Of the sons of Issachar, men who understood the times, with knowledge of what Israel should do, their chiefs were two hundred; and all their kinsmen were at their command — 1 Chronicles 12:32
RUSH: This is gonna be close to my all-time favorite or this is close to my all-time favorite. I can’t say it is my all-time favorite ’cause I don’t remember them all, but this is clearly in the top five. On April 29th, Lesley Stahl, 60 Minutes, interviewed Jose Rodriguez who is the chief interrogator of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed at Club Gitmo. And I love this bite because, as I listen to it, I firmly believe that Jose Rodriguez knows exactly who he’s dealing with and is having fun with her and she doesn’t know it.He knows he’s talking to somebody who thinks raising your voice at somebody is torture. He knows he’s dealing with somebody who thinks that he committed atrocities and crimes. So he describes the harmless activities he engaged in with Sheikh Mohammed as “dire techniques,” these “dire techniques.” That’s my favorite line in this bite: “Oh, yes, it was one of those dire techniques.” Here it is, her question. “So what happens? Did the Sheikh break down? Does he cry? Does he fall apart after your waterboarding?”RODRIGUEZ: No. He gets a good night’s sleep. He gets his Ensure. By the way, he was very heavy when he came to us and he lost 50 pounds.STAHL: What, his Ensure? You mean like people in the hospital who will drink that stuff?RODRIGUEZ: Yes. Dietary manipulation was part of these dire techniques.STAHL: So sleep deprivation, dietary manipulation, I mean, this is Orwellian stuff. The United States doesn’t do that.RODRIGUEZ: Well, we do.
RUSH: “Well, we do.” (laughing)
“Dietary manipulation was part of these dire techniques.” Dietary manipulation! Ensure. A product that keeps cancer patients alive in the hospital considered “torture” by Lesley Stahl. And I think Jose Rodriguez knew it and when he calls “dietary manipulation … part of the dire techniques,” he was taunting her and she didn’t even know it! So I pointed this out. We played it two or three times, maybe more. We played it again just now. This past Thursday in New York City at the New York Historical Society, they had a panel discussion there about the 2012 presidential race. The moderator… (interruption) Snerdley, stop screening for a minute. You gotta listen to this in case we get phone calls about it. New York Historical Society on Thursday, Lesley Stahl moderating a panel discussion on the 2012 presidential race, said this about the campaign and the media…
STAHL: Here’s something that’s happened over the last couple of years that’s frustrating to me, and that is when you say “we, the press” and then the press is this big salad bowl, and who’s in the press? It’s Rush Limbaugh is in the press. Fox is in the press. MSNBC. I mean, all these people who are devoting themselves to little slices of the pie are in with the so-called “mainstream media.” We’re all the same thing now to the public. We’re not the same thing.
RUSH: Awww. See, they used to have a monopoly. And now the monopoly is gone. And I’m now considered to be in the same business as Lesley Stahl. I can’t tell you how insulted I am. That’s right: A little slice of the pie. All these people have little slices of the pie. I would dare say that the EIB Network rivals CBS News, CBS Evening News. I’d say our audience is larger than the CBS Evening News is. I don’t think there’s any question about it if you want to start talking about slice of the pie.
But that’s not the point.
The point is, I am the turd in the salad bowl. That’s what the point is. I am the [Baby Ruth] in the swimming pool at Caddy Shack. And she just can’t stand it because the salad used to be pure and clean and now, ladies and gentlemen, their monopoly has been destroyed. And it’s no longer ABC, CBS, NBC, the New York Times and the Washington Post manipulating the minds of the American people. Now there’s too much freedom in the media. But I guarantee you I got mentioned first because I keep playing this sound bite with Jose Rodriguez that “dietary manipulation” is part of their “dire techniques.”
I love it.
I just love it.
END TRANSCRIPT
My personal favorite segment:
RODRIGUEZ: No. He gets a good night’s sleep. He gets his Ensure. By the way, he was very heavy when he came to us and he lost 50 pounds.
STAHL: What, his Ensure? You mean like people in the hospital who will drink that stuff?
RODRIGUEZ: Yes. Dietary manipulation was part of these dire techniques.
STAHL: So sleep deprivation, dietary manipulation, I mean, this is Orwellian stuff. The United States doesn’t do that.
Lesley Stahl joins Andrea Mitchell in showing us how “journalism” has become an outright disgrace of leftist propganda.
Hopefully, you agree with me that mainstream media “journalists” ought to be regarded with contempt and suspected of being liars and propagandists unless and until they prove otherwise.
When I first heard about the assault on the compound in Pakistan that resulted in the death of Osama bin Laden, I was happy and proud as an American. And willing to give Obama credit where credit was due.
It seemed like a gutsy move – which the mainstream media narrative quickly seized upon: the political consequences for Obama would have been quite negative if the mission had failed. It would have reminded everyone yet again that Obama is a reincarnation of Jimmy Carter. And the whole “Desert One” fiasco would have surely been remembered.
But take just a second and look at it from the opposite perspective; you know, the one that the mainstream media has never once considered for even a nanosecond. What would have happened had Barack Obama decided NOT to try to take out bin Laden? What would have happened – more to the point – when the American people were informed that Barack Obama had known for certain where Osama bin Laden was, and refused to try to get him?
Wouldn’t that have had even MORE DISASTEROUS consequences???
And, the thing is, it is a near certainty that that information would have gotten out. There would have been sufficient disgust in both the CIA and in the Pentagon that somebody would have made sure that the news got out that Barack Obama – who had PROMISED THE AMERICAN PEOPLE that he would go into Pakistan to get bin Laden – had cowardly refused to keep yet another promise.
Imagine for just a second the abundant campaign ads: slow-moving video of Osama bin Laden, followed by footage of the twin towars collapsing, followed by Barack Obama giving his word to get bin Laden, followed by the evidence that Obama knew for at least half a year where bin Laden was hiding, and refused to even try to get him.
