After a horrific day of violence in Norway that left more than 80 dead, police detained a man in connection with the massive bomb blasts that blew out windows for blocks in downtown Oslo and an attack on a youth camp about 20 miles away that followed shortly thereafter.

Police and the justice minister said a 32-year-old Norwegian man was arrested on the Island where a man who reportedly introduced himself as a police officer opened fire on teenagers attending a camp of Norway’s ruling Labour Party. The man was reportedly also seen in Oslo before the bombs went off. “The police have every reason to believe there is a connection between the explosions and what happened at Utoya,” police told the New York Times, referring to the island.

The Associated Press reported that a Norwegian public broadcaster named the man in custody as Anders Breivik. The British newspaper The Telegraph reported the same name for the suspect, citing the justice ministry. According to earlier reports on Norwegian television, Breivik, not named yet, had connections to right-wing politics.

A Facebook page (now taken down) bearing the same name as the apparent suspect lists his religion as “Christianity” and his political views as “Conservative.” The interests listed on the page range from the computer game World of Warcraft to the U.S. television show The Commish. A Twitter account also surfaced bearing the name Anders Breivik, but only one tweet had been issued. “One person with a belief is equal to the force of 100 000 who have only interests,” it read. Neither of the online accounts were immediately verifiable.

Another Norwegian news account, as translated by Google, indicated that Breivik harbored anti-Islam sentiment. The report said he identified strongly with nationalism and posted on an anti-Islam right-wing website, where he expressed views in opposition to multiculturalism and internationalism. He also expressed admiration for controversial Dutch anti-Islam politician Geert Wilders’s party.

“AP Exclusive: Intel Report says Iranian president wants to develop nuclear arms openly,” reads the headline of an Associated Press story today. The report has been widely picked up with various headlines including Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth writing, “Ahmadinejad said to be pushing for open nuke work.”

The AP’s “exclusive” comes from “an intelligence assessment shared with The Associated Press” by “a nation with traditionally reliable intelligence from the region,” and depicts “Ahmadinejad as wanting to move publicly to develop a bomb.” But the AP buried the lede. Later in the article they point out that neither the intelligence assesment they viewed nor U.S. assessments put much weight on Ahmadinejad’s desire, or lack thereof, for a nuclear weapon. The real power, it would seem, lies with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. It reads:

Proliferation expert David Albright of the Institute for Science and International Security says his briefings from European government officials who have seen the latest U.S. intelligence assessment on the Islamic Republic seem to support the assessment shared with the AP that Khamenei is worried about how the world would react to a nuclear-armed Iran.

Indeed the real story in the AP’s “exclusive” is that Khamenei holds the power to decide if Iran will pursue a nuclear weapon, and he is deeply ambivalent about the potential benefits of doing so:

Ahmadinejad is pushing “to shake free of the restraints Iran has imposed upon itself, and openly push forward to create a nuclear bomb,” says the assessment shared with the AP. But Khamenei, whose word is final on nuclear and other issues, “wants to progress using secret channels, due to concern about a severe response from the West,” says the report. [...]

One theory voiced by government officials and private analysts is that Iran might be looking to reach the level just short of making nuclear weapons — but able to do so quickly if it feels threatened. That would fit in with Khamenei’s reported cautious stance.

In any case, Ahmadinejad seems to be further weakened by the dispute.

Reading the tea leaves of Iranian domestic politics is more of an artform than a science, but broad consensus seems to be forming the Khamenei is not in favor of the immediate acquisition of nuclear weapons and Ahamadinejad, regardless of what position he has taken on the subject, is deeply weakened politically.

Questions might be asked about why the AP, and “a nation with traditionally reliable intelligence from the region” are eager to stoke fears around Ahmadinejad’s supposed support for a nuclear weapon while, in the same assessment, acknowledging that he is increasingly irrelevant and doesn’t make the final decisions about the country’s nuclear program anyway.

Our guest bloggers are Laura Conley, research associate for National Security & International Policy at the Center For American Progress, and Alex Rothman, special assistant for National Security and International Policy at CAP.

Ongoing negotiations about the debt limit have focused attention on the need to regain control of our bloated defense budget. But as Brookings Institution scholars Michael O’Hanlon and Peter W. Singer argue today in Politico, cutting defense is no simple task. Unfortunately their prescription for the problem — drawing out elevated levels of spending fearing “too-hasty” decisions — is out of touch with the reality of the unprecedented high levels of U.S. defense spending and the current state of our economy.

