This morning on Meet The Press, David Gregory twice asserted that, in May, President Obama declared that “al Qaeda has been defeated.” Gregory used that claim to advance a theory that Obama was simply not concerned enough about al Qaeda in advance of the attack on the American embassy in Libya. Here’s the transcript:

GREGORY: The President has said as recently as May of this year that al Qaeda has not had a chance to rebuild, that al Qaeda has been defeated. There is an election on, as we’ve been talking about, and the President’s challenger said plain and simple, the President failed to level with the American people and call this a terrorist attack, because you had to be concerned about another terrorist attack from al Qaeda in the Middle East after the President said that al Qaeda had been defeated. 

Watch it:

That is not, however, what Obama said in May. Gregory was apparently referring to an address that Obama delivered from Afghanistan in May on the one year anniversary of Osama Bin Laden’s death. Here is what Obama said:

And one year ago, from a base here in Afghanistan, our troops launched the operation that killed Osama bin Laden. The goal that I set — to defeat al Qaeda and deny it a chance to rebuild — is now within our reach.

Still, there will be difficult days ahead. The enormous sacrifices of our men and women are not over.

So, the truth is that Obama did not say al Qaeda had already been defeated and specifically acknowledged that there were “difficult days” and “enormous sacrifices” yet to come.

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) on Sunday accused Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) of not caring about the deaths of four American diplomats, including US Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens. All four men were killed in an attack on the American embassy in Libya on September 11th of this year.

Republicans have argued that President Obama botched the response to, and preparation for, the attack. But when asked whether Reid’s statement that the incident was being politicized, McCain politicized it further, saying that Reid “doesn’t care” about it:

CROWLEY: Senator Reid put out a statement yesterday where he called it sad and disappointing that some people seem more focused on trying this score cheap political points off when this intelligence information came than mourning the loss of the ambassador and the other three.

MCCAIN: Maybe Senator Reid doesn’t care about Christopher Stevens. Maybe he doesn’t care about those three other brave Americans.

CROWLEY: You know he does, though?

MCCAIN: Well, to make a statement like that. Well, to make a statement like that, of course, politicizes an issue that all Americans should be concerned about what information there was. No matter whether Democrat or Republican. He is the one that’s taking the cheap political shot.

Watch it:

Mitt Romney campaign co-chair and former New Hampshire Gov. John Sununu accused President Obama of waiting too long to order the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, in an interview with the New York Times that was published on Saturday.

Sununu said that Obama was “timid,” could have gone after the terrorist mastermind sooner, and attributed the successful operation to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton:

The president is trying to take credit for following the strategy and the tactics put into place by George W. Bush. At some point the president is going to have to explain why he was timid on the first two or three opportunities that we had. Thank goodness Hillary Clinton was there was to convince him to do the right thing. [...] His trying to take credit for having been decisive belies the fact that he wasn’t decisive until pressed by others.

But former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who served in both the Bush and Obama administrations, described 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 call. Vice President Biden and Gates both advised Obama against taking the course he chose on the bin Laden raid, noting that “There wasn’t any direct evidence that he was there. It was all circumstantial.”

Indeed, even Romney had hinted that he would have not followed in Obama’s footsteps. In April of 2007, Romney said, “It’s not worth moving heaven and earth spending billions of dollars just trying to catch one person,” but quickly changed his mind after bin Laden was killed. “Any thinking American would have ordered exactly the same thing,” he proclaimed earlier this year.

Fox News host and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) compared the administration’s handling of the consulate attack in Libya to Watergate, during an appearance on the network Friday morning, and hinted that the president should be impeached for not immediately attributing the violence to terrorism.

