We have all watched over the last few days as Twitter went from being a hot social networking tool to being used by brave Iranians to change the world. With media restrictions in place from the Iranian government, the main source of news coming out of Iran was, especially in the first few days, the tweets of students and protestors and supporters of Mir-Hossein Mousavi.

As the protest has grown and the days have worn on, the nature of the intelligence one could glean from certain twitter feeds – #IranElection and #GR88, in particular – changed. In the first few days it was a heavy but seemingly pure stream of raw intelligence, dispatches that contained up to the minute updates on everything from events personally observed by the twitters to rumors to video and pictures of the ongoing clash between protestors and government forces.

In the last 48 hours, the main tagged feeds have become diluted: innocently, by western twitterers who have been captivated and motivated by what they’ve read; and more troublingly, by people who are quite obviously disseminating incorrect, inflammatory, or misleading information. The latter is incredibly problematic, as Twitter is not only being used as a source of information for the outside world. It is also being used by activists in separate parts of the country to communicate information about what is happening where they are. So not only does the misinformation dilute the message and news coming from the Iranian people fighting for freedom, it also is detrimental to their efforts, and could very well have life or death consequences.

That is why I’m starting The Rat List – a collection of Twitter users disseminating incorrect or blatantly propagandistic information. Many of these users have new accounts, have no history of accurate updates, and are not trusted sources. They could be Iranian intelligence agents organizing to thwart the efforts of the activists and put down what is becoming a vibrant and viable uprising. They could also just be assholes who think they are being funny. Either way, I am mostly doing this for my own edification, to record some small part of what is happening in a way that I know something about, by analyzing raw intelligence. If it helps out, I’m glad for that too.

Visit http://ratlist.tumblr.com for updates.

Consider this hypothetical. It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can.

In all manner of matters domestic and foreign, we are truly through the perimeter and fully into a brave new world.

The fear of terrorism is raised on what is little else than old racist fears – you can’t implore people to be afraid of a black guy anymore, so the terrorism thing will have to do – and the message that the Right digests becomes that, outside of Barack Obama not wanting to automatically bomb the Middle East to a sheet of glass (which is code for wanting to hug terrorists), he may actually be a terrorist, or in league with them, or ready to welcome them to the White House.

You don’t have to know much about terrorism to know how stupid that is. It is utterly stone dumb. But knowing a little bit about terrorism might bring you the knowledge that the primary battleground in the war on terror is financial. You have to have money to do everything, and in a world where intelligence agencies and law enforcement are usually forced to defend against the last terrorist attack, organizations like the US Treasury do a great deal to stop terrorism before it happens by disrupting terrorist finances. A student of basic history without any special terrorism knowledge would know that the mujahideen in Afghanistan, with some logistical support from the United States, defeated the Soviet Union by fighting an unwinnable, asymmetrical land war that drained the considerable resources of the Soviets and mired them in a conflict from which there was no readily acceptable excision.

Thus it is no surprise that Al-Qaeda supporters using community website forums – the terrorist communication method of choice these days – would express glee at the financial problems the United States is currently experiencing. It is unlikely that Osama bin Laden blogs there under the pen name 3m1r_31057 or something, but these are used as readily as bookstores and radical mosques are as conduits of information, communication, and message control by the modern al-Qaeda network.

It is also no surprise to me that supporters of militant Islamic transnational terrorism against the United States would be excited about the prospect of a John McCain presidency. He’s determined to “win” in Iraq, an outcome with no definable parameters or possible tangible results, and I see no reason to expect McCain to act any differently towards the Middle East than George Bush has. Understanding that, the War in Iraq has been the single greatest recruiting tool that terrorism has ever enjoyed. A continuation of Bush’s policies and the Bush Doctrine as the United States deals with an enormous economic crisis and continues to isolate itself with unilateral foreign policy aggression would no doubt aid the cause of al-Qaeda and the many, many umbrella organizations that function as its wholly owned subsidiaries.

So, in the long run, something like this is probably inconsequential, some chatter among extremists that made it out into the mainstream for consumption. But it is indicative of a totally predictable reception and attitude, a rational approach to American politics by rational actors who also happen to be militant extremists that claim membership in a transnational terrorist organization that makes war on our country. Further foolish military misadventure is a desirable outcome for the enemies of America, and the fact that no one on the left has made this point – ever – on the national scene drives me up the wall.

Not only is the hyper-amped terrorism fear-mongering about Obama totally false and completely unfounded, it also makes no logical sense when applied to the real world, even when you take the stuff about the Manchurian Candidate out of it and you’re only left with a military intention that doesn’t include knocking chips off of shoulders for no good reason, it is also totally misdirected. True fear about terrorism should spring from the prospect of a continuation of the policies of the last 8 years, not from a change in direction about how we conduct ourselves in the world. We should, as a nation, not only be working to prevent the next terror attack and punish those who perpetrated the last one. We should also be working to stop terrorism 5 or 10 or 20 years before it happens.

The Obama campaign dared McCain to continue his fearmongering, nonsensical attacks on Ayers and ACORN, and McCain dutifully tried those avenues, only to lose the moment to Obama’s calm and unflappable explanation of why those attacks are nonsensical and also, possibly, why no one cares about them. Even his big zinger line – that he isn’t President Bush, and that if Obama wanted to run against Bush he should have done so four year ago – fell flat, and then was visited with absolute destruction by Obama about a minute later. Incredibly, even FOX News is running Obama’s rejoinder paired with McCain’s line.

McCain not only lost this debate, he was directly manipulated by the Obama campaign into believing that non-issues are what he should talk about. Not only is McCain wrong about almost everything: his campaign’s character attacks against Obama, the primary driving force behind everything they’ve done since they picked up Sarah Palin – have now been turned to Obama’s advantage by a much more skillful political operation.

McCain said often tonight that voters are angry, and the base that shows up to his rallies and forwards emails from thenewdumb.com about how Obama is a terrorist is actually angry, as they have shown us. But I think the angriest person that will vote for John McCain is John McCain, and you can see it on his face, as he rolls his eyes and grits his teeth and turns in the most petulant, teen-aged, surly performance I’ve ever seen in a national debate. Or even in national politics.

George Bush took the stage against John Kerry four years ago in a series of debates, and when he would stammer out his talking points, half of the country would say, “Wait, what kind of crazy bullshit was that?” and the other half of the country + 1 percent or so would either say “Awesome.” or “I’m not sure what that’s about, but I like ol’ George. He’s likable. I’d like to have a beer with him.”

After this campaign, the polls are telling us that Senator John McCain is not a guy the vast majority of Americans would want to have a beer with. When he glowered through two debates he looked dour and grumpy. Tonight, when he grinned, he looked scary and full of rage. John McCain is wrong on most issues – at least, the ones he has some discernible position on – and the champion of the same kind of economic policies that have damaged our country almost irreparably. More importantly to John McCain, John McCain is mad that John McCain might not get to be president, and that has everything to do with John McCain and very little to do with us, the American people he would be charged with helping and protecting if he managed to win, an outcome now only seemingly possible in an alternate universe in which McCain had conducted himself or his campaign with any degree of respect for what it all means.