It would have been just as “bold” for Obama to decide that an operation to get bin Laden was too risky, and jeopardized critical U.S.-Pakistani relations to too high a degree.
Barack Obama was forced into a position where he had to rely on the U.S. military to save his political hide. And the U.S. military came through for him.
President Obama has targeted the Department of Defense to absorb more than 80 percent of the cuts he has proposed in next year’s budget for discretionary programs.
Does Obama deserve credit for that? Really? Is he out right now campaigning as the guy who just gutted the military he commands, or is he out campaigning as the commander-in-chief of a glorious military?
People should hear that RIGHT NOW Barack Obama is taking an axe and gutting the Navy SEALs, and the Nightstalkers who brought them in and out of that compound, and the Screaming Eagles he visited yesterday, and the entire rest of the military.
People should know that Barack Obama demonized the primary means of interrogation that got us Osama bin Laden. And there is no question that waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation” methods led us to the breakthroughs we needed to get bin Laden:
A former head of counterterrorism at the CIA, who was investigated last year by the Justice Department for the destruction of videos showing senior al-Qaeda officials being interrogated, says the harsh questioning of terrorism suspects produced the information that eventually led to Osama bin Laden’s death.
Jose Rodriguez ran the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center from 2002 to 2005, the period when top al-Qaeda leaders Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) and Abu Faraj al-Libbi were taken into custody and subjected to “enhanced interrogation techniques” (EITs) at secret prisons overseas. KSM was subjected to waterboarding, sleep deprivation and other techniques. Al-Libbi was not waterboarded, but other EITs were used on him.
“Information provided by KSM and Abu Faraj al-Libbi about bin Laden’s courier was the lead information that eventually led to the location of [bin Laden’s] compound and the operation that led to his death,” Rodriguez tells TIME in his first public interview. Rodriguez was cleared of charges in the video-destruction investigation last year.
Asked by NBC-TV’s Brian Williams about the information obtained from detainees that led to the bin Laden takedown, Panetta replied: ‘We had multiple series of sources that provided information with regards to this situation. … Clearly some of it came from detainees [and] they used these enhanced interrogation techniques against some of those detainees.”
When Williams asked whether “waterboarding” was one of those techniques, Panetta replied: “That’s correct.”
CATHERINE HERRIDGE, FOX NEWS NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): March 2003, Rawalpindi, Pakistan, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was captured and according to U.S. officials, the self-described architect of 9/11 was immediately taken into the CIA enhanced interrogation program and waterboarded. It was three to four months later, according to U.S. officials, that KSM was asked about the courier who was known only by an Al Qaeda alias. He downplayed the courier’s importance. The top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee says the implications of the CIA’s early leads are clear. […]
A former senior intelligence official says the waterboarding of KSM, quote, “took his spirited defiance into a zone of cooperation,” adding that the harsh interrogation tactic critics described as torture was not used to elicit information but rather to alter the detainee’s mindset. Philip Mudd is a former CIA analyst.
PHILIP MUDD, FORMER CIA ANALYST: Having seen this stuff on the inside, that’s not a debate. That is a done deal. The information we got was invaluable. So debate the cultural side and the political side, but please don’t debate the intelligence side.
HERRIDGE: In a radio interview with FOX, former CIA Director Michael Hayden said there is no question the CIA program including waterboarding laid the foundation for bin Laden’s capture.
MICHAEL HAYDEN, FMR CIA DIRECTOR ON FOX NEWS RADIO (via telephone): That database was kind of like the home depot of intelligence analysis. You know, it was incredibly detailed stuff.
HERRIDGE: As for its role in identifying this compound in Pakistan —
HAYDEN: It would be very difficult for me to conceive of an operation like the one that took place on Sunday that did not include in its preparation information that came out of the CIA detention program.
HERRIDGE: 2004 and 2005 are described as turning points. Both Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Faraj al-Libi, a gatekeeper for Osama bin Laden, were both in the CIA secret prisons. U.S. officials say for a second time, KSM downplayed the courier significance and al-Libi denied knowing him. The men’s adamant denials appeared to be an effort to protect the courier and U.S. officials say it, quote, “sent up red flags for the CIA” because other detainees consistently claims the courier maintained bin Laden’s trust.
Which is to say that the entire Obama presidency was spent mining information from waterboarding that Obama personally demonized and from a program that Obama shut down.
Every single major fact that we learned we learned from waterboarding and from enhanced interrogation techniques. And the rest of it was simply a matter of confirming what we knew from waterboarding and from enhanced interrogation techniques.
People should KNOW that Barack Obama demands that the United States of America should be nearly blind.
People should also know that on his second day in office Barack Obama shut down and terminated the CIA intelligence program that actually developed the information that got bin Laden. They should know that America no longer has that capability, and that thanks to Barack Obama we could never even begin to do that again – likely for years to come, given the difficulty of developing such intensive programs.
And people should know that RIGHT NOWBarack Obama is continuing to try to criminally prosecute the incredible men and women who gave us the intelligence breakthroughs that got Osama bin Laden:
In normal times, the officials who uncovered the intelligence that led us to Osama bin Laden would get a medal. In the Obama administration, they have been given subpoenas.
On his second day in office, President Barack Obama shut down the CIA’s high-value interrogation program. His Justice Department then reopened criminal investigations into the conduct of CIA interrogators — inquiries that had been closed years before by career prosecutors who concluded that there were no crimes to prosecute. In a speech at the National Archives in May 2009, Mr. Obama accused the men and women of the CIA of “torture,” declaring that their work “did not advance our war and counterterrorism efforts — they undermined them.”
Now, it turns out that those CIA interrogators played a critical role in the killing of Osama bin Laden, which the president has rightly called “the most significant achievement to date in our nation’s effort to defeat al-Qaida.”
