In an interview with Politico yesterday, Rep. Joe Walsh (R-IL) downplayed his opponent Tammy Duckworth’s military service and injury.

Duckworth, who served in Iraq and then at the VA, lost both legs and part of her arm in combat. Walsh’s response? Ehhh:

“I have so much respect for what she did in the fact that she sacrificed her body for this country,” said Walsh, simultaneously lowering his voice as he leaned forward before pausing for dramatic effect. “Ehhh. Now let’s move on.”

“What else has she done? Female, wounded veteran … ehhh,” he continued. “She is nothing more than a handpicked Washington bureaucrat. David Axelrod, Rahm Emanuel just picked her up and dropped her into this district.”

Walsh has since tried to walk back his statement. “I often catch myself when I’m talking. I meant something other than how it came out,” he told Chicagomag.com, although he did not expound on what he meant. But Walsh’s insulting comment is just another instance in a long, long, long line of offensive behavior against a range of marginalized groups.

Tensions are high today in Israel-Palestine as thousands of protesters are expected to participate in what organizers have billed a “Global March to Jerusalem.” Activists from neighboring countries will march to the Israeli border, according to organizers, to “demonstrate solidarity with Palestinians and to protect Jerusalem.”

The march coincides with Palestinian “Land Day,” which commemorates the 1976 protests against Israeli expropriation of Palestinian land, in which six Palestinian Israelis were killed and hundreds wounded by Israeli forces. Clashes have already occurred between Palestinian protesters and Israeli security forces inside the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem earlier today.

While the march was planned as “non-violent civil resistance,” the event has received legitimate criticism because of organizers’ condemnation of Israel as a “racist, Zionist state,” and because of the support it has received from groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, and the government of Iran. Critics note that the goal of some extremists is to create a crisis by provoking a violent Israeli response.

Unfortunately, some conservatives are also quite happy to encourage that violence. Noah Pollak, the executive director of the neoconservative Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI), tweeted his own preferences this morning:

Much like his ECI colleague Rachel Abrams, Pollak has a history of exhorting violence on Twitter:

Pollak also raised eyebrows last year when, after he praised President Obama’s May 19 speech calling for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, ECI turned around and attacked the president for the speech.

Yesterday during a policy discussion hosted by the National Journal, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), the House GOP’s supposed budget guru, said that America’s top military brass were lying about their support for President Obama’s Pentagon budget. When asked why the GOP’s budget — which passed the House yesterday — ignores the generals advice and increases military spending, Ryan replied, “We don’t think the generals are giving us their true advice.”

Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Martin Dempsey fired back at Ryan, the Wall Street Journal reports:

“There’s a difference between having someone say they don’t believe what you said versus … calling us, collectively, liars,” Gen. Dempsey told reporters aboard a U.S. military aircraft after a four day visit to Latin America. ”My response is: I stand by my testimony. This was very much a strategy-driven process to which we mapped the budget.”

Dempsey — who said in February that the Pentagon’s new budget will “maintain our military’s decisive edge and help sustain America’s global leadership” — added that the budget “was a collaborative effort” among the nation’s top military officers as well as combat leaders.

Pentagon spokesman George Little also responded to Ryan’s comments yesterday. “We value Congress’s oversight role and the secretary expects honest, straightforward input from our military leadership,” he said, adding, “and he believes that’s precisely what they do on a military basis time and time and time again.”

A new report from the Congressional Research Service (CRS) — an organization dedicated to carrying out non-partisan investigations for Congress — laid out considerations that could affect an Israeli decision to attack Iran’s nuclear program, and the potential issues that the U.S. might have to deal with in the wake of such an event.

The CRS report’s (PDF) summary states:

By all accounts, such an attack could have considerable regional and global security, political, and economic repercussions, not least for the United States, Israel, and their bilateral relationship. It is unclear what the ultimate effect of a strike would be on the likelihood of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons.

A potential Iranian nuclear weapon is widely considered a threat to both the security of the U.S. and its allies in the region, and the nuclear non-proliferation regime — though U.S. intelligence has not concluded that Iran has made a decision to pursue a weapon. The Obama administration vows to keep “all options on the table” to deal with the possibility, but the efficacy and consequences of a strike raise serious questions, leading the U.S. to pursue, for the meantime, a pressure track aimed at a negotiated resolution of the Iranian nuclear crisis.

