At a public hearing in Oklahoma during summer 2010, Kimberly Demuth, a vice president at CardnoEntrix, described the State Department’s capacity as “a staff of one person, Betsy Orlando, who’s in charge of this project.”

During the Bush administration, Orlando oversaw the approval process of the earlier Keystone pipeline beginning in 2006. That pipeline, which ships tar sands crude across the US-Canada border, gained a Presidential Permit in March, 2008. After that success, TransCanada filed its application to construct the Keystone XL pipeline at the tail end of the Bush administration.

Orlando, who has no formal background that would help her assess the risks of such a pipeline or judge the work of oil industry contractors, moved to a new tour of service in Nigeria in October 2010.

“The people I worked with at State were good, honest people, and they were very inexperienced and naive about environmental laws,” a federal environmental compliance officer told the Huffington Post. “They did not have a senior expert on their environmental impact study, and I’ve never seen that before.”

As criticism from other agencies and grassroots activists of the corrupt draft impact statement has poured in, Clinton’s State Department has called for more work, but with the same conflicts of interest. An analysis of greenhouse gas impacts in response to EPA concerns was done by ICF International under contract to Cardno Entrix, not the State Department. However, the Department of Energy did directly commission contractor Ensys Energy to assess the “impacts on U.S. and global refining, trade and oil markets of the Keystone XL project.” Both reports include the caveat that the “views and opinions of authors expressed herein do not necessarily state or reflect those of the United States Government or any agency thereof.”

The demise of repressive governments in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere during this year’s “Arab spring,” she says, stemmed in part from Bush’s “freedom agenda,” which promoted democracy in the Middle East. “The change in the conversation about the Middle East, where people now routinely talk about democratization is something that I’m very grateful for and I think we had a role in that,” Rice says.

Indeed, Cheney had a similar take. When asked about the Arab Spring in August, Cheney replied, “I think that what happened in Iraq, the fact that we brought democracy, if you will, and freedom to Iraq, has had a ripple effect on some of those other countries.” And of course, according to Rice, the only to get rid of Saddam Hussein was to invade militarily:

“It would be a mistake to make the leap of faith that this [Arab Spring] would somehow have worked in Iraq,” she says in her first newspaper interview about her memoir, No Higher Honor. [...]

“Gadhafi … wasn’t Saddam Hussein in terms of his reach and capacity,” she says. “I do think that an Arab spring in Iraq would have been unthinkable under Saddam Hussein.”

There isn’t any real evidence of this claim that Bush’s democracy promotion in the Middle East (i.e. invasion of Iraq) had something to do with the Arab Spring. And this claim also ignores the agency of Arab citizens themselves in their collective action to rise up against social and economic injustices.

A 2010 RAND report found that “Iraq’s instability has become a convenient scarecrow neighboring regimes can use to delay political reform by asserting that democratization inevitably leads to insecurity.” And now, ironically, the Iraqi government is “offering key moral and financial support” to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in his violent crackdown on pro-democracy activists there.

The Council on Foreign Relations’ Steven Cook addressed this question back in July. “It is time to put the Bush boosters’ arguments where they belong: in the trash heap of discredited ideas,” he said, adding, “There is no connection between the invasion of Iraq and Arab efforts to throw off generations of dictatorship.” (HT: The Hill)

Bush said the events that led to the death of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in May began during his administration.

“The work that was done by intelligence communities during my presidency was part of putting together the puzzle that enabled us to see the full picture of how bin Laden was communicating and eventually where he was hiding,” he said. “It began the day after 9/11.”

The reality, of course, is that Bush’s attempts to capture or kill bin Laden were huge failures. While it’s been well documented that the Bush administration missed an opportunity to get bin Laden in Tora Bora in 2001, Bush himself subsequently stated publicly that he wasn’t spending much time thinking about getting him. “I truly am not that concerned about him. I am deeply concerned about Iraq,” Bush said in 2002, “I really just don’t spend that much time on him, to be honest with you.” Bush told reporters in 2006 that hunting the al Qaeda leader was “not a top priority use of American resources.”

