In the closing days of the election, Republicans are throwing everything they can think of at President Obama to rattle his position on national security. Though a CBS poll taken immediately after the final Presidential debate had 64 percent of undecided voters believing Obama would be better on national security than Mitt Romney, the right remains convinced that Libya will be Obama’s undoing.

Despite former Bush administration Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice imploring that attacks be held off until an investigation is complete, more partisan Republicans refuse to heed her advice. To facilitate this, the right wing is floating almost any theory, no matter how implausible, in hopes of bringing Obama down, for example:

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) on Fox News this morning claimed, without offering any evidence, that veterans no longer trust Obama post-Benghazi:

MCCAIN: I’ve been traveling all over the country on behalf of Mitt Romney and I can tell you, our veterans are angry. They’re angry, and they no longer trust their Commander-in-Chief. Because this debacle has been — not only what has happened infuriated them, but also the cover-up.

John Bolton, seeming to take cues from conspiracy theorists Frank Gaffney and Aaron Klein, speculated on Tuesday that the U.S. may have been buying arms from terrorists in Libya to give to Syrians at the time of the attack:

BOLTON: Well, there has been speculation about it. I’ll just say my personal opinion. If we were buying weapons from the al Qaeda or terrorist militias in Benghazi to give to the Syrian opposition, I’m outraged by that because these surface-to-air missiles and other weapons from Gadhafi’s arsenal falling into the hands of terrorists is bad enough. For the U.S. to be transmitting them to opposition forces in Syria I think would be beyond the pale.

Also on Tuesday, Newt Gingrich referred to “rumors” about emails implicating the White House in incompetence:

GINGRICH: There is a rumor — I want to be clear, it’s a rumor — that at least two networks have emails from the National Security Adviser’s office telling a counterterrorism group to stand down. But they were a group in real-time trying to mobilize marines and C-130s and the fighter aircraft, and they were told explicitly by the White House stand down and do nothing. This is not a terrorist action.

And Rep. Randy Forbes (R-VA) and Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) think Obama’s anti-torture pledge is keeping one of the arrested suspects away from U.S. interrogators:

CHAMBLISS: Once the president in January of 2009 signed the executive order, saying we are going to shut down Guantanamo … any enemy combatant, as this individual is, there are no policies in place to take possession and interrogate him in a way to gain valuable information.

Meanwhile, Sean Hannity is now claiming to have sources who heard “damning” audio tapes of those under attack in Benghazi:

HANNITY: [D]on’t you think, in fairness, in the complete spirit of transparency that the Obama administration promised, that if there are tapes that we could hear that caused Ty Woods to disobey orders, risk his military career, his life, and then he gave his life, why not release them to the American people before the election so we could get a picture of the full truth?

Watch all of their claims here:

As varying and disparate as they are, these right-wing claims all focus more on attacking the Obama administration than any desire to seek the truth on Benghazi. For the last month and a half, after Ambassador Susan Rice’s Sept. 16 appearance on several news shows, the right has taken every opportunity to try to politicize the attacks. So far all of their attempts and claims have gone down in flames.

In comparison, the State Department’s investigation is set to be completed in the coming weeks, which will lay out in full any security failures. Likewise, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence will be convening hearings after the election to determine what intelligence failures actually happened on Sept. 11.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu yesterday told a Paris-based magazine that a military strike on Iran would be beneficial to the region. Netanyahu’s statement was published on the eve of a meeting with French President Francois Holland, during which the two planned to discuss the Iran issue among other topics. Netanyahu cited Iran’s lack of popularity in the Middle East:

“Five minutes after, contrary to what the skeptics say, I think a feeling of relief would spread across the region…Iran is not popular in the Arab world, far from it, and some governments in the region, as well as their citizens, have understood that a nuclear armed Iran would be dangerous for them, not just for Israel.”

Sound familiar? Netanyahu’s statement echoes a point that he made in 2002, when he advocated for a strike on Iraq on the grounds that, among other things, it would benefit the region:

“If you take out Saddam, Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region…the test and the great opportunity and challenge is not merely to effect the ouster of the regime, but also transform that society and thereby begin too the process of democratizing the Arab world.”

