The New York Police Department used a 19-year-old paid informant to infiltrate New York’s Muslim community and then spy on it and entice individuals into criminal acts, according to a painstaking review of related evidence by the Associated Press. The activites in question:

Shamiur Rahman, a 19-year-old American of Bengali descent who has now denounced his work as an informant, said police told him to embrace a strategy called “create and capture.” He said it involved creating a conversation about jihad or terrorism, then capturing the response to send to the NYPD. For his work, he earned as much as $1,000 a month and goodwill from the police after a string of minor marijuana arrests. ….

Rahman said he received little training and spied on “everything and anyone.” He took pictures inside the many mosques he visited and eavesdropped on imams. By his own measure, he said he was very good at his job and his handler never once told him he was collecting too much, no matter whom he was spying on.

The story is written by Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman, two of the lead reporters in the AP’s Pulitzer-prize winning expose on NYPD surveillance of Muslims. The AP’s earlier work found that the NYPD created lists of devout Muslims to watch, treated name changes as worthy of investigation, and snuck informants into mosques. This program may have broken the law and yielded no leads or cases.

In 2005, Mitt Romney supported stepped up surveillance of mosques along similar lines. GOP members of Congress today accuse top Muslim White House aides of disloyalty and candidates compete over who can be more Islamophobic. Islamophobic incidents in the United States hit an all-time high this year.

Conservative blogs and news media are all buzzing about a team of international election monitors coming to observe the presidential elections in November. The observers are arriving at the invitation of the State Department and the behest of a number of civil rights organizations, including the NAACP, ACLU, and others.

The latter groups’ call for an international team to keep an eye on the U.S. elections focuses particularly on states that have enacted strict voter I.D. laws and other curtailing of voting rights. An NAACP delegation visited the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, Switzerland in September to bring attention to the issue. The NAACP’s move, and the idea of foreign presence in the U.S. to observe elections, has infuriated many on the right.

The response at the state-level is varying. Alabama Speaker of the House Mike Hubbard is, in protest of the monitors’ presence preparing legislation to have all poll watchers in Alabama hold U.S. citizenship. “It’s bad enough that Alabama remains trapped under the provisions of the Voting Rights Act,” Hubbard said “So we certainly don’t need anyone from the United Nations coming into our state and meddling in our elections, as well.”

Catherine Engelbrecht of True the Vote appeared on Fox News on Monday claiming that the monitors’ presence was actually intended to prevent and discourage U.S. voters from exercising their rights. Fox’s Megyn Kelly readily agreed, stressing the left-leaning nature of the civil rights groups, seemingly unaware of the State Department’s role in inviting the monitors. It’s worth mentioning that True the Vote, itself a Tea Party group voter suppression effort, is currently under investigation for possible criminal conspiracy. Watch the full interview here:

What none of these commentators mention is that this is neither an unprecedented event nor particularly worrisome. The Organization for Security and Cooperation (OSCE) is a group of over fifty countries in North America, Europe, and Central Asia committed to security and strengthening democracy. Counter to many of the exclamatory statements by the right-wing, the OSCE is not a part of the United Nations, but instead is loosely affiliated with the global organization.

According to the 1990 Copenhagen Document, which the U.S. has signed, all member states of the OSCE are called upon to accept monitors to observe their elections. As a founding member, the U.S. has taken part in dozens of observer missions over the years. In allowing observers into the country, the United States is preventing setting a precedent for other, less democratic states, to ban these monitors.
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During last night’s final presidential debate, Governor Mitt Romney repeated a goal listed on his website: to have Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad charged with promoting genocide. The statement, intended to illustrate how much tougher Romney would be in confronting Iran over its nuclear program, instead shows several ways in which he and his campaign team neither understand the political structure of Iran nor the international justice system.

Romney was clear last night about the steps he would take diplomatically to ensure Iran’s isolation, saving his harshest terms for Ahmadinejad:

ROMNEY: Secondly, I’d take on diplomatic isolation efforts. I’d make sure that Ahmadinejad is indicted under the Genocide Convention. His words amount to genocide incitation. I would indict him for it. I would also make sure that their diplomats are treated like the pariah they are around the world. The same way we treated the apartheid diplomats of South Africa.

When asked after the debate about Romney’s genocide declaration, his advisers suggested that Ahmadinejad could be tried at the “World Court“:

According to Romney senior adviser Eric Fehrnstrom, successfully indicting Ahmadinejad would be more than just a symbolic victory.

“I think it would remove probably one of the most anti-Jewish, anti-Israel, pro-genocide members of that regime in Tehran,” he told TPM after the debate. As to whether he would actually be arrested: “I’m hoping that he would be indicted and that action would unfold following that indictment. Absolutely.”

