The Newt Gingrich campaign’s choice of foreign policy advisers follows the trend of GOP candidates borrowing heavily from the neoconservative policymakers who helped form the hawkish foreign policy of the George W. Bush administration. But Gingrich, who denied his own history of influence peddling for corporate clients, made an interesting choice in adding Stephen Yates, a Washington lobbyist specializing in foreign companies and governments, to his national security team.

Yates, whose biography on the Newt Gingrich campaign website only lists him as president of DC International Advisors, “a consultancy,” since 2006, had an extremely active lobbying career in the two years following his job as Deputy Assistant to Vice President Dick Cheney for National Security Affairs from 2001 to 2005. The Gingrich campaign’s decision to leave Yates’ career as vice president of the “global affairs practice” at Barbour Griffith & Rogers off his official bio, might have something to do with the two years of active lobbying he conducted on behalf of foreign clients.

In 2005 and 2006, while he was based at Barbour Griffith & Rogers, Yates was listed on lobbying disclosures as having represented the interests of:

Taiwan

The Indonesian National Shipowners’ Association

Moneygram International

Lebanon’s National Dialogue Party

The Republic of India

British Nuclear Fuels, Plc. (via a contract with Sutherland Asbill & Brennan)

Yates also serves as a director at the U.S.-Taiwan Business Council.

The campaign’s decision to present Yates’ biography without any reference to his career at Barbour Griffith & Rogers or his representation of Taiwanese, Indonesian, Lebanese, Indian and British interests in Washington, raises questions. Indeed, Yates’ two-year career as a lobbyist focusing almost exclusively on foreign clients seeking influence in Washington is an interesting omission from a biography that portrays Gingrich’s national security adviser as a career civil servant.

Yates’ background in public service would indicate that he has a strong interest in U.S. foreign policy and national security. But his two years as a professional lobbyist might also suggest that annual contracts of $740,000 with the Indonesian National Shipowners Association, $720,000 with the Republic of India, and $1.5 million with the Republic of China (Taiwan), held a certain appeal in more recent years.

Former House Speaker and GOP presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich announced his national security team last night, ahead of tonight’s CNN national security debate. Foreign Policy points out that the group, which “seems a little long in the tooth,” is a mixed bag. But some advisers have staked out right-wing militaristic positions on Iraq and now Iran. Here’s a rundown of a few key figures:

DAVID WURMSER

A fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (or AEI, where Gingrich is a former senior fellow), Wurmser served on the staffs of two top Bush administration hawks, former U.N. ambassador John Bolton and Vice President Dick Cheney (where Stephen Yates, another Gingrich adviser, also served). In 2007, a U.N. official called Wurmser one of the “new crazies” who wanted to attack Iran. In 1996, Wurmser co-authored a paper from a right-wing pro-Israel group advocating the removal of Saddam Hussein from power. The group wrote:

Israel can shape its strategic environment… by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq — an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right — as a means of foiling Syria’s regional ambitions.

ILAN BERMAN

Berman, the vice president of the American Foreign Policy Council (which also gave the Gingrich campaign Herman Pirchner and Yates) and editor of the Jewish Institute For National Security Affairs journal, has advocated U.S.-led regime change in Iran and wrote that military action against Iran should be a “last resort.” But he’s also attempted to minimize negative effects of an attack and, in 2005 at a Middle East Forum briefing, said Iran is a “prime candidate” for Iraq-style pre-emption:

I supported the war in Iraq… The minimum nexus the President [Bush] was talking about was the confluence of a regime that sponsors terrorism and the presence of weapons of mass destruction. The fact that we haven’t found WMD… undercuts the case for pre-emption in later circumstances, unfortunately. Which is too bad because I think Iran is a prime candidate for this sort of discussion.

JAMES WOOLSEY

Woolsey served as honorary co-chair of Islamophobe Frank Gaffney‘s Center For Security Policy and is a current leadership board and executive team member at the neoconservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD). Woolsey advocated for the Iraq war, supports illegal Israeli West Bank settlement construction, and now pushes a confrontational stance on Iran. In 1998, Woolsey signed onto a Project For a New American Century letter urging the military removal of Saddam Hussein:

The only acceptable strategy is one that eliminates the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction. In the near term, this means a willingness to undertake military action as diplomacy is clearly failing. In the long term, it means removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power.

ROBERT “BUD” McFARLANE

McFarlane, a former Reagan administration National Security Adviser, serves on the leadership council of FDD. In 1988, McFarlane plead guilty to four counts of withholding information from Congress in the Iran-Contra scandal, in which he played a major role, even secretly travelling to Iran in the early arms-for-hostages part of the affair. (McFarlane, who attempted suicide three hours before he was meant to testify before Congress in 1987, was pardoned in 1992.) McFarlane also served as an adviser to Sen. John McCain’s 2008 presidential run.

Our guest blogger is Jennifer Addison, national security team intern at the Center for American Progress.

Dozens of Israeli women bared it all this week in homage to Egyptian activist Aliaa Elmahdy and her controversial naked photos, the latest in a string of efforts from women in the Middle East to reclaim their sexuality. Last week, Elmahdy posted nude photos of herself on the internet in an attempt to send a message about sexual equality and expression in Egypt. In an interview with CNN, Elmahdy further explained her reasons for posting the photos:

ELMADHY: I am not shy of being a woman in a society where women are nothing but sex objects harassed on a daily basis by men who know nothing about sex or the importance of a woman. The photo is an expression of my being and I see the human body as the best artistic representation of that.