And in 2005, Bush shut down the CIA’s unit dedicated to finding bin Laden in order to shift resources to Iraq. “The Central Intelligence Agency has closed a unit that for a decade had the mission of hunting Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants,” the New York Times reported in 2006, adding that resources “had been redirected from the hunt for Mr. bin Laden to the search for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was killed last month in Iraq.” When the right wing rushed to give Bush credit after bin Laden’s death in May, ThinkProgress produced this short video highlighting Bush’s failures:

Soon after he took office, President Obama steered the U.S. on a course to end the war in Iraq and put resources back into finding bin Laden. “Shortly after I got into office,” Obama said in an interview after bin Laden’s death, “I brought [then-CIA director] Leon Panetta privately into the Oval Office and I said to him, ‘We need to redouble our efforts in hunting bin Laden down. And I want us to start putting more resources, more focus, and more urgency into that mission.’”

Why was Bechtel VP and former Bush official David Welch helping Qaddafi?

Al Jazeera’s Jamal Elshayyal unearthed files in Libya’s intelligence headquarters that suggest that David Welch — the former assistant secretary of state under President George W. Bush who brokered the deal that normalized relations between Libya and the United States and who later went on to work for the manufacturing and development giant Bechtel — met with Libyan officials in early August to coordinate on undermining the Libyan rebels and NATO forces by, for example, trying to establish ties between the uprising and al Qaeda:

I found what appeared to be the minutes of a meeting between senior Libyan officials – Abubakr Alzleitny and Mohammed Ahmed Ismail – and David Welch, the former assistant secretary of state who served under George W Bush and the man who brokered the deal which restored diplomatic relations between the US and Libya in 2008. [...]During that meeting Welch advised Gaddafi’s team on how to win the propaganda war – suggesting several “confidence building measures”, the documents said. The documents appear to indicate that an influential US political personality was advising Gaddafi on how to beat the US and NATO. [...] Minutes of this meeting note his advice on how to undermine Libya’s rebel movement, with the potential assistance of foreign intelligence agencies, including Israel. “Any information related to al-Qaeda or other terrorist extremist organisations should be found and given to the American administration but only via the intelligence agencies of either Israel, Egypt, Morroco, or Jordan… America will listen to them… It’s better to receive this information as if it originated from those countries…”

Watch Al Jazeera’s video report about the documents:

It is unclear exactly what would motivate Welch to help Qaddafi battle the pro-democracy uprising and even his own country, but it should be noted that Welch’s position at Bechtel put him in a spot where he was incentivized to maintain strong business relationships with Libya. Shortly after helping normalize relations between the two countries, Welch became a vice president at Bechtel, overseeing the company’s Middle Eastern operations. Under Welch, the company rapidly expanded in Libya, even setting up its first office in the country since the 1960s.

Also included among the documents that Al Jazeera uncovered was evidence that Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), a Libya war foe, had contacts with Qaddafi’s regime and had asked for evidence of corruption or al Qaeda contacts among the rebels.

The President of the United States oversees the national response to Hurricane Irene

On Saturday, Obama chaired a meeting at the National Response Coordination Center at FEMA’s Washington headquarters, and “convened a conference call with members of his senior emergency response team including Vice President Joe Biden and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, among others.” He also “heard updates on Saturday from governors and emergency management officials in North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Puerto Rico, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Maine and Vermont.”

Right-wing pundits lashed out at Obama, bizarrely claiming that the President of the United States is engaged in a political campaign when he commands the executive branch’s response to Hurricane Irene:

“How to Politicize a Hurricane,” Koch Industries lawyer John Hinderaker cried, saying Obama “posed for a photo-op today, pretending to have something to do with the potentially-severe weather event.”

Scared Monkeys: “The President left the friendly confines of “Life styles of the Rich & Famous to try and act presidential. However, it seems like more of a shameless photo-op.”

“Fearless Leader “Takes Charge” At Hurricane Command Center…” Weasel Zippers writes. “More like a pathetic photo-op.”

Six years after the Bush administration’s criminal failure to protect the citizens of the Gulf Coast from the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, American conservatives are still reeling. One of the prime tenets of the American right — that everyday Americans don’t ever need a strong federal government — was belied by the tragedy of Katrina. Bush put FEMA under the control of an Arabian horse commissioner, Michael “Heckuva Job” Brown, eviscerating the crucial agency and demoralizing its proud public servants. Instead of responding to the warnings of National Weather Service officials or to reports of levee failures and mass suffering, Bush spent five days on photo ops like cutting a birthday cake with Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and playing a guitar with country singer Mark Wills, and going to political events to promote Medicare Part D.

