It is said that, to Washington’s neoconservative pundits, every problem looks a nail, and they have just the hammer: military force. Washington Post columnist and Fox News commentator Charles Krauthammer nicely encapsulated this concept last night on Bill O’Reilly’s show when he said that the U.S. should have sent “weaponry” to the pro-democracy movement that erupted in Iran after the fraudulent presidential elections of June 2009.

Krauthammer said that President Obama should have ramped up rhetoric against Iran during the brutal crackdown on the Green Movement — the distinctly non-violent protest movement born out of Mir Hossien Moussavi’s failed 2009 presidential campaign. And when O’Reilly asked what else Obama could have done, Krauthammer said he should have armed the protesters and order a covert war against Iran:

O’REILLY: But what else could he have done except rhetoric?

KRAUTHAMMER: Weaponry — he could have done a lot of things. Rhetoric is one thing and not to support the legitimacy of the regime. Clandestine operations. Why do we have $50 billion in secret operations in the CIA if not for an opportunity like this? He was hands off. He did nothing and we lost one of the great opportunities in history.

Watch the video:

Presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney and his ideological comrades have made President Obama’s reaction to the 2009 post-election Iranian government crackdown on Green Movement demonstrators a centerpiece of their criticisms. Romney’s campaign issue page for Iran says Obama “refrained from supporting the nascent Green Movement.” In a Washington Post op-ed, Romney wrote that he would “speak out on behalf of the cause of democracy in Iran and support Iranian dissidents who are fighting for their freedom.”

In reality, Obama didn’t, as Krauthammer put it, “support the legitimacy of the [Iranian] regime.” Daniel Larison has pointed out that, when failed presidential candidate Rick Santorum made the same charge, that unlike many world governments, Obama never recognized the elections. Furthermore, Obama condemned the abuses against demonstrators that June.

But more to the point, one hopes that Romney does not conflate symbolic “fighting” for freedom with literal fighting. Unlike in Syria and Libya, the Green Movement in Iran never took up arms. As Ardeshir Amirarjmand, a top adviser to Moussavi now in exile in France, told an audience at MIT last year, “We do not have any other choice than a nonviolent path toward democracy.” Or, as University of Toronto professor Ramin Jahanbegloo put it, “The Green Movement faces a troubling situation, but it is banking on its strategy of nonviolence as moral capital.” Iranian human rights lawyer and Nobel Laureate Shirin Ebadi — who, like Iranian civil society as a whole, opposes attacking Iran — told ThinkProgress in 2010 that she disagreed with critics who said that Obama should have spoken more forcefully in support of the Green movement in June 2009.

Krauthammer worries that Obama is not doing enough to support Iran’s democracy movement. But it’s perfectly clear that the Green Movement doesn’t want the kind of support — weapons and covert war — that Krauthammer is offering.

Yesterday, a tribal court in Pakistan handed down a 33-year prison term for treason to the doctor who helped the CIA locate Osama Bin Laden in a Pakistani army garrison town. The verdict drew widespread attention in Washington, but Congress and the State Department are having very different reactions.

After Capitol HIll collectively expressed considerable outrage, the Senate Appropriations Committee voted unanimously to cut $33 million from Pakistan’s foreign aid package — $1 million for each year of the sentence against the doctor, Shakeel Afridi. The reduction comes on top of the more than 50 percent of the aid a Senate panel cut earlier this week.

But the U.S. State Department didn’t ramp up its rhetoric so dramatically, maintaining its position that Afridi is detained without basis. A spokesperson said the U.S. will continue to let the Pakistani government know about that position. The softer line might reflect the possibility that Afridi’s verdict could easily be overturned.

Afridi, who ran a vaccination drive to collect data that the U.S. has credited with helping to find Bin Laden, was tried under a British colonial-era law that does not carry a death penalty, according to the New York Times. (The L.A. Times reported that “Afridi could have been given the death penalty.”) Having never approved of his detention, however, the U.S. still objected to the sentence. Asked about the issue yesterday, spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said:

We will – we continue to see no basis for Dr. Afridi to be held….