It hardly bears repeating that Arabs in the Middle East did not react favorably to the Iraq war. The year the war began, the Los Angeles Times reported from Syria and found that negative views of America had hardened. One Syrian told the Times ”What they are doing is worse than what Saddam [Hussein] has done.” Brookings Institution polling from 2003 backed up the anecdotes. More than 60 percent of Arabs saw the Iraq war causing “less peace” in the region and more than 70 percent said it would result in “more terrorism.” Shelby Tahimi, a Middle East expert and the creator of the poll, found an “unprecedented tide of public opinion running against the United States” after the Iraq war.

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The federal government faces a shortage of cyber security experts. That’s according to an article published in FCW, a technology-focused publication. FCW interviewed federal officials regarding the government’s ability to effectively beef up its cyber security program and found a unsettling trend: the government needs more tech experts. In some cases, according to a Department of Defense official, the government hasn’t even figured out what to hire for:

“We don’t have all the capacity and the right sets of skills that we need to do all that’s required. In the department we are still struggling to fully define and empower the cyber workforce. It’s a big challenge, just to define the techniques.”

In July, a State Department official gave an estimate of the shortage to Reuters: “The numbers I’ve seen look like shortages in the 20,000s to 40,000s for years to come.”

Why is there a shortage? According to Cynthia Dion-Schwarz from the National Science Foundation, it’s a “pipeline” problem. In short, the government can’t find the “people with the right skills sets to just have the entry-level skills needed in order to make progress in cybersecurity,” Schwarz told FCW. Others, like John Arguila, a U.S. Naval Postgraduate School professor and cyber security expert, say it’s time to think outside the box when it comes to recruiting, telling the Guardian that “most of these sorts of guys can’t be vetted in the traditional way. We need a new institutional culture that allows us to reach out to them.”

The shortage is especially relevant now that the president is likely to sign an executive order on cyber security, putting, according to a copy of the report, “the Department of Homeland Security in charge of organizing an information-sharing network that rapidly distributes sanitized summaries of top-secret intelligence reports about known cyberthreats that identify a specific target.”

For months, federal officials and cyber security experts have been warning about this. In April, Janet Napolitano, the head of Homeland Security, said:

“There is a lack of expertise and there are a lot of people clamoring for people who know the internet well…We need analysts. We need people who are engineers. We need people who are experienced in intelligence as it relates to the cyber-universe.”

It’s not just federal officials who have connected the shortage to national security; Enrique Salem, an executive at Symantec, a cyber security organization and software maker, told Reuters in June: “What I would tell you is it’s going to be a bigger issue from a national security perspective than people realize.”

Earlier this month, Leon Panetta, the secretary of defense, said cyber security was at a “pre-9/11 moment.”

Former FEMA Director Michael Brown offered criticism of President Obama’s early responses to Hurricane Sandy yesterday, including a dig at the administration’s response to last month’s attack in Libya.

Yesterday, ahead of the storm’s pummeling of the eastern seaboard, Brown gave an interview to the local alternative paper, the Denver Westword, on how he believed the Obama administration was responding to Sandy too quickly and that Obama had spoken to the press about Sandy’s potential effect too early.

Brown turned then to a reliable right-wing attack on the President’s response to the attack on a U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi that killed four Americans:

“One thing he’s gonna be asked is, why did he jump on [the hurricane] so quickly and go back to D.C. so quickly when in…Benghazi, he went to Las Vegas?” Brown says. “Why was this so quick?… At some point, somebody’s going to ask that question…. This is like the inverse of Benghazi.”

Conservatives have been hitting Obama for weeks on his attendance at a fundraiser in Nevada following the assault in Benghazi, claiming at alternate times that the President either cared more about politics than lives lost or that he was trying to downplay the attack’s significance. Now the critique has mutated into a belief that Obama is currently “playing President” to score points during disaster relief in the run-up to the election, in contrast to his actions in September.