Before this year’s billion-dollar climate disasters struck across the nation, Obama rebuilt the tattered Federal Emergency Management Agency into a shining example of how our government serves the Constitutional mandate to protect the public welfare in times of need. Not every president plays guitar and eats cake when the safety of Americans is threatened.

To take one example, here’s Greenwald giving Bush credit for the Arab awakening:

It was the Freedom Agenda of the George W. Bush administration—delineated and formulated as a conscious alternative to jihadism—that showed the way. Indeed, the costly American nation-building in Iraq has now led to the creation of the world’s first and only functioning democratic Arab state. One popular indictment of Bush maintains that he settled on the Freedom Agenda as justification for war after U.S. forces and inspectors found no Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. The record shows otherwise. “A free Iraq can be a source of hope for all the Middle East,” he said before the invasion, in February 2003. “Iraq can be an example of progress and prosperity in a region that needs both.”

And something of the kind has come to pass. “One despot fell in 2003,” [Fouad] Ajami has said. “We decapitated him. Two despots, in Tunisia and Egypt, fell, and there is absolutely a direct connection between what happened in Iraq in 2003 and what’s happening today throughout the rest of the Arab world.”

It’s probably a devastating enough rebuttal just to note that that quote from Fouad Ajami, one of the Iraq war’s most committed cheerleaders, constitutes the entirety of Greenwald’s evidence that the Iraq war spurred the democracy movements throughout the Arab world.

This is understandable, as there is no real evidence for the claim. Arabs themselves clearly don’t agree, as all available polling shows the war to be overwhelmingly unpopular in the region. An April 2010 RAND study also concluded that, rather than encouraging reform, “Iraq’s instability has become a convenient scarecrow neighboring regimes can use to delay political reform by asserting that democratization inevitably leads to insecurity.”

Examining the claim in an article back in July, the Council on Foreign Relations’ Steven Cook concluded, “It is time to put the Bush boosters’ arguments where they belong: in the trash heap of discredited ideas”:

There is no connection between the invasion of Iraq and Arab efforts to throw off generations of dictatorship. Other than helping to shape the Middle East’s discourse about political change, the effects of the Freedom Agenda are inconclusive at best. It is entirely possible that the uprisings would have happened without George W. Bush, or if he had been more like his father. Bush 41 placed a premium on international order rather than democratic change and, let’s not forget, presided over massive pro-democratic change anyway.

Back to Greenwald:

Meanwhile, as the noble call for representative government continues to be heard by Muslims around the region, let us not forget that the one existing democratic country among them is the successful American project in Mesopotamia.

From Saturday’s New York Times:

As leaders in the Arab world and other countries condemn President Bashar al-Assad’s violent crackdown on demonstrators in Syria, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq has struck a far friendlier tone, urging the protesters not to “sabotage” the state and hosting an official Syrian delegation.

Mr. Maliki’s support for Mr. Assad has illustrated how much Iraq’s position in the Middle East has shifted toward an axis led by Iran. And it has also aggravated the fault line between Iraq’s Shiite majority, whose leaders have accepted Mr. Assad’s account that Al Qaeda is behind the uprising, and the Sunni minority, whose leaders have condemned the Syrian crackdown.

Today’s Los Angeles Times:

A series of blasts and gunshots ripped across Iraq on Monday, killing at least 70 people and wounding more than 300 in a spasm of bloodshed that raised fresh concerns that the nation’s security forces might be overwhelmed by insurgents when American soldiers withdraw later this year. [...] It appeared Iraq was in a time warp, a nation still struggling with terrorists, sectarian gangs and militias at a time much of the Arab world is moving to replace extremism through revolutions for democracy.

As my colleagues and I wrote in our May 2010 report, The Iraq War Ledger, there is simply no conceivable calculus by which Operation Iraqi Freedom can be judged to have been a successful or worthwhile policy. The war was intended to show the extent of America’s power. It succeeded only in showing its limits. We’ll be dealing with the implications of that for many years to come, regardless of whether the war’s advocates can bring themselves to face it.

Cross-posted from Middle East Progress.

Artist Mario Piperni's rendering of Bush and Perry photos.