I think we’ve said that we don’t see any basis for what’s happened here, and so we will continue to make those representations to the Government of Pakistan.

Watch the video:

In February, Clinton said of Afridi: “His work on behalf of the effort to take down Bin Laden was in Pakistan’s interests as well as in America’s.” On CBS’s 60 Minutes in January, Panetta was more outspoken on the matter, calling actions against Afridi a “real mistake on their part” and crediting his help and making a case similar to Clinton’s:

This was an individual who in fact helped provide intelligence that was very helpful with regards to this operation. He was not in any way treasonous towards Pakistan, he was not in any way doing anything that would have undermined Pakistan. As a matter of fact, Pakistan and the United States have a common cause here against terrorism.

A Pakistani lawyer speaking to CNN said it was likely the case could be overturned — something Nuland subtly alluded to in the briefing when she said the legal process wasn’t necessarily complete. The lawyer, Shahzad Akbar, said that the tribal court is not based in Abbottabad, the site of the bin Laden raid. He told CNN: “If this punishment is challenged by Dr. Afridi’s family in the Superior Court of Pakistan, there is a good possibility that the sentence will be turned around.“

In an interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes, former Central Intelligence Agency clandestine operations chief Jose Rodriguez defended his department’s use of torture methods when questioning terrorist suspects.

Rodriguez, who had tapes of the interrogations destroyed, was unapologetic. He told 60 Minutes:

We made some al Qaeda terrorists with American blood on their hands uncomfortable for a few days. But we did the right thing for the right reason. And the right reason was to protect the homeland and to protect American lives. So yes, I had no qualms. [...]

If there was going to be another attack against the U.S., we would have blood on our hands because we would not have been able to extract that information from [a terrorist suspect]. So we started to talk about an alternative set of interrogation procedures.

Watch a clip:

Rodriguez compared so-called stress positions — such as making detainees hold their hands above their heads — and sleep-deprivation to going to the gym and having jetlag, respectively. He cited the interrogations of alleged Al Qaeda terrorists Abu Zubaydeh and Khalid Sheikh Mohammad. “This program was about instilling a sense of hopelessness and despair on the terrorist, on the detainee, so that he would conclude on his own that he was better off cooperating with us,” he said.

But others — including military and law enforcement officials and politicians — have said that interrogations are most effective when interrogators stick to the script laid out on interrogations in the Army Field Manual, which is informed by decades of military experience. Anti-torture advocates note that the interrogation techniques employed during the Bush administration go against American values, endanger U.S. troops who might facing reciprocal treatment, and often lead to false information because subjects of harsh interrogations will say anything to get the sessions to end.

When confronted by CBS’s Leslie Stahl with the FBI’s contention that Abu Zubaydeh gave up his most useful information before harsh interrogations, Rodriguez said, “It’s not true.” Asked about a CIA inspector general’s report stating that the guidelines — or lack thereof — led to “unauthorized, improvised, inhumane and undocumented” techniques, Rodriguez said, “Well our own inspector general in many cases did very sloppy work. That report is flawed in many different ways.” Told by Stahl that she’d heard information gained from Abu Zubayded through waterboarding led the U.S. on wild goose chases, Rodriguez fired back, “Bullshit. He gave us a road map that allowed us to capture a bunch of Al Qaeda senior leaders.” Still-secret documentation of the claims makes sorting out the disputes difficult.

But former FBI interrogator Ali Soufan said in an interview with CNN that “the examples that they are mentioning as the successes of EITs absolutely were not produced by EITs.” He said the information gleaned from Abu Zubaydeh that pointed to Khalid Sheik Muhammad’s central role in the 9/11 attacks came before waterboarding on Abu Zubaydeh began.