“We have been flat-out lied to,” Huckabee told Fox’s Bill Hemmer. “They know they lied. As if airplanes crashing into the World Trade Center said those were just accidents. Anybody with two eyes and an IQ above plant life knows what happened in Libya was not a spontaneous reaction to a 13 minute video on YouTube”:

HUCKABEE: It was a planned orchestrated attack led by terrorists, terrorists, Bill. And this White House has to explain why it hasn’t owned up to that. Why it can’t say it. I think frankly, if this issue really gets traction that it deserves, and let it say it deserves, go back. Richard Nixon was forced out of office because he lied. And because he covered some stuff up. I will be blunt and tell you this. Nobody died in Watergate. We have people who are dead because of this. There are questions to be answered and Americans ought to demand to get answers. [...]

HEMMER: Just one more thing here. What you’re describing, comparing events of today to Watergate.

HUCKABEE: I sure am….Bill, i’m not saying this just out of some political interest. I’m saying that our trust as a nation is built on our ability to know that when our president, whoever he is, Democrat or Republican, looks us in the eye and tells us something, we ought to know he is telling us the truth.

Watch it:

Fox News, Republican lawmakers, and conservative pundits have for weeks hinted at an administration cover-up, naming it Benghazi-gate, and alleging that Ambassador Susan Rice misled Americans, when she initially claimed that the attacks were a “spontaneous reaction” to a movie trailer disparaging the Prophet Muhammed.

And while some administration officials expressed concern that “the White House began pushing the line that the attack was spontaneous and not the work of terrorists,” officials began labeling the incident the work of terrorism after investigating the incident. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, and even White House Spokesperson Jay Carney have all used the word “terrorist” to describe the attack. Obama himself attributed the violence to terrorism during a September 12 address at the Rose Garden. “No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation, alter that character, or eclipse the light of the values that we stand for,” he said. “Today, we mourn four more Americans who represent the very best of the United States of America. We will not waver in our commitment to see that justice is done for this terrible act. And make no mistake, justice will be done.”

Since then, intelligence agencies have determined that the attack “involved a small number of militants with ties to al-Qaeda in North Africa but see no indication that the terrorist group directed the assault.” They have concluded that the attack “was not timed to coincide with the Sept. 11, 2001, anniversary” and was instead “set in motion after protesters scaled the walls of the U.S. Embassy in Cairo as part of a protest of an amateur anti-Islamic YouTube video.”

In a speech to the American Legion today, Mitt Romney leveled fresh criticism against President Obama, accusing his administration of cutting the benefits of veterans who are returning from Iraq and Afghanistan and going so far as to call plans to cut the Veterans Affairs Department budget a “crisis.”:

Romney charged that the defense budget cuts would affect services for veterans, including the men and women returning from conflict overseas who need psychological counseling. Romney invoked the rising number of suicides – “This is a crisis,” he declared – as he sharpened his attack on the Obama administration’s proposed spending cuts.

But Romney’s claim — that veterans’ care will be negatively impacted by sequestration — is not grounded in reality. Earlier this month, the White House announced that virtually all of the Veterans Affairs Department budget will be exempt from mandatory cuts if and when sequestration goes into effect in January 2013. The only exception, according to VA Secretary Eric Shinseki, would be possible cuts to administrative costs. That means health care, vocational, and education services will remain fully funded while cuts are made elsewhere within the Department of Defense, despite Mitt Romney’s claims to the contrary.

Of course, if Romney were actually concerned about the possibility of losing funding for the Veterans Affairs Department, he probably wouldn’t have embraced Paul Ryan or his budget, which could lead to reductions in veterans’ benefits.

By Dara McLeod, Director of Communications, Refugees International

MOGADISHU, SOMALIA — Yesterday, I met with a man in Mogadishu whose business was the target of a suicide attack. Ahmed is a British-Somali who returned to the country in 2008 and went on to open up several popular restaurants. Last Thursday, two suicide bombers walked into one of those restaurants and killed 15 of Ahmed’s patrons and staff.

Ahmed’s story is a perfect illustration of the current state of affairs in Mogadishu. Since the departure of Al Shabaab last year, Mogadishu has changed for the better. Businesses like Ahmed’s are springing up and doing well, and the unexpected result of the recent presidential election has given people here some hope that the corruption that has plagued this nation is perhaps starting to lose its stranglehold.