“Many women wear the veil just to escape the harassment and be able to walk the streets,” she later added. Elmahdy is to be commended for fighting against oppression; and while her actions are well-intended, she should also be sensitive to the fact that what she feels is oppressive may actually liberating for other women.

Sexual harassment is a serious problem in Egypt. According to a 2008 survey conducted by the Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights, 83 percent of Egyptian women have been sexually harassed. However, it cannot be assumed that all women in Egypt are wearing the veil for this one reason. By connecting sexual harassment and the veil, Elmahdy gives the impression that the veil is strongly associated with oppression. Although there is truth to her statement, it should not be assumed that women only wear the veil because they are oppressed. Even in countries with strong gender-equality laws women are disgruntled with the limits on their expression. Just a few weeks ago in Tunisia, women were protesting for the right to wear the veil. In Libya, under former ruler Muammar Qaddafi, the Niqab was banned. According to a report from the Economist, women across the country are now celebrating over the restoration of their right to wear it.

Of course, it is a mistake to assume that all women want their sexuality to be expressed in the same way. Ideas, opinions and personalities effect one’s desire to be covered or uncovered. Women’s bodies have been the subject of discussion for Islamic scholars and authorities, political figures, even Western feminists, but have Muslim women themselves been adequately consulted on this issue?

This issue of sexuality, like many other issues facing women across the globe, can be boiled down to one thing – choice. Owning your sexuality is a good thing but making assumptions about how all women feel about their bodies is not. Each woman should have the right to choose how to carry herself, how she dresses, and what her body represents. A consensus may never be reached on female sexual expression and the most important thing is for women to acknowledge and respect differences in opinions amongst other women in how they choose to own and express their sexuality.

Republicans in Congress are trying to walk back the nearly $600 billion in military and security spending cuts that are mandated to take effect now that the super committee has failed to reach an agreement on how to cut $1.2 trillion in federal spending. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon (R-CA) are leading the charge, despite the fact that both voted for the debt ceiling agreement back in August that created the super committee and mandated the trigger cuts should it fail.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has been speaking out forcefully against the trigger’s $600 billion in military spending cuts, saying they would be “devastating” and “hollow out” the military. He even said last week that spending reductions of this magnitude would invite an attack on the United States.

President Obama said yesterday that he would veto any bill that would void the $600 billion in security spending cuts. So, obviously, Panetta bucked his boss and got on board with what McCain and McKeon want to do right? Wrong. The AP reports Panetta’s reaction to the super committee failure:

“Despite the danger posed by sequestration, I join the president in his call for Congress to avoid an easy way out of this crisis. Congress cannot simply turn off the sequester mechanism, but instead must pass deficit reduction at least equal to the $1.2 trillion it was charged to pass under the Budget Control Act.”

But if the sequester mechanism’s $600 billion in cuts to security spending would basically, as Panetta has been saying for the last few months, reduce the United States military to a functionless institution incapable of protecting a small island, why isn’t the defense secretary doing everything he can to stop them?

The answer is because it’s not true, as CAP’s Larry Korb recently noted in the New York Times:

Adding $500 billion to the $450 billion already being cut would mean total reductions of $950 billion over the next decade, or about 15 percent.

Since the defense budget has grown by more than 50 percent over the past 10 years, it can easily absorb a 15 percent reduction — which would be about half the defense cuts of Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon and less than that of George H. W. Bush.

Cutting the military budget by that much would, as Korb also notes, “in real terms, allow the Pentagon to spend at its 2007 level for the next decade.”

This past August, Congress passed a law requiring a special super committee to design a deficit reduction plan. If this committee failed, then there would be an automatic sequester to cut $1.2 trillion, dividing among non-defense domestic spending and defense spending.

Now that the super committee has announced its failure, these cuts are supposed to be enacted. But they won’t be put in place until 2013, and some in Congress are trying to stop the defense portion of these cuts. House Armed Services Committee chairman Rep. Buck McKeon (R-CA) will be introducing legislation to prevent these automatic cuts from ever occurring, and Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) says he is working on a similar plan in the Senate.

But it is disingenuous for these lawmakers to now be defending defense pork. After all, both McKeon and McCain supported the bill that created the super committee and mandated these defense cuts if the committee failed.

McKeon actually went on a local news show soon after the passage of the bill and praised its slated cuts, actually saying that he wish it had cut more:

HOST: Give me your assessment of how [the super committee deal] went down. Was this a major coup for the Republican Party?

MCKEON: I don’t think anybody was overjoyed, all of us probably would’ve liked to see more cuts. I think we got all we could get. And that’s good. [...] So, that’s a good thing. Because we’ve been spending way too much money that we don’t have. We’re borrowing over 40 cents for every dollar that we spend. But the apple is so big that it makes the bite seem like it was way too small.

Watch it:

Meanwhile, McCain called the deal “not something that I would’ve written but it is a step forward.” For both these members of Congress to praise and support the super committee law and now to try to undermine it is an act of stunning hypocrisy. House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) said earlier this month that he feels “bound” by the super committee military spending cuts sequester. “I would feel bound. It was part of the agreement, and so either we succeed or we’re in the sequester,” he said. But McKeon and McCain appear to be cutting and then running away — they’re happy to posture as deficit hawks but then can’t follow through.