Thirty-four Muslim bus drivers were suspended from their jobs by Hertz for taking too long to pray. At issue is whether or not the employees of Hertz, who work at the Seattle airport, were supposed to clock in and clock out for their breaks to pray. Hertz maintains that they were required to clock out because many of them were running over the allotted ten-minute breaks, but the suspended Muslim employees and their union said they were unaware of the requirement.

The union, Teamsters Local 177, said the issue of clocking out and in for prayers was not addressed in a contract, but Hertz said the rule was established in a 2009 Equal Employment Opportunity settlement (.DOC), and that Muslim employees who had clocked out and in were not suspended. “Unfortunately, some of these prayer breaks have extended way too long and we felt like it’s important to have procedures for prayers to continue and not have the privilege be abused,” said a Hertz spokesperson.

The union maintains they were not notified when the rule change went into effect on September 30, and that the suspensions are about some of the Muslim employees practicing their faith. The union Secretary-Treasurer Tracy Thompson told CBS Seattle:

They’ve clearly made it about the religious exercise here and that’s where we have a number of problems. They’ve violated the terms of the collective bargaining agreement, let alone these people’s right to exercise their religious rights during the day.

Irrespective of the debate over the rule change and just how long these bus drivers were taking to do their prayers, one of the suspended Muslim employees, Zainab Aweis, told the Seattle Times about an unpleasant encounter around the suspensions:

Aweis said she was not aware the rules had changed until she arrived at work on Friday and managers told her and six other women who were about to pray that several other workers had been sent home that day for praying.

“He said, ‘If you guys pray, you go home,’ ” Aweis recalled.

“I said, ‘Is that a new rule?’ And he said, ‘yes.’ ”

They prayed anyway, she said, contending that managers stood over them taunting and disrupting them.

“I like the job,” Aweis said. “But if I can’t pray, I don’t see the benefit.”

The union’s complaint (PDF) to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) cited this “intimidat(ion),” not the issue of clocking out and in:

On Wednesday, October 5, 2011, the Employer engaged in surveillance of employees engaging in concerted protected activity at the Seattle airport. The surveillance was intended to, and did, intimidate the employees.

It’s unclear how long the NLRB will take to resolve the dispute, but for now the drivers, who are paid under ten dollars an hour and get no health insurance, paid sick days or paid vacation days, will remain suspended.

Mitt Romney’s eagerly awaited foreign policy speech at the Citadel was welcomed by neoconservative hawks who supported the George W. Bush administration’s adventurist foreign policy. But Romney’s speech stood out in that it was full of dire predictions for the future — indeed some were downright apocalyptic — while offering few if any policy responses to confront these supposedly deadly challenges to American national security.

In the first minutes of his speech Romney warned that the next four years could pose a series of potentially devastating foreign policy challenges. He predicted: Iran could hold the Middle East hostage with a nuclear weapon; Obama’s scale-down of U.S. forces in Afghanistan will bring the Taliban back to power; Islamic jihadists will acquire nuclear weapons from Pakistan; China will “brush aside” American naval “inferiority” in the Pacific; and Cuba and Venezuela will undermine the prospects of democracy in the region.

Watch it:

But in response to these dire challenges facing the U.S. — and more broadly the entire world — Romney suggests that the Pentagon increase the shipbuilding rate from 9 per year to 15 and permanently station an aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean.

Other than boosting defense spending — which is a terrible idea in its own right — Romney has few if any specific policy prescriptions. Instead, his response to the foreign policy challenges — whether real or imagined — facing the U.S. is laid out later in his speech. He says:

This century must be an American Century. In an American Century, America has the strongest economy and the strongest military in the world. In an American Century, America leads the free world and the free world leads the entire world.

