Earlier this month, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who served in both the Bush and Obama administrations, said President Obama’s decision to order the raid that killed Osama bin Laden “gutsy,” saying that “people don’t realize” what a tough call it was and not everyone would have made the same decision.

In an interview that aired last night, PBS’s Charlie Rose, noting what Gates had said, asked his predecessor Donald Rumsfeld if he agreed that it was a “gutsy” call. “I don’t,” a defiant Rumsfeld quickly shot back, adding that he would have done the same thing. “It seems to me that it is a 15-minute decision and the first 14 are for coffee,” he said. Rumsfeld then, just like President Bush had done, credited himself for the raid’s success:

RUMSFELD: You can’t imagine the difference in competence and capability and the investment we made and the talent of these people [U.S. special operations forces]. We doubled their authorities, we’ve improved their equipment, we’ve increased their numbers. They have gotten better and better and better, they’re the finest warriors on the face of the earth. [...]

We took the investment that the Obama administration benefited from. The capabilities they have were developed during their predecessors and each President –

ROSE: The predecessor meaning the Bush administration you served?

RUMSFELD: And, yes exactly.

Watch the clip:

The Obama-ordering-the-bin-Laden-raid-was-no-big-deal meme is standard fare for former Bush administration officials. Karl Rove said recently that it wasn’t an “epic achievement” despite the fact that he called it a “very tough decision” just one day after Obama announced the raid.

Rumsfeld says Obama’s decision was a no-brainer. But what would the former defense secretary have recommended? “I would have recommended what the President decided,” he told Rose last night. But would he have? The New York Times reported in 2007 that “[a] secret military operation in early 2005 to capture senior members of Al Qaeda in Pakistan’s tribal areas was aborted at the last minute after top Bush administration officials decided it was too risky.” Which top Bush official called off the raid? Donald Rumsfeld.

Among Israel’s former top security officials, a growing consensus has emerged over the past several months that a military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities would be counterproductive to Israeli interests. Yesterday, former Israeli spy chief Meir Dagan emphasized that point, telling an audience that “a strike could accelerate the procurement of the bomb” and “provide them with the legitimacy to achieve nuclear capabilities.” But a new report by Ynet, suggests that the consensus opposing an Israeli attack on Iran extends all the way to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s defense chiefs.

“[P]olitical sources told Ynet on Wednesday that IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Benny Gantz, Mossad Chief Tamir Pardo and several top section chiefs in the Mossad are against a strike at this time,” reads a report by Ynet. “Without Gantz’ support the chances of mounting a strike are slim,” an anonymous “political source” said.

Indeed, Gantz and Pardo have expressed reservations in the past about the effectiveness of an Israeli strike.

In December, Pardo warned that while Iran poses a threat to Israel, “The term existential threat is used too freely,” a view closely mirrored by former Mossad Chief Ephraim Halevy, Meir Dagan and a number of former high-ranking Israeli security officials.

And while hawks in the U.S. and Israel frequently misrepresent the intelligence on Iran’s nuclear program to portray an Iranian nuclear weapons as imminent, IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Benny Gantz pushed back last month, telling Haaretz, “[Iran] hasn’t yet decided whether to go the extra mile.” That assessment is shared by U.S. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

Gantz also told Haaretz, “I don’t think [Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamanei] will want to go the extra mile. I think the Iranian leadership is composed of very rational people.”

Ynet looked at Netanyahu’s nine-minister security forum and concluded that Netanyahu, Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman support an attack. But Vice Premier Moshe Yaalon, Kadima Chairman Shaul Mofaz and ministers Dan Meridor, Benny Begin, Eli Yishai and Yuval Steinitz oppose a strike.

A potential Iranian nuclear weapon is widely considered a threat to both the security of U.S. and its allies in the region, as well as the nuclear non-proliferation regime. However, intelligence estimates give the West time to pursue a dual-track approach of pressure and diplomacy to resolve the crisis. Questions about the efficacy and consequences of a strike have led U.S. officials to declare that diplomacy is the “best and most permanent way” to resolve the crisis.

Mitt Romney’s foreign policy is in tatters. His “quite far to the right” advisers are divided. The candidate has a tendency to needlessly “hyperbolize” his rhetoric and his positions on national security issues are often confusing and incoherent — which may explain why some GOP foreign policy experts aren’t hurrying to endorse Romney or why the campaign “doesn’t really want to engage these issues.”

There’s also perhaps another reason. It doesn’t appear that Romney has any idea how to set himself apart from President Obama’s foreign policy, as the Los Angeles Times put it today:

Romney has roughed up Obama with a hawkish tone — at times bordering on belligerent. Yet for all his criticisms of the president, it has been difficult to tell exactly what Romney would do differently.

He has argued that reelecting Obama will result in Iran having a nuclear weapon — without explaining how. He has charged that Obama should have taken “more assertive steps” to force out the repressive regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad — but has said he is not “anxious to employ military action.” He accused Obama of tipping his hand to the Taliban by announcing a timeline for withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan, but also accepts the 2014 timeline.

