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Former Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich says that President Barack Obama's policies are allowing a "worldwide virus" of terrorism from places like North Africa and Syria to destabilize the planet and "potentially" infect Europe and the United States.

Gingrich on Sunday told CNN's Candy Crowley that a recent hostage crisis at a gas plant in Algeria was evidence that terrorism was more like a virus than "Whac-A-Mole."

"I think we haven't had any honest epidemiology," he explained. "We're trying to hunt down 5,000 people in al Qaeda, there is a potential pool of 65 to 100 million recruits... They're spreading across the whole planet, from the Philippines to, frankly, the United States. And I think we greatly underestimate how many places you're going to have trouble in the next decade."

"We talk about the Iranian potential nuclear weapon, Pakistan is probably building more nuclear weapons than any other country in the world right now," he continued. "Pakistan is a very fragile system which could disintegrate at any time. We're not prepared for that. The whole challenge of the Persian Gulf, we're not prepared for that. The level of violence in Syria."

The former House Speaker argued that Obama was advocating a "minimalist approach to the world" by nominating Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) and former Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE) to be secretary of state and secretary of defense.

"Neither of them nor the president have a positive vision of how you're going to deal with a worldwide virus that is increasingly destabilizing the planet," he opined.

"And that's what's happening from Pakistan through North Africa to Syria, and I think potentially in Europe and the United States."

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Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol says that Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney is going to have a tough time winning if the election is a referendum on President Barack Obama's first term.

"They need to focus on the next four years," the conservative columnist told Fox News host Chris Wallace on Sunday. "If this election is just about the last four years, that's a muddy verdict."

"Bush was president during the financial meltdown, the Obama team has turned that around pretty well," he explained. "He's got to make it a referendum on the choice about the next four years, and explain what Obama would do over the next four years that would be bad for the country and what he would do would be good for the country."

Kristol added that President Barack Obama had been "rattled" on foreign policy.

"Voters are watching, turning on the TV. Embassies are being burned, there are demonstrations in Pakistan. What's going on there? Why is it happening? What can the next president do about this? Romney should answer that question," Kristol pointed out.

"If they just go back to mindlessly reminding people for the 5,000th time, 'Guess what? The economy's not great,' they will waste the next 10 days."

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In Monday night's debate, this exchange immediately followed the audience booing Ron Paul for invoking the Golden Rule as part of foreign policy.

I wonder if Mitt Romney really understands the Taliban. I wonder if he understands that there are different factions of the Taliban in Pakistan, Afghanistan and elsewhere. But mostly, I wonder if he understands that no matter how hard he might try, he cannot truly challenge the current Administration's successful foreign policy, even when that foreign policy includes negotiations with the Taliban.

Romney practically oozes testosterone as he swears that negotiation with the Taliban is absolutely off-limits to a President Romney. He reiterates the neocon line that Iraq was necessary and the only way to avoid such "necessary conflicts" would be to build the "strongest military in the world." Because of course, spending all that money on weapons of world destruction surely endears us to the rest of the world.

This is the official Republican party line. It wouldn't matter if it was Romney or Santorum. These men are one hundred percent committed to Empire writ large all over the world. They have no compunction about our young people being sent off to die for no apparent reason beyond revenge in foreign lands, nor would they lose even a little bit of sleep at night.

Also? I'd like to correct one thing Mr. Romney said. No Iraqi killed Americans. No Iraqi declared war on us. No Iraqi did harm to us. But we invaded and occupied their country anyway, based on a lie. I also appreciate his endorsement of our current President's foreign policy.

Transcript below the fold.

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From the "Jesus candidate" Rick Santorum at this Sunday's NBC-Facebook debate. Santorum apparently thinks that it's perfectly acceptable for a nuclear armed United States to become a theocracy, but if it's the Iranians, well, that's a reason to go to war with them.

How very unChristian like of him. How many countries would Jesus bomb Rick?

GREGORY: Senator Santorum, I want to ask you about Iran. It's been a big issue in the course of this campaign so far. I wonder why it is, if America has lived with a nuclear Soviet Union, we have come to live with a nuclear North Korea, why is it that we cannot live with a nuclear Iran? And if we can't, are you prepared to take the country to war to disarm that country?

SANTORUM: They're, they're a theocracy. They're a theocracy that has deeply embedded beliefs that the, the afterlife is better than this life. President Ahmadinejad has repeatedly said the principal virtue of the Islamic Republic of Iran is martyrdom. So when your principal virtue is to die for your--for Allah, then it's not a deterrent to have a nuclear threat if they would use a nuclear weapon. It is, in fact, an encouragement for them to use their nuclear weapon, and that's why there's a difference between the Soviet Union and China and others and Iran.

