The past week offered numerous opportunities for neoconservatives and their hawkish allies to defend the Bush foreign policy and push for a continuation of the adventurist foreign policy pursued since 9/11. As always, Iran tops the list as the next Middle Eastern country ripe for U.S. military induced “regime change.”

The Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Mark Dubowitz claimed sanctions have failed because they didn’t provide “material support for the millions of Iranian dissidents who could overthrow the regime,” something the sanctions architects have never claimed to accomplish. Mitt Romney misrepresented Obama’s implementation of Iran sanctions and claimed the U.S. wasn’t communicating a “credible military threat.” Dick Cheney expressed his support for military action against Iran and neoconservative pundit Lee Smith opined that Israel is dissapointed in the U.S. as an ally because Obama hasn’t ordered a military strike on Iranian nuclear facilities.

But buried under all the hawkish rhetoric are a series of interesting news accounts with implications for Washington’s Iran watchers.

Ali Vaez and Charles Ferguson wrote in The Atlantic that the September IAEA report on Iran’s nuclear program has been falsely interpreted by both Iran’s boasting and Washington’s hardline rhetoric. Instead, they argue, the report shows that Iran is still having serious difficulty in operating their centrifuges and the pace of uranium enrichment hasn’t increased since May. They observe, “Five years after Ahmadinejad promised to deploy a new generation of indigenous centrifuges, Iran has yet to set up a complete cascade of the new devices.”

A day after Ahmadinejad announced the release of the two U.S. hikers, Iran’s judiciary sent out a very different message saying that it was still examining the pleas by the hikers’ lawyers. Ariel Zirulnick at the Christian Science Monitor examined this series of events and concludes the move was a “clear jab” at Ahmadinejad and the Iranian president is facing unprecedented domestic political opposition.

Yesterday, the Associated Press ran an exclusive report on a new Iranian offer to meet with world powers without the the usual set of preconditions. Interestingly, and contrary to previous offers to negotiate, the letter authored by Iranian nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili suggested that Tehran might be ready to discuss some nuclear issues which were previously off the table. While Iran has yet to act, Jalili writes that Iran is “ready to cooperate in … nonproliferation and peaceful nuclear cooperation.”

None of these reports alone should serve as indication that a major breakthrough is imminent in bringing Iran back in line with the Non-Proliferation Treaty. But the events of the past week suggest interesting movement on a number of important fronts in the Obama administration’s efforts to apply pressure to Ahmadinejad and Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program.

While Cheney and Romney’s saber rattling got played on Fox News, progress in the right direction might be occurring in incremental steps and under the mainstream media’s radar.

GOP presidential candidate Rick Perry took criticism from the hawkish Republican right when he said, at Monday night’s debate, “[I]t’s time to bring our young men and women home as soon, and obviously as safely, as we can.” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) told Foreign Policy’s Josh Rogin he was “disappointed” with Perry’s stance. Now, the Perry campaign deployed an adviser to speak to Rogin and clear things up, albeit still leaving questions.

The adviser told Rogin:

In the dynamic of a debate when you follow someone, you kind of play off of them, and what Gov. Perry wanted to do was to express a similar sentiment to Gov. Huntsman that he very much wants to bring the troops home, we all do, but he wasn’t saying, “I want to bring the troops home now.”

He went on:

Gov. Perry is not confident in the Obama policy, which seems to be driven largely by politics, and he’s not confident in the 100,000 troops number. He’d like to know if it’s possible at 40,000.

But asked what Perry’s target number would be — not just a hypothetical — the adviser was short on specifics: “We’re not in a position to answer that question, we’re not in those briefings.”

Speaking to Time Magazine this week, Perry was equally vague:

I think we need to try to move our men and women home as soon as we can. Not just in Afghanistan, but in Iraq as well. And we’ve got to continually reassess our objectives. We need to make strategic decisions based on consultation with our military leaders on the ground, rather than just some arbitrary political promises.

All the meandering aside, Perry’s Afghanistan war strategy sounds an awful lot like President Obama’s because of the focus on handing over responsibility to Afghan security forces. So too do Perry’s vague numbers sound like those Obama has instituted from the Oval Office.

Perry initially got the Bush foreign policy band back together again to get advice on international affairs, which led the the neocons to think that they may have had their man in the Texas governor. But now, the so-called “hawk internationalist” appears to be reading the tea-leaves and trying to distinguish himself from the rapacious hawkishness of most of the Republican field by declaring that he didn’t want to engage in “military adventurism.” He still seems to be trying to find a middle ground, but doing it with muddled policies.

Fox News’s website blatantly misquoted State Department spokesman Mark Toner in a press briefing yesterday in Foggy Bottom. The Fox News report, which lists the Associated Press as a contributor, says Toner called a vote for the Palestinian statehood recognition bid at the U.N. an “anti-Israel vote.” The Fox story says:

State Department spokesman Mark Toner said Wednesday the U.S. continues to see any kind of effort by the Palestinians at the U.N. gathering in New York as “counterproductive.”

He said a vote for Palestinian statehood is an “anti-Israel vote.”

But at the press briefing, Toner was asked repeatedly whether or not the U.S. considered voting for the Palestinian statehood recognition resolution to be “anti-Israel.” He failed to respond several times, but then said it was “not a zero-sum game.” Pressed on it, Toner seemed to say that the administration did not, in fact, consider voting for the resolution to be “anti-Israel.”

The relevant portion of the briefing transcript says:

QUESTION: But do – I understand that, but do you think that a vote for recognition of Palestine as a state is an anti-Israel vote?

MR. TONER: And I will –

QUESTION: Is this – in other words, is this, in fact, a zero-sum game?

