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McCain Fights With Sean Hannity On Foreign Policy: ‘You Were Wrong About Libya’

By Ben Armbruster on Sep 14, 2012 at 5:13 pm

John McCain

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and Fox News host Sean Hannity got into a bit of a spat last night after Hannity pushed a set of right-wing talking points on President Obama’s foreign policy that even McCain thought went to far. Hannity said Obama “apologized” for the attackers that killed four American foreign service officers but McCain pushed back. “I’m not sure there was an apology,” McCain said.

Hannity then attacked Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi for meeting with Iranian leaders. “President Morsi did go to Tehran and condemn Bashar Al-Assad, which was a pleasant turn of events,” McCain again pushed back. But Hannity wouldn’t budge and McCain then had enough, criticizing Hannity and his network for being “wrong” about Libya:

HANNITY: How is it that Sean Hannity and a few others of us out here predicted with pin-point accuracy that the Muslim Brotherhood would be in charge in Egypt? Their first task when they took over the parliament was to declare Israel, our closest ally, an enemy, their number one enemy. How is it that the administration with all their intelligence and the CIA — how is it that they didn’t see this coming?!

And they kept telling the American people, this is democracy. I don’t think the Muslim Brotherhood is democracy. They want Sharia Law implemented now in Egypt.

MCCAIN: Well, first of all. It is not clear that that’s true. It was and you people on Fox that said in Libya, we didn’t know who they were and let’s not help these people. They had an election and they elected moderates and rejected Islamists and yes, there are al Qaeda factors and there are extremists in Libya today. But the Libyan people are friends of ours and they support us and they support democracy — so you were wrong about Libya.

HANNITY: I don’t think I was wrong about Libya at all.

MCCAIN: Yes, I do. I know you were.

Moments later, as McCain was speaking, Hannity cut him short, saying, “Senator, thanks for being with us.” Watch the clip:

(HT: Crooks and Liars)

Fox Hosts Iraq War Architect To Discuss The Alleged ‘Failure Of The Obama Doctrine In The Middle East’

By Ben Armbruster on Sep 14, 2012 at 4:02 pm

Fox News on Friday hosted Paul Wolfowitz, a key architect of the war in Iraq, to discuss an alleged “failure of the Obama doctrine in the Middle East,” as host Megyn Kelly described it. Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer made the (bogus) charge yesterday on Fox, and Kelly, without any sense of irony, asked Wolfowitz to respond. Krauthammer “is exactly right,” the former Bush administration official said.

Yet Wolfowitz later backhandedly praised Obama’s Middle East policy, lamenting that the successes of the new democracy in Libya (of which President Obama’s Middle East policy helped bring about) don’t get much media attention:

HOST MEGYN KELLY: Your thoughts on Charles Krauthammer’s assertion that this is — what we are witnessing now is the failure of the Obama doctrine in the Middle East.

WOLFOWITZ: I believe that what Charles Krauthammer said is exactly right about the apologetic posture that Obama has taken with the Muslim world, in particular the Arab world. [...]

In Libya it’s very important to emphasize that your viewers may not know because this doesn’t get covered but back in July they had an election. The Libyan people voted freely and fairly for the first time in over forty years and the Muslim Brotherhood came in a distant second and these extremists who seem to be behind the attacks … didn’t even show. ….

Watch the segment:

So things are going relatively well in Libya, but Obama’s Middle East policy is a failure. Got it.

“Our viewers may not know that you were one of the people who believed that we needed to go to war in Iraq,” Kelly told Wolfowitz. Believed? Try: Paul Wolfowitz was a high ranking Bush administration official who pushed this country into a needless war that wound up costing trillions of dollars, thousands of American lives, and tens of thousands wounded — not to mention the cost in Iraqi lives and treasure.

And Wolfowitz was the one who rebuked a high ranking U.S. military officer who said (rightly as it turned out) the United States would need hundreds of thousands of troops to go to war in Iraq. “The notion that it will take several hundred thousand U.S. troops to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq, are wildly off the mark,” Wolfowitz said in February 2003.

“When weighing [the] possible benefits against the costs of the Iraq intervention,” CAP’s Matt Duss once observed, “there is simply no conceivable calculus by which Operation Iraqi Freedom can be judged to have been a successful or worthwhile policy.” And Fox hosts Wolfowitz to talk about some fantasy about the failure of the current president’s Middle East doctrine? Very rich indeed.

