Conservative commentators and advisers to Mitt Romney’s foreign policy team have been chattering to the press a lot in the past few weeks, often on background to discuss in internal machinations over policy. The result is an emerging picture of a Romney team fractured by a lack of focus and unable to draw a sharp distinction between the candidate’s policies and those of President Obama.

Two press accounts today bolster the notion of disarray on Romney’s foreign policy team. In an article in the Daily Beast, neoconservative American Enterprise Institute vice president of foreign policy and defense studies Danielle Pletka — whose husband Stephen Rademaker advises Romney — lamented the lack of a top tier foreign policy spokesman for Romney who can speak to the press and keep the candidate abreast of developments, which in effect is keeping foreign policy on the back-burner:

One of the things that troubles me is that there is no lead foreign policy person who is traveling with the governor and who is there to talk to the press. … [Foreign policy] is one of President Obama’s biggest failings and the American people need to hear a debate about more than the economy.”

Former John Bolton aide Richard Grenell’s tenure as the campaign foreign policy spokesman ended almost before it started when the openly-gay Grenell resigned after the campaign buckled under pressure from right-wing groups and kept him cloistered during a critical foreign policy conference call with reporters.

One aide recalled to the Daily Beast a weekly team conference call where one adviser raised a report in Iran’s semi-official Fars news agency — known for its blatantly false propaganda — that Russia, Iran, Syria and China would stage a joint military exercise. The adviser told the Daily Beast:

It was so lame. These conference calls are really for people who have an hour in a half of time every week to waste.

The disarray was also on display in a Washington Times article from Monday. In the story, Romney advisers outlined a policy centered on supporting allies and not publicly diverging from supporting allies’ positions (something that already happened when an adviser trashed the British prime minister).

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Lawyers for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) revealed yesterday, the U.N.’s International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, that they had written to the U.N. special rapporteur on torture asking the world body to investigate KSM’s alleged torture at Guantanamo Bay. Agence-France Presse reports:

The letter asks that the special UN rapporteur “initiate a full, fair and impartial inquiry” into both US conduct and that of “any other potentially complicit state party to the Convention (against Torture).”

“After subjecting Mr. Mohammed to torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment following his capture on March 1, 2003 in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, the US government has silenced him,” reads the letter, a copy of which was obtained by AFP. [...]

“The US government seeks to close this painful and dark chapter in our Nation’s history by killing Mr. Mohammed after a show trial,” it claims.

Army Capt. Jason Wright, one of Mohammad’s lawyers, said: “No human being should be tortured. In the period since 9/11, the US has misplaced its moral compass. Through accountability, we can hopefully find our way again, and pursue a path of rediscovery and redemption.”

Yesterday, the ACLU released a “Torture Database” making over 100,000 pages of government Bush-era interrogation and rendition documents searchable by the general public.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) today released their “Torture Database” website, making over 100,000 pages of government documents on the George W. Bush administration’s interrogation policies, primarily obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests by the ACLU, searchable by the general public.

Alexander Abdo, a Staff Attorney with the ACLU’s National Security Project, announced the new database in a Guardian column today. Abdo wrote:

…[T]the government has yet to create a single, official report documenting the post 9/11 abuses. There is hope that the Senate Intelligence Committee will fill the void when it completes its long-expected report on the CIA’s program later this year. In the meantime, the ACLU today is launching the Torture Database to help fill the transparency gap. Our database allows researchers and the public to conduct sophisticated searches of thousands of documents relating to the Bush administration’s policies on rendition, detention, and interrogation.

Abdo and the ACLU hope the database will put pressure on the Obama administration to release more information about torture and other so-called enhanced interrogation techniques (EITs) authorized during the Bush administration. “[The Obama administration] continues to withhold hundreds of CIA cables describing the use of waterboarding and other harsh techniques, hundreds of photographs of detainee abuse throughout Iraq and Afghanistan, and the presidential memorandum that authorized the CIA to establish its secret prisons overseas,” writes Abdo.

The database includes: Justice Department legal memos authorizing torture; autopsy reports completed by Army medical examiners after detainees died in U.S. custody; reports documenting and evaluating the interrogation practices of the military and CIA; and a series of email and correspondences “linking the CIA’s and military’s interrogation policies to officials at the highest levels of our government.”

While much of the database is dedicated to documents outlining torture and EITs, the ACLU emphasizes that the site also offers “inspiring and heroic stories” in the form of written dissents from soldiers, lawyers, officials and others as they resisted the interrogation policies approved by senior political leaders.

Mitt Romney doesn’t like it that President Obama’s re-election campaign in a new video decided to tout the president’s decision to order the raid that killed Osama bin Laden and to question — based on his comments from 2007 — whether Romney would have done the same thing. Here’s Romney complaining about the video ad on CBS this morning:

ROMNEY: And the idea to try to politicize this, and to say, “oh, I, President Obama would have done it one way and Mitt Romney would have done it another,” is really disappointing. Let’s not make the capture or killing of Osama bin Laden a politically divisive event. There are plenty of differences between President Obama and myself. But let’s not make up ones based on, “Well he might not have done this.” It’s disappointing and it’s unfortunate and it’s taking an event that really brought America together.

Back in 2004, President Bush ran a smear campaign against challenger Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) which undermined his service in Vietnam and questioned Kerry’s ability and determination to protect the United States — just three years removed from the 9/11 attacks — from another terror strike. “If we make the wrong choice, then the danger is that we’ll get hit again,” then Vice President Dick Cheney said at the time.

