the problems we have economically, you look at the collapse of our governmental institutions, you look at our inability to control our own border, you look at the rise of China. And you have a Secretary of Defense who’s living in la-la land. I’ve known Leon Panetta for a long time. He is a nice man. But if he thinks we’re winning over al Qaeda, what I’m really frightened of is he may actually believe it. I mean, 10 years after 9/11 — I’m going to give some speeches on this in August — we’re in worse shape today than we were 10 years ago.

Watch it:

Obviously, Panetta is in a better position than Gingrich to know intricate details about al Qaeda. But even publicly available evidence suggests the terror group’s strength has been severely diminished. While al Qaeda’s membership is said to be in the mere hundreds in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region, bin Laden himself thought his group’s influence was waning and even considered a rebranding effort. CNN terrorism expert Peter Bergen said recently:

“Between the drone program, losing the war of ideas, their relevance, the bench depleted by captures or kills, the lack of success of attacks on the West — all these things don’t suggest a great deal of strength for al Qaeda.”

But Gingrich is a lone voice of criticism amidst a sea of bipartisan praise. So widespread is the respect for Panetta, in fact, that when he was nominated by President Obama to become the Secretary of Defense and came up for a vote in the viciously polarized Senate last month, Panetta was confirmed by a vote of 100 to 0.

Indeed, Gingrich’s attack on Panetta for supposedly not understanding the al Qaeda threat, is a laughable charge. Just ask the 47 Republican senators who unanimously approved his Defense Secretary nomination.

Somali children at a UNICEF school.

Levels of malnutrition have reached a new peak and are currently the highest in the world, said the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) today. In some parts of Somalia, the number of children with severe acute malnutrition has almost doubled since March. [...] “A dramatic increase in cases of malnutrition can be observed even in the Bay and Lower Shabelle regions, usually described as the country’s breadbaskets, where nearly 11 per cent of children under five suffer from severe acute malnutrition,” said Andrea Heath, the ICRC’s economic-security coordinator for Somalia.

While yet another humanitarian crisis unfolds in Somalia, it is important to note America’s uneven policy towards the East African country. Since the early 1990s, the U.S. has poured billions of aid dollars into Somalia. But in recent years this assistance has been increasingly geared towards military assistance to Somalia’s dysfunctional interim government, regional militaries, and the African Union peacekeeping operation.

In FY2009 — the year for which data is most readily available — the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) spent $123 million on food assistance and an additional $7.3 million on disaster assistance to Somalis. Meanwhile, the U.S. spent $246 million on “Peacekeeping Operations” the same year, which enables the U.S. to train foreign militaries participating in the Mogadishu-based African Union peacekeeping mission, known as AMISOM. USAID illustrated this funding disparity with the following graph:

It’s important to note that these numbers represent a conservative estimate that doesn’t include covert funding for CIA or JSOC operations within the country, and it also does not include U.S. military assistance to Somalia’s feeble and poorly trained Transitional Federal Government (TFG) security forces or to regional militaries — such as Kenya and Ethiopia — that must address the growing threat posed by Somalia.

To be sure, the United States has been the top humanitarian assistance contributor, but without a broader and more comprehensive approach, we can expect this imbalance to continue to grow as counterterrorism operations expand.

During an Israel lobby group junket to the Holy Land, former Bush administration U.N. ambassador John Bolton sat down with staff from the Jerusalem Post newspaper to give comments and answer questions. Bolton delivered the sort of partisan shots one can reliably expect from him, denouncing President Obama as “the most anti-Israel president in the history of the state, without any question.”

But supporting the assertion — by drawing a contrast to his own boss, President George W. Bush — Bolton turns history on its head and ignores the inconvenient truth. Bolton told the Jerusalem Post staffers:

BOLTON: If I had been in charge of the Israeli government I would’ve attacked [Iran] in 2008 for several reasons. First, it’s three years ago so you’re much more likely to have eliminated key elements of the Iranian nuclear program. [...]

And in 2008 you had a president in Washington sympathetic to Israel. So you calculate when the next time that event is going to occur.

Watch the video:

Actually, the Israeli government did want to bomb Iran in spring 2008, and it was Bush — who Bolton insists is so “sympathetic to Israel” — who said, “No.” As ThinkProgress noted in early 2009, David Sanger of the New York Times reported Israel’s request for bunker-busting bombs and permission to fly through U.S.-controlled airspace in Iraq to attack Iran:

President Bush deflected a secret request by Israel last year for specialized bunker-busting bombs it wanted for an attack on Iran’s main nuclear complex. [...]

