Last Thursday, NBC News reported that the Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK), an exiled Iranian opposition group designated a “foreign terrorist organization” by the State Department, conducted a series of assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists.

Former CIA official and visiting Georgetown professor Paul Pillar, citing the U.S. government’s definition of terrorism, observed that “with or without confirmation of details of this story, the assassinations are terrorism.” But numerous right-wing pundits and politicians here in the United States — many of whom regularly decry the use of terrorism as a means to political ends — have celebrated the MEK’s alleged attacks.

Appearing on Fox News on Sunday, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani declared that the MEK should be the Time Magazine “person of the year” if they were behind assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists.

An editorial in Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post said on Friday that the MEK deserves a Nobel Peace Prize:

Let’s be frank: Were the MeK to play the critical role in derailing an Iranian bomb, it would be far more deserving of a Nobel Peace Prize than a certain president of the United States we could mention.

And Commentary’s Jonathan Tobin justified the MEK’s action and Israel’s alleged role in financing, arming and training the group:

To those who say it is immoral to use those who have employed terrorism, the only reply can be that it would be far worse for Israel’s government to allow such scruples to prevent them from carrying out actions that might stop the Iranians from going nuclear.

Noticeably, the MEK’s defenders chose not to address the NBC report’s other major disclosure. The MEK reportedly worked with Ramzi Yousef, the terrorist behind the first attack on the World Trade Center, to bomb an Iranian shrine, killing at least 26 people.

The NBC report did not go on to substantiate any direct links between the Israeli government and the assassination campaign, and the MEK denied any involvement in the attacks.

Indeed, the MEK’s American supporters find themselves in the increasingly difficult position of lobbying to remove the organization from the State Department’s terror list while openly celebrating the group’s involvement in terrorist attacks.

A top Pentagon official admitted that the U.S. government may have misjudged the actual threat posed by Al Qaeda in the immediate aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. More than a decade later, Michael A. Sheehan, the assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low intensity conflict, told an audience Tuesday, “Quite frankly, we, the American people, were asleep at the switch, the U.S. government, prior to 9/11. So an organization that wasn’t that good looked really great on 9/11.”

Sheehan, speaking at a Special Operations, Low Intensity Conflict Planning conference, questioned Al Qaeda’s capabilities:

Everyone looked to the skies every day after 9/11 and said, ‘When is the next attack?’ And it didn’t come, partly because al-Qaida wasn’t that capable. They didn’t have other units here in the U.S. … Really, they didn’t have the capability to conduct a second attack.

Sheehan credited the American military’s “brilliant operation” in October 2001 that ousted the Taliban from power but also emphasized that Al Qaeda’s limited capabilities were one of the key reasons the U.S. hasn’t suffered a terrorist attack since 2001.

Unrealistic estimates of Al Qaeda’s reach and strength weren’t the only overblown fears after the 9/11 attacks. A new University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Duke University and RTI International study [PDF] finds that counterterrorism officials’ warning about a potential wave of homegrown terrorism have not materialized. Moreover, numbers of U.S. Muslims with any suspected links to terrorism have been declining since 9/11. The study found that 20 Muslim-Americans committed or were arrested for terrorist crimes in 2011, down from 26 in 2010 and 49 in 2009. A chart from the report illustrates the data:

“Those who predicted an inevitable, rapid increase of homegrown violent extremism among Muslim-Americans were wrong,” said David Schanzer [DOC], director of the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security and professor of public policy at Duke. UNC professor Charles Kurzman, author of the report, called terrorism by Muslim Americans “a minuscule threat to public safety.”

In September, Kurzman’s new book The Missing Martyrs: Why There Are So Few Muslim Terrorists found that Al Qaeda and its affiliates have “failed so dismally” because they have been unable to recruit American Muslims. Putting the homegrown terrorist threat in context, Kurzman pointed out that in the ten years since 9/11, Muslim American terrorist plots have killed 33 people in the U.S. but there have been more than 150,000 murders.

Out on the campaign trail and in debates, Mitt Romney has tried to paint President Obama as a ineffective commander-in-chief. The former Massachusetts governor regularly says things like the President is “weak” or that he “went around the world and apologized for America” — an assertion the Washington Post said was “based on distortions.”

