Rudy Giuliani with MEK leader Maryam Rajavi on January 20, 2012

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.

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.

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.”

First, she argues that Carrie’s actions are: “quite horrifying; she installs bugs on the home of a terror suspect, which she has been ordered to take down before she can gather any meaningful intelligence. Isn’t that convenient? Our civil liberties are what come between sniffing out Al Qaeda operatives, who just won’t allow well-meaning if somewhat psychotic spies to do their jobs properly.” But this is a total misreading of Carrie’s bugging activities. The cameras turn up no useful information. Carrie’s first break in the case comes from analyzing publicly available cable footage and finding Brody’s tell. The fact that Carrie’s been spying on him ruins the rapport she’s building with him in person when she accidentally reveals that she knows more about him than she could have without surveillance. And not only does the show emphasize that Carrie’s surveillance of Brody is ineffective, it’s repeatedly and clearly stated by credible actors that it’s illegal. (Relatedly, AuCoin says that Carrie doesn’t lose her job, which is true in that incident, but factually untrue by the end of the season).

Second, she says that the al Qaeda operative who commits suicide was about to give up valuable information. But I’m not actually sure what textual evidence there is that the information he was about to surrender would be significant, actionable, or even true. If anything, the man seemed relatively stoic throughout his ordeal, his suicide a triumphant martyr’s death rather than a desperate act to preserve his silence. By contrast, Saul’s road trip with a homegrown terrorist produces the first break in the case, revealing that Tom Walker is alive. He uses conversation, compassion, and intellect to get her to talk—and the show devotes an entire episode to showing how and why that approach works.

I’m also puzzled by her assertion that, after the effort to capture Tom Walker goes wrong, “the issue is not dealt with; it is understood this will not create an international or even domestic incident. They are Muslims, and therefore expendable; this seems to be the show’s message.” Again, on a factual basis, the idea that the shooting isn’t dealt with isn’t supported by the text of the show: there are protests after the shooting, and Carrie says clearly that the shooting is a public relations disaster that her agency should deal with directly and compassionately. That they don’t is a clear strategic and moral error. And to say that the show’s message is that Muslims are expendable is a dramatic and offensive misreading of a show that treats Muslim prayers as lovely; has the show’s most prominent Muslim talk at length about the beauty and joy his faith has brought into his life; and argues that we should sympathize with that Muslim because of his outrage over the murder of Muslims in a drone strike that treated Muslim children as acceptable collateral damage.

Finally, AuCoin seems to assume that the audience for Homeland is too stupid to parse the gap between how the characters view themselves and how we’re clearly supposed to view them. Yes, David has a lot of power and is told he’s smart: we’re also show than he’s venal, ambitious, petty, close-minded, and an enabler of the Vice President who is more interested in beefing up his anti-terror credentials than the truth. AuCoin praises a British show called The Sandbaggers because “The agency bosses are portrayed as careerists, all too willing to send the sandbaggers on highly dangerous and morally ambiguous missions while they wine, dine, and dream of knighthood.” it’s hard to imagine a better description of David Estes. AuCoin says Homeland would “would never go so far as to suggest that there is something rotten about the State Department, whose endorsement of internationally illegal prisons abroad has served to encourage the growth of terror cells and damaged our authenticity when we criticize other nations like China, Syria, and Russia for not respecting civil liberties,” except that the show clearly shows a lower-level State Department official objecting to CIA tactics only to get sold out by his bosses and rolled by the CIA in such a way that even casual viewers couldn’t miss it. Carrie’s errors and insane decisions, including her affair with Brody, are clearly errors and insane decisions. And if Homeland doesn’t pick up on AuCoin’s pet issue, it makes a strong, sustained argument against the use of drone strikes.

And it’s not really true that “Carrie is the rogue genius who might become occasionally unhinged, but her unorthodox methods are what is needed, and can lead to results.” Carrie’s brain works faster than her colleagues, but her tragedy is less that the people around her can’t understand her, but that her mental illness causes her to undermine her own good, legitimate work and prevents her from presenting it in a way that resonates with and is comprehensible to her colleagues. Given that the first season of Homeland literally ends with her wiping her own brain via electroshock therapy and Saul begging her not to do it, it’s nigh-incomprehensible to me that someone would argue that the show is endorsing a vision of the CIA rife with rogue agents: it’s clear that both Carrie and the organization she works for are deeply broken.

