A top foreign policy adviser to GOP presidential contender Mitt Romney is highly active in a campaign on behalf of an Iranian anti-regime exile group designated as a foreign terrorist organization by the State Department.

Mitchell Reiss, the president of Maryland’s Washington College who also advised Romney in his 2007 campaign for the Republican presidential nod, has spoken at several events this year aimed at removing the Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK) from the U.S. terror list. Describing Reiss as taking a “leading role” in the campaign, Salon’s Justin Elliott reported:

“[T]he U.S. State Department needs to delist the MEK immediately,” Reiss said at a pro-MEK conference in Washington in April, where he was joined by a group of other luminaries, some of whom have acknowledged being paid to appear. [...]

In January he spoke at a conference organized by ExecutiveAction, a D.C.-based “problem solving company” that has spearheaded the campaign to delist the MEK. He also moderated a second, similar MEK event in April at the Capital Hilton in Washington and moderated yet another in July at the Willard Intercontinental Hotel.

While Reiss, who was a State Department official under George W. Bush, didn’t respond to Elliott’s inquiry about being paid for appearances, he’s shared the dais with other former officials who’ve admitted to taking money.

The pro-MEK campaign has drawn attention for the millions of dollars behind it. The Huffington Post and Christian Science Monitor recently released long and granular exposés of the shadowy networks behind the campaign and the speakers who take tens of thousands of dollars for speeches that often clock in under ten minutes.

The MEK, a group with roots in an unusual revolutionary mix of Islamic Marxism, has a support network among a small number of Iranian exiles and some of Washington’s Iran hawks, including a few liberal supporters.

Blacklisted by the U.S. in 1997 for terrorist actions undertaken since roughly its founding in the mid-1960s (including killing Americans in Iran in the 1970s), the group fought a terror war against the Shah and, after falling out of favor with the new Islamic regime of 1979, against the Islamic Republic. At the peak of their popular strength in Iran, the group went into exile first in France then in the mid-1980s to Iraq, where it both continued its struggle against Iran and periodically served as a Saddam Hussein mercenary force.

The MEK’s partnership with Saddam during the 1980s Iran-Iraq War caused its popularity among Iranians to plummet, and by almost all accounts few supporters remain inside the country. For these reasons and others, many don’t consider the group a viable Iranian democratic opposition.

Likewise, the MEK’s partnership with Saddam’s brutal regime created hostility toward the group among Iraqis. Much of the pro-MEK advocacy focuses on the 3,400 fighters that remain in an Iraqi encampment known as Camp Ashraf. Forcibly disarmed by invading U.S. troops in 2003, Iraqi security forces occasionally storm the outskirts of the camp, leading to what many critics have called a humanitarian crisis. (Human Rights Watch has also accused the MEK of abusing its members at the camp.)

But the crisis at Camp Ashraf is often conflated with the MEK’s push to get off the terror list. Iranian-American groups as well as members of Iran’s internal opposition Green Movement have advocated for keeping the group on the list because of the potential harmful effects to their efforts inside Iran.

Despite the group’s bizarre founding ideology, today it seems to adhere mostly to adoration of the groups husband-and-wife leadership Massoud and Maryam Rajavi — leading reputable journalists and think tanks to accuse the group of having cultish traits.

While the MEK renounced violence in 2001, in 2003 French police investigated the group for plotting terror attacks inside Iran and Europe. 16 people across Europe set themselves on fire when the Maryam Rajavi was arrested. No charges were ever filed.

But more recently, some pro-MEK activists in Washington hinted that the group may indeed still intend to commit violent acts inside Iran and do it at the behest of the U.S. — a possibility that would open up were the group delisted. The National Iranian American Council, and advocacy group that’s mounted an anti-delisting campaign, reported on a pro-MEK event last week in Washington:

Lieutenant General Thomas McInerney said an MEK delisting should be part of a campaign of “proactive actions” against Tehran. The MEK, he said, is the only “credible overt political-military counterforce to the Iranian regime.”

“We need a very active tit for tat policy,” said McInerney. “So every time they kill Americans, they have an accident in Iran.”

While Elliott reports that Romney has not taken a postion on the MEK, he has used bellicose rhetoric about Iran, calling the Islamic Republic “unalloyed evil.”

In a New Republic piece on the various foreign policies of the Republican field, journalist Eli Lake noted that in Romney’s 2007 campaign for the Republican nod, Reiss served to moderate the hawkish influence of neoconservative pundit Dan Senor (who’s also back advising Romney). But with Reiss so active in a campaign the support the MEK, one shouldn’t expect him to moderate any hawkishness on Iran issues — a pro-MEK stance would even out-hawk some neoconservatives.

Yesterday, a blog post at the Heritage Foundation pulled a quote from a draft constitution to suggest that the Libyan revolution may descend into a radical Islamic state supporting Sharia law. Rush Limbaugh, the Drudge Report, and several pundits and commentators on Fox News picked up the meme and ran with it. The task fell to Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) to try to talk everyone down.

We’ve produced this video compilation to tell the story. Watch it:

As Adam Serwer noted over at The American Prospect, references to Islamic law are common in national constitutions throughout the Middle East, including those of post-occupation Iraq and Afghanistan. While theocratic extremism is a real danger in the region, such references in a constitution hardly guarantee its enactment — and ensuring a functional civic order and the absence of political repression are much more important to preventing it.

ThinkProgress filed this report from a town hall in Cincinnati, Ohio.

