The “whistleblowers” at today’s House Oversight Committee hearing on what really happened in Benghazi, Libya last September were supposed to break the dam that would lead to President Obama’s eventual downfall, in the eyes of conservatives. Instead, these witness actually served to debunk several theories that the right-wing has pushed on Benghazi, leaving the hearing a fizzle for the GOP:

1. F-16s could have been sent to Benghazi

Part of the prevailing theory surrounding the events the night of the Benghazi attacks is that the Obama administration did not do enough militarily to respond to the crisis. Gregory Hicks — a Foreign Service Officer and the former Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Libya — claimed during his pre-hearing testimony that fighter jets could have been flown over Benghazi, preventing the second wave of the attack from occurring.

Ranking Member Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) questioned that statement, asking Hicks whether he disagreed with Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff Gen Martin Dempsey’s assessment that no air assets were in range the night of the attack. Hicks didn’t disagree, saying he was “speaking from [his] perspective” and what “veteran Libyan revolutionaries” told him, rather than Pentagon assessments.

2. Hillary Clinton signed cables denying additional security to Benghazi

House Republicans came to the conclusion in their interim report on Benghazi that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton lied to them about what she knew and when during her testimony this January. This includes her statement that at no time was she aware of requests for additional security at the diplomatic facility in Benghazi prior to the attack.

Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) used her time to take issue with this claim, asking all three witnesses about standard protocol for cables leaving the State Department. All three agreed with Maloney, that the Secretary of State’s name is placed at the bottom of all outgoing cables and telegrams from Foggy Bottom, whether the Secretary has viewed them or not, shooting down the GOP claim.

3. A Special Forces Team that could have saved lives was told to stand down

One of the most shocking reveals in the lead-up to today’s hearing was that a team of Special Forces in Tripoli were told not to deploy to Benghazi during the attack. That decision has led to an uproar on the right, including claims of dereliction of duty towards Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey for not taking actions that could have saved lives.

During questioning, Hicks confirmed that the team was ready to be deployed — not to join the fighting at the CIA annex — but “to secure the airport for the withdrawal of our personnel from Benghazi after the mortar attack.” Hicks also confirmed that it was the second such team to be readied for deployment, with the first having proceeded to Benghazi earlier. Despite the second team not deploying, the staff was all evacuated first to Tripoli, then to Germany, within 18 hours of the attack taking place.
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The co-chair of the State Department’s Accountability Review Board on the Benghazi terror attacks last year said on Wednesday criticized those claiming the Obama administration’s response to the attacks has the elements of some kind of Watergate-style cover-up.

“I think the notion of a quote, cover up, has all the elements of Pulitzer Prize fiction attached to it,” former Ambassador Thomas Pickering said on MSNBC. He also rebutted claims that the review board tried to protect former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton from scrutiny:

PICKERING: I saw no evidence of it. She did publicly take responsibility for what happened below her and indeed one of the things the Congress did in preparing the legislation that established the Accountability Review Board was to say we don’t want a situation where heads of agencies take responsibility and then nobody who made the decision in the chain has to suffer any consequences for failure for performance. I believe in fact the Accountability Review Board did it’s work well. I think the notion of a quote, cover up, has all the elements of Pulitzer Prize fiction attached to it.

Watch the clip:

Pickering wanted to testify at today’s House Oversight Committee hearings on the Benghazi attacks, which was billed as letting State Department officials expose an Obama administration cover-up of wrong-doing in handing the aftermath of the attacks. “I am willing to testify,” Pickering said. “I made that clear yesterday and the White House I understand made that clear to [Committee chair Rep. Darrell] Issa [R-CA]. He declined. I don’t know the reasons for that.” Pickering also countered claims that the military could have done more to respond to the attacks:

PICKERING: The aircraft at Aviano were 2 to 3 hours away but there were no refueling aircraft available. I think that speaks for itself. It has all along. I don’t see any contradiction. … There should be no controversy over that. Aircraft were there but they were not available in a time span that could have made any serious difference in connection with the issue.