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.”

Aden’s campaign manager, Jake Burris, lives in central Arkansas with his four kids. Blue Arkansas has more on the scene at Burris’s home (emphases are ours):

Last night, Jake and his four kids had come back to their Russellville home. As they were getting out of the car, one of his children discovered their family cat dead on the front porch. One side of the animal’s head had been bashed in and an eyeball was hanging out of its socket. But there was something even more horrifying to be found on the corpse. Written across the animal’s fur in black marker was the word “LIBERAL“.

Here is a picture of the family’s murdered cat:

Pope County, where Burris lives, is a highly-conservative area of Arkansas. Aden has been running for the 3rd congressional district seat, currently held by Rep. Steve Womack (R-AR), since August 2011. He released a statement on the matter this morning: “To kill a child’s pet is just unconscionable. As a former combat soldier, I’ve seen the best of humanity and the worst of humanity. Whoever did this is definitely part of the worst of humanity.”

It is unclear at this time precisely who committed this heinous act.

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.”

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.

Rep. Jeff Landry (R-LA)

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.”

“I’m not.” -Sgt. Nicholas Brody

The war on terror has made America sick, and accepting a cure will kill us. The finale of the first season of Showtime was full of philosophical debates. And it ended with a Carrie, a patient driven mad by a basic and critical impossibility behind those debates — the dream that we can ever be completely safe from terrorism — wiping out her own brain, all the joy and love and agony, and crucial insights, of her last few weeks. Whatever you may think of how the show has handled Brody’s motivations, there’s no question that it’s successfully walked an exceedingly fine line in making a difficult point: that it’s insanity to let yourself be consumed by a fear of terrorism, but equally insane to refuse to see the risk. It’s a tragic madness to let terrorism convince you to give up who you are, whether you’re an American elected official or a captured Marine. And it’s equally devastating to cling rigidly to the past when you desperately need to change. The show hasn’t forged a compromise, and neither have we in the world beyond the screen. But Homeland is articulating that central dilemma, the one that’s governed so much of our politics for the last decade, in a critical and urgent way.

It’s also become a fantasy about assassinating or undermining Dick Cheney, who is the clear model for Vice President William Walden. “My action this day is against such domestic enemies,” Brody tells us in the suicide video that he records and that begins the episode in language that echoes charges lobbed at both Cheney and President Bush. “The Vice President and members of his national security team who I know to be liars and war criminals, responsible for atrocities they were never hold accountable for. This is about justice for 82 children whose deaths were never acknowledged and whose murder is a stain on the soul of this nation.” In the video of him working with David to order the drone strike, Walden declares that “If Abu Nazir is taking refuge among children, he’s putting them at risk, not us.” There are no innocents. In giving the order, he falls into obscurantist language, saying “It’s our collective opinion that the potential collateral damage falls within current matrix parameters.” Watching years later, Saul has the reaction that many of us would: “Good God. Someone actually came up with that language?” And that’s not all he’s done. In his sitdown with Walden, Saul reminds the Vice President that David may be willing to throw evidence down the memory for the sake of his career and clothe that decision in an ideological shift, but he is not. “I’m a sentimentalist,” Saul declares with controlled venom. “I like to hold on to things. For old times’ sake. Whoever told the American people these interrogation tapes had been destroyed is mistaken. Coercion. cruelty. Outright torture makes for a very unhappy human. You gave the orders, William.” When he survives Brody’s botched attack, Walden makes grotesque use of Elizabeth’s death to kickstart his presidential campaign. He’s easy to despise.

But while Cheney is out of power, the ideas he promoted persist, and Homeland focuses instead on what the real and fictional vice presidents have wrought. Brody and Nazir come to a collective conclusion that the man isn’t what’s important. “Why kill a man when you can kill an idea?” Nazir asks Brody, as they reach an uneasy truce over a new strategy.