This nation should be grateful to George W. Bush, and for his courage and foresight to develop the programs and to create the capabilities that ultimately won us this victory against Osama bin Laden. It was the courage of George Bush that resulted in waterboarding – which Bush and his key advisors KNEW would be used by vile cowards like Barack Obama to demonize them. But they knew it had to be done, and they did it.
In the same way, Bush created the Guantanamo Bay (“Gitmo”) detention facility. Bush expanded the rendition program that had been used by Bill Clinton. Bush created the Patriot Act. Bush approved of domestic surveillance. Bush set up the military tribunals that had been used by Democrats like FDR in previous time of war. Bush established the indefinite detentions of the most hardened terrorists.
Barack Obama personally demonized and vilified all of these things. But he is using them to this day because they had to be done.
I would argue that the hero of this is George Bush; and that Barack Obama is a self-aggrandizing coward who was forced to use virtually all of the programs that he self-righteously demagogued for political advantage in a way that is frankly treasonous.
Right now we have a treasure trove of intelligence that is likewise nearly entirely the result of the work of George W. Bush. But be advised: if we don’t shut down al Qaeda now, we probably never will due to the massive failures of the man who sits in the Oval Office as we speak.
It’s really quite amazing: Barack Obama is a near-total failure even when he finally manages to get something right.
Obama’s disasterous bungling of the aftermath of the killing of bin Laden makes me think about that proverbial idiot who managed to kill the goose that laid the golden eggs.
The past few days have seemed like an extended amateur hour in the White House as unforced error after unforced error has been made in the handling of the US Government’s message about the killing of bin Laden.
We should not forget the bottom line in this: bin Laden was justifiably and legally killed by brave and skilled US Navy SEALs. The operation was audacious and meticulous in its planning and execution. President Barack Obama made the call to carry out the raid and his decision was vindicated in spades.
Having said that, the messiness since then has taken much of the sheen off this success, temporarily at least. Here’s a summary of what went wrong once the most difficult bit had been achieved:
1. It took nearly three days to decide not to release the photographs. I think there was a case for not releasing the pictures, though on balance I think disclosure would have been best. But whichever way Obama went on this, the decision should have been made quickly, on Monday. By letting the world and his dog debate the issue for so long and then say no made the administration look indecisive and appear that it had something to hide. It will fuel the conspiracy theories. And the pictures will surely be leaked anyway.
2. To say that bin Laden was armed and hiding behind a wife being used as a human shield was an unforgiveable embellishment. The way it was expressed by John Brennan was to mock bin Laden as being unmanly and cowardly. It turned out to be incorrect and gave fuel, again, to conspiracy theories as well as accusations of cover-ups and illegality. Of all the mistakes of the week, this was by far the biggest.
3. It was a kill mission and no one should have been afraid to admit that. Bin Laden was a dead man as soon as the SEAL Team landed. There’s nothing wrong with that but the Obama administration should have been honest about it rather than spinning tales about bin Laden having a gun, reaching for a gun (the latest) and resisting (without saying how he resisted).
4. Too much information was released, too quickly and a lot of it was wrong. When it made the administration look good, the information flowed freely. When the tide turned, Jay Carney, Obama’s spokesman, clammed up completely. I’m a journalist; I like it when people talk about things. But from the administration’s perspective, it would have been much better to have given a very sparse, accurate description of what happened without going into too much detail, especially about the intelligence that led to the compound (an account which is necessarily suspect).
5. Obama tried to claim too much credit. Don’t get me wrong, he was entitled to a lot of credit. but sometimes less is more and it’s better to let facts speak for themselves. We didn’t need official after official to say how “gutsy” Obama was. Far better to have heaped praise on the CIA and SEALs (which, to be fair, was done most of the time) and talked less about Obama’s decision-making. And a nod to President George W. Bush would have been classy – and good politics for Obama.
6. Proof of death was needed. The whole point of the SEAL operation, rather than a B2 bombing that levelled the compound, was to achieve certainty. The administration has DNA evidence, facial recognition evidence and photographic evidence. Some combination of that evidence should have been collated and released swiftly. It’s not enough to say, effectively, “Trust me, I’m Obama” – especially given all the misinformation that was put out.
7. The mission should have been a ‘capture’ one. Notwithstanding 3. above and the legitimacy of killing bin Laden, I think a capture of bin Laden was probably possible and, in the long term, would have been better – not least because of the intelligence that could have been gleaned from interrogating him and the couriers. My hunch is that Obama didn’t want him alive because there would have been uncomfortable issues to address like whether he should be tried, where he should be held (it would have been Guantanamo – obviously) and the techniques for questioning him.
8. Obama’s rhetoric lurched from jingoistic to moralistic. During the initial announcement, Obama said that by killing bin Laden “we are once again reminded that America can do whatever we set our mind to”. If Bush had said that, he would have been mocked and laughed at, with some justification. But by today Obama was all preachy and holier than thou saying: “It is important for us to make sure that very graphic photos of somebody who was shot in the head are not floating around as an incitement to additional violence or as a propaganda tool. That’s not who we are. We don’t trot out this stuff as trophies.”
9. Triggering a torture debate was an avoidable own goal. Following on from 3. by discussing the intelligence, the administration walked into the issue of whether enhanced interrogation techniques yielded important information. That was certainly something they could have done without. Politically, it gave something for Republicans to use against Obama.
10. The muddle over Pakistan. Everyone I talk to with knowledge of these things tells me that Pakistan had to have given the green light for the raid in some form. But the Pakistanis, for good reasons, would not want this made public. Rather than say it would not comment on whether Pakistan had harboured bin Laden or was playing a double game, the White House poured petrol on the flames by encouraging criticism of Pakistan. That might have been deserved, but in terms of managing the region it was impolitic. The Pakistanis are clearly riled and the contradictions between the US and Pakistani accounts, again, fuel the conspiracy theories.
