New ads went up yesterday in New York City’s subway system to counter controversial anti-Muslim ads paid for by Pamela Geller’s American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI) that referred to Muslims as “savages.” United Methodist Women announced their ad campaign Sept. 25 press conference of the Interfaith Center of New York.

The counter-ads — which read “Hate speech is not civilized. Support peace in word and deed” on a simple green background — will be running in subway stations throughout Manhattan at all ten of the locations where AFDI ads are currently running. United Methodist Women’s Facebook page has posted photos:

Previously, others had plastered “Hate Speech” and “Racist” stickers on AFDI’s ads.

United Methodist Women’s General Secretary Harriet J. Olson said at the group’s ad campaign unveiling:

“United Methodist Women recognizes that women have always been the most significant victims of violence,” Ms. Olson said, acknowledging hate speech as a form of violence. Because of that, she said, “We have a particular incentive to work toward peace.”

Ms. Olson said United Methodists support and respect the use of faith toward peaceful goals.

“Religions of the world should invest in the work for peace,” she said. “Peace comes because we work for it. Women know that the best.”

The counter-ads will run for as long as Pamela Geller’s ads do. AFDI also ran its campaign in San Fransisco and may be coming to Washington, D.C. in the near future. United Methodist Women is already preparing to run counter-ads in the nation’s capital, possibly in partnership with local social justice campaign, Sojourners.

United Methodist Women is also running a social media campaign through Facebook and Twitter, inviting those interested to spread awareness of their message by attaching a “Twibbon” to their avatar and use the hashtag #mysubwayad.

Eleven Russian nationals have been indicted in U.S. District Court for being part of a false-front operation to procure sensitive microelectronics for Russian military and state security agency use. The Department of Justice is charging that the Russian company APEX, Ltd. worked through a Houston-based front company, ARC, Inc. to illegally export these U.S.-made components to Russia. The court documents show several instances of APEX falsifying reports to circumvent U.S. customs.

APEX is the owner of several subsidiary companies within Russia and its clientele includes the Russian Ministry of Defense, to which it is a certified supplier of electronics, and the FSB, the domestic intelligence agency that replaced the KGB. To aid in their deception, APEX allegedly ordered several of its employees to delete from its webpage images of missiles and other military equipment and references to the company’s ties to the Russian military.

APEX is charged with circumventing both the International Emergency Economic Powers Act and the Arms Export Control Act. These laws require providing notification of “end user information” and “end use information,” or just who will be the entity actually utilizing the parts in question and how. The Justice Department says in a press release on the case:

[T]he defendants went to great lengths to conceal their procurement activities for the Russian military. For example, on one occasion, defendants Posobilov and Yuri Savin, the Director of Marketing at another Russian procurement firm, discussed how best to conceal the fact that certain goods Savin had purchased from Arc were intended for the Russian military. Savin asked Posobilov, “What can we do if a client is military all over?” Posobilov replied, “We can’t be the ones making things up. You should be the ones.” Similarly, on another occasion defendant Fishenko directed a Russian procurement company that, when the company provided false end user information, to “make it up pretty, correctly, and make sure it looks good.” On yet another occasion, Posobilov instructed a Russian procurement company to “make sure that” the end use certificate indicated “fishing boats, and not fishing/anti-submarine ones … Then we’ll be able to start working.”

Among the items that the defendants are alleged to have smuggled include analog-to-digital converters, digital signal processors, micro-controllers, static random access memory chips, and field programmable gate arrays. None of these items are in themselves illegal to own or sell. However, their export is strictly controlled by the Department of Commerce in light of their application in such equipment as radar and sonar, weapons targeting systems and detonation triggers. As part of their case against APEX, Justice cites an FBI-acquired letter from the FSB to an APEX-affiliate stating that received “microchips were faulty, and demanded that the defendants supply replacement parts.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin is in the middle of an ongoing crackdown against opposition leaders and democracy activists in the country. Among the tools Putin uses is the FSB, which has recently been empowered through a series of amendments to the Russian constitution to take action against almost anything it deems to be a threat to the state, including pro-democracy protestors. The FSB linkage, paired with Russia’s continuing support of and export of arms to the Syrian government, highlights the importance of shutting down this ring’s exports. (HT: Colin Freeze)

Protests have flared up in Tehran after two days of collapse of the Iranian rial in the currency market. International sanctions on Iranian banks and oil have caused the rial to plummet 18 percent against the U.S. dollar on Monday and hit a record low of 37,500 rial to the U.S. dollar on Tuesday.

Government reaction to these protests has varied since they began with initial reports indicating that the main bazaar in Tehran, where protests have been centered, was closed for security reasons. Mehr, the semi-official news agency in Iran, later reported that the bazaar was open and that action would be taken against shopkeepers who closed their shops. In either case, protestors have been due to “enemies” and that international sanctions would not bully Iran into giving up its nuclear program.

