Yesterday in an interview with ABC News, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reiterated that Obama administration’s position that it prefers to a diplomatic solution to resolving the crisis surrounding Iran’s nuclear program. “We really believe in giving diplomacy a chance, perhaps a last chance to demonstrate a way forward,” Clinton said, later adding that a unilateral Israeli attack on Iran is “not in anyone’s interest”:

REENA NINAN: How successful has the U.S. been in getting and preventing Israel from taking unilateral action against Iran?

CLINTON: Well we’ve worked very hard with Israel on all levels from the military, intelligence, strategic, diplomatic level to make sure we were sharing information, that we knew what each other was assessing. And it’s our very strong belief, as President Obama conveyed to the Israelis, that it is not in anyone’s interest for them to take unilateral action. It is in everyone’s interest for us to seriously pursue at this time the diplomatic path.

Watch the full interview (with Clinton’s comments on Iran starting at 1:30):

Clinton’s view is shared not only by top U.S. officials — including Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and reportedly Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey — but also Republicans in Congress, senior Israeli officials and the Israeli public.

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. and Israeli intelligence has not concluded that Iran has made a decision to pursue a weapon. The Obama administration — as Clinton said in her interview with ABC — 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.

Journalist, author and publisher Charles Glass has a feature in this month’s edition of Harper’s magazine called “The Warrior Class,” a feature covering the rise of private security contractors after 9/11. The article describes a number videos shown to Glass by a source who had worked for Blackwater. Harpers published clips from the videos yesterday, which show Blackwater guards and other private security contractors operating as if living in the Wild West. One video shows a contractor randomly and “enthusiastically” firing an AK-47 from the turret of an armored vehicle and another shows a private guard yelling obscenities at passers-by and other armored cars smashing into civilian vehicles:

Another video shows what appears to be an American-made SUV running over a civilian without stopping. The car videoing the incident also does not stop:

Harpers reports that “the tape ended with the inscription ‘In support of security, peace, freedom and democracy everywhere.”

Yesterday the National Security Archive released a newly declassified February, 2006 memo from then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s top aide, Philip D. Zelikow, opposing the Justice Department’s authorization of “enhanced interrogation techniques” (i.e. torture) by CIA officers questioning terrorist suspects. “All copies of the memo…were thought to have been destroyed,” the Archive writes.

Zelikow summarized his views contained in the 2006 memo in an article on Foreign Policy’s website in April, 2009 and again in congressional testimony one month later. “At the time, in 2005 [and in 2006],” Zelikow wrote in 2009, “I circulated an opposing view of the legal reasoning” behind DOJ’s authorization of torture. He added: “I felt obliged to put an alternative view in front of my colleagues at other agencies, warning them that other lawyers (and judges) might find the OLC’s [Office of Legal Counsel's] views unsustainable.”

Indeed, in the newly declassified 2006 memo, Zelikow writes that while the State Department agreed with DOJ’s determination in 2005 that Article 16 of the Convention Against Torture (which prohibits “cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment which do not amount to torture”) does not apply to CIA interrogations world wide,” he countered that “the situation has now changed.” What had changed was the fact that Congress passed a law applying Article 16 to conduct by U.S. officials anywhere in the world.

Zelikow concluded that practices the OLC authorized “should be considered ‘cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment’ within the meaning of Artical 16″ while going on to explain what he views are techniques to be “least likely to be sustained” (waterboarding, walling, dousing, stress positions, and cramped confinement) and those that are “most likely to be sustained” (“basic detention conditions” and slaps).

Zelikow’s 2006 memo doesn’t deviate much from his 2005 memo on the subject that was made public shortly before his congressional hearing in May, 2009. In the 2005 memo, Zelikow and other top officials advised President Bush that the United States treat terror suspects as if they were “civilian detainees under the law of war.” The memo continued (emphasis added):

We are not saying that these detainees are necessarily entitled to this status. To be clear: We are giving them a temporary status they do not deserve. But we are not doing this for them. We are doing it for us.

Zelikow wasn’t the only Bush administration official that opposed the torture program. Bush’s top adviser Karen Hughes said in May, 2009 that she was also concerned about the program. “I was very vocal in the internal debate,” she said. “I worried about how that would make us look in the eyes of the world.”

Read More on the Bush administration’s “torture memos” here and here.