Brown is not the only one making the insinuation that Obama and his administration are responding too quickly to Sandy only for political reasons. He’s joined in his accusations by such prominent right-wing commentators as former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and columnist Charles Krauthammer.

However, Brown’s comments carry a special irony due to the role he played during the Hurricane Katrina debacle in 2005. As director of FEMA during the legendarily botched response, Brown, famously dubbed “Brownie” by President Bush, was in the center of criticism from both sides of the aisle that the Bush administration was too slow to respond. An internal review by the Department of Homeland Security’s Inspector-General following the disaster concluded, “Much of the criticism is warranted.” Brown resigned from his position as director less than two weeks after Katrina hit.

Jeffrey Goldberg, a correspondent for the Atlantic and a Bloomberg News columnist, today criticized the Obama administration for publicly discussing the consequences of war with Iran.

Goldberg emailed Mitt Romney wondering if his Iran policy had changed given his relatively moderate tone during last week’s foreign policy debate and published Romney’s response in a Bloomberg piece published today. Romney replied with some of his standard boilerplate answers on Iran but criticized “the president’s top advisers and cabinet secretaries broadcasting the risks of the military option, therefore conveying to Iran’s leadership that the threat is simply not real.”

Goldberg agreed with this latter assessment, writing, “it doesn’t help the American negotiating position to publicly telegraph to the Iranians these sorts of doubts” (although he didn’t say how exactly discussing the consequences of war with Iran would undermine the U.S. negotiating position). But in a follow-up article for the Atlantic, Goldberg went a bit further, saying that having a public discussion of the repercussions of attacking Iran is a “relief” for Iran’s leaders:

President Obama has been undermined from time to time by his own team on the Iran question — whenever a senior official of his administration analyzes publicly the dangers of a military confrontation to the U.S., we should assume the Iranian leaders breathe a sigh of relief, and make the calculations that Obama is bluffing on military action.

Again, Goldberg doesn’t explain how having an open and public discussion about the consequences of war with Iran harms the U.S. negotiating position or how exactly it means President Obama is not sincere that “no options are off the table” when dealing with Iran’s nuclear program. We asked Goldberg on Twitter but he has yet to respond.

Joel Rubin, Director of Policy and Government Affairs at the Ploughshares Fund, pushed back on Goldberg’s assertion. “Does this mean that the administration, if it disagrees with Congress or other critics, has to be silent?” Rubin asked. “Are we not a democracy? Is the only voice that’s allowed the one that calls for military action?” Rubin said, adding, “This implies that there’s only one correct policy towards Iran, and that any debate about it is counterproductive.”

And in a twist to Goldberg’s comments, Iran’s leaders might actually “breathe a sigh of relief” if the U.S. or Israel attacks Iran’s nuclear facilities. From the Green Movement protests in 2009 to the strains on Iranians caused by tough international sanctions, Iranian society is currently deeply divided. An attack could end all that and cause ordinary Iranians to rally around the regime. We know this precisely because this administration has fostered a public discussion of the consequences of war with Iran. But it’s not just the Obama administration saying this. Meir Dagan, the former head of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency, said an attack “would galvanize Iranian society behind the leadership and create unity around the nuclear issue.”

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On Friday, the FBI announced a new initiative to track down and identify hackers. The program is an attempt to respond to hacking that had led to “malicious software in two million computers” in early 2011. The FBI describes the program as a way to “uncover and investigate web-based intrusion attacks and develop a cadre of specially trained computer scientists able to extract hackers’ digital signatures from mountains of malicious code.” Besides its relevance to individual computer users, hacking and the need for cybersecurity is becoming increasingly relevant to national security.

Word of the FBI’s new initiative comes on the heels of Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s strong call for action earlier this month, when he said that cybersecurity is at a “pre-9/11 moment.” The FBI will share the information it gathers with the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, and the National Security Agency.