MR. TONER: It’s not a zero-sum game. It’s – what it is is it’s not conducive to –

QUESTION: Then the Administration does not agree that it is an anti-Israel –

MR. TONER: It is not – no. What I’m saying is this is not going to lead to progress in peace negotiations, direct negotiations. And so we believe it’s counterproductive, that it’s not in the interest of either of the parties, and our goal, therefore, remains in getting them back to the – into negotiations, and that’s what we’re pursuing on the ground in Tel Aviv.

QUESTION: Okay. But you don’t see this vote – you don’t see a country voting in favor of a Palestinian resolution to be anti-Israel?

MR. TONER: Again, I’m not going to characterize what a –

QUESTION: Well, let me get to the reason why I’m asking the question…

Watch the video of the whole exchange here:

While it’s not precisely clear that Toner’s remark that “It is not – no” was a response to the reporter’s question, it’s absolutely clear that at no point does Toner say that a vote for the Palestinian initiative is “anti-Israel.” He repeatedly refused to answer the question. By saying the situation did not constitute “zero-sum game,” Toner implied that supporting the Palestinian position was not by default “anti-Israel.” Toner then made a statement suggesting that, no, the administration did not view voting for the Palestinian resolution as anti-Israel.

Fox News should correct its report and apologize to Toner for so egregiously misquoting him.

PLO Ambassador Maen Areikat came under intense criticism yesterday for comments he supposedly made in a meeting with reporters indicating that a future Palestinian state should not have any Jews in it.

What appears to have people exercised is not anything Areikat said recently, but comments he made in a Tablet magazine interview a year ago, in which he said Jews who “fall under the jurisdiction of a Palestinian state” would have to be transferred.

AREIKAT: I think this is a very necessary step, before we can allow the two states to somehow develop their separate national identities, and then maybe open up the doors for all kinds of cultural, social, political, economic exchanges, that freedom of movement of both citizens of Israelis and Palestinians from one area to another. You know you have to think of the day after.

Despite the fact that Areikat described these as his personal views (and despite, or maybe because of, the fact that they resemble the views of Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman), they’re still pretty troubling. Obviously, the goal of U.S. policy should be a Palestinian state where people of all faiths can live and freely practice.

In a follow-up interview with the Huffington Post’s Josh Hersh, Areikat’s distanced himself from the remarks. “Under no circumstances was I saying that no Jews can be in Palestine,” Areikat told Hersh. “What a statement that would be for me to make! I never said that, and I never meant to say such a thing. This is not a religious conflict, and we want to establish a secular state.”

In another piece, the Palestinian Authority’s Minister of Religious Affairs Mahmoud Al Habash told Maan News, “The Palestinian state will a be a civilized state in which all faiths will live. The attempt of media outlets to play games with statements hostile to Jews has a purely political goal. The PA and its ambassador in Washington have a clear position on the issue and do not need to play games with words.”

As for the usual neocon outlets pushing the talking point that the Palestinian Authority envisions a “Judenrein” Palestine, it’s worth noting that, not only do any of these characters ever have anything critical to say about Israel’s policies of expropriation of Palestinian property and eviction of Palestinian families in places like Sheikh Jarrah, Silwan, and elsewhere in the West Bank, they stood foursquare behind those policies when the Obama administration criticized them. Apparently, kicking people out of their homes and seizing their property is only bad when the Palestinians might do it in the future, not when Israelis are actually doing it right now.

Cross-posted from Middle East Progress.

Counterterrorism agents at the FBI’s training center in Quantico, Virginia are being taught that “devout” Muslims are more likely to be “violent” and that American Muslims are likely to be terrorist sympathizers, according to training materials acquired by Wired’s Spencer Ackerman. (In fact, mosques have been found to be a deterrent to the spread of terrorism.)

An FBI spokesperson told Ackerman that the slides were no longer in use but dates on the slides would suggest that they were used at least until March 21.

The documents offer a violent interpretation of Islam in which “Any war against non-believers is justified” and a “moderating process cannot happen if the Koran continues to be regarded as the unalterable word of Allah.” A particularly blunt slide shows a comparison of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, depicting how they have moderated their “militancy considerations” over time:

The information in the slides is clearly Islamophobic and completely ignores the fact that Islamic extremism, while a national security concern worthy of sober discussion, is a limited problem within the United States and hardly a frequent phenomenon in Muslim communities. A recent Duke terrorism study showed that since 9/11, the U.S. has experienced only 33 deaths from Muslim terrorism while 150,000 murders have occurred during the same time.

Several of the slide presentations are the work of an FBI intelligence analyst named William Gawthrop who, in 2006, before he joined the Bureau, gave an interview to WorldNetDaily, in which he said “Muhammad’s mindset is a source for terrorism.”

Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time that the FBI has given a stage to noted Islamophobes. In July, Ackerman identified that an FBI terrorism presentation recommended anti-Muslim blogger Robert Spencer’s book, “The Truth About Mohammed: Founder of the World’s Most Intolerant Religion.”

Spencer, who is profiled in the Center for American Progress’ new Islamophobia report, “Fear, Inc.,” operates the blog Jihad Watch and co-founded the Stop Islamization of America group with Pamela Geller. Spencer is one of the core “misinformation experts” discussed in “Fear, Inc.” and has promoted the conspiracy theory that President Obama may be a Muslim. Notably, Norwegian terrorist Anders Brevik cited Spencer’s work 162 times in his manifesto.

While the FBI is developing a track-record for giving pseudo-experts like Robert Spencer and William Gawthrop an opportunity to spread their Islamophobic views which demonize all Muslims, the truth is that Muslim communities have served as some of the most important allies for the FBI in their efforts to combat Muslim terrorists.