While the notion of an “American Century” is not new — a number of the foreign policy positions associated with the George W. Bush administration were first promoted by the Project for the New American Century — the lack of policy specifics in Romney’s speech is noticeable, especially in light of the existential threats he says are facing the U.S. Simplistic notions of American military power as a democratizing force in the world were put to the test in Afghanistan and Iraq during the George W. Bush administration. Even leading neoconservatives such as Richard Perle, David Frum, and Kenneth Adelman criticized the Bush administration for its execution of the war in Iraq and its loosely defined “freedom agenda.”

As Romney frames his foreign policy along similar lines, he may face tough questions about how he intends to combat the long list of threats he says are bearing down on the U.S.

Yesterday, GOP presidential front runner Mitt Romney announced his campaign’s foreign policy team. While ThinkProgress pointed out that many of Romney’s advisers helped push the United States into war with Iraq, it might also be interesting to know what the former Massachusetts governor will be hearing from his top aides regarding Iran. Prominent neoconservative Robert Kagan, who is among Romney’s foreign policy advisers, has actually spoken out in favor of talking to Iran. However, that view is by far an outlier among Romney’s team. While some of them have tried to push the claim that Iran is working with al Qaeda, others have said or written that the U.S. should take a more militaristic approach toward the Islamic Republic:

ELIOT COHEN: Soon after the 9/11 attacks, Cohen, now director of the strategic studies program and Johns Hopkins University, called for the overthrow of the Iranian government. And that thinking doesn’t appear to have changed. In 2009, Cohen again called for the overthrow of the Iranian regime and said either attack Iran or it gets nukes. “The choices are now what they ever were: an American or an Israeli strike, which would probably cause a substantial war, or living in a world with Iranian nuclear weapons, which may also result in war, perhaps nuclear, over a longer period of time.”

MICHAEL HAYDEN: On CNN last year, former CIA director (and prominent torture advocate) Michael Hayden said attacking Iran over its nuclear program might not be a bad idea. “In my personal thinking — I need to emphasize that — I have begun to consider that that may not be the worst of all possible outcomes,” he said.

ERIC EDELMAN: Edelman was a career diplomat and former aid to Vice President Dick Cheney. Earlier this year in an article in Foreign Affairs, Edelman, along with two other co-authors, said that the U.S. will either have to attack Iran or contain its nuclear weapons capability. “The military option should not be dismissed because of the appealing but flawed notion that containment is a relatively easy or low-risk solution to a very difficult problem,” they wrote.

NORM COLEMAN: Coleman, the former Republican senator from Minnesota, said in 2007 that if Israel ever attacks Iran, the United States should join in. “If something is taken,” Coleman said, “the United States is going to be part of that. We have to understand that. There is no saying, ‘Israel did it.’”

KIM HOLMES: In 2005, the Heritage Foundation’s Kim Holmes worried that the Europeans, by negotiating with Iran over its nuclear program, might be preventing the U.S. from using military force to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. Holmes called it a “serious mistake” to allow Iran to obtain the bomb because “Iran itself is simply too untrustworthy to be trusted with nuclear weapons.”

Holmes is referring to the hackneyed right-wing fearmongering talking point which CAP’s Matt Duss has labeled, “The martyr state myth.” The myth is that Iran is hell bent on using nuclear weapons, against Israel, the U.S., etc, should it acquire them and that Iran’s leaders are “uniquely immune to the cost-benefit calculations that underpin a conventional theory of deterrence.”

Today in his foreign policy speech at the Citadel military college in South Carolina, which happened to also be “full of ridiculous fear mongering,” Romney echoed this sentiment. “In the hands of the ayatollahs, a nuclear Iran is nothing less than an existential threat to Israel,” he said. “Iran’s suicidal fanatics could blackmail the world.”

Romney also said in his speech today that “Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon is unacceptable.” Now that we know how he will be advised on how to prevent that, it looks like Romney’s new American Century that he called for today, should he become president, is likely to turn out just like the last new American Century the neocons tried to create under the previous Republican president.

As ThinkProgress noted in August, one of GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s top foreign policy advisers has taken an active role in a campaign of advocacy for a controversial Iranian exile group listed by the State Department as a “Foreign Terrorist Organization” (FTO).