Even before they do that work, though, the show does it for them, showing the weaknesses in Walden’s worldview in a stunning sequence where Brody comes to within a fingernail of fulfilling his mission even after a failed attempt, and pulls away. “Tell him it doesn’t matter why terrorists do what they do,” Walden snaps at David on the way to the event, as David tells him that Saul is on to the drone strike. “He’s a security expert not a fucking social worker.” But of course it matters why terrorists do what they do: it lets us figure out how not to generate more of them, and to win potential terrorists back before they can carry out their terrible work. Which is, of course, what happens to Brody in this episode. He easily could have given up when the vest doesn’t work, but in that profoundly claustrophobic space, he reconnects the wires dislodged when he reached for his ID or in the rush through the metal detectors and tries again. I, of course, just adore that it’s a father-daughter relationship that saves the republic. And it’s extraordinary to hear Brody tell Dana first “I’m not,” when she begs him for reassurance that Carrie is lying about him being a terrorist, to see him go through the process of coming to a place where he can tell her “I’m coming home, Dana. I promise,” and mean it, to give up the cause that’s consumed so much of his life. It’s Dana with whom he can share both the roof and the revelation that “I never knew we had views.” He’s finally home.

Isa’s gone, and it’s Abu Nazir who needs him avenged. But Brody has a living daughter telling him “I need you. You know that.” And it appears that he’ll play an awfully dangerous game to serve that need. A suicide bombing has an end point. A permanent role as Abu Nazir’s lobbyist does not. And I’d be curious to know what happened to the drive from Brody’s camera that Tom Walker retrieved. Did Brody have the presence of mind to remove it from Walker’s body and destroy it? Will it be yet another thing that a newly inquisitive Dana, discovering her parents’ private lives as she develops her own, discovers around the house? And what became of the vest?

If there’s one thing I feel somewhat reluctant about in this episode and this season, it’s the treatment of Tom Walker. One of the best things about Homeland has been its commitment to letting Brody live in his contradictions, to reveal his motivations and convictions slowly, to let him explain his conversion to Carrie and to Dana (I love the latter’s “Well it is a good time you didn’t shoot a deer or step out on Mom” reaction.). By contrast, his black counterpart gets to jack an old white lady’s car and apartment. I do love Walker fluffing his victim’s hair on the way out the door after sparking the panic, which makes up for the play to trope. But there’s no question that Walker’s given short shrift here, and there are compelling questions that are left unanswered. When he and Brody face off in the tunnel and he tells Brody, “We both got to the same place, Nick. I just got there quicker,” I want to know that journey. Did Tom Walker not need 82 dead children to turn to Abu Nazir? What convinced him? Is the implication that a black man is less likely to be attached to and trust in the American idea than a white one? And what happened to Tom’s guilt-ridden wife after she helped him get away?

If Walker’s motivations are opaque to us, and seem likely to remain that way, by the end of the episode, Carrie’s are painfully clear. “It’s fucking barbaric. I won’t allow it,” Saul declares when he races into the hospital, the need to preserve “a brain I happen to love” as urgent as Carrie’s need to save the whole world. Unlike David (who seems to have become a version of his namesake, David Addington), Saul can see the value of the woman — and of the tactics, mission, and morals — his agency is throwing out like trash. But her rationale for getting shock treatment is painful but undeniable. “I want to do this thing. It was my decision. I told them to go ahead,” Carrie tells her mentor. “I need to do something. I can’t take this anymore…It won’t pass. It’s only getting worse…[The risk of memory loss is] only short term. It’s usually temporary. And a lot of what’s happened lately I’d kind of like to forget anyway…I’m grateful for the concern. But I can’t live like this anymore. It needs to stop.”

It does. Of course it does. But it doesn’t make it easier to see Carrie give up part of herself for the sake of sanity, to slow down that big, speeding brain. The finale suggests that she’s losing at least one insight, as Maggie and the nurses miss her murmuring “Isa. Isa. Nazir’s son. Don’t let me forget.” But I imagine she’ll have lost more than that. It will be heartbreaking next season to have see this woman we’ve come to love maimed in search of a health. Carrie can’t both purify herself entirely and remain the woman that she was. And neither can her country.

GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum regularly lobs the inane “appeasement” charge at Obama. “At every single turn the president has appeased those who would do us harm,” the former Pennsylvania senator said on Sunday. So naturally, Santorum probably isn’t convinced that Obama even had anything to do with killing bin Laden and he said so last night on CNN (as he has before), calling the president’s comment last week “pathetic”:

SANTORUM: Osama bin Laden was a continuation of President Bush’s policy. It had nothing to do with a contingency or a problem that came up on his watch. He simply followed through, which we have been trying to do for 10 years.