But it appears that Romney’s baseless attacks on Obama’s foreign policy aren’t sticking. A new Washington Post-ABC News poll out today found that “Obama has big leads [over Romney], including on the question of who would better protect the middle class, handle foreign policy and fight terrorism.” Fifty-five percent trust Obama over Romney (38 percent) to handle international affairs and 54 percent said Obama is more able to deal with the terrorism theat than Romney (38 percent). See the Post’s chart:

Perhaps Romney knows he doesn’t have much on the president’s foreign policy, which might explain why he regularly lobs false and misleading charges at Obama, on issues ranging from Iran, Israel, the war in Afghanistan and the military. Regarding Romney’s charges that Obama is “weakening” the U.S. military, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, himself a Republican, called that line of attack “ridiculous.”

American special forces raided into Somalia early this morning and rescued two aid workers, one American woman and one Danish man, and killed their captors, nine Somali pirates. President Obama reportedly authorized the raid on Monday and said in a statement after the operation: “This is yet another message to the world that the United States of America will stand strongly against any threats to our people.” And last night before his State of the Union address, the president appeared to congratulate Defense Secretary Leon Panetta on the raid’s success. Reuters reports:

Obama was overheard congratulating Panetta on the success of the operation as the president entered the U.S. House of Representatives chamber on Tuesday for his annual State of the Union speech.

Panetta had been at the White House, where he had monitored the progress of the operation, before the speech. The raid was still being wrapped up when the president spoke to him.

“Leon. Good job tonight. Good job tonight,” said Obama.

Watch it:

The American commandos who rescued the two aid workers this morning were, as the New York Times reports, “drawn from the same Navy commando unit that killed Osama bin Laden” — a point that highlights the president’s success in the face of threats to the security of the U.S. and its allies. Here are some examples since January 2009:

– TAKING OUT TERRORISTS: In addition to ordering the raids that killed bin Laden and al Qaeda propagandist Anwar al-Alwaki, dozens of high level terrorists have been taken out under President Obama’s watch.

– ISRAEL’S CAIRO EMBASSY: Last September, demonstrators in Cairo, Egypt ransacked the Israeli embassy calling for the Jewish state’s ambassador to be expelled after Israeli security forces killed Egyptian soldiers. President Obama intervened with U.S. assets to assist in evacuating the Israeli embassy staff. “I would like to express my gratitude to the President of the United States, Barack Obama,” Israeli Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu said in a subsequent statement. “I asked for his help. This was a decisive and fateful moment. He said, ‘I will do everything I can.’ And so he did.”

– HOSTAGE RESCUE: The president’s first encounter with Somali pirates occurred just months after he took office. Then, Obama ordered Navy SEAL snipers to kill three pirates in order to free an American sea captain who had offered himself as a hostage to save his crew. “I want to be very clear that we are resolved to halt the rise of piracy in that region and to achieve that goal, we’re going to have to continue to work with our partners to prevent future attacks,” Obama said after the sea captain had been freed.

Throughout the presidential campaign this year, Republicans regularly charge that Obama appeases America’s adversaries. “President Obama has adopted an appeasement strategy,” Mitt Romney said last month. The Daily Beast’s Andrew Sullivan recently ran through a number of false claims the GOP presidential candidates constantly recycle, including the appeasement charge, and concluded, “None of this is even faintly connected to reality.”

Indeed, as the president himself said last month: “Ask Osama bin Laden and the 22 other out of 30 top al Qaeda leaders who have been taken off the field whether I engage in appeasement.”

In 2008, African-American Muslim student Balayla Ahmad enrolled in Connecticut’s University of Bridgeport with hopes of becoming a chiropractor. Instead, she became of a victim of sexual harassment. Distressed by the repeated sexual advances and “graphic offensive comments” of a male student, Ahmad reported the harassment and “fears for her safety” to multiple teachers, who urged her to say nothing, and finally the university’s president and dean. The dean told Ahmad, “My hands are tied. What do you suggest I do?”

Rather than having her claims addressed, Ahmad received allegations of her own. Learning of her report, Ahmad’s harasser decided to falsely accuse her of terrorism to the FBI. And rather than fully investigate what was happening, the University of Bridgeport just expelled Ahmad altogether:

After reporting the sexual harassment in April 2009, Ahmad said she was approached by two university security directors who told her someone had made allegations against her and they threatened to call the FBI and have her arrested.