An Israeli decision to carry out air strikes could hinge on the potential it sees for inflicting long-term damage on Iran’s nuclear program. One aspect of that potential — and one that gives rise to uncertainty — rests on Iran’s ability to reconstitute aspects of its program. Iran, over the years, dispersed it’s program into different locations, some shrouded in mystery.

The report honed in on Iran’s ability to preserve nuclear knowledge and the capability to rebuild its program through its opaque “workshops” for building centrifuges. Bloomberg News noted, “The possibility of dispersed facilities complicates any assessment of a potential raid’s success.” The CRS report went on to cite a former U.S. official with direct knowledge on the issue stating:

Iran’s centrifuge production is widely distributed and that the number of workshops has probably multiplied ‘many times’ since 2005 because of an increase in Iranian contractors and subcontractors working on the program.

Iran withdrew from the rigorous inspection standards of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty’s Additional Protocols in 2006. While the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) maintains access to Iranian enrichment sites, activities related to the construction of those centrifuges — before they get moved into enrichment sites — remain largely in the dark since 2006.

CRS estimated that Iran could largely rebuild its centrifuge construction “workshops” within six months of an attack. The Arms Control Association’s Peter Crail told Bloomberg news that a military strike would likely cause Iran to kick out IAEA inspectors, allowing the Islamic Republic to construct an entirely new enrichment facility dedicated to weapons-grade uranium away from international eyes. Crail told Bloomberg:

At some point they are going to reconstitute the program. It’s really just a question of can they do it within a year or two or is it going to take them a little bit longer.

Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey said in February that he fully supports the Pentagon’s new budget, which incorporates $487 billion in cuts over 10 years, saying it will “maintain our military’s decisive edge and help sustain America’s global leadership.” Dempsey also said the corresponding strategy has “real buy-in” among top U.S. military leaders.

Despite the military’s support for President Obama’s DOD budget, the House GOP decided in its budget released last week to roll back those cuts, claiming the current levels are not sufficient to protect America’s national security.

Today at a “policy summit” hosted by the National Journal, managing editor Kristin Roberts asked the GOP’s budget guy Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) why the Republicans went “against the advice of the generals.” Ryan’s response? They were lying:

ROBERTS: Why did the committee choose to go against the advice of the generals?

RYAN: We don’t think the generals are giving us their true advice. We don’t think the generals believe that their budget is really the right budget. I believe that the president’s budget by virtue of the fact that when he released his budget number of about $500 billion, the number was announced at the same time they announced the beginning of their strategy review of the Pentagon’s budget. So what we get from the Pentagon is more of a budget driven strategy, not a strategy driven budget.

“You don’t believe the generals?” Roberts later wondered, asking Ryan to explain. However, the House Budget Committee chairman dodged, throwing out general baseless platitudes like Obama’s military budget “hollows out defense.” Watch the clip:

In addition to increasing military spending, the GOP’s budget will also cut foreign affairs spending. In response, more than 70 retired military officers wrote to Congress arguing that it should not implement those cuts. It’s likely then that Ryan thinks they’re lying too.

GOP presidential frontrunner Mitt Romney said this week that President Obama’s comment to Russian president Dimitry Medvedev that he would be more “flexible” on issues such as missile defense until after the election was “a cave to Russia.” Romney went on to attack the President’s plan in 2009 to scrap and replace President Bush’s European missile defense program. “The decision to withdrawal our missile defense sites from Poland put us in greater jeopardy in my view,” he said.

Except that’s not what happened. There weren’t any missile defense sites in Poland at that time. “The proposed interceptors for Poland have not even been built, much less tested. The Obama administration is killing an idea, not a program, and replacing it with a more technologically-promising system,” said chairman of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. Lt. Gen. Robert Gard back in 2009.

And the Wall Street Journal reports today that European and NATO officials aren’t too concerned with Obama’s comments to Medvedev:

But broadly, officials and diplomats from across the region said they were inclined to take Mr. Obama’s remarks at face value. The U.S. and its allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization have pledged to cooperate with Russia on the system, which is initially aimed at defending against missiles from Iran.

Diplomats haven’t expected advances on those talks in a U.S. election year.

Stefan Niesiolowski, a Polish lawmaker and chairman of the defense committee in the lower house of Parliament, blew off the hysteria over Obama’s remarks. “This is not surprising or new, and there’s no outrage in Poland,” he said, adding, “There’s no military threat, and we haven’t had a situation as secure as this in 300 years. The level of U.S. military engagement in Poland therefore isn’t of top importance.”

