Just Asking: How Much Credit For Getting Osama Bin Laden Does Obama Truly Deserve?

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.

And how does Obama repay that military?  By literally gutting their budget, that’s how:

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:

Ex-CIA Counterterror Chief: ‘Enhanced Interrogation’ Led U.S. to bin Laden
By Massimo Calabresi Wednesday, May 4, 2011

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.

Even career Democrat and Obama appointee for Director of Central Intelligence Leon Panetta has openly acknowledged that waterboarding was an instrumental part of this intelligence effort:

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.”

We have the following from the CIA analysts and the CIA director at the time, describing how essential the enhanced interrogations were to the knowledge that the CIA learned:

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.

And if you don’t believe EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THE KEY PEOPLE INVOLVED, just accept that Bush and HIS gutsy decision to approve waterboarding led us to the knowledge that Osama bin Laden (UBL) was using couriers, the pseudo-names of those couriers that led to intelligence ultiamtely finding their actual names, and even the very city where Osama bin Laden was hiding:

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.

And we now know that Osama bin Laden was in this compound that we learned about from waterboarding for at least five years.

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 NOW Barack 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.”

Even NOW Obama is refusing to do anything to stop the prosecution of the men and women who gave us bin Laden, even as he flies around taking credit for getting bin Laden.  Should we be giving Obama credit for that???

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.

“In terms of Mr. bin Laden himself, we’ll get him running. We’ll smoke him out of his cave and we’ll get him eventually.” — George W. Bush, October 11, 2001

It was always just a matter of time.  And the time came during the misrule of a hypocritical fool.

How Obama Managed To Screw Up Even The Killing Of Osama Bin Laden

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.

From the UK Telegraph:

10 ways Barack Obama botched the aftermath of the masterful operation to kill Osama bin Laden
By Toby Harnden World Last updated: May 5th, 2011

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.

Waterboarding and “enhanced interrogation” were absolutely vital to nailing bin Laden.  Even the career Democrat who was Barack Obama’s handpicked man to run the CIA openly acknowledged that:

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.

And Obama is STILL continuing to persecute the CIA professionals who got us the intelligence that got bin Laden via his attorney general attack dog.  He won’t even so much as talk to Holder about his rabid attack dog’s rabid determination to criminalize the professionals whose work led to the result Obama is taking credit for.  And that makes Obama 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.

Nor were the photos of Obama’s speech announcing that Osama bin Laden had been killed.

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.

Obama’s Growing List of Man-Caused Disasters

I hoped I would find a more or less complete assemblage of all the attempted terror attacks on U.S. soil that we’ve experienced since Obama came to office promising to end terrorism with his sheer exalted wonderfulness.

It wasn’t easy.  List like this one are far and few between.  I had to go back and stumble across a few names based on some attacks I remembered, and start entering search terms.

The media have clearly dropped the ball in keeping track of Obama’s “success” in dealing with this very real threat.

Barack Obama refused to even use the word “terrorism,” instead calling terrorist attacks “man-caused disasters.”  Whereas George Bush took terrorism seriously and went to war to take on those who would kill Americans wherever they were, Barack Obama decided that there was no war, and renamed it an “overseas contingency operation.”

I provided all the html links, and added a couple of comments in brackets.

Man-Caused Disasters Remained A Concern In 2009

Posted by: RFW @ 2:00 pm

Despite the hope and change brought along with a new administration, Americans discovered in 2009 that the threat of terrorism remained. There were several near disasters this last year along with a couple of actual man-caused disasters. While creating the following list I was surprised by the large number of arrests on American soil. I assume my surprise is due to the fact that the media generally forgets about these incidents within a very short period of time and does not make any attempt to report them as another piece of a larger puzzle.

– On May 20, 2009 three U.S. citizens (James Cromitie, David Williams, Onta Williams) and one Haitian (Laguerre Payen) from Newburgh, New York were arrested in a plot to blow up two synagogues in the Riverdale community of the Bronx. The men allegedly placed bombs wired to cell phones in three separate cars outside the Riverdale Temple and nearby Riverdale Jewish Center. It was also alleged that they planed to shoot down military planes operating out of Stewart Air National Guard Base. Both the car bombs and the missiles were actually fakes given to the plotters with the help of an informant for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. [It is also important to note that all three were black converts to Islam radicalized while in the prison system].

– On June 1, 2009 an assailant opened fire on a United States military recruiting office in Little Rock, Arkansas. Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, an American who had converted to Islam, was accused of killing Private William Long. According to law enforcement officials, Muhammad had conducted research on other targets, including military sites, government facilities and Jewish institutions throughout the country. [Note: a successful terror attack].

– On July 27, 2009 seven men were arrested in North Carolina and charged with plotting to wage “violent jihad” outside the United States. Daniel Patrick Boyd, who authorities allege was the ringleader of a group of men that trained in North Carolina, was later also charged with planning to attack the U.S. Marine base at Quantico, Virginia. Boyd and another man, Hysen Sherifi, were charged with conspiring to murder U.S. military personnel.