Justice

Judge Blocks Indefinite Detention Provision

By Nicole Flatow posted from ThinkProgress Justice on Sep 14, 2012 at 1:15 pm

A New York federal district judge on Wednesday blocked a provision of the National Defense Authorization Act that could be read to authorize the federal government to indefinitely detain people who were “substantially” or “directly” “supporting” the Taliban, Al Qaeda or its allies. The plaintiffs in this case included journalists and writers who feared that their reporting about Al Qaeda or the Taliban might subject them to detention under this law.

The government argued that the provision merely restated its existing detention authority, and did not impose any new burdens on the First Amendment. But District Judge Katherine B. Forrest rejected that assertion outright, pointing out the “logical flaw” in “stating an intention not to expand authority when Congress has set forth what is, in fact, new and broad authority,” the scope of which the government was not willing to define:

The Government did not–and does not–generally agree or anywhere argue that activities protected by the First Amendment could not subject an individual to indefinite military detention under § 1021(b)(2). The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution provides for greater protection: it prohibits Congress from passing any law abridging speech and associational rights. To the extent that § 1021(b)(2) purports to encompass protected First Amendment activities, it is unconstitutionally overbroad.

A key question throughout these proceedings has been, however, precisely what the statute means–what and whose activities it is meant to cover. That is no small question bandied about amongst lawyers and a judge steeped in arcane questions of constitutional law; it is a question of defining an individual’s core liberties. The due process rights guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment require that an individual understand what conduct might subject him or her to criminal or civil penalties. Here, the stakes get no higher: indefinite military detention–potential detention during a war on terrorism that is not expected to end in the foreseeable future, if ever. The Constitution requires specificity–and that specificity is absent from § 1021(b)(2). Understanding the scope of § 1021(b)(2) requires defining key terms. At the March hearing, the Government was unable to provide definitions for those terms.

Forrest temporarily blocked the law in May. In its arguments before that decision, the government “was unable to provide … any assurances” that the law “would not in fact subject plaintiffs to military detention” for engaging in writing and other activities protected by the First Amendment. She said the government later changed its position, but would not state that covered First Amendment activity was protected under the law.

Wednesday’s ruling has been rightly hailed by many commentators as a rare civil liberties victory at a time when limits on government national security power are few and far between. But the decision makes an assumption about the NDAA that some have questioned because an amendment to the law seems to suggest that it was not as broad as Judge Forrest suggests. American University law professor Steve Vladeck laments at Lawfare that Forrest assumes the NDAA confers the power to detain U.S. citizens, even though “the entire point of the Feinstein Amendment was to quell concerns that the NDAA might covertly authorize the detention of U.S. citizens or other individuals within the United States.” Vladeck worries that this assumption distracts from “real and serious” concern about the potentially broad and unknown scope of the law’s impact on non-citizens detained and arrested outside the United States.

This rare victory for civil liberties in a national security case could be short lived, as the government has already filed an appeal to the Second Circuit.

NEWS FLASH

August The Deadliest Month For Syrian Civilians | The U.N. reported this month that more than 100,000 Syrians fled their country in August due to the increasing violence in the civil war there. It was the highest monthly total of refugees since the conflict began more than a year ago. PBS reports today another grim statistic. “August was the deadliest month since the Syrian rebellion began a year-and a-half ago — and more deadly for civilians than the bloodiest months in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.” (via @AzmatKhan)

Romney Aligns Himself With Obama On Key Aspect Of Iran Policy

By Ben Armbruster on Sep 14, 2012 at 10:51 am

Photo: ABC

In an interview that aired on ABC’s Good Morning America on Friday, MItt Romney said that his “red line” on Iran — the point that would trigger a U.S. military response to Iran’s nuclear program — is the same as President Obama’s, despite a Romney adviser’s assertion that Iran represents “the sharpest foreign policy difference” between the two candidates.

After Romney told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that his “red line” on Iran is that the Islamic Republic “may not have a nuclear weapon,” the host pointed out that his policy is the same as Obama’s. The GOP presidential nominee agreed:

STEPHANOPOULOS: President Obama said exactly the same thing. He said it’s unacceptable for Iran to have a nuclear weapon. So your red line is the same as his.

ROMNEY: Yeah, and I laid out what I would do to keep Iran from reaching that red line. [...]

STEPHANOPOULOS: But your red line going forward is the same?