As for Romney’s attacks on Obama’s missile defense posture, experts hailed Obama’s shift from the Bush plan. “The decision to revamp the missile defense plan in Europe is based on technological reality rather than rigid ideology,” said John Isaacs, executive director of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. “The Obama administration’s proposal is a better choice for U.S. and European security.”

Even the Polish foreign minister said at the time of the announcement: “When President Obama announced the new configuration of the system, we did say that we liked the new configuration better, but I think you didn’t believe us.”

And as then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates said, Obama’s missile defense plan has “unanimous support” of the U.S. military’s senior leadership.

So what does Obama mean when he says he will be more “flexible”? The Journal reported that Ian Kearns, chief executive of the London-based European Leadership Network, “said allies could agree to provide more transparency about the system and address Russian worries that when the system ramps up at the end of this decade, it could be big enough to blunt Moscow’s nuclear deterrent.”

The long Washington Post profile this weekend of a top Central Intelligence Agency official contained a remarkable number of details about the man that heads the Agency’s Counterterrorism Center — remarkable because the man remained shrouded in mystery, referenced only by the first name of his cover identity, “Roger.” Roger chain smokes, swears, worked in Africa, was “pudgy” in his youth, and — oh, yeah — he’s Muslim.

This last fact was too much for one of America’s foremost Islamophobes to bear: to an Islamophobe, Islamic extremist terrorism is inseparable from Islam at large, so how could a Muslim head up a counter-terrorism operation? Leave aside that Roger presides over a CIA unit that he expanded from three unmanned drone aircraft to an entire fleet firing missiles that have crippled militant networks — including Al Qaeda — in Pakistan.

Leave aside that Roger presides over a CIA unit that he brought from having three unmanned drone aircraft to a fleet of them that fire myriad missiles which crippled militant networks — including Al Qaeda — in Pakistan. Never mind that retired Gen. David Petraeus, who now heads up the CIA, said of Roger: “No officer in the agency has been more relentless, focused, or committed to the fight against al-Qaeda than has the chief of the Counterterrorism Center.”

None of that was enough to convince Robert Spencer, a long-time ally of anti-Muslim mainstay Pamela Geller, that “Roger” just might be a Manchurian candidate foisted upon the CIA by Muslim extremists looking to destroy America:

[I]f Islamic supremacists wanted to subvert the U.S. defense against jihad terror, they couldn’t do it more easily than by turning someone in a position like Roger’s. The worst part of this story is that no one is even examining that as a possibility.

Maybe the Post’s Greg Miller simply realized that a guy who blows up the actual dangerous “Islamic supremacists” on a regular basis would make an unlikely candidate to be a plant within the system. Perhaps that’s because, under Roger’s watch, “core al Qaida’s ability to perform a variety of functions — including preserving leadership and conducting external operations — has weakened significantly,” according to Capitol Hill testimony by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

But Spencer knows all that. He even says so:

The Washington Post, of course, follows the mainstream media line that Islam is a Religion of Peace that has been hijacked by a tiny minority of extremists, and so takes for granted that “Roger” has no loyalty issues, and proffers the drone campaign and the killing of bin Laden as proof.

Why still the questions, then? Because, Spencer says, “It is impossible to tell from this how serious he is about Islam.” The obvious implication in Spencer’s thinking is that “serious(ness)” about one’s faith — when that faith is Islam — means disloyalty to the U.S. Spencer should consider that the “mainstream media” might be right about this one.

In their latest push for U.S. military involvement in the Syrian conflict, three of the most hawkish Senators today introduced a resolution calling on the U.S. help arm the Syrian rebels through Arab allies. Suggesting support for regional efforts to arm the opposition, Sens. John McCain (R-AZ), Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Joe Lieberman (I-CT) called for condemnation of the regime of Bashar al-Assad, who for more than a year has cracked down with the full force of his military against anti-government demonstrators and rebels.

ABC News described the Senators’ bill:

The resolution supports calls by Arab leaders to provide the Syrian people with weapons and other material support and calls on President Obama to work closely with regional partners to “implement these efforts effectively.”

At a press conference, Lieberman said:

We in the United States have both a moral and strategic reason to support their efforts by at least giving them the means with which to defend themselves.

The Hill reports that the McCain-Graham-Lieberman resolution is likely to be merged with another by Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN) calling for a U.S. government report examining the rebels and gleaning information about its different factions. Other aspects of the resolutions also overlap. The Hill went on to expand on the call to support the Syrian opposition’s self-defense:

That support would likely come in the form of weapons and ammunition for anti-Assad forces. McCain declined to comment on what specific weapons could shipped to rebel troops in the country.