Earlier on Wednesday, Republican Senator Bob Corker (R-TN) shot down his colleagues’ conspiracy theory laden claims about the Obama administration and Benghazi. “We need to know were these people culpable or not. If they were, why are they still on the payroll? Other than that, I’ve been able to read all the cables. I’ve seen the films,” Corker said. “I feel like I know what happened in Benghazi. I’m fairly satisfied.”

Republicans are touting today’s House Oversight Committee hearing as a potential final nail in the coffin of the Obama administration’s continuing cover-up of what really happened the night a diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya was attacked last September. In truth, the event is sure to be a rehash of previously debunked finger-pointing and yet another round of political posturing surrounding the tragic death of four Americans.

The GOP’s star witness at today’s hearings is the former Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Libya, Gregory Hicks, who the right-wing has labeled the main Benghazi “whistle-blower.” Hicks is expected to give testimony before the panel detailing what he believes could have done above and beyond the efforts the administration expended the night of the attack, actions he claims could have saved lives:

“If we had been able to scramble a fighter or aircraft or two over Benghazi as quickly as possible after the attack commenced, I believe there would not have been a mortar attack on the annex in the morning because I believe the Libyans would have split,” Hicks told House Republican investigators.

Hicks is also expected to explain to the panel that a team of special operations forces was told not to fly from Tripoli to Benghazi prior to the second wave of the attack. According to an excerpt of Hicks’ testimony “[Col. Gibson] got a phone call from SOCAFRICA which said, ‘you can’t go now, you don’t have the authority to go now.’ And so they missed the flight … They were told not to board the flight, so they missed it.”

Republicans are latching onto Hicks’ testimony about the lack of military response during the attack as evidence of the administration’s negligence in protecting diplomats overseas and a resulting cover-up to avoid scrutiny. “We were certainly misled at every step of the way,” Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), one of the loudest voices on Benghazi, said on Monday to a surprisingly skeptical panel on Fox News.

The military has repeatedly said, however, that there were simply no air assets close enough to Benghazi that would have arrived in time to make a difference. Hicks himself admitted during his pre-hearing testimony that the nearest fighter jets were at Aviano Air Base in southern Italy, hours away from Libya with no tanker assets available for refueling purposes.

And while Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) during the Senate’s last hearing on the military’s response to Benghazi scolded the Pentagon for not having assets available at the Souda Bay naval base in Crete, Greece, the fact remains that even the hour and a half from the island to Benghazi would have been too late to save Ambassador J. Christopher Stephens and communications specialist Sean Smith. Both died during the first wave of the attack, less than an hour after the Pentagon was first notified.

Likewise, despite what Fox News reports have said, U.S. forces based in Europe as part of U.S. Africa Command would not have arrived until after the second wave of attacks, which took place at the CIA annex in Benghazi hours after the first, had finished.

“The United States military, as I’ve said, is not and frankly should not be a 911 service, arriving on the scene within minutes to every possible contingency around the world,” then-Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta told the Senate Armed Services committee in February. That hasn’t stopped conservatives from railing against the lack of cavalry riding into Benghazi at the last minute, which in turn ignores the valiant efforts from the CIA’s response team that saved lives the night of the attack.
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According to security researchers at Umbrella Labs, war torn Syria effectively went offline today:

“At around 18:45 UTC OpenDNS resolvers saw a significant drop in traffic from Syria. On closer inspection it seems Syria has largely disappeared from the Internet.“

Here’s the illustration from Umbrella Labs:

While the cause is unclear, internet outages in Syria have come at tactically significant times for the Assad regime in the past. Last November 92 percent of web traffic went offline as the regime was rumored to be mixing chemical weapon components, and 78 percent of traffic went offline in January when Assad gave a rare public address.

Today’s outage makes it even harder to know what exactly is going on in Syria because much of the outreach and organization by rebel forces relied on the internet, such as Youtube videos.