Attempting to subtly distance himself from the unpopular Bush, Perry said yesterday, “Our records are quite different. … I went to Texas A&M. He went to Yale.” Even this very mild distancing of Bush was too much for former Bush “architect” Karl Rove.

On Fox News this morning, Rove complained that Perry is trying to contrast himself with Bush “in a way that’s dismissive of the former president,” adding “now, why one would do that, I don’t know.” (Bush left office with an approval rating of 22 percent.)

Rove then argued that Perry and Bush are actually quite close:

[In 1998, Bush] moved heaven and earth to get Rick Perry elected as his running mate. … I know from the perspective of the former president that he has a cordial, personal strong friendship of nearly two decades with the governor. I think that’s true of the governor too. But why he falls into this pattern of sounding like he’s being dismissive of the former president is not smart politics strategically or tactically.

Host Martha MacCallum observed, “It sounds like you feel like he’s been ungrateful to the Bushes.” Watch it:

During the interview, Rove also criticized Rick Perry for his “misstatement” on Ben Bernanke being potentially guilty of treason.

BRODY: What we show in this report is that the justifications presented or prepared by the Justice Department were not arm’s length independent analyses. What we show in this report is that led by Vice President Dick Cheney and his chief lawyer, the administration actually went to the Justice Department and put pressure on the Justice Department. [...] They were complicit. [...] What we are saying is that there are grounds to believe that there was a conspiracy.

Brody also noted the importance of prosecuting torture. He said that while President Obama has rightly abandoned the Bush administration’s torture regime, he added that failure to prosecute it treats it as a policy choice that can be repeated, not a crime to be punished:

BRODY: President Obama is treating torture as a policy choice not as a crime. So, President Obama to his credit has stopped authorizing torture, has disbanded the program of secret prisons but those decisions are easily reversible and very fragile. It’s like a loaded gun that’s on the table: “I’m not going to do it but maybe the next guy is going to do it.”

Watch the France 24 interview:

The HRW also calls for an “independent, nonpartisan commission, along the lines of the 9-11 Commission” in order to “make recommendations to ensure that the systematic abuses of the Bush administration are not repeated.”

Earlier this year, Bush canceled a trip to Switzerland reportedly fearing that legal action would be taken against him for authorizing torture.

Jon Huntsman, Jr.

McIntosh has a long record of environmental activism, and is now an influential actor in the international movement to stop global warming. An heir to the A&P fortune, McIntosh oversaw policy operations for The Pew Environment Group, was an attorney for Earthjustice, and worked at the Environmental Law Clinic. He has long been vice president of his family’s ecocruise non-profit, The Boat Company. The McIntosh Foundation is a major contributor to environmental groups like the Natural Resources Defense Council, Sierra Club, and the Earth Day Network.

In recent years, McIntosh has been the legal advisor to ClientEarth, a European legal non-profit dedicated to environmental activism founded with support from the McIntosh Foundation. ClientEarth believes that a healthy environment is a “fundamental human right,” like liberty and free speech. Other excerpts from the ClientEarth website demonstrate its strong commitment to aggressive action on global warming:

ClientEarth is an organisation of activist lawyers committed to securing a healthy planet.

Coal power is globally the single biggest threat to a secure climate, and we are working across Europe to oppose new coal power stations unless they capture the carbon they produce.

Huntsman is the only Republican candidate other than Mitt Romney to publicly admit that fossil fuel pollution is threatening our planet’s climate. Unlike Romney, who is getting climate advice from a pro-pollution Bush lawyer, Huntsman seems to have picked an advisor with a significant background in environmental activism.

President Obama's Top Counterterror Adviser John Brennan

However, Brennan stressed one key difference in approach from the Bush administration, saying that “our best offense won’t always be deploying large armies abroad but delivering targeted, surgical pressure to the groups that threaten us.” But what reporting on the new strategy has widely overlooked, is that the the United States will no longer treat al Qaeda as an existential threat or as a force that is capable of taking over countries or regions of the world and instituting totalitarian rule:

Our strategy is also shaped by a deeper understanding of al-Qa’ida’s goals, strategy, and tactics. I’m not talking about al-Qa’ida’s grandiose vision of global domination through a violent Islamic caliphate. That vision is absurd, and we are not going to organize our counterterrorism policies against a feckless delusion that is never going to happen. We are not going to elevate these thugs and their murderous aspirations into something larger than they are.