[T]he Bush administration was particularly alarmed by an Israeli request to fly over Iraq to reach Iran’s major nuclear complex at Natanz, where the country’s only known uranium enrichment plant is located.

The White House denied that request outright, American officials said, and the Israelis backed off their plans, at least temporarily.

So if reluctance to green-light an Israeli attack on Iran makes Obama anti-Israel, what does Bolton think of his old boss?

John McLaughlin and Pat Caddell

Over at the Washington Post, Greg Sargent reports that the Post’s polling manager slammed McLaughlin and Caddell’s poll — an uncommon move for a major news organization’s pollster — as “a clear example of advocacy polling.” But ThinkProgress looked at the organization commissioning the poll — Secure America Now — and uncovered a potential conflict of interest for the pollsters.

The poll on Jewish voters was commissioned by Secure America Now, an organization seeking to call attention to “[o]ur national government’s policies of engagement of sworn enemies like Iran and North Korea have failed and are allowing these outlaw nations to progress in their plans to attain nuclear weapons.” (North Korea actually successfully tested a nuclear weapon during the Bush administration.)

Think Progress asked John McLaughlin about Secure America Now and he told us:

Pat [Caddell] and I worked with [Secure America Now] to do the survey. [...] They paid for it.

When asked yesterday if he could provide a contact name for the organization, he responded that he would have to get back to us since “I don’t want to give you the wrong information.”

A little research revealed an article on the conservative Big Peace website from February, discussing how Secure America Now was founded by John McLaughlin and Pat Caddell to “inject national security issues into the public dialogue.”

McLaughlin acknowledged his leadership role at Secure America Now in a phone conversation today, and explaining to ThinkProgress why he didn’t provide a contact name yesterday because:

We don’t have any staff yet so that’s what I was looking for. You know, we’re just putting [Secure America Now] together.

The poll makes no mention of the fact that an organization Caddell described as “a grassroots place where people can join up and begin to do things to force [national security and foreign policy] issues into the debate,” commissioned its own founders to conduct the poll.

When asked why the poll didn’t reveal his overlapping roles as the commissioner of the poll and the pollster, he responded:

McLaughlin and Associates is a separate firm, and we do polling and consulting. It’s my own business. But [Secure America Now] is a 501c4 advocacy group discussing issues.

ThinkProgress asked pollster John Zogby about this omission. He called the move “clumsy” and said McLaughlin and Caddell “should know better”:

Frankly, I don’t understand why two names like John McLaughlin and Pat Caddell can’t just say “Hey, we did a poll.” So it’s the old watergate question, who actually paid for it? [...] It is odd. These are two experienced, credible pollsters. Let’s lay that out and that’s accepted. This is clumsy. They should know better than to do something this way.

While McLaughlin candidly provided details of the poll and his relationship with it, he declined to offer details about the funding of Secure America Now.

Human Rights Watch released a report yesterday calling on foreign governments to prosecute President George W. Bush and other officials in his administration — including Vice President Cheney — for authorizing torture on suspected terrorists if the Obama administration fails to investigate. In an interview with France 24 today, the report’s author Reed Brody said Bush’s explaination that his lawyers said authorizing waterboarding was OK is “not a legal defense,” adding that according to his report, the Bush White House was actually complicit in the Justice Department’s authorizing torture:

BRODY: What we show in this report is that the justifications presented or prepared by the Justice Department were not arm’s length independent analyses. What we show in this report is that led by Vice President Dick Cheney and his chief lawyer, the administration actually went to the Justice Department and put pressure on the Justice Department. [...] They were complicit. [...] What we are saying is that there are grounds to believe that there was a conspiracy.

Brody also noted the importance of prosecuting torture. He said that while President Obama has rightly abandoned the Bush administration’s torture regime, he added that failure to prosecute it treats it as a policy choice that can be repeated, not a crime to be punished:

BRODY: President Obama is treating torture as a policy choice not as a crime. So, President Obama to his credit has stopped authorizing torture, has disbanded the program of secret prisons but those decisions are easily reversible and very fragile. It’s like a loaded gun that’s on the table: “I’m not going to do it but maybe the next guy is going to do it.”

Watch the France 24 interview:

The HRW also calls for an “independent, nonpartisan commission, along the lines of the 9-11 Commission” in order to “make recommendations to ensure that the systematic abuses of the Bush administration are not repeated.”

Earlier this year, Bush canceled a trip to Switzerland reportedly fearing that legal action would be taken against him for authorizing torture.