Later, two FBI agents knocked on Ahmad’s apartment door, questioned her and left a business card, according to the lawsuit. She said she learned that her harasser or his associates had fabricated a story falsely accusing her of being a terrorist in apparent retaliation for having made a sexual harassment complaint against him.

“Ahmad was racially profiled and discriminated against because of her race, color and ethnic identity as an African American Muslim and labeled a terrorist based on false accusations provided by the harasser and adopted without adequate investigation by the university,” the lawsuit states.

Ahmad asked that the university provide her with an off-site proctor for her exams, but she said the university told her in April 2009 that her sexual harassment complaint had been closed and that she was being referred to a disciplinary committee. In June, she said the university dismissed her.

Ahmad filed a lawsuit against the university last week for failing to investigate her claims, instead showing “deliberate indifference” to her plight. The lawsuit claims that the college even “recklessly disseminated false accusations by the harasser that they had good reason to believe were unreliable and threatened her with arrest by the FBI.”

Ahmad’s lawyer, Bradford Conover noted that because Ahmad regularly wears the hijab, she was easily targeted for her religion. “[B]ecause of that, she ended up getting targeted based on some reckless accusations against her,” Conover said. “They never investigated it. Had they done so, they would have discovered the accusations against her were false and she had been subject to sexual harassment.”

It’s been difficult for the Republicans to attack President Obama on foreign policy, particularly seeing that he oversaw and ordered the operation that ended up killing Osama bin Laden. But the Republicans have a strategy on that: pretend Obama had nothing to do with it. Rick Santorum says repeatedly that Obama had no role in getting bin Laden. “The president doesn’t deserve credit” for getting bin Laden, Santorum said last week. “The people who deserve credit for that were the military whose mission it was to find them,” he said.

Rick Perry has picked up on this too. CNN reports that after Perry called Obama’s foreign policy an “abject failure,” a student pointed out that the President should get some recognition for getting bin Laden. But instead of agreeing with this obvious conclusion, Perry took the Santorum route — denial:

“I would suggest to you that it was Navy SEALs and our intelligence community that was the reason bin Laden was taken out, not the President of the United States,” he said.

Asked again by CNN if he believed that the president should be given some share of the credit for bin Laden’s death, Perry answered: “I’m almost positive it was Navy SEALs.”

Of course Perry and Santorum are correct; without the Navy SEAL team and their skills and professionalism, bin Laden might still be alive today. And Obama said so himself. “These Americans deserve credit for one of the greatest intelligence and military operations in our nation’s history,” he said. But of course it goes without saying that the raid would not have taken place if not for Obama’s push to “redouble” efforts to find bin Laden and his order to raid the al Qaeda leader’s compound in Pakistan, a decision Robert Gates said was “one of the most courageous calls I’ve ever seen a president make.”

But Perry and co. will most likely still carry on living in this denial. After all, despite all of the turmoil the United States and the world have faced throughout history, the Texas governor believes “the world has never been as dangerous as it is today” because of Obama.

As Congress passed the $662 billion defense authorization bill last week, critics worried that the bill authorized indefinite military detention for terror suspects, including American citizens, captured inside the United States. However, the bill does not change existing law on the subject, and CAP’s Ken Gude believes, “It does not limit or expand existing detention authority.”

Yet Rep. Jeff Landry (R-LA) wants to make sure. Landry told the Hill newspaper yesterday that he has asked House Armed Services Committee chair Rep. Buck McKeon (R-CA) to revisit the issue in the defense bill to make sure that the language does not give the U.S. government new rights to hold U.S. citizens without due process:

“We have assurances that they would work to clarify the language,” Landry told The Hill. “I have a commitment from the chairman that the type of language I have is the type of language he would use to clarify that.”

Landry has introduced H.R. 3676, which would amend the NDAA by saying that “no United States citizen may be detained against his or her will without all the rights of due process afforded to the citizen in a court ordained or established by or under Article III of the Constitution of the United States.”

As the Hill also notes, the defense bill Congress passed last week “does say explicitly that no new authority is created to detain U.S. citizens, and that the military detention language does not apply to citizens.”

Landry however fears the bill has some holes. “The problem we’ve had is that Congress over the last 30 years has just not done a good job of basically telling the administration through legislation what the confines of its power are,” Landry said. “All we’re trying to do is say look, this is what Congress is trying to intend.”