Mitchell Reiss, a former Bush administration State Department official, has spoken at events and moderated at least two panels making the case that the Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK), a formerly-Islamic Marxist armed revolutionary group now claiming to renounce violence and preaching democracy, should be removed from the U.S. terror rolls.

On Thursday, Reiss made the announcement of formal foreign policy advisers to the campaign that Josh Rogin of Foreign Policy described as a “shadow National Security Council.”

Also Thursday morning, Reiss’s name conspicuously appeared in the Washington Post — but not in a news article. Instead, he was listed among the signatories to a paid, full-page advertisement (PDF) by a British group supporting the U.S. de-listing the MEK as a terrorist group. In an “Open Letter to President Obama,” the signatories urged Obama to “Delist the MEK (PMOI) Now” and to “Protect Camp Ashraf” — the camp inside Iraq where more than 3,000 of the group’s former-fighters live.

Here’s a photo of the signatories:

Both Reiss and the Romney camp at large have been less than forthcoming about their relationships with the MEK. Here are a few questions intrepid reporters should press them on at availabilities:

- Many of the other signatories listed to today’s Post ad have admitted being paid huge sums of money for speaking appearances both before the group itself at rallies in Europe and at Washington panels where close associates of the group advocate for their delisting. Has Reiss been paid for any of his appearances?

- Several commentators have raised questions about whether or not some of the advocacy for a designated terror group crosses the line into “material support for terror.” This is particularly true since the Supreme Court found an expansive definition of “material support” in Holder vs. the Humanitarian Law Project, where “coordinated” speech with terror groups was prohibited. Georgetown law professor David Cole observed that “(b)y ‘coordinated,’ [Chief Justice John Roberts] seemed to mean speech that involves some kind of direct contact with the group in question.” Has Reiss had any contact with the MEK either with the leadership in Paris or the former-fighters in Camp Ashraf?

- Lastly, though Romney seems to have a position on Iran (largely defined by attacking Obama’s policies), he has yet to stake out a position on the MEK itself. It seems clear that with a two-time campaign foreign policy adviser is a staunch supporter of the group. So where does Romney stand on delisting the MEK and giving them American government support as an Iranian opposition group?

Today marks the 10th anniversary of the war in Afghanistan, and progressive lawmakers are using the date to call for its end. The U.S. has largely completed its mission in Afghanistan, they say, so we shouldn’t continue sending American troops into harms way. Moreover, the fighting has been extremely costly — a recent Brown University study found that 10 years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq have cost between $2.3 and $2.7 trillion — and lawmakers are calling for an end to that spending at at a time when the needy are facing cuts at home, the Hill reports:

“Bin Laden is gone, Al-Qaeda has been scattered around the globe, and yet we continue to risk the lives of brave Americans and squander billions of dollars after a decade of interminable conflict,” [Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-NY)] added. “It has to stop.” [...]

“The American people are weary of war, period, and want our troops to come home,” [House Minority Leader Nancy] Pelosi [D-CA] said. “We appreciate that the president is winding that war down, and we won’t have many more anniversaries of the longest wars in our country’s history.” [...]

“We are now spending $120 billion a year in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And incredibly, President Obama – who I strongly support in general – is contemplating staying in Iraq even longer than George Bush wanted to,” [Rep. Barney] Frank [D-NY] said Tuesday to a crowd of liberal activists gathered in Washington for the Take Back the American Dream conference. “That is totally unacceptable, and we must make that very clear.”

The war in Afghanistan, which President Bush launched on Oct. 7 2001, became the longest war in American history last July.

Under Obama, the U.S. has begun to draw down its troop presence, beginning with pulling the 33,000 surge troops by the end of 2012 and the remaining 68,000 by the end of 2014. But yesterday, the defense ministers from the 49 nations that make up the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan pledged their support to the country, even after 2014. “Let there be no mistake: transition is not departure. We will not take our leave when the Afghans take the lead,” NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen told reporters.