The Romney team seems discouragingly uninformed when it comes to international law, which their candidate reflected on stage. The World Court, another name for the International Court of Justice, was founded as part of the United Nations in 1945, with its headquarters in the Hague. A continuation of the Permanent Court of International Justice under the League of Nations, the ICJ settles legal disputes between states on matters such as border disputes and the use of force. Unfortunately for the Romney team, the ICJ only tries states, not individuals like Ahmadinejad.

What the campaign could have been referring to instead is the International Criminal Court, created in 2002 for just such a purpose. Its founding document, the Rome Statute, does indeed cover incitement of genocide as one of the crimes against humanity that it is able to hear. An indictment of a sitting President, such as that of Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir in 2009, could take place under the Rome Statute, or the 1948 Genocide Convention as Romney seems to wish.

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If you didn’t know better, you would think at times in the third and final debate that Governor Mitt Romney was actually an Obama campaign surrogate. For someone who once said, “This is the first time we’ve had a president that doesn’t have a foreign policy,” Romney agreed in part or in totality with an astonishing number of the President’s policies.

“I don’t blame the administration for the fact that the relationship with Pakistan is strained,” Romney said, later adding that “the president was right to up the usage” of drones.

From Iran to Afghanistan to China, Romney attempted to swing to a much more moderate position on many of the foreign policies under debate and in doing so, put himself in conflict with his previous statements:

AL QAEDA

ROMNEY NOW: We’re going to have to recognize that we have to do as the president has done. I congratulate him on taking out Osama bin Laden and going after the leadership in al-Qaeda.

ROMNEY THEN: “I do not concur in the words of Barack Obama in a plan to enter an ally of ours [Pakistan]” to get bin Laden. [8/06/2007]

IRAN

ROMNEY NOW: I laid out seven steps, crippling sanctions were number one. And they do work. You’re seeing it right now in the economy. It’s absolutely the right thing to do, to have crippling sanctions. I would have put them in place earlier. But it’s good that we have them.

ROMNEY THEN: But 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. [02/22/2012]

AFGHANISTAN

ROMNEY NOW: We’ve seen progress over the past several years. The surge has been successful and the training program is proceeding apace. There are now a large number of Afghan Security Forces, 350,000 that are ready to step in to provide security and we’re going to be able to make that transition by the end of 2014.

ROMNEY THEN: I stand with the commanders in this regard and have no information that suggests that pulling our troops out faster than that would do anything but put at — at great peril the extraordinary sacrifice that’s been made. This is not time for America to cut and run. [11/22/2011]

CHINA

ROMNEY NOW: We can be a partner with China. We don’t have to be an adversary in any way, shape or form. We can work with them, we can collaborate with them, if they’re willing to be responsible.

ROMNEY THEN: [W]e should not fail to recognize that a China that is a prosperous tyranny will increasingly pose problems for us, for its neighbors, and for the entire world. [2/16/12]

During last night’s debate, Romney “had little coherent to say and often sounded completely lost,” a New York Times editorial noted this morning. “That’s because he has no original ideas of substance on most world issues. … Mr. Romney’s problem is that he does not actually have any real ideas on foreign policy beyond what President Obama has already done, or plans to do.”

Republican vice presidential nominee Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) said in an interview that aired on CBS this morning that Mitt Romney would agree to one-on-one talks with Iran over its nuclear program.

The issue came to the forefront this week after the New York Times reported on Saturday that the Obama administration has agreed in principle to bilateral negotiations with the Iranians (the White House denied the report). Romney and his top aides repeatedly dodged questions from reporters asking if a President Romney would meet one-on-one with the Iranians. But it doesn’t appear that Ryan got the script:

O’DONNELL: What is your position on one-on-one negotiations with Iran. Do you see a scenario where that could ever happen?

RYAN: Sure. Look, we’ve always said that we’re willing to talk but we’re not willing take off sanctions. We’re not going to lessen anything. We’re not going to give any kind of talk, whether they’re multilateral or whether they’re bilateral as an excuse to delay sanctions. We’ve got to keep pushing sanctions. We’ve got to have harder sanctions, we have to do all the lists of the things that governor Romney said and if they want to talk that’s fine but we’re not going to cease or put any kind of temporary hold on any kinds of sanctions as a condition of talking. No preconditions but if they want to talk that is perfectly fine.

So will he or won’t he? It’s unlikely that Romney or his advisers will give a definitive answer. The Romney campaign’s strategy, it seems, is to try to paint their candidate in the best light possible on foreign policy (i.e. Romney’s debate performance last night in which he came off as a reasonable moderate), yet at the same time placate the neocon base — and indeed Romney’s own team of Bush administration holdovers — by keeping the option open for war with Iran. But the reality is that if you pull back the curtain, a President Romney’s foreign policy wouldn’t be much different from George W. Bush’s.