But last week’s attack at Ahmed’s restaurant also demonstrates just how precarious life still can be in this town formerly described as “the world’s most dangerous city.” And there is no group of people more vulnerable than the city’s tens of thousands of internally displaced.

Drive through the streets of Mogadishu, and you’ll see that almost every place where there is an empty plot of land, there are the makeshift shelters of internally displaced people (IDPs). Some IDPs have been here for decades, others more recently arrived — the victims of ongoing conflict and last year’s famine. All came to Mogadishu seeking shelter, only to be further victimized by a system that prevents them from getting the assistance they so desperately need.

Most of Mogadishu’s IDP settlements are run by so-called “gatekeepers” — de facto camp managers who control access to the camps as well as exit from them. Some estimates suggest that there are as many as 1,100 gatekeepers in Mogadishu. There are a few examples of “good” gatekeepers, who provide a measure of security for the IDPs in their care. However, there are far more examples of gatekeepers who are using the IDPs as commodities in a complex matrix that includes local government officials, private militias, and the international aid community.

It is no secret that Somalia suffers from an institutional diversion of aid. Many of the gatekeepers are a large part of this. For example, to live in the camps, IDPs often have to pay “rent” to the gatekeepers — usually in the form of a portion of the international assistance that they receive. There are stories of IDPs wanting to leave the camps, but who are unable to do so because their rent is always in arrears. There are other stories of entire camps of IDPs being sold from one gatekeeper to another. The system has been described by some as a kind of slavery. And it can make it incredibly difficult for those IDPs to break out of this cycle of obligation and re-establish their own livelihoods. Here is video of an IDP camp in Mogadishu we recently filmed:

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Seeing that Mitt Romney’s campaign has struggled to substantively differentiate itself from President Obama’s Iran policy, it has turned to strange claims about making the military option in preventing Iran from getting a nuke more “credible.” It’s unclear what that actually means but Romney surrogate Rudy Giuliani gave shot at clearing it up this morning on CNN:

GIULIANI: He hasn’t said that he would use military force. The President keeps out two words from his vocabulary, two phrases, “I will use military force.” Like Ronald Reagan would have said. Direct. Clear.

HOST: Isn’t that the same as all options are on the table? [...]

GIULIANI: Here’s the difference, when you say all options are on the table you sound like Jimmy Carter and you keep the hostages. When you say, “I’m going to bomb you” … and if you say “I’m going to bomb you,” you look like Ronald Reagan and you release the hostages.

Watch the clip:

Giuliani’s comments probably fall under that “loose talk of war” category the president recently referred to.

The Obama administration has indicated that it takes no option off the table in its effort to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, including military force. Indeed, President Obama has said that he won’t allow Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon. The Obama administration is aware, not only of the threat an Iranian nuclear weapon poses, but also the potential negative consequences of a military attack on Iran, such as those outlined in a new bipartisan expert report. And that, coupled with U.N., U.S. and Israeli assessments that Iran has not yet decided on whether to build a nuclear weapon, leads the administration to pursue a diplomatic solution with Iran, a track the it deems the “best and most permanent way” to solve the nuclear crisis.

Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler today again criticized his Post colleague and American Enterprise Institute fellow Marc Thiessen for continuing to promote the debunked claim that President Obama is not sufficiently concerned about U.S. national security.

In a Sept. 10 Washington Post opinion piece, Thiessen — citing a recent “study” finding that Obama has attended about half his personal daily intelligence briefs (PDBs) — claimed that “national security has not necessarily been” Obama’s “personal priority.” Obama’s right-wing critics picked up the attack and on Monday, Kessler wrote a scathing article, calling the claim “bogus” and “misleading.” “Obama reads his PDB every day, but he does not always require an in-person briefing every day,” Kessler noted.

This particular practice has precedent with previous commanders-in-chief, including Ronald Reagan, whom Kessler noted chose to forgo the CIA in-person brief 99 percent of the time (Thiessen had compared Obama’s practice to President Bush’s, claiming Bush “almost never missed his daily intelligence meeting.”)

