UPDATE: Phil Mudd withdraws his nomination this afternoon, says he doesn’t want to be “a distraction” after ties to CIA interrogation program are explored.

It’s hard not to be cynical when on the day President Barack Obama “delivered a direct appeal to the Islamic world … for a ‘new beginning’ with the United States, acknowledging historical mistakes over centuries in the name of culture and religion,” it is reported his key man for homeland security intelligence once tried to tie falafel purchases in San Francisco to Iranian extremists.

But that’s the word on Philip Mudd, a “tremendously intense” agent at the FBI’s National Security Division and former CIA operative who, as deputy director of the Office of Terrorism Analysis at the CIA during the Bush Administration, “had direct knowledge of the agency’s harsh interrogation program,” according to a congressional aide, speaking anonymously about the background being gathered by staffers at the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

The committee will be taking up Mudd’s nomination for under-secretary of intelligence and analysis at the Department Homeland Security, sometime next week, according to reports.

Described as one of the first CIA operatives in Afghanistan in 2001, Mudd also reportedly started a program in 2005 to collect and sift through intelligence gathered on Americans here in the U.S in order to look for “patterns” of possible extremism. Even fellow FBI agents were worried that Mudd was going too far, calling his scheme to follow grocery records to Iranian secret agents in the south San Francisco-San Jose area, “ethnic targeting.”

Justin Raimondo asks today, Obama talks the talk, but will he “walk the walk?” Even seemingly little things matter — like nominating a man to a sensitive post who might be tied to the ongoing torture controversy, and who just four years ago thought that using Americans’ gastronomic inclinations against them was appropriate counterterrorism practice. More nominations like this — and this — and Phil won’t be the only man with the name Mudd, at least in the “Islamic world” Obama is trying to woo.