And it almost seems as if the Romney campaign is looking to Obama for guidance. Soon after a report surfaced that the the Obama administration is considering the approval of arms transfers to Syrian rebels via Arab allies, the former Massachusetts governor announced that he would do the same (however, Obama administration officials publicly oppose militarizing the conflict any further at this point).

The Times points out that one key difference has been on military spending. Obama pushed through nearly $500 billion in cuts over the next ten years (with Congress adding another $500 billion), although military spending will continue to grow in that same period. Romney, however, plans to (needlessly) increase defense spending by nearly $2 trillion with no plan on how he will pay for it.

“A lot is made of Romney’s tough talk with respect to Russia and Iran and China, but even there it’s not like I see a dearth of toughness on the part of President Obama,” Cato Institute foreign policy expert Christopher Preble told the Times. “As a challenger, for someone like Mitt Romney, it really is incumbent on him to draw distinctions and differences. He doesn’t. It allows people to paint with a broad brush [what] they would guess … his response would be.”

Appearing on CNN last night, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice urged caution about arming the Syrian rebels. The Obama administration has already suggested it will help its Gulf Arab allies do so, but yesterday the Pentagon walked back the suggestion, with a spokesman telling reporters the U.S. focus “remains on economic and diplomatic pressure.”

Rice told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that the U.S. has less knowledge about the Syrian rebels fighting against Bashar al-Assad than it did about Libyan rebels during that country’s uprising against the dictator Muammar Qaddafi. In the Libyan case, the U.S., through NATO, provided air support but didn’t directly arm the opposition. Reacting to a statement from Mitt Romney that suggested helping allies to arm the Syrian rebels, Rice said some advocates of arming the rebels had not thought through all of the consequences:

Wolf, even in Libya, we did not take the very exceptional decision to arm the opposition. And in Syria, we know much, much less about the nature of this opposition. It’s not coherent. There’s not a unified command and control. It’s a series of different groups in different cities. There’s, clearly, also an extremist element that is trying to infiltrate elements of the opposition.

So to argue that we ought to be arming the opposition is a very consequential statement. And I don’t think that those that are advocating that have fully thought through the consequences.

That would mean that we are conceding that the only option is to see the further militarization, to see an intensified regional war, which is hardly in our interests or in the interests of our allies and partners in that neighborhood.

Watch the video:

Rice’s words of caution were preceded by similar warnings yesterday from the Republican Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Mike Rogers (MI), who told CNN: “I’m not sure arming is the right answer here, mainly because we’re just not exactly sure who the bad guys are and who the good guys are right now in Syria. So you don’t know who you’re giving weapons to.” Top U.S. officials have already acknowledged that they believe, for instance, that Al Qaeda in Iraq is behind some of the anti-government bombings in Damascus.

The proposed U.S. plan, which was at least publicly walked back by the Pentagon, called exactly for the U.S. to provide information on rebels who could be reliably armed. The original report on the U.S. plan, from the AP, said that “some intelligence analysts worry that there may be no suitable recipients of lethal aid in the Syria conflict.”

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) takes approximately 300,000 fingerprints per day from non-U.S. citizens crossing the border into the U.S. and collects biometrics from noncitizens applying for immigration. A report from the Electronic Frontiers Foundation (EFF) and the Immigration Policy Center (IPC), both policy research foundations, warns that DHS biometric databases — which are increasingly interconnected with biometric data collected by state and local law enforcement officers who regularly collect fingerprints — DNA and even face prints and iris scans of people booked into local jails, could raise serious privacy concerns.

“Some people believe biometrics and databases are the silver-bullets that will solve the immigrant enforcement dilemma. But biometrics are not infallible, and databases contain errors. These problems can result in huge negative consequences for U.S. citizens and legal immigrants mistakenly identified,” said Michele Waslin, Senior Policy Analyst at the IPC.

“Biometric data collection can lead to racial profiling and can disproportionately affect immigrants,” said EFF Staff Attorney Jennifer Lynch. “It also gives the government a new way to find and track people throughout the United States.”

The EFF and IPC are urging the U.S. government to curb potential racial profiling and discrimination against immigrants by limiting unnecessary biometric collection and addressing the privacy issues that arise from growing and increasingly interconnected biometric databases.

Police use of biometrics has already emerged as a contentious political issue in New York. Earlier this month, the Obama administration expanded the Secure Communities Program, a federal fingerprinting program to identify illegal immigrants in Massachusetts and New York. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo objected to the program. “There are concerns about the implementation of the program as well as its impact on families, immigrant communities and law enforcement in New York,” wrote New York Governor Andrew Cuomo in a letter to DHS. “As a result, New York is suspending its participation in the program.”

While most Americans haven’t yet encountered law enforcement’s increasing use of biometrics data collection and biometrics databases, the Los Angeles Police Department are already using handheld devices to scan the fingerprints of day laborers standing on street corners who are not suspected of any criminal activity.

“While most of us would be really suspect if a police officer randomly asked us to submit to a fingerprint scan on the street,” Lynch told New America Media. “When you feel like you have little voice in society and you lack power to challenge authority, I think harassment like this is a big issue.”