Instead of accepting the obvious defeat, Thiessen dug in, responding on the Post’s website today saying basically, “Yeah, well. … 9/11!”:

Kessler ignores one giant difference between then and now: Sept. 11, 2001.

Comparing lax presidential briefing habits before and after 9/11 is like comparing lax presidential security habits before and after the Kennedy assassination. After terrorists killed 3,000 people in our midst, everything changed — and the president’s daily intelligence meeting took on dramatically increased importance. President Bush made it a priority to sit down with his senior intelligence advisers every day to discuss overnight intelligence on threats to the country. President Obama has not.

Hopefully putting the matter to rest, Kessler was again forced to debunk his colleague, calling Thiessen’s response “an interesting, if not very factual argument. (Reagan, for instance, suffered the loss of 241 servicemen in Beirut as a result of a terror act.).” But Kessler also noticed something else. In his original piece, Thiessen claimed he received his data on Obama’s PDBs from a “conservative” research organization. But in his response to Kessler, that story changed:

We also find it curious that he now discloses the study was done at his request, by his business partner, and that he now describes the Government Accountability Institute as “nonpartisan” whereas in his earlier column he had called it a “conservative investigative research organization.”

Upon reflection, we now realize that the GAI report had a bit of a math problem. The White House public schedule does not list meetings on weekends, so Obama automatically loses 28 percent of the “meetings” because of that fact. Thiessen had earlier claimed Bush had oral intel briefings six days a week–though no actual schedule is available to confirm that–so at the very least GAI should have subtracted one a day week from Obama’s numbers to make a valid comparison.

“We had nearly given this data Four Pinocchios and in restrospect we were perhaps too generous with Three,” Kessler wrote, adding in a tweet today at Thiessen, “9/11 is not excuse to wipe out history.”

At the U.N. General Assembly this morning, President Obama spoke forcefully in favor of free speech and human rights more broadly, saying “Americans have fought and died around the globe to protect the right of all people to express their views — even views that we disagree with.” The General Assembly was, as it turns out, an appropriate venue for the President’s words: according to a new report, diplomatic engagement with U.N. member states have moved important elements of the organization more in line with universal ideals about human rights.

The study, conducted by the European Council on Foreign Relations, tallies vote counts in the U.N. General Assembly and Human Rights Council and determined how many states voted with the EU bloc, with which the U.S. aligns almost identically (according to the report) on human rights issues like condemnations of atrocities and endorsement of basic legal rights protections. The study found “that there is a genuine shift [since 2008] towards Western human rights positions in UN forums, extending beyond the Syrian case, but that this is built on fragile foundations.”

While some of this shift can be explained by repressive Arab states aligning with the West on Syria votes, this is by no means the entire shift. Indeed, the vote counts in the General Assembly and Human Rights Council suggests a genuine global shift in favor of Western views that splits the influential BRICS — India, Brazil and South Africa backing pro-rights resolutions and Russia and China opposing them:

[T]here have been glimmers of progress in diplomacy on other countries on the General Assembly’s agenda. In recent years, the EU and U.S. have supported annual resolutions tackling the state of human rights in Myanmar, Iran and North Korea. Although the number of countries voting in favor of the Burmese resolution remained roughly level over the last two years, the number backing the Iran resolution jumped from 78 to 89 and that on North Korea from 106 to 123. Most of the Arab countries that supported the Syrian resolutions did not back the West in any of these cases (Gulf Arab countries avoid taking on Iran directly at the UN) although Libya and Tunisia did vote for them. U.S. and European diplomats can take credit for building up human rights coalitions beyond Syria in the General Assembly. The same is true at the Human Rights Council.