President Obama’s renewed calls to close the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba are already being met with promises of further stonewalling from Republicans in Congress, before a new plan can even be put forward.

It’s not new that Republicans oppose the idea that closing a prison that has been for years now a symbol of U.S. disregard for human rights would be in the interests of the United States, having blocked administration proposals several times. And now, Republicans are already shooting down Obama’s renewed push, mostly based on previous proposals to transport detainees to “supermax” prisons in the United States:

• Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY): “There is wide, bipartisan opposition in Congress to the president’s goal of moving those terrorists to American cities and towns.”
• Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC): “[The detainees are] individuals hell-bent on our destruction and destroying our way of life.”
• Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL): “All of the prisoners housed at Guantanamo are terrorists. They pose an obvious threat to our national security, and they should not be allowed to set foot on our soil.”
• Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN): “The American people expect us to keep them safe. I have yet to hear one good reason why moving these terrorists from off our shores right into the heart of our country makes us safer.”
• Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN): “The president needs to realize that the Global War on Terrorism did not end with the killing of Osama bin Laden. The Boston bombing is a sharp reminder that there is still a clear and present threat to our American way of life from those that mean us harm.”
• Rep. Jimmy Duncan (R-TN): “[Detainees] are not U.S. citizens and should not be given the same rights and privileges as if they were. [...] I do not support any plan for these prisoners that puts them on U.S. soil.”

The insistence that Guantanamo’s current population of 166 detainees must remain in place rather than reach U.S. soil is in itself based on a flawed premise. More than 200 international terrorists are currently serving out sentences in super-maximum security facilities in the United States, and — counter to GOP theories about the consequences of transferring detainees to the mainland — no convicted terrorist has escaped or attacked a prison in the U.S.

While Democrats are largely remaining silent on the issue thus far, not all Republicans are opposed to closing down the prison, with some seeming willing to work with the President on its closure — so long as they aren’t the ones that have to propose solutions. “I don’t agree with the reasons that have been offered, that they outweigh the use of Guantanamo,” Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) told the Wall Street Journal, but maintained that she would be willing to work with the administration should they propose a new detention policy. Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon — chair of the House Armed Services Committee — made a similar point in an op-ed this weekend, demanding a new detention suggestion from Obama before Gitmo can be closed.

Obama made his comments regarding Gitmo’s eventual closure at a press conference last week when asked about the ongoing hunger strike among the detainees imprisoned there. “I’ve asked my team to review everything that’s currently being done in Guantanamo, everything that we can do administratively and I’m going to reengage with Congress to try to make the case that this is not something that’s in the best interests of the American people,” Obama said at the time.

Given the intransigence of Republicans, President Obama may be forced to go around Congress to release some Gitmo detainees. Several options are available to Obama including, as CAP expert Ken Gude pointed out, utilizing his authority to transfer detainees cleared for release from Gitmo to custody in their country of origin.

A lawyer representing several prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay prison said on Monday that hunger striking detainees have described to him the excruciatingly painful process of being force-fed, saying that the tube going down to the stomach through the detainee’s nostril feels like “having a razor blade pulled down.”

The U.S. military says that 100 of the 166 Gitmo detainees are currently on hunger strike, although detainee lawyers say the number could be closer to 130. Their refusal to eat initially began in February as a protest against guards allegedly mishandling their Qurans but it has grown into a general demonstration against their indefinite detention.

David Remes, a lawyer representing some of those on hunger strike, described the process to the CBC’s As It Happens on Monday:

REMES: You’re strapped into a restraining chair with so many straps and hand cuffs that you can’t move a muscle. Then a tube is snaked down your throat putting it through your nostril down to your stomach and they pump Ensure into it or other nutrients and they do that until they’ve given you what they consider to be enough and then they take the tube out. … And detainees have described the experience of having the tube snaked down your throat as being like having a razor blade pulled down.