ROMNEY: Yes. And recognize that when one says that it’s unacceptable to the United States of America that that means what it says. You’ll take any action necessary to prevent that development, which is Iran becoming nuclear.

Watch the clip:

Romney’s statement illustrates the confusion from Romney’s team on Iran, and indeed on the Romney camp’s wider foreign policy. (Romney’s foreign policy director would neither confirm nor deny that Romney is a neoconservative.) On one hand, the Romney campaign struggles to differentiate its Iran policy from President Obama’s, and on the other, his team sounds more like a neocon revival committee pushing for another war in the Middle East.

The New York Times noticed this contradiction as well, reporting in an article on Friday that a senior foreign policy adviser to Romney said the former Massachusetts governor “would not be content with an Iran one screwdriver’s turn away from a nuclear weapon.” But, the Times added, the adviser “stopped short of saying exactly where, in the development of nuclear capability, Mr. Romney would draw the line.”

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 released yesterday. 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.

Election

Fox Host Challenges GOP Congressman For Supporting Military Spending Cuts He’s Now Against

By Aviva Shen posted from ThinkProgress Election on Sep 14, 2012 at 9:46 am

As Congress briefly reconvenes before the election, Republicans have made a lot of noise about impending military spending cuts, seemingly forgetting that many GOPers voted for them when they passed the Budget Control Act of 2011. Rep. Mike Kelly (R-PA) was reminded of this fact on Friday morning’s Fox & Friends, but refused to account for his vote.

During an early morning segment, Fox host Brian Kilmeade demanded to know why Kelly and his Republican colleagues supported the military spending sequester. Kelly essentially shrugged the question off, claiming we shouldn’t “quibble” about the past and instead place the blame on President Obama:

KILMEADE: As we know this is a deal cut, so we didn’t have another debt ceiling debate this year like last year. You made huge mistake putting the defense up there on the chopping block even as — they had nothing to do with the fight that the congress was having with the president. Why was it even put into play?

KELLY: First of all, when that took place, this was an idea that came from the administration, put on the table by the administration.

KILMEADE: You should say no.

KELLY: What should have happened and what could have happened are two different things. We can’t do anything about what happened before. But we can certainly do something about what happened today… If we cannot rely on the president to lead, and we’ve seen a lack of leadership in this country for the last three years, this is a vacuum of leadership both of our domestic policy and foreign policy. My goodness, let’s not quibble about what shouldn’t have happened at a bargaining table. Let’s talk about what the president has the power to do today and to reassure our military and our allies around the world, the American military will remain the strongest. We are the leaders of the free world. Let’s start act like it.

Watch it:

Kelly isn’t the first Republican to be tripped up by his voting record. When vice presidential candidate Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) faced the same question on Sunday, he simultaneously denied that he voted for the defense cuts and agreed that he voted for the bill that enacted the cuts.

The narrative that Obama is weak on defense is a favorite among Republican politicians this week, who are taking up the false accusation that the president caused the attacks on American diplomats in Libya and Egypt by apologizing for America.

National Security Brief: Obama Rebuffs Netanyahu On ‘Red Lines’

By ThinkProgress on Sep 14, 2012 at 8:50 am


– President Obama told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the U.S. will use any means to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, but added that he will not be setting any so-called “red lines” that would trigger military action.

– The Atlantic’s Robert Wright notes that Obama “has already laid down a red line,” noting that the President has said that “if Iran tries to build a nuclear weapon — something that would require, for starters, the very conspicuous breaking of UN monitoring seals at its nuclear facilities — Obama will resort to military force to stop it.”

– Meanwhile, the IAEA passed a resolution condemning Iran for defying demands to curb its uranium enrichment and failing to assure the nuclear watchdog that it is not trying to build nuclear weapons.

– And the Wall Street Journal adds: “At least several European banks that vowed to stop doing business with Iran have kept handling billions of euros in transactions for Iranian entities and foreign companies with operations there.”

– The British are planning for an early withdrawal from Afghanistan “because military commanders have changed their views about how many troops need to remain to help local security forces fight the Taliban,” the Guardian reports.

– “Protests inspired by an anti-Islam film targeted more U.S. facilities in the Muslim world Thursday,” the Washington Post reports.

– The AP reports: “The diplomat tasked with ending Syria’s civil war said that the conflict is worsening on Thursday, the same day he travelled to the country for the first time since taking up a job he himself has called ‘nearly impossible.’”

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