Barack Obama’s campaign held a conference call with former 9/11 commissioner Richard Ben Veniste to excoriate McCain adviser Charlie Black — accusing him of engaging in the “politics of fear” by speculating that a terrorist attack could help McCain in November.

Black, a long-time senior aid to McCain, told Fortune Magazine that a new attack “would be a big advantage to him,” saying that the assassination of Pakistani leader Benazir Bhutto last December helped McCain win the GOP nomination.

“His knowledge and ability to talk about it reemphasized that this is the guy who’s ready to be Commander-in-Chief,” he said. “It helped us.”

Asked about his aide’s remarks, McCain said “I strenuously disagree,” adding “I cannot imagine why he said it. It’s not true.” Black himself said he deeply regretted his comments, calling them inappropriate. “I recognize that John McCain has devoted his entire life to protecting his country,” he said.

Obama’s campaign released a statement last night calling Black’s comments a “complete disgrace.” Spokesman Bill Burton said “Barack Obama will turn the page on these failed policies and this cynical and divisive brand of politics.”

On the conference call this morning, Ben Veniste and foreign policy adviser Denis McDonough said that while McCain had been a supporter of the 9/11 commission, the Bush policies in Iraq that he supports have kept the US from going after the real threats to the United States - Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

“We’ve seen the political play that was manifest yesterday by Mr Black’s candid comments, so what we want to do is get back to what will make this country safer,” said McDonough. “That has not been the record of this administration or what Senator McCain appears ready to continue for the next four years.”

Ben Veniste, however, stopped short of calling for Black’s head — saying only that his remarks “call for some recalibration in the thinking and perhaps a greater adherence to principle here in staying away from the politics of fear.

“I would suggest it would be a good idea to caution those whose candid thoughts have created this turmoil with Senator McCain,” he said.

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McCain campaign advisers attacked Barack Obama today as naïve, ignorant and weak for comments the Democrat made praising the U.S. response to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing as an example of how to approach post-9/11 terror suspects.

“Once again, we have seen that Senator Obama is a perfect manifestation of a September 10th mindset. He brings the attitudes, the failures of judgment and the weakness and misunderstanding of the nature of our adversary and the dangers posed by them to a series of policy positions,” said McCain foreign policy adviser Randy Scheunemann during a conference call with reporters Tuesday.

Obama told ABC yesterday that the federal government should have taken the same approach to detaining and prosecuting 9/11 suspects that it did following the 1993 attack.

“We were able to arrest those responsible, put them on trial. They are currently in U.S. prisons, incapacitated. And the fact that the administration has not tried to do that has created a situation where not only have we never actually put many of these folks on trial, but we have destroyed our credibility when it comes to rule of law all around the world, and given a huge boost to terrorist recruitment,” Obama said. “So that, I think, is an example of something that was unnecessary. We could have done the exact same thing, but done it in a way that was consistent with our laws.”

James Woolsey, who served as CIA Director 1993-1995, told reporters that the approach taken by Clinton administration and President Bush before 9/11 was a “miserable failure.”

“I don’t say this lightly. This is an extremely dangerous and extremely naïve approach toward terrorism,” Woolsey said. “It was tried for essentially eight years…it was a miserable failure and we need an approach that combines law enforcement, where appropriate, with intelligence and going after terrorists where they are.”

Scheunemann also revived the 3 a.m. argument from the Democratic primary in making his case today.

“Whether its an ignorance of the facts, a misunderstanding of the threat we face, the only conclusion we can reach is if Senator Obama did receive the 3 a.m. phone call that was so talked about in the primaries, I guess his response would be to call the lawyers at the Justice Department,” Scheunemann added.

Additionally, in what could be a preview of a new talking point for a campaign that has aggressively lashed out at last week’s Supreme Court ruling on detainees, Scheuneman said, “Someone should frankly ask Senator Obama if he believes that is Osama bin Laden were captured and taken to Guantanamo, whether he should have habeas (corpus) rights.”

