Republican chairman of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee Rep. C.W. Bill Young (FL) told the Tampa Bay Times editorial board on Monday that he can no longer support the American war in Afghanistan:

“I think we should remove ourselves from Afghanistan as quickly as we can,” Young, R-Indian Shores, said during a meeting with the Times editorial board Monday. “I just think we’re killing kids that don’t need to die.” … “It’s a real mess,” he said.

Young — the longest serving Republican in the House — said the death of a local Army Ranger in Afghanistan last month pushed him to change his mind. Young said the Ranger, Staff Sergeant Matthew S. Sitton, wrote him a letter before he died “and told me some things I found hard to believe”:

Young said he did not want to detail all of Sitton’s criticisms, but he listed two. In the letter, Sitton told Young about “being forced to go on patrol on foot through fields that they knew were mined with no explanation for why they were patrolling on foot,” the congressman said.

Sitton also explained that local streams and rivers were contaminated by pollution, creating a strong risk of bacterial and fungal infection, Young said. Yet when a flood soaked their uniforms, Young said, “they were required to continue patrols without changing their clothes.”

Young said Sitton predicted his own death, “and what he said would happen happened.” He stepped on an improvised explosive device and was killed, leaving behind his wife, Sarah, and their 9-month-old son, Brodey.

Americans’ support for the war in Afghanistan, including from Republicans, is at an all-time low. A recent poll found that 60 percent of Americans said the U.S. should not be involved there and a poll from May found that only 27 percent support the war. A majority of Republicans in a poll from April said the war has not been worth the effort.

While some House Republicans, such as Rep. Walter Jones (R-NC), have been vocal in their opposition to the U.S. war in Afghanistan, Young said many privately tell him they no longer support it. “[T}hey tend not to want to go public” about it, he said.

Reuters reports researchers at anti-virus makers Symantec Corp and Kaspersky Labs have uncovered evidence of three previously undocumented computer viruses on systems in Lebanon and Iran, possibly developed by the United States for espionage or cyber warfare. Previous reporting from the New York Times tied the development of another virus,  Stuxnet, to a joint U.S.-Israeli campaign against the Iranian nuclear program code named Olympic Games.

The new viruses are linked to another previously identified virus also allegedly connected to Olympic Games, Flame, via a program called Newsforyou that masquerades as a web content management system:

“Newsforyou handled four types of malicious software: Flame and programs code-named SP, SPE and IP, according to both firms. Neither firm has obtained samples of the other three pieces of malware.

Kaspersky Lab said it believes that SP, SPE and IP were espionage or sabotage tools separate from Flame. Symantec said it was not sure if they were simply variations of Flame or completely different pieces of software.”

The digital era has dramatically changed the tactics available to countries engaging in espionage and sabotage, but cyber warfare raises it’s own set of new moral questions.

Deploying targeted malware to crash centrifuges is arguably preferable to more destructive and life threatening military strikes or targeted assassinations, but it raises other key questions: by developing these kinds of cyber weapons is the U.S. providing intellectual cover to hostile nations developing similar programs? And what happens when these weapons make their way into the digital wild?

The latter has already happened: While there isn’t any known damage due to domestic infections, as early as 2010 Symantec reported 1.56% of Stuxnet infections were to U.S. computers. At least one Stuxnet infection to a critical infrastructure system resulted in the deployment of the Department of Homeland Security’s Industrial Control Systems Computer Emergency Readiness Team (ICS-CERT).

As to the first question: The Department of Homeland Security’s emergency cyber-responder team has “seen a three-year surge in cyberattacks” on American critical infrastructure, reporting in June “a 20-fold leap in the number of incidents since the team was created in 2009.”

During a fundraiser with wealthy donors earlier this year, Mitt Romney didn’t appear to know how much the United States spends on its military, saying it’s “about twice as much as China.” Mother Jones released video of the entire event this afternoon, after reporting yesterday that during the event, Romney said he’s not worried about the 47 percent of Americans who support President Obama.