But the Arizona Republicans said those arms could be funneled through the same lines that the “non-lethal” supplies being sent to Syria by the U.S. and Turkey.

The Hill also noted that McCain, Lieberman and Graham did not call in their resolution for airstrikes against Syria. Earlier this month, McCain voiced support for U.S. air strikes against Assad’s regime aimed at helping the rebels topple it. Lieberman and Graham almost immediately followed McCain’s lead.

But those sorts of actions are deeply unpopular among Americans. A Fox News poll released on March 15 said 68 percent of those surveyed opposed air strikes aimed at overthrowing the country, and only 19 percent supported such a strategy. A slim majority opposed and 37 supported air strikes narrowly limited to protecting anti-government rebels. Even the U.S. arming the rebels was unpopular: 64 percent of respondents opposed it, with a quarter of them supporting it.

According to the Hill, “Lieberman said it was decided to exclude the airstrikes demand from the resolution, fearing it would sap bipartisan support for the legislation among rank-and-file senators.”

Pakistani acid attack victim Fakhra Younus committed suicide earlier this month, jumping out of a sixth floor window of a building in Rome. Younus, whose face was severely disfigured from the attack, received dozens surgeries in last decade. Her ex-husband, Bilal Khar, allegedly committed the crime. The AP described Khar as “an ex-lawmaker and son of a political powerhouse.”

The Global Post describes the circumstances of the attack:

In 1998, Younus was an 18-year-old working in Karachi’s red light district when she met Bilal Khar, the son of politically powerful Ghulam Mustafa Khar. The two married after six months, the Express Tribune reported. But Khar was verbally and physically abusive. Younus eventually left him.

Younus claimed that she was sleeping at her mother’s house in May 2000 when Khar entered and poured acid on her. Her 5-year-old son from a different man witnessed the attack as well, the Associated Press reported.

Pakistani writer and activist Tehmina Durrani wrote that Younus’ attack was the worst she’d ever seen: “I have met many acid victims. Never have I seen one as completely disfigured as Fakhra. She had not just become faceless; her body had also melted to the bone.”

Khar was acquitted in the crime. The AP reports that “many believe he used his connections to escape the law’s grip — a common occurrence in Pakistan.”

In her suicide note, Younus said she was taking her own life because of the silence of law on the atrocities and the insensitivity of Pakistani rulers.

“The saddest part is that she realized that the system in Pakistan was never going to provide her with relief or remedy,” Nayyar Shabana Kiyani, an activist at The Aurat Foundation, told the AP. “She was totally disappointed that there was no justice available to her.”

In an interview after Younus’s death, Khar again denied that he was responsible for the acid attack, saying that a man with the same name committed the crime. And he criticized the media for bringing up the matter. “You people should be a little considerate,” said Khar. “I have three daughters and when they go to school people tease them.”

In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee today, Former Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs and former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations (appointed by George H.W. Bush) Thomas Pickering laid out the potential risks of a military strike on Iran’s nuclear program.

Pickering — who served as Ambassador to Israel during Reagan administration and Ambassador to Russia during the Clinton administration — warned that an attack would only set back Iran’s nuclear program “for a number of years” and could push Iran in the direction of pursuing a nuclear weapon, a decision which neither the IAEA nor U.S. intelligence agencies believe Iran has yet made:

[A military strike] has a very high propensity, in my view, of driving Iran in the direction of openly declaring and deciding, which it has not yet done according to our intelligence, to make a nuclear weapon to seemingly defend itself under what might look to them and others to be an unprovoked attack.

Iran has great possibilities for asymmetrical reactions including against Israel through Hezbollah and Hamas who have accumulated a large number of missiles. [...] It is a series of potential escalatory possibilites that puts us deep in the potential for another land war in Asia, something that I think we’ve spent the last number of years trying to get out of.

Watch him:

Pickering’s comments today closely match the warnings issued by former Israeli spy chief Meir Dagan earlier this month. Dagan warned that an Israeli attack on Iran could spark a “regional war” and, at best, could only delay Iran’s nuclear program. That assessment is shared by U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta.

