Israeli soldier Galid Shalit returned home today five years after Hamas fighters captured him during a military conflict with Israeli Defense Forces in 2006. In exchange, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agreed to release more than 1,000 Palestinians prisoners.

Today on CNN, host Wolf Blitzer asked now-GOP frontrunner Herman Cain — who’s not exactly a student of foreign policy — if he thought Netanyahu made the right choice. While Cain said he doesn’t know all the facts of the case, he said, “On the surface, you would say ‘one for hundreds, doesn’t make any sense.’” Blitzer then asked if he’d make a similar deal if he were president, and Cain said he would:

BLITZER: Could you imagine if you were president…and there were one American soldier who had been held for years and the demand was al Qaeda or some other terrorist group, “You got to free everyone at Guantanamo Bay” – several hundred prisoners at Guantanamo. Could you see yourself as president authorizing that kind of transfer?

CAIN: I could see myself authorizing that kind of transfer but what I would do is I would make sure that I got all of the information. I got all of the input, considered all of the options. And then, the president has to be the president and make a judgment call. I can make that call if I had to.

Watch the clip:

As Matt Yglesias noted, the Galid Shalit case is a uniquely Israeli one:

The contrast between Mahmoud Abbas getting nothing from Israel through international law and advocacy for two states, and Hamas getting a lopsided deal through kidnapping, violence, and unreasonable demands must be palpable.

But what Herman Cain is saying here is that he would negotiate with a terrorist organization. But not only that, he’d agree to release every prisoner at Guantanamo Bay — regardless of their danger to the national security of the United States — in exchange for the release of one American in captivity. Be on the look out for a sharp increase in al Qaeda kidnappings in a Cain administration.

The Daily Beast reports that, with cuts to the over-inflated defense budget imminent, firms that develop military technologies are looking to alternative markets. Because the products they develop are sensitive, they’ll likely be prohibited from making sales overseas. So they’re turning to domestic markets, looking to sell surveillance products like unmanned aerial “drone” vehicles — and presumably other goods, including some weapons — to everyone from local and state cops to the Department of Homeland Security:

Gulu Gambhir, the chief technology officer for the [Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR)] group of [Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC)], said he has seen this day coming. [...]

“A number of our influential products have dual-use capability to locations and missions adjacent to our primary overseas ISR mission. One such example is local law enforcement, emergency first responders and border protection.”

“All kinds of capabilities that were developed with an eye to foreign countries are being turned inward upon the American people,” said ACLU senior fellow Jay Stanley.

Indeed, local law enforcement agencies — and even national ones — have, at times, been less-than-responsible with their surveillance, particularly of American Muslims, raising the potential for further abuse with a greater technological reach.

At Wired’s Danger Room, Spencer Ackerman’s investigative reporting has revealed a deep-seeded anti-Muslim bias among training materials used by the Federal Bureau of Investigations. That bias has also sometimes manifested itself in local law enforcement. A recent groundbreaking investigation by the AP revealed that the New York Police Department’s (NYPD) surveillance was highly focused on Muslim Americans in the city, including one local cleric who was a counter-terror partner to local and national law enforcement.

Technologies are likely to aid these type of biased surveillance. Stanley, who authored a forthcoming report on the use of drones in American cities, told the Daily Beast that police need to exercise restraint “because the Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional to use a thermal imaging technology to peer into someone’s home without a warrant.” But this didn’t stop the NYPD in 2004 from using infrared technology from recording a “couple on the terrace of a Second Avenue penthouse” as they had an “intimate moment.” The only reason the case came to light was because it surfaced in separate court proceedings.

Likewise, technologies developed for the military have come into much closer contact with Americans on U.S. soil. In 2004, during the Republican National Convention in New York, authorities deployed Long Range Acoustic Devices — or sound cannons — against demonstrators, but never fired them. That changed during the 2009 demonstrations against the G-20 Summit in Pittsburgh, when sound cannons were fired on protesters.

And these are just a few of the ways that military technologies can, as the ACLU’s Stanley put it, be “turned inward upon the American people.” It seems like a good space for some oversight: Lawmakers should be cautious about the implications of transferring war-making technologies over to domestic forces for use against Americans. Keeping the profit margins high for these organs of the military industrial complex — at a time when everyone is suffering from belt-tightening — is no excuse to risk encroaching on the rights of ordinary Americans.

The charges against two people in an alleged Iranian plot to assassinate Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the U.S. has given neoconservative think tanks — such as the America Enterprise Institute, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and the Heritage Foundation — yet another reason to promote military action against Iran. Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol even went so far as to gloat that “we have an engraved invitation” for war against Iran.

But not everyone is buying into the neoconservative push for yet another U.S. military operation in the Middle East. Rep. Presidential contender Ron Paul (R-TX) pushed back against the calls for war in an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer yesterday:

BLITZER: But why do you think — because various Republicans and Democrats, Mike Rogers, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee — you know him — he believes that the evidence is strong [against the Iranians].

PAUL: I think it’s mostly war propaganda. They’ve been itching to go to war against Iran for a long, long time. This is exactly what they did leading up to the war in Iraq, and the danger was not there.

I don’t think the Iranians are that stupid. And yet, the people here right now are getting pretty excited about it.

[...]

People are suggesting we go to war over this. That is such a careless attitude.

Watch it:

Indeed, the drive for war has come from some of the same voices who had pushed for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein since the 1990s. And, much as in Iraq, inconvenient intelligence reports are overlooked by these hawks.

Today, the Washington Post’s Joby Warrick revealed that while Iran continues to stockpile enriched uranium, the nuclear program is “riddled with problems” as a combination of old equipment and inferior replacement machinery have resulted in a steady decline in enriched uranium output.

Warrick also reports that U.S. intelligence officials believe Iran is seeking the technical capability to produce a nuclear weapon but that there is little indication that the clerical leadership has firmly committed to making a bomb.

While much remains to be explained about both Iranian nuclear intentions and the alleged assassination plot against the Saudi ambassador, neoconservatives and their allies are using the latest diplomatic crisis with Tehran as yet another justification for preemptive military action.