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.

Former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice broke with the majority of her party last night on Fox News, as she tried to hit the brakes on the right wing’s politicization of the recent attack in Libya.

Host Greta Van Susteren asked Rice directly and repeatedly about a set of emails uncovered by Reuters. In what has been dubbed “Benghazi-Gate,” the conservative media has jumped on the emails as definitive proof that the Obama administration has been lying about what it knew and when in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attack on a diplomatic mission in Benghazi. Rice’s response was likely not what Van Susteren expected:

RICE: But when things are unfolding very, very quickly, it’s not always easy to know what is really going on on the ground. And to my mind, the really important questions here are about how information was collected. Did the various agencies really coordinate and share intelligence in the way that we had hoped, with the reforms that were made after 9/11?

So there’s a big picture to be examined here. But we don’t have all of the pieces, and I think it’s easy to try and jump to conclusions about what might have happened here. It’s probably better to let the relevant bodies do their work.

Watch Rice’s full interview here:

Throughout the interview, Rice highlighted the difficulty that comes in a “fog of war” situation, with multiple stories coming in which need to be processed and verified. Her statements strongly align with the evolution of the Obama administration’s understanding of what happened in Benghazi. Rice also joined current Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in dismissing the big picture importance of the emails from the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli, as a small portion of the overall communication between the mission and the State Department.

With her reasoned response, Rice stands apart from other former Bush administration officials, including former United Nations Ambassador John Bolton and former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Both Rumsfeld and Bolton have repeatedly insisted that the Obama administration has performed a cover-up of the events in Benghazi.

Less than a day after conservatives definitively called a set of emails from the State Department hard evidence that the Obama administration misled the public over the Sept. attack against a U.S. diplomatic mission in Libya, the accuracy of the emails’ content is coming under scrutiny.

While many on the right have labeled the email, which says that the Ansar al-Sharia militia had claimed credit for the assault in Benghazi on Facebook and Twitter, as a
“smoking gun,” the truth may be more complex than that. Aaron Zelin, Richard Borow fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, extensively tracks jihadist groups’ presence on the Internet. In an interview with CNN, Zelin indicated that he’s seen no evidence that backs up the email’s claim that Ansar al-Sharia had taken responsibility for the attack:

Zelin, who said his RSS feed sends him any new statement from the group, provided CNN with a copy of [his RSS] feed. It shows no Facebook update between September 8 and September 12, when a posting late that afternoon first referenced the attack. Zelin notes that the posting referred to a news conference the group had held earlier that day in Benghazi in which it denied any role in the assault on the consulate, while sympathizing with the attackers.

Accompanying a posting of the news conference on YouTube, a commentary says that the attack on the consulate was “a wave of rage for Allah and his Prophet, it came from the Muslim youths.”

The posting continues: “Ansar al-Sharia brigade did not officially participate as a military body, nor received any orders directed from the brigade.”

According to Zelin, the militia’s Twitter feed likewise did not display any posts between Sept. 8-12. He has also stated via his own Twitter account that there have been instances in the past where posts deleted on social media sites have been captured by his RSS. While there is also a group known as Ansar al-Sharia based out of the Libyan city of Derna, they maintain no social media presence whatsoever.

Zelin’s evidence calls into question the accuracy of the State Department’s initial email, and leaves unanswered the question of what the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli saw to tell State that it had seen claims of responsibility. In any event, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton yesterday dismissed the claim that such a Facebook post would count as a new facet to the investigation, as “[p]osting something on Facebook is not in and of itself evidence.”

The new doubts raise once more the issue of how clouded the initial indications coming out of Benghazi were at the time of the attack. The right-wing argument from Sept. 19 on has been one that finds the idea of an attack being precipitated by an anti-Islamic video and being a terrorist attack as being mutually exclusive. Likewise, it depicts any change in the official story from the Obama administration as being due to intentional misleading. However, as we’ve seen in recent weeks, the GOP narrative over-simplifies the highly complicated procedure of analyzing intelligence.

Former Secretary of State Gen. Colin Powell endorsed President Obama’s re-election campaign this morning on CBS This Morning. Powell — who served as the top U.S. diplomat during the Bush administration — said the president would be better on the economy but he also had harsh criticism of Mitt Romney’s foreign policy, reiterating his concern about Romney’s neocon advisers and that the GOP presidential nominee essentially threw out all his past hawkish positions and played a moderate during this week’s foreign policy debate:

POWELL: Not only am I uncomfortable with what Governor Romney is proposing for his economic plan, I have concerns about his views on foreign policy. The governor who was speaking on Monday night at the debate was saying things that were quite different from what he said earlier so I’m not quite sure which governor Romney we would be getting with respect to foreign policy.

O’DONNELL: What concerns do you have with governor Romney’s foreign policy?

POWELL: Well it’s hard to fix it, I mean it’s a moving target, one day he has a certain strong view about staying in Afghanistan but then on Monday night he agrees with the withdrawal, the same thing in Iraq and almost every issue that was discussed on Monday night, governor Romney agreed with the president with some nuances but this is quite a different set of foreign policy views than he had earlier in the campaign and my concern which I’ve expressed previously in a public way is that sometimes I don’t sense he has thought through these issues as thoroughly as he should have and he gets advice from his campaign staff that he then has to adjust or modify as they go along.

ROSE: Are you concerned about the people that are advising governor Romney?

POWELL: I think there are some very very strong neoconservative views that are presented by the governor that I have some trouble with.

Watch the clip:

Back in May, Powell took issue with Romney’s characterization of Russia as America’s “number one geopolitical foe.” “Come on Mitt,” Powell said, “think.” The former Secretary of State also said at the time that he was concerned with who is advising Romney on foreign policy. “I’ve seen some of the names and some of them are quite far to the right and sometimes I think they might be in a position to make judgements or recommendations to the candidate that should get a second thought,” he said.

But Powell noticed the obvious during the presidential foreign policy debate this week. The Mitt Romney whose “instinct is to call to the Cheney-ites” on foreign policy issues was nowhere to be found. “Despite Romney’s momentary embrace of President Obama’s policies [during the debate],” CAP’s Matt Duss wrote this week, “we should still be concerned with the role that neoconservatives would play in a Romney administration.”