With the six-month-long civil war in Libya apparently drawing to a close and dictator Moammar Qaddafi losing his grip on power, Republican presidential hopefuls have pointedly refused to give President Obama any credit for the United States’ intervention in the North African country. As ThinkProgress noted yesterday, none of the leading Republican candidates offered praise for the commander-in-chief. Rick Santorum even declared that “this indecisive President had little to do with this triumph.”

However, one Republican congressman broke ranks with his GOP colleagues and offered credit where it’s due.

ThinkProgress spoke with Rep. Steve Chabot (R-OH) following a town hall meeting last night in Cincinnati, Ohio. Chabot, who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia, conceded that President Obama “deserves some credit” for his decision to endorse the NATO intervention earlier this year.

KEYES: Do you think President Obama deserves any credit for [Qaddafi's] imminent ouster?

CHABOT: I think he deserves some credit. I also think, however, there were a lot of missteps. There were a lot of decisions that should have been made earlier. I think it’s never a good idea for the United States to so-called “lead from behind.” And there were mistakes made in this, as there are in all endeavors.

Though Chabot is correct to credit Obama’s intervention with the eventual success of the Libyan uprising, the Ohio congressman’s criticism of the “lead from behind” approach is misguided. The Libyan rebels’ victory can in many ways be seen as a vindication of Obama’s approach, as it allowed the matter to remain largely directed by the Libyan people rather than foreigners.

In any case, Chabot’s willingness to offer some credit to Obama on Libya is a refreshing reminder that politicians can still cross the aisle with praise when the truth warrants doing so. Unfortunately, as we’ve seen over the past 48 hours, even praising Obama for an obvious victory like this one is still a bridge too far for Republican presidential hopefuls.

ThinkProgress filed this report from Jerusalem.

As Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Courage” rally in Jerusalem prepares for its unveiling this week, his team is starting to set up near the Western Wall. This afternoon in Jerusalem, ThinkProgress and other journalists visited the event site and found a surprisingly small venue. The down-sized event indicates that perhaps Beck’s event might not have garnered wide interest among Israelis or fans from other countries willing to pay to attend the event. Here’s some photos ThinkProgress took of the staging area:

A small group of elderly American tourists overheard this conversation and confronted us, claiming that thousands attended Beck’s event days earlier in Caesaria and we were wrong to suggest the small size of the venue site in Jerusalem in any way indicates a lack of support for Beck. A few minutes into our discussion with the group of tourists — a man joined the group and asked us to identify ourselves and the media outlet we are writing for. The individual later told CAP’s Matt Duss that he is a media consultant for Glenn Beck and that the radio host has “asked that journalists not bother tourists” attending the event (ThinkProgress verified that this individual is indeed a paid consultant working for Beck’s event).

Beck previously moved the location of the event away form the base of the Temple Mount because he feared “40,000 Muslims” were going to be there. Speaker John Boehner urged House members not to attend the event (to avoid the appearance of joining a political event while on a policy-related trip to Israel). Rep. Eric Cantor and Sen. Joe Lieberman then backed out of attending the event.

In an apparent effort to exploit the success of Libya’s rebels for political gain, conservative lawmakers and presidential candidates have been demanding that the administration lean on the fragile post-Qaddafi government to extradite Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, a mastermind of the 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. Last night on Fox News host Greta Van Susteren’s show, former U.N. ambassador John Bolton, who is considering a presidential bid, said Megrahi should be brought to the U.S. because the Libyans “clearly did not” cooperate with Scotland’s investigation into the bombing. Watch it:

Megrahi, who was convicted in Scotland on 270 murder counts, was controversially returned to Libya several years later after BP leaned on the U.K. government for his release in an effort to secure Libyan oil rights.

While Megrahi’s legal status is perhaps up for debate, to demand his extradition before the rebels have even fully taken Tripoli or established a new government seems aimed more at scoring cheap political points than it does about doing justice. Obama’s measured tone reflected that Qaddafi’s fall was only the first step in rebuilding Libya and both NATO and its allies — including the Libyan transitional government themselves — are up to their necks in other priorities. Braying about the extradition of Megrahi distracts from these other literally life and death issues, at best, and, at worst, has the potential to destabilize the fragile rebel coalition, as some factions are wary of sending Libyans abroad to face justice

But Bolton’s call is particularly disingenuous. He claims the Libyans didn’t cooperate with the Scottish investigation, but that’s not what his former boss, President Bush, told personally told Moammar Qaddafi in a 2008 phone call. The Washington Post reported at the time:

President Bush called Libya’s Moammar Gaddafi yesterday — apparently the first time any president has spoken to the African leader — to voice his satisfaction that Libya had settled a long-standing dispute over terrorist attacks, including the bombing of a Pan Am jet over Scotland, the White House said.

In their conversation, Bush and Gaddafi “discussed that this agreement should help to bring a painful chapter in the history between our two countries closer to closure,” White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe said in a statement.

Presidential front-runner Mitt Romney has led the charge on Megrahi, demanding his extradition in the same statement congratulating the rebels on their success. Like Romney, Bolton’s call for “bring[ing] him to this country” contradicts his earlier demands that terrorists never be tried on U.S soil in criminal courts. Bolton even threatened to move his family out of New York City when the Justice Department was considering trying 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed there. “It’s a major strategic blunder,” Bolton told Fox News at the time, “to put them [terorists] on trial anywhere in the United States.”