All this has meant that this week’s media story has become one about Obama and the White House more than one about the SEALs, the CIA and what killing bin Laden means. That’s exactly the wrong way round.
It’s not enough to say that Obama arrogantly and falsely took too much credit, or even that Obama didn’t give Bush and the programs Bush developed enough credit: Obama personally demonized programs that were essential to finally getting Osama bin Laden, and even launched a vendetta to destroy the professionals who gave us the vital information via his attorney general.
Asked by NBC-TV’s Brian Williams about the information obtained from detainees that led to the bin Laden takedown, Panetta replied: ‘We had multiple series of sources that provided information with regards to this situation. … Clearly some of it came from detainees [and] they used these enhanced interrogation techniques against some of those detainees.”
When Williams asked whether “waterboarding” was one of those techniques, Panetta replied: “That’s correct.”
General Michael Hayden, the career intelligence professional who had directed the CIA prior to Leon Panetta, speaking about the CIA program Obama terminated on his second day as president, had this to say:
Michael Hayden said there is no question the CIA program including waterboarding laid the foundation for bin Laden’s capture.
MICHAEL HAYDEN, FMR CIA DIRECTOR ON FOX NEWS RADIO (via telephone): That database was kind of like the home depot of intelligence analysis. You know, it was incredibly detailed stuff.
HERRIDGE: As for its role in identifying this compound in Pakistan —
HAYDEN: It would be very difficult for me to conceive of an operation like the one that took place on Sunday that did not include in its preparation information that came out of the CIA detention program.
It is a well-documented fact, confirmed by both the Republican- and Democrat-appointed Directors of Central Intelligence, that waterboarding led to the breakthrough that finally resulted in nailing Osama bin Laden.
Barack Obama wants to demonize the people and procedures that led to Osama bin Laden’s killing even as he takes credit for what could not possibly have happened without the people and procedures that he demonized. It is a disgrace.
Then there’s the fact that so many of the events surrounding Barack Obama were staged propaganda.
Of the famous photo supposedly showing Obama and his national security team monitoring and directing the SEAL Team that got Osama bin Laden, we now know that:
Leon Panetta, director of the CIA, revealed there was a 25 minute blackout during which the live feed from cameras mounted on the helmets of the US special forces was cut off.
A photograph released by the White House appeared to show the President and his aides in the situation room watching the action as it unfolded. In fact they had little knowledge of what was happening in the compound.
In an interview with PBS, Mr Panetta said: “Once those teams went into the compound I can tell you that there was a time period of almost 20 or 25 minutes where we really didn’t know just exactly what was going on. And there were some very tense moments as we were waiting for information.
“We had some observation of the approach there, but we did not have direct flow of information as to the actual conduct of the operation itself as they were going through the compound.”
Which is to say that much of the hubub of Obama as commanding figure was simply staged. It wasn’t real.
And while a liberal might argue that what Obama did has been done before, my response is that there are times when you’ve got to be real and not propaganda, and this was clearly one of those times.
In light of what George Bush did to create programs, build special operations capabilities capable of performing the Pakistan mission that got bin Laden, and even what Barack Obama said during his campaign for president, the decision to capture or kill Osama bin Laden was a no-brainer.
I mean, just imagine the fecal matter that would have struck the rotary oscillator had it emerged that Barack Obama had known for at least six months where Osama bin Laden was – and refused to get him????
That said, the man acted brainless before the decision to get Osama bin Laden, and he’s clearly returned to his brainless form since.
It had to happen eventually. And it finally has. Osama bin Laden is in hell where he belongs, where seventy-two very un-virginal demons will tear his flesh for all eternity.
And it came the best way: by the trigger fingers of individual heroes, rather than by the faceless push of a button to activate a missile by a Predator drone. It is fitting that bin Laden died at the hands of Americans who got to look him in the eye as they facilitated his journey to the eternally burning trash pit in the sky.
And just to add some icing to the cake, the reports are that they killed Osama bin Laden’s oldest son in the attack, too.
Osama bin Laden, hunted as the mastermind behind the worst-ever terrorist attack on U.S. soil, has been killed, sources told ABC News.
Bin Laden was killed in a ground attack by Joint Special Operations Command forces working with the CIA, not a drone strike, a national security source told ABC News.
According to a national security source, a compound in Pakistan where the terrorist mastermind was believed to be had been monitored for months. When the decision was made to move on it, special operations forces were sent across the border from Afghanistan to launch a ground attack and take the body.
DNA testing confirmed that it was bin Laden, sources told ABC News.
Vice President Biden has reached out to congressional leadership to update them on the news tonight.
“This is a terrific day for America and quite frankly the whole world that cares about winning the war on terror,” former Bush chief of staff Andy Card told ABC News. Card said the news is “particularly significant” for the intelligence community.
“They’re the ones who kept their nose to the grindstone and worked very hard to allow this day to be realized … finally,” he said.
[The rest of the ABC story is mostly biographical on who bin Laden was and what he did. You may read it here].
My congratulations and heartfelt appreciation go out to all the intelligence and military professionals who brought about this fitting end.
As President George Bush put it on October 11, 2001:
Anyone who has read one paragraph of my blog knows that I am a fierce critic of President Barack Obama. But he and his administration deserve credit for approving the actions that led to this day of reckoning. Obama also displayed some class in how he first called former President Bush and then cited him in his announcement of bin Laden’s killing.
That said, the city where bin Laden was killed – Abbottabad – was a military district headquarters. And the early releases are claiming that the Pakistani government was not informed prior to the raid that got Osama bin Laden. And the fact that bin Laden was staying in a large walled security compound only 100 yards from a Pakistani military facility tells you that bin Laden was almost certainly being protected by at least a faction of the Pakistani military.
Given how badly we need Pakistan and other key Muslim countries to cooperate with us if we are to be able to use anything other than a “Kill them all; let God sort them out” policy, Pakistan’s apparent duplicity and its cooperation with al Qaeda is not good news.