Earlier this month the military announced similar efforts to counter cyber attacks directed at the U.S. But Panetta said there should be more emphasis on cybersecurity. “We know of specific instances where intruders have successfully gained access to these control systems,” he said. “We also know they are seeking to create advanced tools to attack those systems and cause panic, destruction and even loss of life.” Panetta added that the private sector and government should share information about cyber threats.

In the past year alone there have been several reports of international hackers targeting and attacking U.S.-based agencies and organizations like NASA and the Chamber of Commerce.

In July, John Arguila, a defense expert and professor, told the Guardian that the U.S. needed to recruit more hackers to join its side, adding that finding them through traditional means probably wouldn’t work because “most of these sorts of guys can’t be vetted in the traditional way. We need a new institutional culture that allows us to reach out to them.”

The Obama administration, hoping to circumvent a stalled Congress, is finalizing its draft executive cybersecurity order. The Associated Press, which received a copy of it last week, said the order “would put the Department of Homeland Security in charge of organizing an information-sharing network that rapidly distributes sanitized summaries of top-secret intelligence reports about known cyberthreats that identify a specific target.”

Ehud Barak, Israel’s defense minister, described the security relationship between the U.S. and Israel as “deeper and stronger than it has been in recent years” in a statement to Israeli media today. Barak met with U.S. Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, who is in Israel to oversee a joint military exercise between the two countries.

The record-setting exercise features: “as many as 3,500 U.S. personnel in the region along with 1,000 members of the Israel Defense Forces.” The Times of Israel says the goal of the exercise is to test: “multiple Israeli and American air-defense systems against incoming missiles and rockets from as far away as Iran.” An Israel-based professor told Bloomberg the exercise is a sign of deep cooperation between the two countries:

“This drill sends a message that the pressure will continue, and that despite strategic disagreements between Israel and the U.S. the alliance remains strong, particularly with respect to any Iranian effort to retaliate.”

This isn’t the first time Barak has praised the U.S.-Israeli relationship under President Obama. In July, he told CNN:

“I should tell you honestly that this administration under President Obama is doing, in regard to our security, more than anything that I can remember in the past.”

Shimon Peres, Israel’s president, echoed Barak’s comments in July, saying:

“When I look at the record of President Obama concerning the major issues, security, I think it’s a highly satisfactory record, from an Israeli point of view.”

Efraim Halevy, Israel’s former spy agency head, said two weeks go in Washington D.C. that the Israel’s relationship with the U.S. is “very good.” He added, “in the last four years we have had a relationship with the U.S. on the practical issues which are important to Israel; the like of which we have never had with almost any other administration.”

The record-setting exercise and the comments by current and former-high level Israeli officials continue to contradict Mitt Romney’s statement that under President Obama there is “turmoil with Israel.”

In July, President Obama signed a $70 million military aid package to Israel. The money was designated for Israel’s “Iron Dome,” a rocket-defense system. Obama also requested over $3 billion in military aid to Israel in his FY 2013 budget.

While U.S. media coverage today will focus on the impact Hurricane Sandy will have in the states and on the coming election, the storm has already ravaged locations throughout the Caribbean. The majority of the 65 reported deaths came from Haiti, where over fifty were reported killed by rampant flooding.

Rains finally abated there after pummeling the island since Friday:

As the rains stopped and rivers began to recede, authorities were getting a fuller idea of how much damage Sandy brought on Haiti. Bridges collapsed. Banana crops were ruined. Homes were underwater. Officials said the death toll might still rise.

“This is a disaster of major proportions,” Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe told The Associated Press, adding with a touch of hyperbole, “The whole south is under water.”

Tropical storms and hurricanes have so far this year killed more and done greater comparable damage to island nations than they have once reaching the United States. Hurricane Issac, at the time a tropical storm, killed 29 in Haiti in August, compared to six deaths in the U.S. from the same storm system.

These storms can prove more devastating to Haiti and the surrounding states, despite often gaining strength as they move north, due to lower level of infrastructure development and mass deforestation. The amount of trees cleared to use in building shelters, cook-fires, and farm land wipes out natural barriers to flooding and landslides. Adding to the problem, hundreds of thousands of Haitians still live in tents and make-shift shelters as part of the ongoing aftermath of the 2010 earthquake.