When the debate over harsh interrogations reignited after Osama Bin Laden’s killing, numerous former interrogators, officials who oversaw interrogations, military officials, and national security experts stated that the techniques were not as effective as traditional interrogation techniques and, furthermore, hurt U.S. interests by putting a bad face forward.

Even sometime Bush administration ally Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) wrote, “Ultimately, this is more than a utilitarian debate. This is a moral debate. It is about who we are.”

In a new book, the former head of the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) operations wing discussed publicly for the first time his role in destroying videos of interrogations that involved torture — including 92 videos of the waterboarding of suspected terrorist Abu Zubaydah. The former official, Jose Rodriguez, reportedly laces his book with scathing criticisms of President Obama and his administration’s anti-torture policies. “I cannot tell you how disgusted my former colleagues and I felt to hear ourselves labeled ‘torturers’ by the president of the United States,” he writes in “Hard Measures: How Aggressive CIA Actions After 9/11 Saved American Lives,” due out next week. Rodrigues was referring to “waterboarding,” which the American people, international law, and even some Republicans consider to be torture.

But for some reviewers, the most eye-catching revelation has focused on Rodriguez’s role in destroying the interrogation tapes that included waterboarding. Upon the closing of one of the CIA’s “black sites” — secret detention centers used to keep so-called “high-level detainees” off the grid and outside even U.S. law — Rodriguez was asked about destroying the tapes, and leaned toward the affirmative. But a memo from his superiors told him to hold off. After his superiors’ wavering between allowing the tapes’ destruction and then backing off, it was finally the Abu Ghraib prison scandal that pushed Rodriguez to order the videos destroyed. According to a review in the Washington Post, Rodriguez wrote:

We knew that if the photos of CIA officers conducting authorized EIT [enhanced interrogation techniques] ever got out, the difference between a legal, authorized, necessary, and safe program and the mindless actions of some MPs [military police] would be buried by the impact of the images.

The propaganda damage to the image of America would be immense. But the main concern then, and always, was for the safety of my officers.

…I was not depriving anyone of information about what was done or what was said. I was just getting rid of some ugly visuals that could put the lives of my people at risk.

Dana Priest, the Post reviewer who had her own run-in with Rodriguez when in the process of exposing the “black sites,” commented on the ex-spy’s motivations for destroying the videos:

In this case, a loyal civil servant — and the decision-makers above him who blessed these programs — were not thinking about the larger, longer-lasting damage to the core values of the United States that disclosure of these secrets might cause. They were thinking about the near term. About efficiency. About the safety of friends and colleagues. In their minds, they were thinking, too, about the safety of the country.

Rodriguez also contends in his book that it was the Bush administration’s torture program that led to the killing of Osama bin Laden — a common theme among proponents of torture:

I am certain, beyond any doubt, that these techniques… shielded the people of the United States from harm and led to the capture and killing of Usama bin Ladin.

That view is at odds with former interrogators and Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Diane Feinstein. Amid an extensive investigation of the techniques, Feinsten was asked if the harsh methods played a role in finding and killing Osama bin Laden. “To date, the answer to your question is no,” she replied.

The long Washington Post profile this weekend of a top Central Intelligence Agency official contained a remarkable number of details about the man that heads the Agency’s Counterterrorism Center — remarkable because the man remained shrouded in mystery, referenced only by the first name of his cover identity, “Roger.” Roger chain smokes, swears, worked in Africa, was “pudgy” in his youth, and — oh, yeah — he’s Muslim.

This last fact was too much for one of America’s foremost Islamophobes to bear: to an Islamophobe, Islamic extremist terrorism is inseparable from Islam at large, so how could a Muslim head up a counter-terrorism operation? Leave aside that Roger presides over a CIA unit that he expanded from three unmanned drone aircraft to an entire fleet firing missiles that have crippled militant networks — including Al Qaeda — in Pakistan.