This point of view, as basis for dealing with al Qaeda, is a significant departure from the Bush administration’s counterterrorism strategy. In its 2006 “National Strategy for Combating Terrorism,” the Bush White House described the terror threat as such:

What unites the movement is a common vision, a common set of ideas about the nature and destiny of the world, and a common goal of ushering in totalitarian rule. What unites the movement is the ideology of oppression, violence, and hate.

Indeed, in his speech announcing the strategy, President Bush justified this policy, saying that Osama bin Laden wanted to make Baghdad the “capital of the Caliphate“:

They hope to establish a violent political utopia across the Middle East, which they call a “Caliphate” — where all would be ruled according to their hateful ideology. Osama bin Laden has called the 9/11 attacks — in his words — “a great step towards the unity of Muslims and establishing the Righteous… [Caliphate].” This caliphate would be a totalitarian Islamic empire encompassing all current and former Muslim lands, stretching from Europe to North Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia.

This is obviously, as Brennen said, “absurd.” Al Qaeda isn’t taking over anything and it’s refreshing for United States counterterror policy to officially recognize that.

10 years ago tomorrow, the first of the Bush tax cuts was enacted. That 2001 tax cut was followed up by a second tax cut in 2003, passed after Vice-President Dick Cheney reportedly asserted that “deficits don’t matter.” The tax cuts were sold as necessary economic stimulus that would boost job creation and a moribund economy. “Tax relief will create new jobs, tax relief will generate new wealth, and tax relief will open new opportunities,” Bush said on April 16, 2001 as he was pushing for the passage of the first tax cut. Two years later he said, “These tax reductions will bring real and immediate benefits to middle-income Americans…By speeding up the income tax cuts, we will speed up economic recovery and the pace of job creation.”

Bush called the 2001 tax cut, “a victory for fairness and a vote for economic growth.” Then-Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert (R-IL) said that the cuts were necessary to “spur the economy on.” And up through 2008, Bush was still convinced that his tax cuts had been good for the economy. “I think when people take a look back at this moment in our economic history, they’ll recognize tax cuts work. They have made a difference,” Bush said. However, the record of the Bush tax cuts is undeniable: their enactment coincided with the weakest economic expansion of the post-war period, blowing up the national deficit and debt, while not bringing any of the promised gains.

Read the whole thing here.

Ross Douthat did a column yesterday noting the substantial continuities on foreign policy between Barack Obama and George W Bush. I think there’s a lot to that, but there’s also a gaping Iraq-shaped hole in these continuity accounts and this is what makes assessments of continuity so difficult. After all, the decision to invade Iraq was kind of a big deal. And yet in seven out of eight years, Bush didn’t launch any unwarranted invasions of medium-sized countries. Like his predecessors and his successors Bush mostly eschewed unilateral preventive war as the key plank of his non-proliferation policy. But he spent the fall of 2002, the winter of 2002-2003, and the spring of 2003 pursuing a very different foreign policy approach from Obama’s.

That matters, a lot. Iraq was a giant disaster that got huge numbers of people killed and did enormous damage to American interests. When a normal person thinks about Bush, the Bush foreign policy, and the “Bush legacy” the misbegotten invasion of Iraq and the related decisions to brush off Iranian peace overtures and refuse to deal with North Korea loom extremely large. And while there are certainly precedents for what Bush did in Iraq, no other president ever made that kind of coercive regime change the centerpiece of his national security strategy.

ZAKARIA: President Obama did say that he felt that the capture or killing of Bin Laden was not a top priority when he took office and he moved it to a top priority. What’s your reaction?

RICE: Oh, it was a top priority. We wanted to get Osama Bin Laden every single day. And there was a unit at the — the agency that worked on nothing else.

Watch it:

While it’s impossible to know what level of priority President Bush gave to nabbing bin Laden, he routinely said, even as early as March 2002, that he didn’t “spend that much time on him.” But if by “every single day” Rice meant, “every single day until late 2005″ then she would be correct because, as the New York Times reported in 2006, that’s when Bush closed the bin Laden unit in order to shift resources to Iraq:

The Central Intelligence Agency has closed a unit that for a decade had the mission of hunting Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants, intelligence officials confirmed. [...]

The unit, known as Alec Station, was disbanded late last year and its analysts reassigned within the C.I.A. Counterterrorist Center, the officials said. [...]