The Obama administration has emphasized that a diplomatic solution is the “best and most permanent way” to resolve tensions with Iran. President Obama warned that a nuclear armed Iran poses a threat to regional and international security and endangers the nonproliferation regime. While the Obama administration does not rule out military action on Iran’s nuclear facilities, Obama said that “loose talk of war” with Iran is only serving to benefit the regime in Tehran.

GOP presidential frontrunner Mitt Romney thought his mediocre campaign stumbled upon a game changer this week when President Obama was caught on an open mic telling Russian President Dimitry Medvedev that he’d be more “flexible” on issues like missile defense after the election. Romney called Obama’s comment “frightening” because Russia “is without question our number one geopolitical foe.” As evidence, Romney said “it is always Russia” that opposes the United States at the United Nations.

The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler looked into this claim and concluded that “Romney’s comments are a bit puzzling“:

But on the broader question of Iran and North Korea, Romney’s comments are a bit puzzling. Russia has repeatedly supported resolutions that have sought to limit Tehran’s and Pyongyang’s nuclear ambitions, such as the 2010 Security Council resolution that paved the way for increasingly tough sanctions on Iran.

As we wrote in our book on former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, some of the negotiations leading up to those resolutions were difficult and contentious, but it would be wrong to say Russia was “standing up” for those “bad actors.” Russia has cast no vetoes on resolutions concerning Iran and North Korea.

Indeed, Romney has been misrepresenting Obama’s record on Russia and Iran throughout the presidential campaign. “Had he gotten Russia to agree to impose tough, crippling sanctions on Iran, we could have put a lot more pressure on Iran,” Romney said back in September.

But as this blog noted at the time, the Obama administration spearheaded an effort to apply tougher sanctions on Iran in 2010. In June, Russia voted for U.N. Security Council Resolution 1929, which imposed a fourth round of tough sanctions on Iran because of it’s failure to comply with earlier resolutions demanding an end to nuclear enrichment. Last Spring, a U.N. experts panel on the sanctions concluded that the new measures “are constraining Iran’s procurement of items related to prohibited nuclear and ballistic missile activity and thus slowing development of these programs.”

Romney said this week that he does not think Obama “can recover” from the fallout of his comments to Medvedev. But it might turn out that it’s the former Massachusetts governor who will have some more explaining to do. Apart from being wrong on the substance of his attack on Obama, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) basically told Romney to stop criticizing the president and even some of Romney’s supporters have said publicly that he’s wrong to say that Russia is America’s “number one geopolitical foe.”

Approximately 400 women and girls are currently imprisoned for “moral crimes” in Afghanistan, says a new report released today by Human Rights Watch (HRW). The report finds that almost all girls in juvenile detention in Afghanistan had been arrested for “moral crimes” which usually involved escaping from unlawful forced marriage or domestic violence.

Some women and girls have been convicted of “zina,” sex outside of marriage, after being raped or forced into prostitution.

“It is shocking that 10 years after the overthrow of the Taliban, women and girls are still imprisoned for running away from domestic violence or forced marriage,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of HRW. “No one should be locked up for fleeing a dangerous situation even if it’s at home. President Karzai and Afghanistan’s allies should act decisively to end this abusive and discriminatory practice.”

HRW conducted 58 interviews with women and girls accused of “moral crimes.” Some of the women interviewed by HRW reported going to the police for help in escaping forced marriages and/or domestic abuse, only to find themselves arrested. HRW explains [PDF]:

[M]any of the women interviewed for this report were accused of “running away” and zina. Zina is a crime under the Afghan Penal Code, though “running away” is not. Zina is the crime of sexual intercourse by two individuals who are not married to each other. The sentence of “long imprisonment” for zina constitutes 5-15 years of imprisonment under Afghan law.

Women and girls interviewed by HRW described fleeing from forced and underage marriages, beatings, stabbings, burnings, rapes, forced prostitution, kidnapping and murder threats.

HRW warns that women and girls accused of “moral crimes” face a justice system stacked against them. The report describes situations in which: women are arrested solely on a complaint from a husband or relative; prosecutors ignore evidence that supports the women’s claims of innocence; and “confessions” are given in the absence of lawyers. While women routinely face long prison sentences for “moral crimes,” prosecutors and judges rarely work to prosecute cases of violence and abuse against the accused women.

One woman told HRW about her experience of “running away” after fleeing a husband and mother-in-law who beat her:

I will try to become independent and divorce him. I hate the word ‘husband.’ My liver is totally black from my husband… If I knew about prison and everything [that would happen to me] I would have just jumped into the river and committed suicide.