Leave aside that Roger presides over a CIA unit that he brought from having three unmanned drone aircraft to a fleet of them that fire myriad missiles which crippled militant networks — including Al Qaeda — in Pakistan. Never mind that retired Gen. David Petraeus, who now heads up the CIA, said of Roger: “No officer in the agency has been more relentless, focused, or committed to the fight against al-Qaeda than has the chief of the Counterterrorism Center.”

None of that was enough to convince Robert Spencer, a long-time ally of anti-Muslim mainstay Pamela Geller, that “Roger” just might be a Manchurian candidate foisted upon the CIA by Muslim extremists looking to destroy America:

[I]f Islamic supremacists wanted to subvert the U.S. defense against jihad terror, they couldn’t do it more easily than by turning someone in a position like Roger’s. The worst part of this story is that no one is even examining that as a possibility.

Maybe the Post’s Greg Miller simply realized that a guy who blows up the actual dangerous “Islamic supremacists” on a regular basis would make an unlikely candidate to be a plant within the system. Perhaps that’s because, under Roger’s watch, “core al Qaida’s ability to perform a variety of functions — including preserving leadership and conducting external operations — has weakened significantly,” according to Capitol Hill testimony by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

But Spencer knows all that. He even says so:

The Washington Post, of course, follows the mainstream media line that Islam is a Religion of Peace that has been hijacked by a tiny minority of extremists, and so takes for granted that “Roger” has no loyalty issues, and proffers the drone campaign and the killing of bin Laden as proof.

Why still the questions, then? Because, Spencer says, “It is impossible to tell from this how serious he is about Islam.” The obvious implication in Spencer’s thinking is that “serious(ness)” about one’s faith — when that faith is Islam — means disloyalty to the U.S. Spencer should consider that the “mainstream media” might be right about this one.

The GOP primary races — and the candidates’ efforts to one-up each others’ hawkishness on Iran — often dominates the foreign policy headlines, but a growing number of U.S. and Israeli officials are expressing reservations over the possibility of a military confrontation with Iran. The latest official to add their voice is George W. Bush’s CIA director and NSA chief Gen. Michael Hayden.

Foreign Policy’s Josh Rogin reports that Hayden, while speaking yesterday at the Center for the National Interest, told a small group:

When we talked about this in the government, the consensus was that [attacking Iran] would guarantee that which we are trying to prevent — an Iran that will spare nothing to build a nuclear weapon and that would build it in secret.

Hayden, reports Rogin, told the audience that the Bush administration concluded that without a military occupation of Iran, a military campaign would be counterproductive.

Hayden’s misgivings about a airstrikes come the same week that Colin Kahl, Obama’s recently retired Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East, expressed his own reservations about attacking Iran. He wrote in Foreign Affairs:

[G]iven the high costs and inherent uncertainties of a strike, the United States should not rush to use force until all other options have been exhausted and the Iranian threat is not just growing but imminent. Until then, force is, and should remain, a last resort, not a first choice.

And on Tuesday, Former CIA acting director John McLaughlin told an audience that attacking Iran “would be a very bad option.”

Yukiya Amano, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said this week that what the IAEA knows about Iran’s nuclear program “suggests the development of nuclear weapons” and vowed to “alert the world” about program’s military dimensions. And the Chinese came out forcefully against Iran, warning that it does not tolerate a course toward nuclear weapons. “China adamantly opposes Iran developing and possessing nuclear weapons,” Chinese premier Wen Jiabao said.

Britain, China, France, Russia, Germany and the United States offered new negotiations with Iran on its nuclear program. “We are waiting for the Iranian reaction,” said a spokesperson for EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton.

At the same time, a growing number of retired U.S. defense and intelligence officials, combined with twelve of the 18 living former heads of the three Israeli security branches, are expressing reservations about the rush towards military action against Iran.

Congress and GOP presidential candidates might find short-term political benefits in hawkish rhetoric and turning the discussion “into a political debate and one -upmanship,” as Rep. Peter Welch (D-VT) warned on Wednesday, but officials in both Washington and Tel Aviv are expressing strongly worded concerns about the potential dangers of a military strike.