KING: Deserves no credit for that?

SANTORUM: Any more — no, the people who deserve credit for that were the military whose mission it was to find them. And the president doesn’t deserve credit for doing — he didn’t make a decision, if you will, as to go after bin Laden. That decision had been made 10 years ago.

Santorum eventually relented after host John King noted that Obama “gave the go-ahead” to raid bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan. “I do give him credit for that,” Santorum said. Watch the clip:

President Bush himself tried to sneak this narrative by the press too but the reality is that Obama nabbed bin Laden in spite of the former president’s policies, not because of them.

The conservative claim that Bush is the one responsible for the bin Laden raid “couldn’t be further from the truth,” the National Journal’s Michael Hirsch wrote in May. “Behind Obama’s takedown of the Qaida leader…lies a profound discontinuity between administrations — a major strategic shift in how to deal with terrorists,” from Bush’s bombastic and overly expansive “war on terror,” to Obama’s “covert, laserlike focus on al-Qaida and its spawn.”

“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.’”

I would love to see the mic check that goes into getting consensus for this kind of nonsense. But as much as I’d just love to knock this impulse, I’m also dead sure that while most of Hollywood will blame one-off Ponzi schemers for much of the recession, conservative artists will try to help cement a narrative that the 99 percent movement and advocates of financial system reform are inherently anti-capitalist and violent. Our culture will identify a few individual villains in the halls of power. But some narratives will demonize wide swaths of people who protest against not just Bernie Madoff and his assorted pop-culture knockoffs, but the bankers of Margin Call and the culture that made them so successful. It’s a lot easier to paint protesters as violent thugs than it is to explain what the financial system as a whole did to us, and helped us do to ourselves. But just because those narratives are easy doesn’t make defaulting to them good storytelling or good politics.

But asked about the comments by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos before a debate crowd later that night, Gingrich didn’t back away from the comment and doubled down on his Palestinian-bashing:

GINGRICH: Is what I said factually correct? Yes. Is it historically true? Yes. Are we in a situation where every day rockets are fired into Israel while the United States — the current administration tries to pressure the Israeli’s into a peace process? [...]

Somebody ought to have the courage to tell the truth. These people are terrorists. They teach terrorism in their schools. They have textbooks that say, if there are 13 Jews and nine Jews are killed, how many Jews are left? We pay for those textbooks through our aid money. It’s fundamentally time for somebody to have the guts to stand up and say, enough lying about the Middle East.

After Gingrich’s remarks were greeted by a round of applause, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney commented, “I happen to agree with most of the Speaker said, except by going out and saying the Palestinians are an invented people.” Romney then said that Gingrich might feel the same, that it was a “mistake” to say Palestinians are “invented.” Gingrich then shook his head in disagreement. Watch the video of the full exchange:

As the New Yorker’s David Remnick points out, Gingrich’s claim that Palestinians are “invented” is not historically accurate, but rather was borne out of a long-since debunked piece of “propaganda.”

And while the Hamas organization and political party that seized the Gaza Strip by force in 2007 in a pre-emptive counter-coup is listed by the U.S. State Department as a foreign terror organization, the Palestinian Liberation Organization and its constituent Fatah party that rules the Palestinian authority are not considered terrorists by the U.S.

Romney could have been reflecting on the breadth of Gingrich’s comments when he said he agrees with the former Speaker. While he should be given credit for repudiating the line about “invented” people, enterprising reporters should nonetheless ask for a clarification from Romney and his campaign as to whether he agrees with Gingrich’s statement that “These people [Palestinians] are terrorists.”

Before anything else, I just want to pause in the delight of Claire Danes’ acting in this episode. She’s been more subtle, of course, much more tender, more sexy, tougher, more intelligent. But this was a textbook case for why we love actors who aren’t afraid to leave their vanity behind. I really appreciate the coherence of Carrie’s insanity, when it’s full-blown. There’s the troikas of descriptors, the question “Green is important. Green is necessary…Is green so hard? Is green elusive? I mean, my kingdom for a fucking green pen,” to the infinitely patient nurse in the hospital; the explanation to Saul that “Abu Nazir has methods, and patterns, and priorities…He goes big, he explodes, he maims on mass;” the promise that “Maggie will come. Maggie’s reliable. You can count on Maggie every time;” the musing “What makes them? Is it a whisper? A crash? A deep internal pain?”

