It’s now well known that after President Obama’s re-election campaign released a video wondering whether Mitt Romney would have ordered the raid that killed Osama bin Laden (given that Romney said in 2008 that he would not), Romney’s push back has been that it was a no-brainer. “Any thinking American would have ordered exactly the same thing,” he says.

Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who led the Pentagon at the time of the raid, and Vice President Biden said they advised Obama against the raid. And during a portion of an interview with Charlie Rose that aired on CBS This Morning yesterday, Gates said that “people don’t realize” how tough the decision was. PBS aired the full interview last night and Gates expounded on the consequences, saying a failed raid could have been “catastrophic” militarily and might have cost Obama re-election.

Rose then wondered if “any thinking American,” as Romney put it, would have made the same decision as Obama:

ROSE: Nobody can say “I would have made the same decision.” You don’t really know until you’re in the room and you listen to what the best people you know say to you and then you have to go as president and decide.

GATES: Right, absolutely.

Watch the clip:

Later in the interview, Gates, a Republican holdover from the Bush administration, also disagreed with Romney’s contention that Russia is American’s “number one geopolitical foe.”

“Do you agree with Governor Romney that Russia is our principal adversary or how he’s characterized the national security issue?,” Rose asked. “No, I don`t think so,” Gates replied.

Yesterday, a federal judge in Manhattan struck down a portion of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), ruling in favor of a group of activists, journalists and writers who say the act puts them in danger of indefinite military detention for activities including news reporting on terrorist organizations and political activism.

U.S. District Judge Katherine Forrest found that a section of the NDAA which gives the government powers to regulate the detention, interrogation and prosecution of suspected terrorists could be used against journalists, scholars and activists to curtail their first amendment rights. The judge’s opinion [PDF] found:

The statute at issue places the public at undue risk of having their speech chilled for the purported protection from al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and ‘associated forces’ – i.e., ‘foreign terrorist organizations.’ The vagueness of Section 1021 does not allow the average citizen, or even the government itself, to understand with the type of definiteness to which our citizens are entitled, or what conduct comes within its scope.

Opponents of the law, which include Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times journalist Christopher Hedges, contend that the law permits the detention of U.S. citizens and permanent residents taken into custody in the U.S. who are suspected of providing “substantial support” to people or organizations engaged in violence against the U.S., such as al Qaeda. Journalists testified that they feared their associations with certain individuals overseas, as part of reporting assignments, could result in their arrest or even indefinite detention.

“An individual could run the risk of substantially supporting or directly supporting an associated force without even being aware that he or she was doing so,” the judge said. She also said the law gave the government the ability to detain individuals who engage in political speech that “may be extreme and unpopular” but “That, however, is precisely what the First Amendment protects.”

Hedges testified that while, in the past, he had interviewed al Qaeda members, spoken with members of the Taliban and reported on 17 groups named on the State Department’s list of known terrorist organizations, the law has forced him to consider altering speeches where a member of al Qaeda and the Taliban might attend.

Hedges celebrated the ruling, telling ABC News, “Ever since the law has come out, and because the law is so amorphous, the problem is you’re not sure what you can say, what you can do and what context you can have,” and called Forrest’s ruling “a tremendous step forward for the restoration of due process and the rule of law.”

By Colin Cookman

The United States, NATO allies, and dozens of partner countries will convene in Chicago this weekend to plan for the transition of greater security responsibility in Afghanistan to the Afghan government, as well as the future of the alliance’s capabilities, partnerships and priorities beyond the Afghan conflict.

As my colleagues Caroline Wadhams, Brian Katulis and I argue in a new Center for American Progress report released today, the U.S. and NATO commitment to transition is the right path for U.S. interests, but the agenda at Chicago appears to overlook issues of Afghan political reform and reconciliation that will be crucial for Afghanistan’s long-term stability.

Current transition plans center on the training and rapid expansion of Afghan police and military forces, as well as irregular militia groups. But these forces remain dependent on external funding, and a strategy that hinges on their cohesion and capability to continue battling insurgent rivals carries real risks — particularly as insider attacks threaten the ability of U.S. and NATO trainers to partner effectively with these units going forward.

Further, Afghanistan will undergo its first major transition of power in 2014, as President Hamid Karzai steps down from the position he has held since the earliest days of the post-Taliban interim government. The highly centralized formal Afghan presidential system offers few other institutional positions in which a broader coalition of political interests can easily share power, increasing the risk of instability that was seen in the wake of past fraud-ridden elections in 2009 and 2010 if action is not taken to broaden participation and ensure the independence and credibility of electoral authorities.

And while reconciliation efforts with the Taliban appear to be currently stalled, a process of negotiated settlement with a broad range of Afghan factions will ultimately be necessary for the country’s future stability. The participation of neighboring Pakistan at the Chicago summit is a welcome opportunity to renew these discussions at the regional level, but suspicions remain on all sides. Through both international forums and direct diplomacy, the U.S. and the Afghan government will need to engage in confidence-building measures that can kick-start this process and show that negotiations can deliver a better outcome than continued conflict.

As the Afghan government’s primary sponsor, the U.S. and other international allies have a responsibility to hold it accountable for its pledges of political reforms and reconciliation outreach efforts, and to ensure that the security commitments the U.S. makes in Chicago and through the newly-signed strategic partnership agreement are not a one-way street. A transition to greater Afghan responsibility is a necessary step for the normalization of the country’s internal politics, relations with external partners, and the eventual end of a now decade-long war, but much more work needs to be done to prioritize these political and diplomatic steps, at Chicago and beyond.