And while Romney complains about Obama’s alleged “politicization” now, he willfully participated in the Bush-Cheney smear campaign on Kerry in 2004. During an August 9, 2004 (accessed via Lexis/Nexis) interview on Fox News, Romney suggested that Kerry would “twiddle his thumbs” when dealing with terrorism and in September 2004, also on Fox News, Romney said Kerry is too much of a flip-flopper to protect the country:

ROMNEY: [M]ost has already been said about John Kerry. I think people know pretty well that he’s a guy who has a hard time finding which side of a position to come down on. But I’m going to focus on the fact that our nation needs strong leadership. We’re under attack, militarily, economically. Our very way of life is under attack. And we need to have the kind of steady, strong leadership, which is represented by Dick Cheney, and by of course, President George W. Bush.

In his speech at the 2004 Republican National Convention (RNC) in New York City, Romney said “America is under attack from almost every direction,” later adding, “On the just war our brave soldiers are fighting to protect free people everywhere, there is no question: George W. Bush is right, and the ‘Blame America First’ crowd is wrong.”

The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent also notes that during his speech at the 2008 RNC, Romney “blasted Obama as untrustworthy when it comes to combating ‘the threat from radical, violent jihad,’ which he contrasted with John McCain, who, apparently unlike Obama, understands that ‘radical, violent Islam is evil,’ and will do everything he can to defeat it.”

“Republicans are — forgive the cliché — shocked, shocked to discover that a presidential contender is ‘politicizing’ an important national event,” Jon Meacham writes today, noting that Obama’s alleged “politicizing” might be a bit different from what the GOP knows. “In this sense,” Meacham writes, “‘politicizing’ might be best translated as ‘beating us up and we don’t have anything much to say to stop it.’”

Last week, the State Department released a February 2006 memo from then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s top aide, Philip D. Zelikow, opposing the Justice Department’s authorization of “enhanced interrogation techniques” (i.e. torture) by CIA officers questioning terrorist suspects. Zelikow concluded in the memo that the techniques DOJ authorized should be considered “‘cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment’ within the meaning of Artical 16″ of the Convention Against Torture.

Zelikow — who has previously spoken out publicly against President Bush’s torture program — will publish a “damning article” in the upcoming issue of the Houston Law Journal, Salon reports (emphasis added):

Based on published histories and his firsthand observations, and adapted from a lecture delivered in November, the article calls the administration’s rationale for its use of torture — which he nonetheless insists only on calling “extreme interrogation” and “coercive methods” — “radical,” “an amazing contention,” “untenable and extreme,” “unsustainable,” “an unprecedented program of coolly calculated dehumanizing abuse and physical torment,” and, finally, simply a “mistake.” He concludes: “This was a collective failure of American public leadership, in which a number of officials and members of Congress (and staffers) of both parties played a part, endorsing a CIA program of physical coercion without any precedent in U.S. history.” In fact, “The only defense against criminal prosecution would be that officials acted in good faith reliance on the advice of their government lawyers.”

While Zelikow calls on the White House to be more forthcoming and transparent about its own counter-terrorism methods, he praises President Obama for abandoning Bush’s torture polices Noting the Obama administration’s success in combatting terrorism and al-Qaeda in general, Zelikow concludes that “[t]here is no evident correlations between intelligence success and the available of extreme interrogation methods.”

Yesterday the National Security Archive released a newly declassified February, 2006 memo from then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s top aide, Philip D. Zelikow, opposing the Justice Department’s authorization of “enhanced interrogation techniques” (i.e. torture) by CIA officers questioning terrorist suspects. “All copies of the memo…were thought to have been destroyed,” the Archive writes.

Zelikow summarized his views contained in the 2006 memo in an article on Foreign Policy’s website in April, 2009 and again in congressional testimony one month later. “At the time, in 2005 [and in 2006],” Zelikow wrote in 2009, “I circulated an opposing view of the legal reasoning” behind DOJ’s authorization of torture. He added: “I felt obliged to put an alternative view in front of my colleagues at other agencies, warning them that other lawyers (and judges) might find the OLC’s [Office of Legal Counsel's] views unsustainable.”

Indeed, in the newly declassified 2006 memo, Zelikow writes that while the State Department agreed with DOJ’s determination in 2005 that Article 16 of the Convention Against Torture (which prohibits “cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment which do not amount to torture”) does not apply to CIA interrogations world wide,” he countered that “the situation has now changed.” What had changed was the fact that Congress passed a law applying Article 16 to conduct by U.S. officials anywhere in the world.

Zelikow concluded that practices the OLC authorized “should be considered ‘cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment’ within the meaning of Artical 16″ while going on to explain what he views are techniques to be “least likely to be sustained” (waterboarding, walling, dousing, stress positions, and cramped confinement) and those that are “most likely to be sustained” (“basic detention conditions” and slaps).

Zelikow’s 2006 memo doesn’t deviate much from his 2005 memo on the subject that was made public shortly before his congressional hearing in May, 2009. In the 2005 memo, Zelikow and other top officials advised President Bush that the United States treat terror suspects as if they were “civilian detainees under the law of war.” The memo continued (emphasis added):

We are not saying that these detainees are necessarily entitled to this status. To be clear: We are giving them a temporary status they do not deserve. But we are not doing this for them. We are doing it for us.

Zelikow wasn’t the only Bush administration official that opposed the torture program. Bush’s top adviser Karen Hughes said in May, 2009 that she was also concerned about the program. “I was very vocal in the internal debate,” she said. “I worried about how that would make us look in the eyes of the world.”

Read More on the Bush administration’s “torture memos” here and here.