While the United States pledged billions to help rebuild Haiti following the earthquake, the effect of what money has been delivered is lacking, and has done little the strengthen the island’s ability to weather hurricanes. Recent cuts of $8 billion dollars to international development funding by Congress is also unlikely to help Haiti and other states’ resilience against natural disasters in the future.

Before the nation even learned the full extent of an attack on a U.S. diplomatic mission in Libya, Republicans raced to politicize this tragedy. GOP presidential candidate Romney released a much maligned — and entirely discredited — statement claiming President Obama “sympathize[d] with those who waged the attacks.” A month later, Romney received an embarrassing live fact check during the second presidential debate after he falsely claimed that the president did not label the attack an “act of terror” the day after it occurred.

Yet, despite the fact that their tin foil theories attacking Obama’s reaction to the Libya attack routinely embarrass the politicians who repeat them, Republicans continue to believe they can score political points off the death of an American ambassador by simply engaging in overheated rhetoric. On CBS’ Face the Nation, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) took this effort to politicize the attacks to a new level, claiming it was “either cover-up or the worst kind of incompetence”, worse even than the scandal that forced President Nixon to resign:

MCCAIN: Also, by the way, he said he immediately ordered action to be taken, no action was taken over seven hours. Now we find out the Secretary of Defense decided not to take any action. You know what, somebody the other day said to me that this is as bad as Watergate. Well, nobody died in Watergate. But this is either a massive cover-up or an incompetence that is not acceptable service to the American people.

Similar statements were made by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich on other shows, all focused on the Defense Department’s supposed inaction. Watch McCain’s interview here:

The new GOP claims of cover-up are part of a long-line of attempts to label the shifting narrative as a policy failure. These latest claims build on a Fox News ‘exclusive’ that the CIA was denied a request to aid in countering the assault, while watching the attack in “real-time.” Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said on Thursday that intelligence on the ground during the assault in Benghazi was not clear enough to warrant sending U.S. forces potentially into harms way.

Yet this new line of attack is unlikely to prove any more grounded in reality than previous ones. Indeed, even former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice tried to hit the brakes on the idea that the Obama Administration reacted improperly to the attack, telling Fox News earlier this week that “it’s probably better to let the relevant bodies do their work” rather than “jump to conclusions about what might have happened here.”

Amos Yadlin, a former high-level Israeli military intelligence official, said in a paper he co-wrote and published yesterday that bilateral negotiations between the United States and Iran would be “a positive development” for Israel. Yadlin’s report comes on the heals of a New York Times report that Iran and the U.S. had agreed to bilateral negotiations on Iran’s nuclear program after the election. The White House and Iran have denied the Times’ report.

Israeli government officials have said they are unaware of any agreement; Michael Oren, Israeli ambassador to the U.S., said “we do not think Iran should be rewarded with direct talks.” But an anonymous “senior Israeli official” told the New York Times that “the Israelis were aware of the effort toward bilateral talks and were open to it.” Another Israeli official, Moshe Ya’alon, told Israeli radio that Israel had “no objections” and knew about the talks in advance.

In the paper, Yadlin and co-author Avner Golov say that negotiations could signify a productive shift in diplomacy with Iran:

“This degree of backpedalling, a complete U-turn from its official policy, is indicative of the effectiveness of the pressure exerted on Iran, and a signal of its capacity to bring about real change in the country’s policy.”

According to Haaretz, Yadlin and Golov say one-on-one talks between Iran and the U.S. would be a welcome alternative to “extreme options that are currently on the table: ‘a[n Iranian] bomb or a [Western or Israeli] bombardment’,” adding, “If the negotiations fail, the argument that all other options have been exhausted will be stronger, and there’s no way to prevent Iran’s nuclearization except a military strike.”

