The Democratic Party re-inserted language into its platform yesterday that declares Jerusalem as the capital of Israel after howls from Republicans suggesting that its omission meant the Democrats aren’t sufficiently pro-Israel. As many have noted, the actual process of amending the platform yesterday was a bit of a mess. President Obama himself reportedly asked that it be inserted while convention chair and L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa awkwardly ignored the wishes of at least half the delegates and rubber stamped the change.

Seeming to try to sift through the pandering and political theatre yesterday on MSNBC, some of the network’s hosts thought it was good that Obama embraced the DNC platform and made it his own, as compared to Mitt Romney, who had previously distanced himself from some of the GOP’s more distasteful elements. But fellow host Chris Hayes challenged his colleagues and the entire charade and noted that the Democratic platform isn’t even-handed on the Israel-Palestine issue:

HAYES: Can we just say, I’ll just say for myself, it’s a substantively terrible decision. It’s bad policy alright. It’s a craven capitulation and it’s a craven capitulation that empowers the worst elements in the people that are working on this issue. If you read this platform, there is not a single condition put on Israel, in the Israel-Palestine section, there’s conditions put on the Palestinians that they must renounce — they must accept Israel’s right to exist, etc. There’s nothing said about the settlements.

And if the American government policy is actually that Jerusalem is the capital and the American government wants move the embassy to Jerusalem, there have been plenty of opportunities for both Republicans and Democrats to do that and they have not done it because it’s a terrible idea from the perspective of actually getting a lasting peace between these two peoples.

Watch the clip:

Indeed, as this blog also noted yesterday, in 1995 Congress passed a measure mandating that the U.S. move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and every U.S. president since has refused to implement it on grounds that such a move would severely damage the peace process and the two-state solution. As Jerusalem expert Daniel Seidemann wrote yesterday at the Daily Beast, the whole faux-controversy is all about politics:

It has become politically suicidal to refrain from declaring loyalty to an undivided Jerusalem in which no one, save the ignorant and the true believers on the fringes, genuinely believe. Parties, party platforms, and even Presidential candidates pander to what they, correctly or incorrectly, perceive to be “the Jewish vote,” advocating policies—like transferring the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem—that no responsible president, regardless of party, will carry out. The discourse on Jerusalem within the political arena in the United States is a charade, and all but the deluded and the devout know it.

“Those of us who deal with Jerusalem relate to presidential elections in the United States much as Floridians do to the hurricane season,” Seidemann writes, “we board up our windows, hunker down, hope for the best, and wait for the season to pass (when possible, maintaining a sense of humor).”

During the early years of the Bush administration, the United States detained and tortured several alleged members of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, which the U.S. listed as a terrorist organization, according to a report by Human Rights Watch researcher Laura Pitter. Pitter surveyed several documents discovered in Libyan intelligence offices after the fall of Muammer Qaddafi and interviewed fourteen Libyans who claimed to have been detained by Americans during that time. The most explosive allegation in the report is Mohammed Shoroeiya’s claim that the CIA waterboarded him. Bush administration officials have only acknowledged three instances of waterboarding, none of which include Shoroeiya:

One former detainee, Mohammed Shoroeiya, provided detailed and credible testimony that he was waterboarded on repeated occasions during US interrogations in Afghanistan. While never using the phrase “waterboarding,” he said that after his captors put a hood over his head and strapped him onto a wooden board, “then they start with the water pouring. They start to pour water to the point where you feel like you are suffocating.” He added that, “they wouldn’t stop until they got some kind of answer from me.” He said a doctor was present during the waterboarding and that this happened numerous times, so many times he could not count.

A second detainee in Afghanistan described being subjected to a water suffocation practice similar to waterboarding, and said that he was threatened with use of the board. A doctor was present during his suffocation-inducing abuse as well. The allegations of waterboarding contradict statements about the practice from senior US officials, such as former CIA Director Michael Hayden, who testified to the Senate that the CIA waterboarded only three individuals: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah, and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. Former President Bush similarly declared in his memoirs that only three detainees in CIA custody were waterboarded. Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has also denied the use of waterboarding by the US military.

While New York Times notes that the allegations in the HRW report have yet to be independently verified, it also finds that the testimony in the report “match[es] up with official documents on C.I.A. techniques” and “underscores how much is still not known about the United States’ treatment of terrorist suspects during the early years of the Bush administration.” Though torture techniques like waterboarding are both morally abominable and widely considered to be ineffective by intelligence experts, Mitt Romney will not rule out reintroducing the torture of alleged terrorists if he wins the election.

Last night during his speech to the Democratic National Convention, President Clinton called out Mitt Romney’s reckless plan to increase military spending. “The Republican argument against the president’s re-election was actually pretty simple — pretty snappy,” Clinton said, “It went something like this: We left him a total mess. He hasn’t cleaned it up fast enough. So fire him and put us back in.” The former president then noted that all Romney and the GOP plan to do is go back to Bush era policies and boost military spending without paying for it:

They convinced me they were honorable people who believed what they said and they’re going to keep every commitment they’ve made. We just got to make sure the American people know what those commitments are — (cheers, applause) — because in order to look like an acceptable, reasonable, moderate alternative to President Obama, they just didn’t say very much about the ideas they’ve offered over the last two years.

They couldn’t because they want to the same old policies that got us in trouble in the first place. They want to cut taxes for high- income Americans, even more than President Bush did. They want to get rid of those pesky financial regulations designed to prevent another crash and prohibit future bailouts. They want to actually increase defense spending over a decade $2 trillion more than the Pentagon has requested without saying what they’ll spend it on. And they want to make enormous cuts in the rest of the budget, especially programs that help the middle class and poor children.

Watch the clip:

Indeed, Clinton is right. If elected president, Mitt Romney plans to increase military spending by $2.1 trillion and he has not said how he would pay for it. Back in July, top Romney foreign policy adviser Richard Williamson was asked repeatedly how Romney would pay for the increase but Williamson just dodged the questions and had no real answer.