One of the report’s authors gives significant credit for the changing vote counts to the Obama administration’s more engaged approach to the U.N., saying “the Bush administration still adopted a semi-detached approach to multilateral institutions. Since 2009, the Obama administration has adopted a much more engaged posture and the U.S. and Europeans have gradually strengthened their position at the UN.” Further, Ted Piccione, an expert on the United Nations at the Brookings Insitute, has written that “human rights is rising on the agenda of the international community and leading to surprising, albeit slow, progress” as a consequence of (in part) “determined leadership from the United States and other democracies.”

Mitt Romney and the Republican Party, by contrast, have publicly embraced extreme anti-U.N. conspiracy theories. Top Romney adviser and potential Romney administration Secretary of State John Bolton was, as Ambassador to the U.N. for President George W. Bush, famously contemptuous of the organization.

After the anti-American protests erupted in the Middle East earlier this month, Pam Geller’s American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI) decided to re-up its anti-Muslim ad campaign in New York’s subway system. The ad, borrowing from an Ayn Rand quote, is meant to imply that Muslims are savages.

New York City transit authorities did not want to display the ads but a federal court said refusing the ads would violate AFDI’s First Amendment rights. But now that the ads are up, New Yorkers are taking matters into their own hands, writing “RACIST” and “HATE SPEECH” over the ads in certain subway stations:

AFDI is trying to run a similar campaign in the Washington DC Metro but authorities there have so far been successful at blocking the campaign “out of a concern for public safety.” (HT: Mondoweiss)

Several thousand people in Georgia rallied against the incumbent government of Prime Minister Mikhail Saakashvili this weekend after videos from government-run prisons depicted appalling torture of inmates. Pushed out on September 18 by the opposition leader, billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, the videos document savage beatings and sexual assault against prisoners by guards who were seemingly enjoying themselves (warning — graphic depiction of sexual assault):

PRISONER: “Please don’t video tape it. I will do everything you ask for!”

GUARD: “What will you do?”

PRISONER: “Please stop!”

GUARD: “It is already videotaped. Did it hurt? Did it hurt a lot? Did your ass hurt?” …

Prisoner is chained to cell bars, wears a head protection, so he can’t hurt his head hitting it on the cell bars. This time there is no guard in the cell itself. The guard asks the same question over and over again. The prisoner was raped with a broom and is abased by the guard.

Given the scale of the protests and the upcoming election on October 1, the scandal — dubbed Georgia’s Abu Ghraib — appears primed to shake up the Georgian political scene. The videos, together with past reports of prisoner abuse, appear to implicate several officials high-up in the Saakashvili government. Moreover, they cement the broader perception of lost democracy and reversion to one-party rule in Georgia, as the government’s respect for human rights has been in decline in recent years, despite the fact that Saakashvili rose to power as part of a democratic uprising:

Georgia’s human rights record remained uneven in 2011. The government used excessive force to disperse anti-government protests in Tbilisi, the capital, in May, and prosecuted dozens in misdemeanor trials without full respect for due process rights. The authorities failed to effectively investigate these events and past instances of excessive use of force. Other concerns include restrictions on freedom of association and media, as well as forced evictions of internally displaced persons (IDPs) living in state-owned temporary housing.

The evidence of torture and authoritarian backsliding in Georgia presents a serious problem for American neoconservatives, who have embraced Georgia as a democratic bulwark against Russia and potential NATO ally after the latter’s 2008 invasion of the small, post-Soviet republic. The Romney campaign has pledged to confront Russia on Georgia-related issues. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) said this month that he “admired the remarkable progress made by Georgia under [Saakashvili's] leadership,” adding that the Georgian President was a personal friend and a “friend of the United States.” He also wrote that “the partnership between the United States and Georgia rests not on individuals alone, but on our shared commitment to a set of mutual interests and universal values, including democracy, rule of law, and human rights.”

Our guest blogger is Alice Thomas, Climate Displacement Program Manager at Refugees International.

Poverty and malnutrition are chronic in the countries of the Sahel, a region in northern Africa stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea, and the surrounding area is hardly a paragon of political stability. This year, however, a confluence of man-made and natural disasters has sent the region into a tailspin.