The war on terror isn’t over. It might even intensify, as the terrorist network al Qaeda looks for vengeance. It’ s who they are; it’s what they do. Here, for instance, is a story that al Qaeda threatened a “nuclear hellstorm” if America killed or captured bin Laden. Rest assured, al Qaeda will be determined to do something that will seek to restore their honor and credibility in the Islamic world as a result of this raid.
What will happen as a result of this raid and the killing of bin Laden? Will Pakistan be embarrassed into more cooperation with the U.S., or will they be embarrassed into LESS cooperation with the U.S.? Did conducting a massively consequential military operation in a foreign country without notifying its leaders make that country a better friend, or a less trustworthy foe? Under the presidency of Barack Obama, U.S.-Pakistani relationships have soured to an all-time low. Did this attack on their country improve those relations? What will happen as a direct result of this attack?
I don’t even want to think about what would have happened had a Pakistani military or police unit fired on the U.S. special operations forces.
If liberals are consistent, they will immediately denounce President Obama and demonize him for further antagonizing the Islamic world and for risking an escalation of terrorism.
The problem with that is that it is total crap. And whether liberals like it or not, we are in a war for the survival of our culture against a culture of hate.
George Bush put it best describing countries and their attitude toward the United States: “You’re either with us or against us in the fight against terror.” That statement was met with incredible criticism and condemnation from the left. And yet, in what way did Obama’s actions today do anything other than reinforce that that was the only attitude we could realistically take?
The left has been proven fundamentally and profoundly wrong in its attitude toward the war on terror. And it should be obvious by now that the only way to be successful is to not just follow George Bush’s example, but to actually try to “out-Bush” Bush’s example.
And Obama has largely “out-Bushed” Bush in Pakistan. President Bush did not want to cause a deterioration in U.S.-Pakistani relations, because he viewed Pakistani cooperation as key in the war on terror. Obama, in using drone attacks and now direct military action, has been far more aggressive in “taking the war” to Pakistan.
Another example of “out-Bushing Bush” would be the Libya attack. George Bush – decried as the “imperial president” for his attack on Iraq – at least had constitutional authorization for that action (i.e,. the Iraq War Resolution). Obama took the “cowboy” route in Libya without bothering to obtain permission from any constitutional authority whatsoever. Except the “world.” Obama’s actions should serve to amply demonstrate just how hypocritical and utterly vacuous George W. Bush’s liberal critics truly were.
Liberals said that Bush’s attack on Iraq was a provocation that would make the war on terror worse. They said that the war on terror was a provocation. They said the surge was a provocation. And we shouldn’t be provoking the Muslim world like that.
Let me assure you, what those spec op warriors just did in their raid on that compound in Pakistan was an in-your-face provocation.
What’s the long-term effect of this degraded relationship with Pakistan going to be? I have no idea. But any liberal who wants to tell me that “cooperative” liberal policies are working where “confrontational” conservative ones have failed is simply an imbecile. Because what just happened clearly proves the exact opposite. And when you consider the fact that Obama has already pursued Bush’s policies on Guantanamo Bay, rendition, domestic eavesdropping, the Patriot Act, military tribunals, indefinite detentions and a host of other polices, George Bush and Dick Cheney stand as men proven correct.
We cannot relent. Because our enemies will not relent. They are determined to murder. It is a virtue for them. It is a religious duty. And the 9/11 attack was a religious act.
Our warriors should smile and give one another hearty high-fives for this victory. And then they need to get right back to work. Because what they do is vital for their country, whether their country has the moral intelligence to understand that or not.
What I most like about this is that it sends a message. Even ten years later, the United States of America will continue to hunt you down and kill you if you kill her citizens. And that is a message that Republican and Democrat alike ought to be able to unite around.
Update: we are now learning that it was a squadron of forty U.S. Navy SEALs from Team 6 who conducted the raid that got bin Laden. God bless you guys.
And now we are even beginning to learn that “enhanced interrogation” may very well have given us the information breakthrough that got us bin Laden.
I remember exactly what I was doing the morning of September 11, 2001. I was a grad student at the time, getting ready for my first class with the television running in the background. Just before the first large passenger plane crashed into one of the towers of the World Trade Center something caught my attention just in time to see it happen live. [Note: please see the update at the conclusion for a correction].
And the day froze into shock, numbness, dismay, terror, and a rising anger.
The broadcasters were talking to themselves about whether this was an accident, or an intentional attack. I didn’t need them to tell me what it was: like many other Americans, I knew exactly what had just happened.
And then the second plane struck the second tower. And shortly afterward the cameras began to catch specks falling out of the towers that turned out to be Americans throwing themselves out of top story windows to their deaths in order to avoid the even more agonizing death by burning.
President George Bush had been President for just over six months. But I would have felt EXACTLY the same sense of horror and outrage whether Bill Clinton, or Al Gore, or George Bush was President.
It wasn’t about being a member of a political party, or who was President or what party he was from; it was about being an American whose country had just been attacked.
That’s just no longer the case, though. I no longer feel that way.
Barack Obama’s constant unrelenting blaming of the Bush administration for virtually every problem under the sun was bad enough; Obama’s description of Bush “torture” and his releasing of CIA memos intended to politically hurt the Bush administration at the expense of informing our enemies exactly how we would and would not interrogate them was bad enough; House Speaker Nancy Peolosi’s demagoguery of the Bush administration over its “torture” and her subsequent lies that she herself had been informed about such “torture” and done nothing was bad enough; but it just never seems to end.
But the following example of Bush Derangement Syndrome finally sent me over the top:
The delusional claims he has made this day could be proved by documentation and firsthand testimony to be the literal and absolute truth, and he still, himself, would be wrong because the America he sought to impose upon the world and upon its own citizens, the dark, hateful place of Dick Cheney`s own soul, the place he to this hour defends, and to this day prefers, is a repudiation of all that our ancestors, all that for which our brave troops of two years ago and two minutes ago, have sacrificed and fought.