GREGORY: What about Pakistan? They are in indifferent ally at best, they have nuclear weapons. Are you also prepared as president to say they must disarm or else?

SANTORUM: They are not a theocracy. And we're very hopeful of, of maintaining a more secular state than, than is in place today. But there is a serious threat, and this administration has bungled it about as badly as they can in trying to continue those positive relationships. We've had some real serious problems with the, with the Pakistani military. Obviously, with respect to Osama bin Laden, with respect to North Waziristan, but you have a--the reason is we have a president that's just very weak in, in that region of the world and is not respected...

GREGORY: All right.

SANTORUM: ...and, therefore, he's not, he's not been able to have that strong hand in working with Pakistan that they're used to.

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Americans probably had no idea that six of Pakistan's nuclear sites had come under jihadist attack. That is, until Republican presidential candidate spilled the beans on national television Tuesday.

During the CNN-hosted Republican presidential debate on national security, Bachmann, who serves on the House Intelligence Committee, revealed that 15 nuclear sites in Pakistan were vulnerable to attack, and attempts had already been made on six of them.

CNN moderator Wolf Blitzer asked the candidate if she agreed with Texas Gov. Rick Perry's pledge that he would send no foreign aid to Pakistan.

"We have to recognize that 15 of the sites, nuclear sites, are available or are potentially penetrable by jihadist," Bachmann explained. "Six attempts have already been made on nuclear sites. This is more than an existential threat."

"At this point, I would continue that aid," she added. "Pakistan is a nation that it's kind of like, too nuclear to fail."

A National Journal fact check found that the U.S. had never publicly admitted that 15 of Pakistan's sites were vulnerable to attack, or that six of them had already been attacked.

"[H]er comments on Pakistan’s nuclear program represent either a news-making leak of previously unknown classified information or another in her recent series of seemingly-random, and highly inaccurate, public comments," Yochi J. Dreazen wrote.

After all, the candidate also recently said that Hezbollah was working to create "missile sites" in Cuba -- and there seems to be no truth to that.

EDITOR'S NOTE: I put my money on her just making stuff up. See: "Mental Retardation."

UPDATE: CNN fact check finds Bachmann's claims 'misleading'

Jane's Terrorism and Insurgency Centre says that there have been six attacks near Pakistani nuclear facilities, but they did not represent a threat to the country's nuclear arsenal.

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Ed Schultz talked to The Nation's Jeremy Scahill and Brave New Film's Robert Greenwald about the need to rethink our policies on Pakistan and Afghanistan and this so-called "war on terror."

Robert Greenwald has a petition at his site Rethink Afghanistan -- Osama bin Laden is Dead. Bring the Troops Home.:

How much did YOU pay for war this year?

Did you know that the Afghanistan War alone costs us roughly $2 billion per week? When you include the Iraq War and other military spending, it turns out that more than 27 percent of your income taxes will be spent on war.

We want our money back.

To find out how much of your money has gone to fund a war that's not making us safer, visit our Tax Day Calculator. Enter how much income you earned this year and we'll give you an I.O.U. for what you paid that you can forward to your Member of Congress. Ask for your money back!

Go visit his site to watch the video.

And here's Jeremy Scahill's latest at The Nation -- JSOC: The Black Ops Force That Took Down Bin Laden:

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Color me not shocked. Not only is the right desperately trying to give Bush credit for locating and killing Osama bin Laden, now the torture apologists are coming out of the woodwork as well. Expect to see more of this over the coming weeks.

Resident wingnut and GOP New York Rep. Peter King went on O'Reilly's show and claimed that torturing prisoners by waterboarding them led to locating Osama bin Laden in Pakistan.

Marcy Wheeler has a post up debunking King's claims and I'll just ask that our readers go check out her entire post here -- The Osama bin Laden Trail Shows Waterboarding Didn’t Work.

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With our economy in a state where everyone in Washington DC is claiming that we must all "share the sacrifice" in order to get our budget deficit in hand, I have to wonder what this fiasco cost us. In a news cycle dominated understandably by the coverage of what's going on in Japan, I give Rachel Maddow credit for making at least a small amount of time for this and not allowing it to go completely under the radar.

I already posted about this at Video Cafe last month -- American Being Held for Shootings in Pakistan Worked as Blackwater CIA Contractor.

Here's the latest.

CIA contractor Raymond Davis freed after ‘blood money’ payment:

Pakistan’s decision Wednesday to release a CIA contractor accused of killing two men resolved a standoff that threatened to damage diplomatic relations between Islamabad and Washington, but it triggered new protests in Pakistan that reflected rising hostility from the United States’ key counterterrorism ally.

