The McCain campaign picked up on a story in the New York Sun today, which reported that an Obama adviser met with Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem while on a non-campaign related trip. Daniel Kurtzer, the former U.S. ambassador to Israel, was reportedly in Syria for an American Bar Association-sponsored law conference when he spoke with al-Moallem about the Syrian-Israeli peace agreement.

Responding to the report, Rudy Giuliani, who was named the keynote speaker at the Republican convention, spoke with reporters on an afternoon conference call and questioned Obama's ability to correctly handle foreign policy. "This was never disclosed to anyone," Giuliani said of Kurtzer's meeting with Syrian officials. "It would seem to me that this was an important fact. If Senator Obama is truly going to bring transparency to Washington, this is surely no way to do it."

"This is yet another indication of the inexperience that Senator Obama has in conducting foreign policy and may be an indication of his ability to do so in a way that would be responsible, which is of course the point that Senator Clinton made when Senator Obama said he would negotiate with...some of these people without preconditions."

In the Sun article, Obama spokeswoman Wendy Morigi said: "Senator Obama values the expertise of Ambassador Kurtzer, but he is not a paid adviser, nor is he authorized to conduct talks with any government."

And in an afternoon conference call, Obama advisers again responded to the report and subsequent comments made by the McCain campaign.

Foreign policy advisers Susan Rice and Richard Clarke both hit McCain for his past foreign policy judgment, as McCain had done toward Obama on the stump earlier in the day. Clarke, a former White House counterterrorism adviser, called the Arizona senator "reckless" and "trigger-happy," and referred to him as "Quick-Draw McCain" because, Clarke said, his first instinct is to use the military to solve issues.

"The greatest tests of national security judgment in the last decade have been: What do you do about Iraq and what do you do about Afghanistan," Clarke said. "And John McCain failed both of those two tests. He was part of the group who wanted to go into Iraq from the beginning."

"For the McCain campaign to suggest that a private citizen in his personal capacity going to Syria is problematic...is hypocrisy in the extreme, and again indicative of the say-anything, do-anything Karl Rove play book that they're running in this campaign," said Rice, who noted McCain's meeting with the Syrian president in 1984.