UPDATE–4:30 pm ET: Senator Obama responds to the comments while talking to reporters aboard his flight to D.C. today:

“What they are trying to do is what they’ve done every election cycle which is to use terrorism as a club to make the American people afraid - to win elections - that’s what they’re trying to do. They are not serious about this. Because if they wanted to have a serious conversation about it then they would know for example that the issue of habeas corpus is not designed to free prisoners, what its designed to do is make sure that prisoners who are being held have at least one shot to say ‘I’m being held wrongly’. My quote, the point I was making and I’ve made before, is without giving full blown rights to those who are being held, we can set up a system of due process, and when I said that the administration didn’t even try to do that what I have consistently said is that rather than figure out how do we effectively hold these folks, detain them, provided them with some due process, try them, lock them up, the administration decided to take a bunch of short cuts. What it essentially wanted to do was to be completely inculcated from any checks and balances. And my position on this, and a whole host of other issues related to battling terrorism has always been clear. And that is that we don’t have to truth these folks as U.S. citizen. We don’t have to treat them in the same way that we would treat a criminal suspect in the U.S., but we should abide by the Geneva conventions. We should at least follow through on the same principals we followed though when dealing with Nazis during Nuremburg, that is not only the right thing to do but it also actually will strengthen our ability over the long term to fight terrorism.”

Just after 8:30pm on a balmy Friday night outside of San Antonio, Texas, Obama looked out at a see of some 8,000 spectators. He was midway through his stump speech and then decided to sock it to Hillary Clinton for running a new campaign ad entitled “Children” - or as it’s being referred to in media and political circles, the “Red Phone” ad because of its similarity to a 1984 ad with the same name run by Walter Mondale in 1984.

“I want to take a moment to respond to an ad that Senator Clinton put up today,” Obama stated as the crowd began to jeer.  “We’ve seen these ads before. They’re usually the kind that play on people’s fears and try to scare up votes. But it won’t work. Because the question is not about who’s picking up the phone – the question is what kind of judgment will the person who answers the phone have?”

Senator Obama has made his consistent anti-war voice an example of his judgment in the realm of all things foreign policy - and once again, his weapon of choice to attack Senator Clinton’s foreign policy experience is her vote for the Iraq War Resolution in 2002.

“Senator Clinton may not be aware, but we already had a red phone moment. It was the decision to invade Iraq. And Senator Clinton picked up the phone and gave the wrong answer. And John McCain picked up the phone and gave the wrong answer. And George Bush picked up the
phone and gave the wrong answer,” he said, not so subtly linking her decisions with those made by Republicans McCain and Bush.

“I stood up and I said this war in Iraq would cost us billions of dollars and thousands of lives. I said it would distract us from the real threat we faced. That’s the judgment I made on the most important foreign policy decision of a generation and that’s the kind of judgment I’ll show when I pick up the phone at 3am in the morning!” he exclaimed to rousing applause.

He then wacked President Bush for good measure - always a crowd favorite at Democratic rallies. He promised he would use his judgment to provide, equip, and train troops and to “use them wisely and not deploy them because of some ideological bent that you were on, but because it is absolutely necessary to protect the United States of America – that’s the answer that I’ll give when somebody calls me on the phone at 3am in the morning!”

Obama ended his rant by saying he won’t scare up votes using the threat of terrorism. “I intend to make sure that we rally the country together, against our common enemies – that we’re distracted by politics when it comes to our national security. That’s the judgment that I intend provide when I’m president of the United States of America.”

Mt. Pleasant, IA — Rudy Giuliani’s closing argument to voters is increasingly revolving around one issue—the war on terrorism. While he has spent most of the year talking up his record as New York City mayor and time as US Attorney and at the US Justice Department, he has turned to his pet issue in the last couple weeks amid slumping poll numbers.

At a town hall meeting at Iowa Wesleyan College Saturday night, Giuliani spoke for about 16 minutes before taking questions from attendees—devoting the first 14 minutes solely to what he refers to as the “terrorists war on us.” For some perspective, here is a quick count of the words (stated or referenced) he used in the first 14 minutes to make his case:

Terrorists War on Us/War: 21
Islamic Terrorism/Terrorists: 21
Military/soldiers: 14
Offense: 12
Defense: 7
September 11: 6
Security/secure: 4
Bin Laden: 2

At  town hall forum Friday in Guttenberg, Iowa, Senator Obama was asked an unusual question for a Democratic candidate - What is your plan if we begin to withdraw troops from Iraq and the terrorists follow us home?

Iraq is not a strange or new topic for discussion on the campaign trail for Obama, but the candidate’s response was interesting for two reasons.

First, Obama (as he usually does) said that our invasion of Iraq has created a “hotbed” of terrorism in the country. But he qualified that today by saying, “although it’s lessened over the last year.”

And later in his answer, Obama seemed to assure the woman that, if elected, troops would still be in Iraq for another “two and a half, three years.” Not exactly a bragging point for a Democrat running for president.

Here is the unedited question and answer:

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