In recent years, the war in Iraq has stretched the resources of the intelligence agencies and the Pentagon, generating new priorities for American officials. For instance, much of the military’s counterterrorism units, like the Army’s Delta Force, had been redirected from the hunt for Mr. bin Laden to the search for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was killed last month in Iraq.

And of course, President Obama ended to the war in Iraq and put resources back into getting bin Laden. “Shortly after I got into office,” Obama said in an interview on 60 Minutes last night, “I brought [CIA director] Leon Panetta privately into the Oval Office and I said to him, ‘We need to redouble our efforts in hunting bin Laden down. And I want us to start putting more resources, more focus, and more urgency into that mission.’” So actually making bin Laden a top priority seems to have worked out pretty well.

RICE: So the Georgians who went there and the Japanese who went there and others –

O’DONNELL: Actually had soldiers firing weapons on the ground?

RICE: This was not part of the coalition. The people who — the British and the Australians and the Poles and all of those who — the Canadians, all of those who were ultimately in Iraq, these were not part of the coalition?

Watch it, starting at 5:22:

This must be news to the Canadians. While Canada did participate in reconstruction projects after the war began, the Canadian government led by Liberal Party Prime Minister Jean Chrétien did not support the decision to invade. But seeing that Dr. Rice has never made a mistake in her life, perhaps it’s the facts that are wrong in this case.

RUMSFELD: I’m told there was some confusion today on some programs…suggesting that I indicated that no one who was waterboarded at Guantanamo provided any information on this. That’s just not true. What I said was no one was waterboarded at Guantanamo by the U.S. military…Three people were waterboarded by the CIA…and then later brought to Guantanamo. In fact, as you point out, the information that came from those individuals was critically important.“

Rumsfeld also agreed with Hannity that “if he [Obama] had had his way, and Democrats had their way, we wouldn’t have had this intelligence.” Watch it:

Before the interview, Rumsfeld aide Keith Urbahn accused ThinkProgress of using his boss’s previous quote “cynically” and taking the statement “out of context.” But Rumsfeld’s original statement to Newsmax was quite clear, and the conservative outlet ran the interview under the headline, “Rumsfeld Exclusive: There Was No Waterboarding of Courier Source.”

Rumsfeld’s original position was more accurate, according to numerous sources who are familiar with the intelligence that led to Bin Laden. White House spokesman Tommy Vietor recently summed up a key flaw in the argument that waterboarding was integral to the mission, saying, “The bottom line is this: If we had some kind of smoking-gun intelligence from waterboarding in 2003, we would have taken out Osama bin Laden in 2003.”

Rumsfeld and others have pointed to the comments of CIA Director Leon Panetta on NBC Nightly News this week as proof that waterboarding was instrumental in the intelligence trail that led to Bin Laden. Panetta never actually connected the dots between finding Bin Laden and waterboarding. He simply said that some of the detainees who provided key pieces of intelligence had been waterboarded at some point — an obvious fact — without saying that it was the waterboarding that caused them to turn over the information.

The New York Times’ definitive account of the intelligence trail that led to Bin Laden concluded, “harsh techniques played a small role at most in identifying Bin Laden’s trusted courier and exposing his hide-out.”

In fact, two of the prisoners subjected to the harshest treatment — including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who was waterboarded 183 times — repeatedly lied under torture about the critical piece of intel about the courier. Mohammed has been frequently invoked by conservatives in recent days as the paramount example that waterboarding works. Abu Faraj Al-Libbi, another Al Qaeda leader whose usefulness has been cited by conservatives, also misled interrogators about the courier.

The detainee who provided the most important actionable intelligence about the courier, Al Qaeda operative Hassan Ghul, was not waterboarded, and was described by one official as being “quite cooperative.”

This conservative effort to reopen the torture debate appears to be little more than an attempt to attack President Obama at a moment of strength and distract from that fact that Bush failed to catch Bin Laden.

In fact, the only time Palin referenced Obama was to attack him — on foreign policy. Palin told the crowd at Colorado Christian University that American troops need better leadership. “She cited the Obama administration’s policy in Libya as an example of ‘a lack of clarity,’” saying, “We can’t fight every war.” “We don’t go looking for dragons to slay,” she said. As ThinkProgress noted, Bush had actually largely abandoned the hunt for Bin Laden several years into his administration.