Several camera phone videos of the protests have been added to YouTube. In this video, according to a rough translation to English from Farsi, the protestors can be heard chanting “Support Support Dear Bazari! Close shop! Close shop! Let’s go! Let’s go!”:

Alireza Nader, senior analyst at RAND Corporation, says of the protests, “This is an indication that sanctions are working in the sense that they have increased pressure on the regime. If anything, this shows that a military confrontation with Iran, at this point, would be highly counter-productive.”

Last week, New York Times reporter Charlie Savage unearthed an internal Romney campaign memo advising the candidate to bring back Bush-era “enhanced interrogation techniques” if elected. Though the memo notes that “it is difficult to point to concrete ways in which the Obama Administration’s renunciation of enhanced interrogation techniques has undermined America’s effort in the fight against terrorism,” it recommends a President Romney “pledge” to “rescind President Obama’s executive order restricting government interrogators” from torturing detainees.

This Wednesday, Jack Goldsmith, the head of the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) under President George W. Bush, concluded that any return to the use of torture or any other so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” would be both “indisputably illegal” and strongly opposed by the interrogators who would be tasked with the torturing. Goldsmith, a prominent right-wing legal mind who focuses on terrorism and the law, wrote that a Romney administration would likely not rescind Obama’s torture ban for these reasons (among others):

As a result of the many wrenching investigations (some still ongoing) and other consequences of its interrogation experiences during the last decade, I think the CIA (and DOD, and the rest of the intelligence community) would firmly resist any resumption of official responsibilities for interrogation techniques that departed a lot from the current settlement. Third, I think the likelihood of a return to waterboarding and other extreme interrogation techniques is — despite polls and Romney campaign statements – nill. There are many reasons for this, including bureaucratic resistance, but the main one is that such techniques are now indisputably illegal, and I do not believe that both Houses of Congress would vote to wind back the protections of the Detainee Treatment Act and common Article 3 of the Geneva Convention.

Since the central argument in the memo for rescinding Obama’s executive order is that Bush-era torture was effective (contra the expert consensus), Goldsmith’s analysis implies one of two things: Romney’s lawyers are advising him to condone “indisputably illegal” behavior or they don’t really mean what they say in the memo.

One of Romney’s key advisers on terrorism-related issues is Michael Hayden, a Bush CIA and NSA director who remains a staunch defender of the previous administration’s torture policies.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi on Tuesday shot back at Republicans criticizing the Obama administration after the fallout of the Libya Consulate attacks, pointing out that they withheld hundreds of millions of dollars the State Department had asked for last year for embassy security and construction.

House Republicans wrote to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton suggesting that the Obama administration was negligent in providing security for the consulate in Benghazi where four U.S. diplomats were killed in an attack on Sept. 11 and asked Clinton for more information. Noting that the investigation into what happened is still ongoing, Pelosi, in an interview with CNN, asked, “how can you ask the secretary to come before the information is known?”

The Minority Leader then pointed out that it was Republicans who may have some responsibility in the matter, as they turned down the administration’s request for nearly $300 million for embassy security:

PELOSI: It’s also important to note that the Republican appropriation in Congress gave the administration $300 million less than it asked for for the State Department, including funding for security.

BLITZER: Are you suggesting that there was a financial aspect to what happened in Benghazi, Libya. That the U.S. was not enough money to protect American diplomats?

PELOSI: No what I’m saying is Congress has the right of oversight but it also has the power of the purse. … We also have to look to ourselves for that funding question. $300 million less than what the administration asked for.

Watch the clip:

CAP senior fellow and budget expert Scott Lilly noted last month that in the last two years, Congress has cut the Obama administration’s request for funding to increase diplomatic staffing and boost embassy security:

[E]ven more inexcusable are the repeated and deep cuts made to embassy security and construction. Thousands of our diplomatic personnel are serving overseas in facilities that do not come close to meeting the minimal requirements for security established by the so-called Inman commission’s report on overseas diplomatic security to President Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state more than two decades ago.

Nor is it likely to change anytime soon. In the 2011 continuing resolution, Congress, at the insistence of the House of Representatives, slashed the president’s request for embassy security and construction and forced another cut in fiscal year 2012. Altogether Congress has eliminated $296 million from embassy security and construction in the last two years with additional cuts in other State Department security accounts.

Lilly notes that more funding cuts for the U.S. Foreign Service are set to come under the sequestration required under the Budget Control Act. “Those cuts are largely the result of the draconian and unrealistically low budget caps placed by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) on all discretionary spending,” Lilly said.