– On September 14, 2009 Law enforcement agents raided residences in New York City and later that day briefed members of Congress about their terrorism investigation. Authorities found 14 new black backpacks during the raids fueling concern the plan may have been to use them with suicide bombs. Najibullah Zazi and his father Mohammed Zazi were arrested five days later at Najibullah’s home in Denver, Colorado. FBI agents also arrested Ahmad Wais Afzali in New York. Najibullah Zazi, linked by authorities to al Qaeda, was charged with conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction.

– On September 23, 2009 Michael Finton, a 29-year-old convert to Islam who went by the name Talib Islam, was arrested in an alleged plot to blow up a federal building in Illinois. Finton drove a van containing what he thought was explosive material and parked it directly in front of the northwest corner of the Paul Findley Federal Building, a courthouse in Illinois. He attempted to detonate it remotely but the explosive was actually harmless, supplied to Islam by the FBI.

– On September 24, 2009 Hosam Maher Husein Smadi was arrested after he placed and attempted to detonate what he believed to be a car bomb in the garage of the 60-story Fountain Place office tower in Dallas. The fake explosive was given to him by an undercover FBI agent.

– On October 21, 2009 Tarek Mehanna, a Boston area man who lived with his parents and wrote a blog about Islam, was arrested for conspiring to become a jihadist and kill Americans. His alleged plots – all failed – included the assassination of prominent politicians, attacking US troops in Iraq and shooting randomly in a unidentified shopping mall.

– On November 5, 2009 a gunman killed 14 people (including one unborn baby) and wounded 30 others at the Fort Hood military base located near Killeen, Texas. Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the only suspect in the crime, was radicalized by Muslim ideology. A muslim cleric said Hasan asked him in a December 2008 e-mail “whether killing American soldiers and officers is lawful or not” under Islamic law. [There’s your second successful terrorist attack].

– On December 25, 2009 a Nigerian man named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab allegedly tried to detonate the explosive PETN on Northwest Airlines Flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit. An apparent malfunction in the device and the quick reaction of passengers saved the airplane and 278 lives on board. After being taken into custody, Abdulmutallab told authorities he had been directed by al-Qaeda.

If the media were looking for a theme, as they always do this time of year, 2009 could be called the “Year of the Home Grown Terrorist” as six of those arrested (James Cromitie, Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, Daniel Patrick Boyd, Michael Finton, Tarek Mehanna, and Nidal Malik Hasan) were born right here in the United States.

When George Bush took office, there was absolutely no program in place to keep America safe.  There were dozens of al Qaeda terrorist attacks against US targets, and Clinton did nothing nothing.  The USS Cole was attacked by al Qaeda in Yemen in October 2000 during the waning days of the Clinton administration, with 17 American sailors killed, and Clinton swept it under the rug to create the illusion of a “clean slate.”

And George Bush, naively “looking forward, not backward,” attitude, failed to do anything to change our lack of protection under that terrible day seven months into his presidency.

Bush woke up fast.  And with fury and determination unlike anything this country has seen since the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941, the Bush administration devised a successful system to keep this country safe.

Barack Obama, taking incredibly foolish attitude that terrorism was merely a crime that he could stop with what amounted to a personality cult based on his own wonderfulness, systematically dismantled many of the Bush protections even as he apologized for America’s efforts to keep its citizens safe.

One of the most important things Bush did was to dismantle the wall that the Clinton administration erected preventing the CIA and the FBI from communicating with one another.  Liberals want to maintain that the Clinton policy did not change the law, but merely clarified it.  But the fact remains that the Clinton administration strengthened the communications barrier when he should have been encouraging intelligence-sharing between our security agencies.

We had a wall separating intelligence agencies into separate and disconnected fiefdoms prior to 9/11.

From the LA Times, April 14, 2004:

WASHINGTON — The scapegoat emerging from the Sept. 11 commission inquiry isn’t an elected official or agency but an obscure government policy that came to be known as “the wall.”

On Tuesday, as FBI, CIA and Justice Department officials continued to point the finger of blame at one another, they all seemed to agree that the wall was the overarching villain. Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft, for one, described it as “the single greatest structural cause for Sept. 11.”

Bush took great measures to tear down that wall.

To Obama’s great discredit, he picked Clinton Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder to become his Attorney General, after almost selecting Jamie Gorelick – Clinton’s General Counsel – for the post.  And both men were at the very top of the food chain in strengthening the wall between the FBI and the CIA.

In other words, Obama decided to surround himself with the men who – out of liberal notions antagonistic to a strong intelligence community – built/strengthened the wall.

Obama selected Leon Panetta, another Clinton political hack, and a man who had absolutely no intelligence experience to qualify for leadership, to run the CIA.  And then he selected Janet Napolitano, again an unqualified selection with absolutely no intelligence experience whatsoever, to run Homeland Security.