As a result of erratic rainfall and high food prices, 18 million people across the Sahel do not have enough food coming into the final months of the “lean season” — the period before harvest when food stocks are nearly depleted. A shocking one million children under five are at risk of starvation.

Compounding the crisis, the eruption of violence in Mali resulting in a military coup earlier this year has displaced over 440,000 people. Many have fled to those areas hardest hit by the nutrition crisis, where food and water are scarce and where local populations themselves are struggling.

Although the Sahel’s dual crises have been going on for months, so far the U.S. and its allies have largely shied away from any major intervention. The U.S., which long viewed Mali as a model of democracy in West Africa, was caught flat-footed as events took place. Despite millions of dollars in development aid and counter-terrorist programs, the U.S. failed to grasp the extent to which the country’s weak institutions, and the lack of public support for its civilian government, made it vulnerable to threats and shifting power dynamics unfolding across the region.

The U.S. has now suspended development aid to Mali given the lack of a legitimate government, and it has limited humanitarian assistance to the north due to continuing insecurity. But allowing the situation to languish risks both the further loss of control to Islamic extremists, and the lives of innocent civilians caught in the middle. On the other hand, a military intervention — as proposed by regional bloc ECOWAS — brings its own perils, including further escalation of the conflict and curtailment of humanitarian aid.

Going forward, establishing security in Mali surely remains a priority for the Obama administration, but a more comprehensive strategy is needed. On Wednesday, the day after President Obama’s speech to the General Assembly, the U.N. will convene a high-level meeting on the Sahel — and it is here where the U.S. should set out a clear, comprehensive plan. In particular, the following three points should be addressed:

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American Enterprise Institute fellow and Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen has been pushing a recent finding that President Obama has not attended about half of his daily intelligence briefings as evidence that “national security has not necessarily been” Obama’s “personal priority.” Theissen based his claim on a recent study by the conservative Government Accountability Institute, which said that Obama has attended only 43.8 percent of his Presidential Daily Briefs, or PDBs. “By contrast,” Thiessen wrote, “Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush almost never missed his daily intelligence meeting.”

This particular statistic, however, doesn’t mean a whole lot. President Obama may not physically get briefed by intelligence officials every day but he does receive and read the PDBs, a point Theissen himself acknowledged when reporting the White House’s response to the charge.

“This is how it was done in the Clinton administration,” Thiessen’s Post colleague Dana Millbank noted, “before Bush decided he would prefer to read less.”

Yet Dick Cheney, John McCain, the right-wing blogs and others picked up on Thiessen’s hook anyway, not seeming to care that the charge has little credibility. The claim eventually made its way to an attack ad by Karl Rove-led SuperPAC American Crossroads which caused Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler to get involved. Kessler called the attack “misguided,” noting that President Reagan rarely attended daily intelligence briefings:

Clearly, different presidents have structured their daily briefing from the CIA to fit their unique personal styles. Many did not have an oral briefing, while three — two of whom are named Bush — preferred to deal directly with a CIA official. Obama appears to have opted for a melding of the two approaches, in which he receives oral briefings, but not as frequently as his predecessor.

Ultimately, what matters is what a president does with the information he receives from the CIA. Republican critics may find fault with Obama’s handling of foreign policy. But this attack ad turns a question of process — how does the president handle his intelligence brief? — into a misguided attack because Obama has chosen to receive his information in a different manner than his predecessor.

As it turns out, no president does it the exact same way. Under the standards of this ad, Republican icon Ronald Reagan skipped his intelligence briefings 99 percent of the time.

It should come as no surprise that Thiessen is hawking “bogus” claims, as his own newspaper described the daily intel charge, and it’s unlikely he will show any signs of remorse. And while the Post should be commended for publicly calling out one of its own and shaming Thiessen, the paper is ultimately responsible for publishing his false claims and baseless attacks. As former Washington Post writer Dan Froomkin said in response to Kessler’s article today on Twitter, the Post op-ed page “is a facts-optional zone. Shame on them.”