Seeming to argue for more military spending, Romney warned the audience not to “over think how strong we are”:

ROMNEY: [The U.S. spends] about twice as much as China, not 10 times as much like is reported. And we have responsibility for the whole world. They’re only focused on one little area of the world, the South China Sea and East China Sea that’s it. And they’re building a military at a rapid rate so this idea that we’ve always spent so much money on the military, it’s like guys, don’t over think how strong we are.

You probably know this was a couple years ago we had one of our aircraft carriers by Japan and the Chinese pulled up behind it in a diesel sub, a super quiet diesel sub pulled up behind it, it could have torpedoed and where did that kind of — our Navy is smaller in number of ships at any time since 1917.

Watch it, which appears at the beginning of this video Mother Jones posted today:

The United States spends about six times more its military than China. Romney said he wants to boost the Pentagon’s budget by $2.1 trillion over 10 years without a plan to pay for it. A recent CAP- National Security Network report warned against “exaggerat[ing] the possible threat posed by China” in arguing for more military spending back home: “Conservatives’ military-first approach, which assumes the two nations are destined for conflict, is more likely to create that reality.”

Mother Jones released a video today that shows Mitt Romney saying “there’s just no way” to achieve Middle East peace. “The pathway to peace is almost unthinkable to accomplish,” Romney said, adding, “we kick the ball down the field and hope that ultimately, somehow, something will happen and resolve it.” The popular right-wing news aggregator the Drudge Report picked up the story, and here’s the photo the website chose to include::

Credit for the photo belongs to the Associated Press, which described it as follows: “A boy holds a toy gun during a protest about a film ridiculing Islam’s Prophet Muhammad in the Palestinian refugee camp of Ain el-Hilweh near Sidon, Lebanon, Friday, Sept. 14, 2012.”

Mother Jones is out with a new video from a high-dollar fundraiser for Mitt Romney in which Romney says he believes a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is “unthinkable” and that his policy will be to “kick the can down the the field and hope that ultimately, somehow, something will happen and resolve it.”

Romney’s comments came at the same fundraiser in which Romney said he’s not concerned about 47 percent of Americans “who are dependent upon the government” and believe they’re entitled to food and shelter.

Romney has previously said he supports a two-state solution but in the video uncovered by Mother Jones, the GOP presidential nominee indicates he has no interest in actively pursuing peace:

ROMNEY: I’m torn by two perspectives in this regard. One is the one which I’ve had for some time, which is that the Palestinians have no interest whatsoever in establishing peace, and that the pathway to peace is almost unthinkable to accomplish. Now why do I say that? Some might say, let’s see the Palestinians have the West Bank, and have security and set up a separate nation for the Palestinians. And then come a couple of thorny questions. [...]

And I look at the Palestinians not wanting to see peace anyway, for political purposes, committed to the destruction and elimination of Israel, and these thorny issues, and I say, “There’s just no way.” And so what you do is you say, “You move things along the best way you can.” You hope for some degree of stability, but you recognize that this is going to remain an unsolved problem. We live with it in China and Taiwan. All right, we have a potentially volatile situation but we sort of live with it, and we kick the ball down the field and hope that ultimately, somehow, something will happen and resolve it. We don’t go to war to try and resolve it imminently.

Watch the video:

But when asked recently if he supported the two-state solution by the Israeli paper Haaretz, Romney said:

“I believe in a two-state solution which suggests there will be two states, including a Jewish state. I respect Israel’s right to remain a Jewish state. The question is not whether the people of the region believe that there should be a Palestinian state. The question is if they believe there should be an Israeli state, a Jewish state.”

While Romney does pay lip service to the two-state solution, publicly, his rhetoric at the fundraiser mirrors much of what he’s been saying throughout the campaign. The “Israel” issue page on his campaign website makes no reference to a “two-state solution” or a “Palestinian” state. He said earlier this year that now is not to the time to be talking about a peace process between the Israelis and Palestinians. So Romney has never really been interested in a two-state solution, he was just more up front about it at his fundraiser.