Olbermann acknowledges that EVEN if Dick Cheney is telling the truth and his own liberal allies are lying, it doesn’t matter. Because he thinks Cheney and his vision for America are evil. So truth be damned. That is the warped mind of the true ideologue.
And he then uses a rhetorical flourish to indicate that our troops have suffered for Cheney’s hateful vision.
What Olbermann, evil liar that he truly is, fails to mention is that our “brave troops” who “have sacrificed and fought” actually think JUST LIKE Cheney and DON’T THINK like Olbermann.
If Keith Olbermann had even a shred of personal honesty, integrity, character, or virtue, he would not have dragged American soldiers into his hateful polemic given that they themselves are on the very side that Olbermann so utterly despises. But Olbermann doesn’t have any honesty, integrity, character, or virtue.
So he warps the men and women who supported George Bush and Dick Cheney so overwhelmingly into victims.
Olbermann says:
Gee, thanks for being motivated by the deaths of nearly 3,000 Americans to go so far as to take a serious second look. And thank you, sir, for admitting, obviously inadvertently, that you did not take a serious first look in the seven months and 23 days between your inauguration and 9/11. For that attack, sir, you are culpable, morally, ethically. At best, you are guilty of malfeasance and eternally lasting stupidity. At worst, sir,in the deaths of 9/11, you are negligent.
Again, if Keith Olbermann had so much as a shred of personal or professional honesty, he wouldn’t say something like this.
Let’s review the list: 1) In 1993 Bill Clinton ran from Somalia after a battle with Islamic insurgents that left 18 American servicemen dead; 2) Also in 1993 the US suffered a terrorist attack in the form of the first World Trade Center bombing that killed 6 and wounded more than 1000 Americans; 3) In 1995 the US suffered its first domestic terrorist attack at the Oklahoma Federal Building that left 168 Americans dead; 4) In 1996 19 American servicemen were killed in a Saudi Arabian terrorist bombing of the US military Khobar Towers barracks; 5) In 1998 there was a simultaneous terrorist bombing of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed more than 200 people; 6) In 2000 the USS Cole was attacked by terrorists, leaving 17 American servicemen dead.
There may well have been more, but that is all I can remember.
How can Keith Olberman in good conscience so blame Bush and Cheney for 9/11 when the Clinton administration had never taken terrorism seriously themselves? But Olbermann doesn’t have a good conscience. He is a truly depraved human being.
Bill Clinton failed to take 9/11 seriously for the same reason George Bush failed to take it seriously in the six months of his administration preceding the 9/11 attack: because we hadn’t been hit hard enough yet. Clinton should have learned from the attacks America suffered throughout his entire presidency; and Bush should have paid attention to Clinton’s disastrous track record.
Olbermann said:
You saved no one, sir. If the classified documents you seek released really did detail plots other than those manufactured by drowning men in order to get it to stop, or if they truly did know plans beyond the laughable ones you and President Bush have already revealed, hijackers without passports, targeting a building whose name Mr. Bush could not remember, clowns who thought they could destroy airports by dropping matches in fuel pipelines 30 miles away, men who planned to attack a military base dressed as pizza delivery boys, forgetting that every man there was armed, and today, the four would-be synagogue bombers, one of whom turns out to keep bottles of urine in his apartment, and is on schizophrenia medicine.
So the man popping schizophrenia medicine and washing it down with his own bottled urine is none other than Keith Olbermann and everyone at MSNBC and everyone who watches the network. It certainly isn’t Dick Cheney.
Olbermann saves his ugliest and most hateful remarks for last:
You saved no one, Mr. Cheney. All you did was help kill Americans. You were negligent before 9/11. Your response to your complicity by omission on 9/11 was panic and shame and insanity, and lying this country into a war that did nothing but kill 4,299 more of us. We will take no further instructions from you, sir. And let me again quote Oliver Cromwell to you, Mr. Cheney. “You have sat too long for any good you have been doing lately. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of god, go.”
I’ve written about other things that Keith Olbermann and his “guests” have said. Only very recently Janeane Garofalo said:
This is about hating a black man in the White House. This is racism straight up. That is nothing but a bunch of teabagging rednecks. And there is no way around that. And you know, you can tell these type of right wingers anything and they’ll believe it, except the truth. You tell them the truth and they become — it’s like showing Frankenstein’s monster fire. They become confused, and angry and highly volatile. That guy, causing them feelings they don’t know, because their limbic brain, we’ve discussed this before, the limbic brain inside a right-winger or Republican or conservative or your average white power activist, the limbic brain is much larger in their head space than in a reasonable person, and it’s pushing against the frontal lobe. So their synapses are misfiring. Is Bernie Goldberg listening?
And there was Keith Olbermann and Michael Musto engaging in about as hateful of an attack as one can possibly imagine against Miss California Carrie Prejean for the simple reason that they despise her right to express her own views about an issue that most Californians and most Americans agree with her over.
Keith Olbermann is a vain, petty, vindictive, vicious, hateful, and truly ugly human being. And MSNBC would do far better broadcasting in place of pro-terrorist al Jazeera than it is doing here. Both networks run basically the same message.
But Keith Olbermann’s rant against Dick Cheney and every conservative who agrees with him rose to such a level of hatred, such a level of vicious, bitter, ugly, deceitful, and frankly evil rhetoric, that it transcends anything I have ever heard.
Right now, liberals like Keith Olbermann are teeing off on conservatives for waterboarding when we now learn that liberals like Nancy Pelosi and many other Democrats were fully briefed on “enhanced interrogation techniques that had been employed,” and neither said or did anything to prevent such techniques. And even the very liberal new CIA Director under Obam0, Leon Panetta, essentially says Pelosi is lying. How are their attacks now anything but partisan demagoguery?