Yadlin, according to Haaretz was from 2006 to 2010: “the national assessor who played a central role in managing the overt and covert campaign against the Iranian uranium enrichment centrifuges in Natanz and Fordow.” In September, Yadlin spoke up for the first time against an early attack on Iran, saying: “They say that time has almost run out, but I say there still is time. The decisive year is not 2012 but 2013. Maybe even early 2014.” Yadlin also added: “I still think we should wait and see whether the heavy sanctions imposed in July 2012 will bring about a change, but up to now the change has not happened.”

Believing that an Iran with a nuclear weapon is a threat, the Obama administration and its European allies have implemented several rounds of crippling sanctions aimed at finding a diplomatic solution. The Congressional Research Service said in an October 15 report that the sanctions could be expected to produce a solution quickly: “Many judge that Iran might soon decide it needs a nuclear compromise to produce an easing of sanctions.” The report also finds that sanctions have resulted in a loss of nearly 1.5 million barrels of oil per day. Oil sales, according to the CRS, “provide about 70% of Iran’s government revenues.” Iran has also watched its currency spiral as a result of sanctions; according to the New York Times, the Iranian rial has “lost 40 percent of its value against the dollar.”

An impassioned plea to halt the politicization of the attack in Benghazi came from surprising quarters this morning. Fox News’s Geraldo Rivera, appearing on Fox and Friends, rattled through several right-wing talking points about what the Obama administration could have and didn’t do during the Sept. 11 assault, debunking each of them.

Rivera was primarily responding to statements just minutes before by Rep. Mike Kelly (R-PA), who sits on the House Government and Oversight Committee. In his remarks, Kelly claimed that the Pentagon was unable or unwilling to respond to the attack, which wound up killing four Americans, despite “real-time” information coming in. Rivera pushed back on Kelly’s claims and the idea that military assets could have made it to Libya in time:

RIVERA: I think we need to stop this politicizing, we’re getting away from the real issue, which is why wasn’t there security before it happened. But these preposterous allegations, reckless allegations, that somebody — They paint a picture of some fat bureaucrat watching TV. You heard him describe it, Congressman Kelly. I think that’s really beyond the pale.

Watch it:

“In terms of the military, stop these politicians” from telling the military what they could have done, Rivera went on. Kelly’s claims centered around a recent idea that the U.S. could have launched a military assault from a base in Europe to counter the attack. Rivera pointed to statements from Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta that indicated that information on the ground was not clear enough to warrant sending U.S. forces into harms way.

Rivera also took flack for agreeing with various Republican Senators that the current political climate was not conducive to holding an investigation into Libya. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has instead scheduled hearings into possible intelligence failures prior to and during the attack for after the election.

The hosts of Fox and Friends were not as willing to acknowledge these facts as Rivera, repeatedly attempting to bring him back on the narrative. At one point Brian Kilmead insisted that the State Department is wrong in not immediately issuing a judgement on precisely what happened in the incident, as “al Qaeda isn’t waiting.” This isn’t the first time that Rivera has gone off the conservative narrative on Libya, with Fox News hosts failing to rein him in.

A U.N. investigative group is set to examine whether the civilian casualties caused by America’s covert targeted killing campaign are violating international law, according to an official at the organization reported by the Guardian.

Ben Emmerson, the U.N. special rapporteur for counterterroism, says his investigation will focus on drone strikes in particular. In Emmerson’s view, the global, indefinite scope of the targeted killing campaign and some of the specific tactics involved may be unlawful under both international human rights law and international humanitarian law:

The [global] war paradigm was always based on the flimsiest of reasoning, and was not supported even by close allies of the US. The first-term Obama administration initially retreated from this approach, but over the past 18 months it has begun to rear its head once again, in briefings by administration officials seeking to provide a legal justification for the drone programme of targeted killing in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia …

[It is] alleged that since President Obama took office at least 50 civilians were killed in follow-up strikes when they had gone to help victims and more than 20 civilians have also been attacked in deliberate strikes on funerals and mourners. Christof Heyns … has described such attacks, if they prove to have happened, as war crimes. I would endorse that view.