The American Medical Association, a bipartisan expert task force on Gitmo detainees and a top U.N. official have condemned the military’s force-feeding policy, saying it violates international law and could amount to torture.

Military officials say authorities force-feeds hunger strikers at Gitmo in order “to preserve life.” But Remes argues the policy is meant to prevent detainees from becoming martyrs:

REMES: The government doesn’t have the right or the authority to make that decision for the detainee. I’m sure you’re aware of the IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands who died many years ago because the British didn’t force feed him. Now they did the right thing but as a consequence, he became a martyr. The U.S. doesn’t want the detainees to become martyrs. When they say it’s lawful, what they really mean is it’s their policy. There’s no requirement that they do it. There’s no prohibition against their doing it. They just do it.

Listen to the full interview here:

Another lawyer representing two Kuwaiti detainees told NBC News on Sunday that one of his clients described a similar brutal force-feeding process:

“When that tube goes up your nose, your eyes begin to water, as it passes through the back of your skull. As it passes through your throat, you begin to gag and you begin to suck for air until it’s passed into your stomach,” [Lt. Col. Barry] Wingard said. “It’s agony, according to my client.

“The more times that you’ve been force-fed this way, the more your nose gets inflamed, the more your esophagus begins to burn, the more your stomach begins to burn.”

A new survey released on Tuesday from the polling firm YouGov found that 56 percent of Americans opposed force-feeding hunger striking Gitmo detainees, even if that means that they will die.

The Gitmo hunger strikes gained national attention after one detainee described the “painful” process of force-feeding in a New York Times op-ed last month. President Obama has since said that he will renew efforts to close the prison there.

Just one day after the Air Force’s chief of sexual assault prevention was arrested for sexual assault himself, a new Pentagon report shows a sharp increase in the estimated number of assaults in the military annually.

The report from the Department of Defense’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office for Fiscal Year 2012 found a 6 percent rise in reported assaults over the last year, for a total of 3,374. But much more troubling is the estimated number of sexual assault incidents that were never officially reported. In last year’s report, there were an estimated 19,000 instances, but this year the number has jumped to an unprecedented 26,000 instances of assault, leaving thousands unreported.

The disparity in the total number of instances of Military Sexual Trauma (MST) compared to those fully reported — where the victim fills out an official report and action is taken — can be seen as being due to victims’ fears of retaliation, including possible discharge from service or being overlooked for a promotion. The new results line up with those seen in a 2011 Pentagon health survey released in April. According to that report, more female service members were willing to come forward about sexual abuse and assault, with roughly one in five women saying they were victims of unwanted sexual contact from another member of the military, but under reporting remains a serious issue.

“Sexual assault has no place in the United States military,” Pentagon spokesman George Little said in a statement released Monday night in reponse to news that Lt. Col. Jeff Krusinski, the Air Forces’s chief of sexual assault prevention, had been arrested on charges of sexual assault. “The American people, including our service members, should expect a culture of absolutely no tolerance for this deplorable behavior that violates not only the law, but basic principles of respect, honor, and dignity in our society and its military.”

Despite that pledge, assault and abuse in the military has been under increased scrutiny in recent months, following a series of high-profile scandals. In February, Lt. Col. James Wilkerson was reinstated into service after an Air Force general overturned a jury, voiding Wilkerson’s sexual assault conviction. In 2012, Lackland Air Force base saw 12 instructors investigated for sexual misconduct toward 31 trainees, with at least one trainer sentenced to twenty years for rape and sexual assault. Army Gen. Jeffery Sinclair was likewise charged in 2012 with sexually assaulting a female subordinate, then threatening her career if she went public.
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Sen. Bob Corker said on Tuesday that he believes the United States will soon be arming moderate Syrian rebels fighting President Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

“I do think we’ll be arming the opposition shortly,” he said on CBS This Morning, adding that the U.S. is “doing a lot more there on the ground than really is known” but that it’s time to “change the equation”:

HOST NORAH O’DONNELL: Do you think this administration needs to move further in terms of arming the opposition? What’s next?