And right now, liberals including Barack Obama himself are deceitfully claiming the moral high ground even as the new liberal administration takes many of the same positions that it hypocritically and demagogically found so hateful on the campaign trail. As many policies as Obama has undone that will make this country less safe, there have been almost as many that he once demonized, only to follow himself once in office.
And Obama has indicated that he likewise reserves the right to continue to hold some prisoners without trial indefinitely – a position he demonized during the campaign. How can such a man who so hypocritically employed such demagoguery only to come to the same position as the man he demagogued claim any semblance of moral high ground? Obama is lower than Bush in his character, not higher. Bush and Cheney didn’t self-righteously demagogue; only Obama did.
Obama decided against the release of the remainder of the infamous Abu Ghraib photos. But only because he had to bow to the reality of the massive resitance against his decision to release them and the consequences such a stupid and depraved act would have had both for our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan and for Democrats at home. In electing not to release them, Obama took the SAME position that Bush/Cheney had taken. Obama is not better than Bush or Cheney; he’s worse. They didn’t waiver and pander before going back on their decision out of the selfish interests of political survival. They were consistent in their determination to do the right thing.
Obama has idiotically promised he would close Gitmo, but even his own party now realizes how foolish that would be and has twice denied him funding to do so until he come up with a plan that makes some kind of sense. Obama wrapped himself up in puffed-up, posturing self-righteousness, but the reality is that Bush was forced to confront the same unsolvable dilemmas. The only difference was that Bush was wiser than Barack Obama in recognizing the problems that made a closure of Gitmo nearly impossible; and that Bush – unlike Obama – was never a pandering demagogue.
Again, Obama isn’t one iota better than Bush or Cheney. He’s worse.
Not that any of these FACTS matter to liberals. Because far too many of them are exactly like Keith Olbermann: even if the facts support conservatives, it doesn’t matter. Such liberals are completely false, vile people who routinely treat the truth with as much contempt as Olbermann does.
I said earlier that I no longer feel the same way about my country that I did following 9/11. I wish it were not true, but the constant unrelenting barrage of lies, hypocristy, demonization, and demagoguery from the left – particularly on national security issues – have left me with an increasingly bitter taste in my mouth. And following so many years of such hateful tactics, I fear that if we are attacked again, that I will react politically, rather than patriotically. I wish it weren’t true, but there it is.
Update: I have since realized that the first attack was not covered live, and film footage of the first airplane was not made available until later. What I would have seen was video footage of smoke billowing out of the World Trade Center shortly following the first attack, finally followed by live footage of the 2nd plane strike. I attempted to describe from memory what I had seen 8 years ago, and it turns out that my memory was not perfect.
The man who has exposed CIA interrogators and Bush officials for condemnation due to their support for “enhanced interrogations” is himself a murderer of innocent women and children.
By RAHIM FAIEZ, Associated Press Writer Rahim Faiez
KABUL – The international Red Cross said Wednesday that its officials saw women and children among dozens of dead bodies in two villages in western Afghanistan targeted in U.S. bombing runs.
The Afghan president said he would raise the issue with President Barack Obama when the two meet later Wednesday.
A team from the International Committee of the Red Cross traveled to two villages in Farah province Tuesday, where the team saw “dozens of bodies in each of the two locations that we went to,” said spokeswoman Jessica Barry.
“There were bodies, there were graves, and there were people burying bodies when we were there,” she said. “We do confirm women and children. There were women and children.”
Afghan President Hamid Karzai ordered a probe Wednesday into the killings, and the U.S. military sent a brigadier general to Farah to head a U.S. investigation, said Col. Greg Julian, a U.S. spokesman. Afghan military and police officials were also part of the investigative team.
Karzai, currently in the United States, will raise the issue of civilian deaths with Obama, a statement from Karzai’s office said. The two presidents were scheduled to hold their first face-to-face meeting later Wednesday.
Karzai called civilian casualties “unacceptable.”
Civilian deaths have caused increasing friction between the Afghan and U.S. governments, and Karzai has long pleaded with American officials to reduce the number of civilian casualties in their operations. U.S. and NATO officials accuse the Taliban militants of fighting from within civilian homes, thus putting them in danger.
Local officials said Tuesday that bombing runs called by U.S. forces killed dozens of civilians in Gerani village in Farah province’s Bala Buluk district.
Let’s see: aggressively interrogating terrorist murders to prevent further attacks and save lives, bad; bombing women and children to kill those same terrorists, good.
Let’s treat Obama by his own standard and bring him up on war crimes charges. Or, at the very least, let’s demand that Barack Obama climb off his moral high horse and recognize that choices have to be made in war, and maybe he shouldn’t judge other presidents for their choices when he has his own share of them to be held accountable for.
Recently, the moral stupidity, hypocrisy, and cowardice of the left was revealed when leftwing funny man Jon Stewart first agreed that Harry Truman, like the hated Bush, was a war criminal for incinerating hundreds of thousands of civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And then he apologized for calling Harry Truman – a Democrat – a war criminal. Mind you, nothing was mentioned of the war crimes of FDR, who killed over a hundred thousand civilians during the firebombing of Tokyo alone. Even the left recognize the blatant dishonesty and hypocrisy endemic to the mainstream leftwing-dominated media. Antiwar.com calls Stewart a “Wimp, Wuss, and Moral Coward.” This Week excoriates Stewart for his “pathetic ass-covering,” and points out that “Surely ‘mass incineration’ of civilians ranks ‘as a far worse crime than the very serious crime of torturing prisoners.'”
While I believe that the antiwar left is utterly wrong for arguing that either Bush or Truman (or FDR) were “war criminals,” I can at least applaud the consistency of their logic. Not so the mainstream left, who hypocritically and dishonestly prefer to subjectively demonize their targets based on politics rather than actual deeds.