O’Hanlon and Singer rightly argue that defense cuts should be based on smart strategy. But their complaint that current plans for cuts “sharply contrast with the resource requirements laid out in the recent quadrennial defense and diplomatic reviews” misses the point. The 2010 QDR failed to make the hard choices necessary to prioritize national security interests. Recent plans to cut military spending — such as the proposal released by Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK), the illustrative Pentagon cuts presented by the president’s Fiscal Commission co-chairs, and our recent report, A Return to Responsibility — are filling in the gaps left by a Pentagon too eager to fund any mission at any cost.

Singer and O’Hanlon condemn recent defense budget debates as based on arithmetic, rather than policy, but simple math makes clear that the proposed cuts amount to good policy. U.S. defense spending over the past decade reached heights not seen in this country since WWII. This virtually unlimited budget enabled DOD to adopt a “do everything, buy everything” approach to security. Setting concrete limits on defense spending now will help to correct this dangerous trend and help DOD identify which missions and programs are essential, and which aren’t.

It’s time to bring DOD back to reality and responsibility. This year, in inflation adjusted dollars, we will spend $100 billion more on defense than President Reagan did at the height of his Cold War build-up. In just research, development, test, and evaluation funding alone — an area of the budget that O’Hanlon and Singer fear may see dangerous cuts – the U.S. is spending about $18 billion more in real terms than at Reagan’s peak. This spending is drastically disproportionate to the threats facing our country at a time when we cannot afford waste.

If we have learned anything over the past decade, it’s that no amount of money can buy perfect security. O’Hanlon and Singer’s call for more discussion on defense cuts only delays the inevitable and allows dysfunctional budgeting practices to continue.

Here’s the headline of an editorial in today’s Washington Post:

Sanctions aren’t slowing Iran’s nuclear progress.

And this is from the May report of the United Nations special experts panel on the impact of sanctions adopted by the UN Security Council in June 2010:

[Sanctions] are constraining Iran’s procurement of items related to prohibited nuclear and ballistic missile activity and thus slowing development of these programs.

It is certainly fair to ask whether or not these measures actually serve the goal of a negotiated solution to the nuclear impasse. But it’s simply false to claim that they’re having no impact on the program.

The editorial goes on to cite British Foreign Secretary William Hague as support for its assertion:

As British Foreign Secretary William Hague wrote in an op-ed published by the Guardian last week, it would take only two to three months to convert the uranium enriched at Qom into weapons-grade material. That means that Iran could have a “breakout” capacity allowing it to quickly produce a weapon when it chose to do so.

And here’s the actual passage from Hague’s op-ed, substantially more qualified than the Post’s rendering:

[W]hen enough 20% enriched uranium is accumulated at the underground facility at Qom, it would take only two or three months of additional work to convert this into weapons grade material. There would remain technical challenges to actually producing a bomb, but Iran would be a significant step closer.

So, if Iran proceeded with plans to enrich to 20 percent, and if it then accumulated enough 20 percent enriched uranium, and if it then decided to convert this to weapons grade material, it could — if it overcame certain technical challenges — have a breakout capacity enabling it to produce a weapon within several months if it chose to do so.

The U.S. intelligence community continues to maintain that, while “Iran continues to develop a range of capabilities that could be applied to producing nuclear weapons, if a decision is made to do so,” there’s still insufficient evidence to determine that such a decision has been made.

Similarly, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) chief Yukiya Amano said in an interview earlier this year that, “Despite all unanswered questions, we cannot say that Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapons program.”

While Iran’s regional ambitions have been set back by the ongoing uprisings in the Arab world, it is still clearly engaged in a range of activities that are of major concern to the U.S. and its allies. As evidenced by its work in creating unprecedented international consensus and pressure on Iran’s nuclear program and its abuses of human rights, the Obama administration understands the extent of the Iranian challenge. But efforts to deal responsibly and effectively with this challenge are not served by alarmist misrepresentations of what we do and do not know about it.

Today’s editorial has echoes of the recent past. In the lead-up to the war in Iraq, the Washington Post disgraced itself by serving as an amplifier for the Bush administration’s false claims about the threat posed by Iraq. The Post’s editors have subsequently continued to mislead the Post’s readers about the extent of those deceptions. Troublingly, they now seemed poised to do it all over again.