And there’s the unreliability of her insights. “I wrote a 45-page manifesto declaring I’d reinvented music,” Carrie explains to Saul. “The professor I handed to escorted me to student health. I wasn’t in his class. You didn’t do anything, Saul. I just came this way.” But she hasn’t lost all trust in herself, and that’s what makes her compelling to us, and what communicates how terrifying her illness is. She keeps working because she senses that there’s something real. And when Saul affirms that she’s correct about the timeline and the gap in Abu Nazir’s life, he’s not just validating her work product but the idea that there’s something that makes sense in her brain, that she has not taken all leave of reason. When she runs out in traffic, seeing a miracle in a community garden and telling us, “Somewhere, down there, there’s a sliver of green. This is how everything works. You wait down there, you lay low, and then you come to life,” she’s right, too. The miracle and the tragedy of Carrie’s brain is its hyperspeed, its ability to beat Saul to conclusions and inability to understand that other people will need more time than she will to work through her insights and moral leaps and judge her as an alien from outer space, a criminal.

Rather than leaping forward, Brody’s taking his family back in time to Gettysburg, where he lays the intellectual foundation for the idea that his planned act of terrorism is of a piece with the noblest impulses in American history. He tells his children:

They prayed. Both sides did. These were extremely religious people…Imagine. You’re bone-tired. You’re cut off from water. The most crucial part of the line that must be held, it’s up there. On the hill. It’s Little Round Top. There are just 300 of you. You’re commanded by a schoolteacher from Maine. When suddenly 2,000 enemy soldiers come screaming out of those trees determined to cut you down…that’s when this teacher from Maine, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain was his name…He told them to stop shooting. No guns. Just bayonettes. And instead of shooting, they charged down the side of the hill towards the enemy. And it was so unexpected, so crazy, that the line was held that day. All because of a schoolteacher from Maine who was willing to do what was necessary for a cause that he believed in.

There’s a finality to it. Chris doesn’t notice — when his father tells him, “I hope that you’ll remember Joshua Chamberlain when you get older, and be brave, and daring, and ready to fight for what you believe in,” the boy asks “Do you mind if we talk about this some other time? It’s kind of melting.” Dana, though, sees something in the mystery package, in the video of her father’s stillness. After her monstrous self-absorption for much of the season, there’s something compelling about seeing Dana turn spy. Her father may, with a brilliant play, have eliminated one watcher. But he’ll never really be without them again, whether it’s the men who recognize him in a diner, telling him, “You’re one tough motherfucker. What you went through kind of puts things in perspective. I’d vote for you,” his daughter, a silent brotherhood waiting for him to act.

So what happens now? I saw this on a screener, so I missed the teaser for next week’s episode, but there are a couple of big issues that need resolution. How can Carrie make it back to the CIA, after the mental illness that she’s been terrified will be disqualifying has been revealed? Will Brody actually go through with his planned attack? Who is the mole? These questions are, of course, related. If Saul is the mole, he now has more extensive knowledge of both Carrie’s mental illness and her understanding of Abu Nazir’s plan than anyone else, giving him the best chance of discrediting her. If Saul’s not the mole, could he sacrifice himself to save Carrie by claiming that he assembled the documents, getting Carrie back into the CIA but without the benefit of his protection? If the vice president is the mole, is he facilitating his own death? Or using Brody to get him even closer to someone else, like the president? If David is the mole, a possibility Alan Sepinwall brought up as we talked while I watched the episode, could uncovering and discrediting him, including his efforts to undermine her, be Carrie’s trip back to the CIA?

And could the vest make it into the second season? It would drive viewers even crazier than The Killing did, I think, but it seems like the only way to keep Brody around. And it would be fascinating to see the tension. By outing his affair with Carrie to David, Brody’s sold, or at least rented, himself to the CIA for the duration — they can ruin him, take him out of the campaign, ruin his scheme, and out him to his wife if he doesn’t cooperate. To serve the master of his heart, Brody will have to play along with the people who have a lien on his reputation. Can he serve both masters?