CORKER: I do think we’ll be arming the opposition shortly. We’re doing a lot more there on the ground than really is known. But we do have to change the equation. I think you all know the moderate opposition groups that we support are not as good at fighting. They’re not as good at delivering humanitarian aid. And we need to change the balance and they need to be reaching out to the Alawite population that supports Assad. I think if we can cause that to happen, Russia will be far more open to some kind of political resolve where Assad is removed. But we’ve got to change the balance there and I do think we’ll be arming the rebels soon.

Watch the clip:

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel confirmed last week that the Obama administration is seriously considering arming the rebels but as the New York Times noted on Tuesday, the White House has been insisting that “it would not be thrown off its cautious approach to Syria.”

Meanwhile, Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) introduced legislation on Monday that would provide weapons to vetted opposition fighters.

The officer in charge of the U.S. Air Force’s response to sexual assault was himself arrested for sexual battery this weekend, drawing attention yet again to the extent of rape culture in the armed services.

Lt. Col. Jeff Krusinski is accused of assaulting a woman in an Arlington, VA, parking lot early Sunday morning. According to the police report of the incident, Krusinski approached the woman in question after a night of drinking:

On May 5 at 12:35 am, a drunken male subject approached a female victim in a parking lot and grabbed her breasts and buttocks. The victim fought the suspect off as he attempted to touch her again and alerted police. Jeffrey Krusinski, 41, of Arlington, VA, was arrested and charged with sexual battery. He was held on a $5,000 unsecured bond.

Krusinski is the head of the Air Force’s branch of the Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Program, a Department of Defense initiative to combat sexual assault in the ranks. A spokesperson for the Air Force confirmed to local blog ARLnow.com the man described in the police report is in fact Lt. Col. Krusinski, but gave no further comment. ARLNow also confirmed that the woman and Krusinski did not know each other prior to the encounter.

The Air Force’s response to sexual violence was last scrutinized following a controversial case involving an Air Force general overturning a jury’s sexual assault conviction. That case launched a review of the military’s approach to cases involving sexual assault, resulting in Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel sending Congress a series of recommendations for them to pass into law. As it stands, however, an estimated 19,000 instances of sexual assault occurred in 2011 alone.

(HT: Graham Jenkins)

A report aired on 60 Minutes on Sunday shed light on the under-reported threat combat soldiers faced when sent back out into the theater with a concussion, a decision that has had long-lasting repercussions on American veterans.

For years, concussions have been an invisible and therefore neglected injury within the armed services. At the height of the Iraq War, the standard operating procedure was to have soldiers who had sustained head injuries from the explosion of IEDs or other trauma to go back out into the field soon thereafter. In doing so, these soldiers — suffering from symptoms including severe aches, double vision, and nausea — were put at risk of suffering a second concussion before the first had healed, an event that heightens the chance of permanent brain damage.

Maj. Ben Richards, a retired Army veteran, was one of the soldiers sent back out after a concussion who has now been diagnosed with brain injury. “If I could trade traumatic brain injury for a single-leg amputation, I’d probably do that in a second,” he told 60 Minutes, underscoring the difference between visible injuries and those hidden inside the brain. Before his new diagnosis, Richards was told he instead had Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). “If you have PTSD and you are not improving through counseling, then it’s your fault,” Richards said of the stigma that still accompanies such a diagnosis. “It was my fault that I wasn’t getting better.”

Watch the full segment here:

Dr. David Hovda, head of UCLA’s Brain Injury Research Center, tried to explain the severity of even mild concussions on soldiers to the Pentagon in 2008. Instead, he was told it was “bad medicine” to keep soldiers out of the field to rest after a concussion, with an assembled team of Army doctors claiming that, because of the stigma that would entail, allowing for rest before being sent back out would make soldiers worse. Gen. Peter Chiarrelli — then the Vice Chief of Staff of the Army, now an advocate for mental health in the military — chose to side with Dr. Hovda in 2009 anyway, issuing an order saying that all forces who suffered concussions would be pulled from combat until their recovery.