The drone strikes have unquestionably killed civilians, but precise estimates are hotly disputed. This is partly as a consequence of the opacity of Obama administration casualty counts, which, among other things, label “all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants.”

The legality of drone strikes is also a subject of heated debate among experts, including those inside the administration. Some maintain that strikes violate the law because they take place outside of formally declared or authorized war zones, but others disagree, arguing that conflict with non-state actors like terrorist organizations should be evaluated by more permissive legal standards than state-to-state warfare. Evaluating these claims is made more difficult by the Obama administration’s refusal to provide a formal, public legal justification.

It is unlikely that Emmerson’s inquiry itself could derail the administration’s commitment to the targeted killing program. Emmerson’s role was established via a mandate of the United Nations Human Rights Council. Founded in 2006, the Council is charged with investigating and reporting on human rights conditions in all 193 of the United Nations’ Member States. Should Emmerson return a negative report on the U.S. drone program, several actions could be taken. By virtue of the Council’s place in the U.N. system, Emmerson could be called upon to present his findings to the full General Assembly. From there, the G.A. could either issue some form of condemnation of the program or call upon the Security Council to take up the issue.

Neither action is likely to cause much of an impact on the U.S.’ program. The General Assembly is only empowered to make non-binding recommendations to its members, leaving any condemnation symbolic. The United States still maintains enough clout in the Assembly to head off any attempt at condemnation. Likewise, sending the matter to the Security Council will have even less of an effect, as the United States holds the power to veto any of the UNSC’s potentially binding decisions.

A recent investigation by the Washington Post also suggests the Obama administration has no plans to scupper the program, but rather plans to institutionalize it into a long-term “disposition matrix” used to decide which terrorism suspects are to be killed or captured. The administration believes targeted killings have been highly effective in degrading al Qaeda’s ability to strike the United States.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations released poll results this week showing that 68 percent of American Muslims support President Obama while just 7 percent support Mitt Romney (1 in 4 remain undecided). These results reflect a new reality for Republicans: American Muslims are rushing toward Democrats. In 2008, 49 percent of Muslim-Americans felt “closer” to Democrats. Now that number has shot up to 66 percent. That’s in contrast to the population as a whole, where Democratic favorability has actually gone down 11 percent.

It’s only recently that the numbers shifted. In 1992, a majority of American Muslims voted for George H.W. Bush. While Bill Clinton won the American Muslim vote in 1996, Muslims continued to trend toward Republicans for the next several years. Mother Jones’ Tim Murphy wrote about a moment in 2000 when a Muslim American political action committee endorsed a Republican:

“The new political action committee spurred voter registration drives and candidate forums, and served as a portal for fundraising efforts; it ultimately endorsed Bush, after securing key promises on the use of secret evidence in deportation cases and racial profiling. After the election, CAIR trumpeted the role of Muslim–Americans in the Republican victory. According to an informal survey of the group’s membership, 72 percent of Florida Muslims had cast their votes for Bush.”

What could account for the shift? Throughout the last 10-years, anti-Muslim sentiment among the right wing and the Republican Party has proliferated significantly. In the background is a vast and well-funded Islamophobia network providing the anti-Islam intellectual framework that trickles its way to mainstream right-wing politicians, as documented in a CAP report last year titled “Fear, Inc,“:

[T]his core group of deeply intertwined individuals and organizations manufacture and exaggerate threats of “creeping Sharia,” Islamic domination of the West, and purported obligatory calls to violence against all non-Muslims by the Quran.

This network of hate is not a new presence in the United States. Indeed, its ability to organize, coordinate, and disseminate its ideology through grassroots organizations increased dramatically over the past 10 years. Furthermore, its ability to influence politicians’ talking points and wedge issues for the upcoming 2012 elections has mainstreamed what was once considered fringe, extremist rhetoric.