So I say this to liberals of all stripes: by all means, attack Bush as a war criminal as you will. But you damn well better be just as shrill demanding that Barack Obama, a murderer of women and children, be prosecuted for his war crimes. And you’d better demand that the memos documenting Nancy Pelosi’s role in participating in “Bush war crimes” become public.
Obama’s DNI reminds Obama that “enhanced interrogation” worked
posted at 8:44 am on April 22, 2009 by Ed Morrissey
Barack Obama’s top man in the intelligence community sent the President a memo defending the use of enhanced interrogation techniques, which the White House edited before releasing to the press de-emphasizing that defense. Dennis Blair, the Director of National Intelligence, pointed out that most of what we know about al-Qaeda came from using those techniques on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah, countering leaks last week from the Obama administration that claimed the methods produced no data:
President Obama’s national intelligence director told colleagues in a private memo last week that the harsh interrogation techniques banned by the White House did produce significant information that helped the nation in its struggle with terrorists.
“High value information came from interrogations in which those methods were used and provided a deeper understanding of the al Qa’ida organization that was attacking this country,” Adm. Dennis C. Blair, the intelligence director, wrote in a memo to his staff last Thursday.
Admiral Blair sent his memo on the same day the administration publicly released secret Bush administration legal memos authorizing the use of interrogation methods that the Obama White House has deemed to be illegal torture. Among other things, the Bush administration memos revealed that two captured Qaeda operatives were subjected to a form of near-drowning known as waterboarding a total of 266 times.
The New York Times, which got a copy of the memo, also notices some odd redactions from the version released by the White House:
Admiral Blair’s assessment that the interrogation methods did produce important information was deleted from a condensed version of his memo released to the media last Thursday. Also deleted was a line in which he empathized with his predecessors who originally approved some of the harsh tactics after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
“I like to think I would not have approved those methods in the past,” he wrote, “but I do not fault those who made the decisions at that time, and I will absolutely defend those who carried out the interrogations within the orders they were given.”
In other words, the Obama administration covered up the fact that even their own DNI acknowledges that the interrogations produced actionable and critical information. When Dick Cheney demanded the release of the rest of the memos relating that information, he wasn’t just going on a fishing expedition. Cheney filed a request to declassify those memos in March, and the CIA has yet to decide on his request, but we can no longer doubt that records exist showing the success of those interrogations.
Obama has occasionally suggested a truth-and-reconciliation approach to probing the use of torture by the Bush administration, but this establishes that Obama isn’t terribly interested in “truth”. Withholding the truth that waterboarding produced information that saved hundreds of American lives, perhaps thousands, shows that Obama values public relations more than he does the truth. He wants to argue that none of this was necessary to secure the nation against terrorist attacks. In order to make that argument, he redacted Blair’s memo, including his defense of his predecessors, whom Blair acknowledges had to face some tough decisions to uncover plots against America.
WASHINGTON – Four former CIA directors opposed releasing classified Bush-era interrogation memos, officials say, describing objections that went all the way to the White House and slowed release of the records.
Former CIA chiefs Michael Hayden, Porter Goss, George Tenet and John Deutch all called the White House in March warning that release of the so-called “torture memos” would compromise intelligence operations, current and former officials say. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity in order to detail internal government discussions.
Even Obama’s OWN CURRENT CIA director pulled back from releasing the memos, said administration needed to consider the possibility that the memos’ release might expose CIA officers to lawsuits on allegations of torture and abuse, and urged more censorship.
Obama now has a proven track record of releasing – in the name of “openness and accountability” – only that information which harms his opposition, while refusing to release and even censoring any mitigating information.
Wow. The most radically liberal Senator in Congress is breaking his promise to be bipartisan and above the political divide as a “new politician,” which was at the heart of his campaign. He is turning out to be the most divisive president in modern history. What can I say? I’m speechless with shock – that there were enough fools in the country who thought he’d turn out any differently to get this leftwing ideologue elected.
And let’s be clear: the buck stops at Obama. He’s the one responsible for this partisan witch hunt, this criminalizing of political differences. If the radical left is driving the agenda, Barack Obama is still the man serving as their tool.
Update, April 27: Porter Goss – CIA director from September 2004 to May 2006, chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence from 1997 to 2004 – described himself as being “slack-jawed” over the Democrats blatantly obvious lies and demagoguery over this issue.
An article from Atlas Shrugs entitled “Obama Crossed the Line” raises the legitimate anger that should result from Obama’s actions:
If Obama commits treason, is it legal? Obama was not brought up in the USA and lacks American DNA. The fact that he was raised in the largest Muslim country in the world and that his mother was a communist and his Kenyan father was no lover of America tells us a lot about where Obama’s sympathies lie. It tells me that for Obama, it’s payback time, and payback is a bitch.
The problem with starting a process of partisan witch hunting is that it won’t stop. You can hunt conservatives down now, Obama; but just realize that you’ll be the witch next.
He knows he’s talking to somebody who thinks raising your voice at somebody is torture. He knows he’s dealing with somebody who thinks that he committed atrocities and crimes. So he describes the harmless activities he engaged in with Sheikh Mohammed as “dire techniques,” these “dire techniques.” That’s my favorite line in this bite: “Oh, yes, it was one of those dire techniques.” Here it is, her question. “So what happens? Did the Sheikh break down? Does he cry? Does he fall apart after your waterboarding?”RODRIGUEZ: No. He gets a good night’s sleep. He gets his Ensure. By the way, he was very heavy when he came to us and he lost 50 pounds.STAHL: What, his Ensure? You mean like people in the hospital who will drink that stuff?RODRIGUEZ: Yes. Dietary manipulation was part of these dire techniques.STAHL: So sleep deprivation, dietary manipulation, I mean, this is Orwellian stuff. The United States doesn’t do that.RODRIGUEZ: Well, we do.
Start Thinking Right 