Despite Chiarrelli’s decision, the numbers still aren’t good for veterans. 357,000 veterans — or about 20 percent of those who served in Iraq and Afghanistan — have experienced a traumatic brain injury as of January 2009. Despite that, only 46 percent of those who experienced a mild traumatic brain injury were screened for a concussion. At its peak in 2011, the Department of Defense reported 16 new concussions were inflicted per day.

Last year, the NFL donated $30 million to study concussions, in partnership with the U.S. military. Efforts are also under way to raise some $90 million to construct more brain injury centers along the lines of the National Intrepid Center of Excellence, the military’s most advanced brain injury evaluation center. Nine additional centers would enable the military to care for 9,000 brain injuries per year, the amount of new injuries officials expect as the war in Afghanistan winds down.

Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) accused the Department of State of repeated threats and intimidation against witnesses to last year’s attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya. But when pressed by Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace for examples, he could offer none.

Asked about a claim by a witness’s lawyer that whistle-blowers had been blocked from testifying (a claim rejected by the Department of State), Chaffetz said that “more than one” witness has indeed been “suppressed” by the Obama administration.

WALLACE: Tell me–a direct threat, a direct act of intimidation against a potential witness?

CHAFFETZ: Yes, and I think we’ll probably…

WALLACE: Tell me one… tell what’s been said.

CHAFFETZ: There are people, more than one, that have felt intimidation from the State Department.

Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-MA) quickly debunked his colleague: “There’ve been two attorneys involved here, the only reason they haven’t received information is that they haven’t asked for it yet… there has not been a request for documents from these attorneys to the State Department.”

The only “retaliation,” Lynch noted, was that one of the witnesses wants a reassignment and a promotion and feels he’s being retaliated against because has not yet gotten the promotion.

Watch the video:

As Media Matters has previously noted, Victoria Toensing, the Republican attorney making the initial claims has been peddling Benghazi conspiracy theories for months, including a November Fox News op/ed in which she attempted to draw a link between the attack and the resignation of former CIA director David Petraeus.

Earlier this week, Bloomberg reported that QinetiQ, a high tech defense contractor specializing in secret satellites drones and software used by U.S. special forces, was the victim of a sustained cybersecurity breach for several years starting in 2007.

According to Bloomberg, documents released in the Anonymous Stratfor hack reveal QinetiQ was compromised as part of a cyber-espionage attack originating in China — and notes the breach was part of a much broader campaign targetting U.S. contractors:

“QinetiQ’s espionage expertise didn’t keep Chinese cyber- spies from outwitting the company. In a three-year operation, hackers linked to China’s military infiltrated QinetiQ’s computers and compromised most if not all of the company’s research. At one point, they logged into the company’s network by taking advantage of a security flaw identified months earlier and never fixed [...]

QinetiQ was only one target in a broader cyberpillage. Beginning at least as early as 2007, Chinese computer spies raided the databanks of almost every major U.S. defense contractor and made off with some of the country’s most closely guarded technological secrets, according to two former Pentagon officials who asked not to be named because damage assessments of the incidents remain classified.“

U.S. intelligence reports ranked cyber threats as the top danger facing the country for the first time in April, but tensions have been running high about the government’s ability to protect digital assets and intelligence for years. A 2011 Department of Justice report noted that only 64 percent of FBI agents assigned to national security-related cyber investigations had the appropriate skills and expertise to handle those types of cases.

Government cybersecurity contracting exploded during the Bush Administration, with many roles traditionally filled by government employees or resources outsourced to external companies over whom the government has less oversight. The Obama Administration has made efforts to curb that trend, but that expansion, combined with a lack of cybersecurity expertise in the military and federal agencies, resulted in many cybersecurity defense operations being outsourced or completed under the heavy supervision of outside contractors. This has sometimes led to much much less than ideal results”>less than ideal outcomes, despite a 2011 General Services Administration (GSA) rule requiring all contractors and subcontractors that provide federal agencies with IT services, systems, or supplies to submit a cybersecurity plan that matches government regulations.