Raymond A. Davis was freed from a jail in Lahore after relatives of the Pakistani victims received as much as $2.3 million in “blood money” compensation.

Davis, a CIA security guard, was pardoned and flown to a U.S. facility in Kabul, where he was to be examined and questioned about his treatment before returning to the United States.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton expressed gratitude to the victims’ families in Pakistan and said that the Justice Department has begun an investigation of the shooting that led to Davis’s arrest in Lahore on Jan. 27.

Clinton insisted that the United States had not made any payment to the families or agreed to reimburse the Pakistani government. But other U.S. officials signaled that Washington had endorsed the “blood money” payments and that it expects to reimburse Pakistani authorities, who had led an effort in recent weeks to persuade the Pakistani families to accept cash in return for dropping the case.

“We expect to receive a bill,” a U.S. official said.

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Apparently MSNBC and The New York Times were both aware of this story but did not report on it at the request of the Unites States government until The Guardian broke their embargo today and ran the story anyway. Somehow Andrea Mitchell and Steve Clemons managed to report on this story without ever using the words Blackwater, Xe or private contractor.

Looks like our so-called "war on terror" is coming back to bite us again with the Pakistani population growing increasingly fed up with these sorts of incidents.

American Held in Pakistan Shootings Worked With the C.I.A.:

The American arrested in Pakistan after shooting two men at a crowded traffic stop was part of a covert, C.I.A.-led team of operatives conducting surveillance on militant groups deep inside the country, according to American government officials.

Working from a safe house in the eastern city of Lahore, the detained American contractor, Raymond A. Davis, a retired Special Forces soldier, carried out scouting and other reconnaissance missions as a security officer for a Central Intelligence Agency task force of case officers and technical surveillance experts, the officials said.

Mr. Davis’s arrest and detention, which came after what American officials have described as a botched robbery attempt, has inadvertently pulled back the curtain on a web of covert American operations inside Pakistan, part of a secret war run by the C.I.A. It has exacerbated already frayed relations between the American intelligence agency and its Pakistani counterpart, created a political dilemma for the weak, pro-American Pakistani government, and further threatened the stability of the country, which has the world’s fastest growing nuclear arsenal.

Without describing Mr. Davis’s mission or intelligence affiliation, President Obama last week made a public plea for his release. Meanwhile, there have been a flurry of private phone calls to Pakistan from Leon E. Panetta, the C.I.A. director, and Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, all intended to persuade the Pakistanis to release the secret operative. Mr. Davis has worked for years as a C.I.A. contractor, including time at Blackwater Worldwide, the controversial private security firm (now called Xe) that Pakistanis have long viewed as symbolizing a culture of American gun slinging overseas.

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For years, the media has covered the two US wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan but a third conflict in Pakistan is almost never thought of as a war.

Now the US may be in the process of escalating that unofficial war in Pakistan, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow observed Thursday.

Since President Barack Obama took office, the US has increased the number of airstrikes in Pakistan by unmanned aerial vehicles. "We have shot missiles at people in Pakistan 20 times in the past 23 days," Maddow noted Wednesday.

Pakistan has largely been silent about the unmanned airstrikes but that changed after reports said the US had started using manned aircraft. Pakistan reportedly closed down US supply lines leading into Afghanistan when they learned that a US helicopter had attacked inside Pakistan.

McClatchy reported:

Pakistan closed down a critical supply route for U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan on Thursday after U.S. helicopters crossed into Pakistan during a confused, predawn attack that killed three Pakistani paramilitary troops.

Pakistan shuttered one of the two main crossings into Afghanistan hours after a pair of Apache helicopters apparently attacked a border post, manned by the paramilitary Frontier Corps, about 200 yards inside Pakistan.
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Hundreds of supply trucks bound for the busy Torkham crossing north of Peshawar were sidelined in Pakistan as the U.S.-led security force said it was investigating.

While the Obama administration has increased operations in Pakistan, they have been cautious not to call it the "war on terror" as the Bush administration often did. Maddow pointed Thursday that the war on terror was meant to be something that wasn't rooted in a single country. "[The idea is that] it has to be a global war, a war anywhere on earth. Countries don't really matter," Maddow explained.

"But countries do matter, borders do matter. They matter as much to anyone else in the world as they do to us."

"And apparently now Pakistan is over us. They are over us acting like the war on people who happen to live in Pakistan, even though we don't say it's a war on Pakistan, is starting to feel like a war on Pakistan," she said.

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