There are many examples of the Islamophobia network’s influence on mainstream American politics. For example, in 2007, Mitt Romney said that he would not select a Muslim to serve in his Presidential cabinet (a statement he later denied). Four years later, in 2011, Rep. Peter King (R-NY) held an over-the-top congressional hearing about the “Radicalization of American Muslims.” At the state level, over the past two years Republican-controlled legislatures in several states including Kansas and Oklahoma tried to legislate Islamophobia, passing bans on Sharia law.

Politicians like Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) have taken things further: Bachmann recently led an anti-Muslim witch-hunt alleging that the Muslim Brotherhood had made a “deep penetration in the halls of our United States government.” Bachmann went on to claim that a top Hillary Clinton aide had ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. Joe Walsh, a Republican congressman from Illinois, said earlier this year that: “there is a radical strain of Islam in this country — it’s not just over there — trying to kill Americans every week.”

However, it’s important to note that not all Republicans have gone King and Bachmann’s route. “This Sharia law business is crap,” GOP New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has said. “It’s just crazy. And I’m tired of dealing with the crazies.” In August, Christie referred to Islamophobic conservatives as “bigots.” “I’ll tell you that there is a gaze of intolerance that is going around our country that is disturbing to me,” he said.

Ami Ayalon, the former chief of Israel’s domestic security organization, Shin Bet, argued that threatening an attack on Iran is not in Israel’s best interest. Specifically, Ayalon took issue with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s militaristic rhetoric toward the Islamic Republic. Speaking in London, Ayalon said “Mr. Netanyahu has been playing the role of irresponsible player in the region. That raises the questions: Does he mean it? And what is the price?”

Later in his interview, Ayalon mentioned that Netanyahu’s tough talk could harm one important aspect of Israel’s interests: the idea of nuclear ambiguity, which refers to Israel’s likely but not acknowledged nuclear weapons program. Ayalon said Netanyahu’s Iran policy jeopardized it: “The world won’t let you have nuclear ambiguity if you act crazy.”

But Ayalon joins a long list of former Israeli defense officials issuing caution about a military approach to Iran. The list includes former Mossad chiefs Meir Dagan and Efraim Halevy, who have each given several rounds of interviews urging diplomacy on the Iran issue. Dagan said on 60 minutes earlier this year that an attack on Iran “would galvanize Iranian society behind the leadership and create unity around the nuclear issue.” Some of these officials have raised similar concerns about Mitt Romney’s Iran policy. In an interview with Al-Monitor, Halevy said, “What Romney is doing is mortally destroying any chance of a resolution without war. Therefore when [he recently] said, he doesn’t think there should be a war with Iran, this does not ring true. It is not consistent with other things he has said.”

Former Israeli defense officials have also praised the Obama administration’s approach, arguing that sanctions enforced by the administration and its European allies have been effective. Last week in Washington, D.C., Halevy said it’s not time for a strike on Iran, and urged diplomacy by adding: “Sanctions, more sanctions, more sanctions and many other things. … The fact of the matter is the sanctions have not brought the end to the program but sanctions are hurting very much.”

During Monday’s presidential foreign policy debate, Romney adopted a position that sanctions enforced by President Obama have “worked” and were “absolutely the right thing to do.” He said he would only consider a strike on Iran “if all of the other avenues had been — had been tried to their full extent.” But that statement stands in contrast to Romney’s usual rhetoric on Iran. Just months earlier, Romney said: “Nothing in my view is as serious a failure as [President Obama's] failure to deal with Iran appropriately. This president — this president should have put in place crippling sanctions against Iran, he did not.” In September, Romney moved up his threshold for military action against Iran to a “nuclear weapons capability” — which some have said Iran already has — as compared to the president’s suggestion of making the decision, or “break out,” to build a bomb his so-called “red line.”

Believing that an Iran with a nuclear weapon is a threat, the Obama administration is set on finding a diplomatic solution to the Iranian nuclear crisis. The sanctions have had a severe impact on Iran’s economy. U.S., Israeli and U.N. officials have repeatedly pointed out that Iran has not yet decided to pursue a nuclear weapon.