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A former Bush White House official on Thursday made the case that Nazi Germany had adhered to the laws of war during World War II when defending the Bush administration’s decision to open the Guantanamo Bay prison for terror suspects.

Nearly 60 percent of the detainees at Guantanamo are currently on hunger strike, in what experts and their lawyers say is a protest against their indefinite incarceration there. Amid the crisis, President Obama announced this week that he will renew his administration’s efforts to close the prison.

The events sparked a debate on CNN last night, prompting former Bush White House press secretary Ari Fleischer to defend his former boss’s decision to open Gitmo to begin with. “We have it because these people did not even follow the law of war, let alone the rule of war,” he said, adding, “These people didn’t even wear a military uniform. They engaged in battle against America as terrorists, a violation of the laws of war. That’s why Guantanamo got invented.”

But most legal experts say detention practices at Gitmo violate international law.

“This country fought Adolf Hitler. And I don’t really believe that Osama bin Laden and his group are worse or more dangerous than Adolf Hitler,” CNN legal expert Jeffery Toobin countered Fleischer, adding, “We managed to defeat Adolf Hitler by following the rule of law.”

Backed in a corner, Fleischer then went a bit off the rail:

FLEISCHER: They [the Germans] followed the law of war. They wore uniforms and they fought us on battlefields. These people are fundamentally, totally by design different. And they need to be treated in a different extrajudicial system.

Watch the clip:

Apparently, according to Fleischer, in order to follow the laws of war, all one has to do is wear a uniform and fight the enemy on a grassy field. But of course the Germans committed countless brutal and vicious war crimes during World War II. We’re assuming Mr. Fleischer knows this, but it’s striking how low he’ll go to defend the Bush administration’s failed and discredited security policies.

While tensions in Syria dominate headlines about the Middle East, a quiet digital battle is brewing in Iran as the June 14 presidential election approaches.

Yesterday, the Basij force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard claimed its websites were being targeted in a wave of cyberattacks:

“Due to the impending vote, elements of the global arrogance have launched a new round of cyberattacks against Basij websites, particularly Basij.ir.”

According to local Iranian news sources, the Basij.ir site was down for part of the day on Wednesday (May 1) and a spokesman for the group claimed its sites faced many attacks in the past three years. However, the Basij is more well known for being the aggressors in cyberattacks. In 2011 it launched a cyberattack against the “enemies” of Iran and has actively recruited hackers to boost its ranks.

Iran had over 8 million internet users in 2009 and online communications including social media and email was key to galvanizing and organizing opposition in the last Iranian Presidential election and the protests that followed. Since then, the regime has cracked down harder than ever on online communications with aggressive surveillance and filtering in what President Obama decried as an “Electronic Curtain” in 2012. Internet access was disrupted before the 2012 parliamentary elections and at other times Iranian authorities have blocked specific web services, such as Google.

While the regime cracked down on tools like virtual private networks (VPNs) many Iranians use to avoid government internet controls in March, hacktivists outside the country are helping provide alternatives to further keep online communications channels open. One group, ASL19 — an interdisciplinary lab named after Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that upholds the right to freedom of expression and access to information — specifically aims to “empower Iranians to communicate freely and engage in dialogue with minimal threat to personal safety.” The group reportedly helps a million Iranians a day avoid network censorship by distributing open source evasion program Psiphon.

But the regime has even been working on an internal intranet, often dubbed the “halalternet” that would be completely closed off from the larger global internet system, and is reportedly very close to being deployed on a broad scale. Chinese technology company Huawei reportedly provided the Iranian government the technological infrastructure for the intranet, and according to Reuters, attempted to sell Iranian internet providers “lawful interception” surveillance tech that they later “acquired.”