We’ve got a lot of popular culture that’s about trying to get us to understand the roots of terrorism and the motivations of individual terrorists. Aileen and Brody on Homeland are both motivated by compassion, an openness to the world that makes them hugely vulnerable to trauma and suggestion. The members of the titular collective on Sleeper Cell have been spurred to extremism by everything from war in Bosnia, to alienation from American bourgeois hypocrisy, to parents who are pressuring them to get married despite the fact that they’re gay. We can’t produce a world full of shiny, happy people, but I can see the appeal in trying to find policy paths and to create an environment that will make people less likely to turn to terrorism in the first place, rather than resorting to convincing ourselves that war is the only answer in the aftermath of the attack.

But it’s sort of hard to find the source of Osama bin Laden’s murderous megalomania in personal trauma or policy. And even if we could, I’m not sure most of us really want to. It’s easier to see him as an unsalvageable other after the things he orchestrated and the damage he lured us into doing to ourselves. Of course, it’s those kinds of tensions that have the potential to produce interesting—if painful and revelatory—art. I’d actually like to see a longer version of this story that parallels the team that killed bin Laden and the team that surrounded him, that contrasts the stringent preparation for the raid with the relaxation of security around the world’s most wanted man. Did bin Laden believe he couldn’t be caught or killed, that he never would be? Or had he accepted it as inevitable? And which reaction would make more sense to us? Would we prefer to believe he was defiant and delusional to the end? Or would we like to see him repentant and resigned? I don’t really expect that any of the flood of bin Laden death movies coming over the transom to our theaters will spend time in this space. But I’m suddenly curious to see what it would look like if one did.

But former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum offered one of the more bizarre attacks of the morning, saying the U.S. needs to be more open about its covert operations around the world, particularly in Iran. But in very next breath, he condemned the President for disclosing to the public that he had ordered the raid on Osama bin Laden, after it had taken place:

SANTORUM: We need to say very clearly that we will be conducting covert activity to do everything we can to stop their nuclear program and that means using covert activity that may have occurred at the missile site in Iran. I would like to think the United States was involved in that. I would like to think we had something to do with that missile site.

But given the President’s record with Osama bin Laden and not being able to keep a secret of anything good that he did for even more than 24 hours I’d suspect we’d already know if we had something to do with that explosion.

Watch the clip:

So on one hand, Santorum wants to be open about U.S. covert operations that have yet to take place, and on the other, he attacks Obama for discussing one particular covert operation that had already happened, and was successful — the raid on bin Laden’s compound that resulted in the death of the al Qaeda leader.

And for the record, the president did a pretty good job at keeping mum about what he wanted to do with bin Laden. “I didn’t tell most people here in the White House. I didn’t tell my own family. It was that important for us to maintain operational security,” he said. When asked why he didn’t consult with the Pakistanis, Obama replied, “If I’m not revealing to some of my closest aides what we’re doing, then I sure as heck am not gonna be revealing it to folks who I don’t know.”

Given that Santorum takes a militaristic line against Iran over its nuclear program, it’s safe to assume that an attack on that country would be a likely scenario should he become president. At least we know he’ll give them a heads up if he decides to do it.

After last week’s off-track, weirdly sentimental episode, I admitted to some anxiety about Homeland‘s core DNA. Fortunately, “Representative Brody” set the show squarely back on track. And as I tweeted while I was watching, “why can’t Henry Bromell just write all the television?” In between this and “The Good Soldier,” the man is having a year.

While what frustrated me about the last episode was its emotional and causal predictability, I appreciated the way “Representative Brody” made its characters do distinct, specific things that were surprising but not wildly illogical. You get the cliche in one scene, the vice president (who increasingly seems like a conspiracy suspect) telling Brody: “I would consider it an honor to work with a man who’s actually fought the war on terror, who’s lived with the enemy and understands them.” But even then, the cliche is revealing — there’s a profound hunger for authenticity in that request. And countering it, you have a Saudi diplomat who doesn’t respond to Saul and Carrie’s threats to reveal his debts and his homosexuality in the way they would have predicted. “I suck cock and I love it,” he snaps back at them. “My wives already know. They don’t care. They love me. So fuck it. Fuck you. Put it on CNN. I’ll admit to everything. Now, I would like to go back to my embassy.” Scripts are useful until they aren’t. In fighting the war on terror, in living your life, there’s only so much you can do to prepare and only so much you can predict. “We’re trying to find what makes them human, not what makes them terrorists,” Carrie tells Saul, and it turns out she’s right.

And the dissolution of Saul and Carrie’s plan to, as Saul put it with a hint of terrible foreshadowing, “eviscerate the motherfucker” also revealed a hidden and under-discussed advantage in the war on terror that also gets to that quest for humanity: modernity is a lot more appealing than the values of the Middle Ages. What Nazir’s collaborator may pretend to want for the world, he doesn’t actually want for his daughter. “We would deport her,” Carrie says, emphasizing the threat and drawing out the disgust he feels at the scenario she lays out for him. “And we would make sure that she was not welcome in England, or Germany, or France, or Italy, or even all-forgiving Scandinavia. We would make sure she had no choice but to go back to Saudi Arabia and get fat and wear a burka for the rest of her miserable life.” Radical Islam will lose not because our military is bigger but because the American idea is more broadly compelling than a return to the caliphate.

That doesn’t mean, of course, that the freedom of modernity is easy to manage. Brody plays on Mike’s need for his forgiveness by offering it — but only after Mike’s promised to talk Jess into the campaign. When he does, Mike wants her so badly he can’t even go in the house. And Jess both wants both men and wants clarity, things she cannot have together that she responds bitterly, “Why don’t we all just take off our clothes and get in bed together?” Brody goes to see Carrie to secure the promise of her discretion, and while she knows it’s the right thing, she can’t quite bring herself to let him go entirely. When he says “goodbye,” she can’t match his finality, telling him “good night,” instead. In her hospital bed in the aftermath of the bombing, she’s pained, seeing Brody kiss Jess as he announces his Congressional campaign. Saul might want good drugs and a long vacation, but the emptiness of even a few days will be a torture to Carrie. And I like the way the show consistently has her listening to jazz, the thing that gave her her first-episode revelation about Brody. In life and in policy, sometimes you need intuitive leaps, sometimes logic doesn’t always serve you.

A tiny nitpick in this episode: I wish the show hadn’t doubled down on calling the location of the bombing “Farragut Square,” when it’s patently, obviously not, and doesn’t even look like the real place. An actual suicide bombing in the Square would have caused a lot more damage: people are clustered more densely together, and the park is smaller, so windows might have blown out of office buildings, etc. It’s not a big deal, but for the political and intelligence junkies in Washington, it’s a bit of a break from the show’s realism and immersive quality. But I think the tension between Saul and the State Department official over whether the CIA can pursue someone with diplomatic immunity was a nice little turf battle that more than made up for that error. “To us mere mortals in the State Department, it’s a serious issue,” the diplomat complains. This is where most of the drama in Washington comes from, not suicide bombs but verbal fencing matches.

Critics of the provision warn that the detention provisions could result in U.S. citizens being held in indefinite military detention and denied access to civilian courts. Graham — who has previously said the U.S. should detain terror suspects indefinitely — concluded his defense of military detention for terror suspects by comparing the threat from Al Qaeda to that posed by Nazi Germany during World War II, saying:

GRAHAM: No one in World War II would have tolerated the idea that someone who collaborated with a Nazi, trying to kill us on our own soil, would have any other disposition than to be considered an enemy of the American people. Now my question for this body is, do you think Al Qaeda is an organization that doesn’t present that same kind of threat?

Watch it:

The European Theater of World War II took the lives of 135,576 American soldiers. By contrast, a State Department report found that 15 Americans died from terrorism in the last year — making it more likely to die from lightning strikes or dog bites — and a Duke terrorism study concluded that since 9/11, terrorist plots within the U.S. have killed 33 individuals.

Graham’s assertion that the threat from Al Qaeda can be compared to the Nazi threat during World War II is bordering on the absurd. And the death of Osama bin Laden “severely weakened” the terrorist organization, according to Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta.

While the threat from Al Qaeda continues to pose a national security threat worthy of discussion, Graham’s comments dramatically overstate the threat facing Americans and trivialize the danger posed by Nazi Germany.