Obama made political loyalty, rather than experience or ability, his criteria for choosing the officials most responsible for keeping this country safe.  And from the very start of his administration, he has politicized intelligence.  They have taken nothing but a demagogic politicized (and incompetent) approach since.  And we are beginning to see the risks with national security these people are willing to take to demagogically blame everyone but themselves for their failures:

The White House, according to the source, is in full defensive spin mode. Other administration sources also say a flurry of memos were generated on December 26th, 27th, and 28th, which developed talking points about how Obama’s decision to effectively shut down the Homeland Security Council (it was merged earlier this year into the National Security Council, run by National Security Adviser James Jones) had nothing to do with what Obama called a “catastrophic” failure on Christmas Day.

“This White House doesn’t view the Northwest [Airlines] failure as one of national security, it’s a political issue,” says the White House source. “That’s why Axelrod and Emanuel are driving the issue.”

After Obama appointed Eric Holder to be Attorney General, the man who pardoned terrorists for Bill Clinton went right to work attacking the CIA who had helped catch those terrorists in the first place.  Democrats and the Obama administration repeatedly demonized the CIA and just as repeatedly threatened to criminalize their efforts to keep us safe.

Thanks to Obama’s demagoguery, the morale of the agency that is essential to our protection is depressed, sullen, and enraged:

[T]he CIA better change their mission to “CYA,” because our government is not going to stand behind you.”

Those concerns were echoed by a retired undercover operative who still works under contract for the agency (and asked to remain anonymous when discussing internal agency politics). Clandestine Service officers are both demoralized and angry at Obama’s decisions to release the memos and ban future agency use of aggressive interrogation tactics, the former operative said. “It embarrasses our families. You just can’t keep hitting us. Sooner or later we’re going to stop going out and working.” The official added that “a lot of offense was taken” among some Clandestine Service veterans when Obama declared that the interrogation practices the agency employed under Bush were wrong, even though the new Administration would not prosecute operatives for carrying them out.

Did you hear that?  “Sooner or later we’re going to stop going out and working.”  That’s Obama’s “change” for you: demonizing and even criminalizing the people who kept us safe.  Forcing them to protect themselves rather than take risks protecting the country.

And you wonder why Obama’s national security is falling apart now.

Obama made waterboarding the hallmark of his campaing to demonize Bush.  Now “58% of U.S. voters say waterboarding and other aggressive interrogation techniques should be used to gain information from the terrorist who attempted to bomb an airliner on Christmas Day,” and just 30% take Obama’s side and oppose the use of such techniques.

Americans were stupid to join with Obama and oppose waterboarding a year ago.  But Obama is far more stupid in his ideological commitment to prevent America from protecting itself.

The use of waterboarding led to the breakthroughs in intelligence that allowed us to dismantle al Qaeda.

Four former CIA directors loudly objected to Obama’s release of CIA memos.  Among other things, the release of those memos – again, for purely partisan political reasons – enabled al Qaeda to know exactly what US interrogators would and would not do and prepare for our new limited and hamstrung techniques.

Now we’re left with, “Tell us what you know, or we’re give you a polite but firmly-worded scolding.”

And we wonder why our national security is breaking down.

We can see Obama’s weakness and incompetence everywhere we turn.  Obama has officially lost TWICE AS MANY American soldiers in Afghanistan as Bush did in 2008.  And this after months of useless dithering that ultimately assured our enemies that we weren’t going to have the fortitude to fight the good fight over the long haul.

Just the other day, eight CIA officers were killed by a suicide bomber inside the safety of a US military base in Afghanistan in yet another example of Obama’s naive “terrorists can be our friends” policy.  They were so busy trying to get the terrorist to change sides and love Big Brother Obama and so afraid of being “politically correct” or “profiling” that they didn’t dare search him.

You might not see this pathetic episode as a microcosm for Obama’s entire failed foreign policy and national security strategy, but you certainly can’t maintain the assertion that what he’s doing is working.

I started out providing a list of terrorists and attempted and successful terrorist attacks.

We could add Iran to that list.  Because we’re certainly going to see Iran and Iranian-trained terrorists rearing their ugly heads due to Obama’s weakness soon.  Every single day, with every new in-your-face step forward in their nuclear weapons program, amounts to a new terrorist attack upon the United States and Israel.  For what it’s worth, I have been predicting that Iran would obtain nuclear weapons under a Democrat presidency since May of 2008.

When Iran gets its nukes and the ballistic missiles to deliver them (and they are very close to both goals), the world will become a different place.  They don’t have to launch atomic Armageddon to use their nuclear weapons; all they have to do is block the Strait of Hormuz and drive up oil prices tenfold, or send out a wave of international terror attacks.  Will we go to war with them, knowing that if we do they will destroy several of our cities and kill millions of our people?

In other words, we haven’t even BEGUN to see the fruit of Obama’s failures in his “man-caused disasters.”

Obama’s Agenda Self-Destructing: Send In CIA Demagogues And Change The Subject

This is about as transparent as it gets. Obama’s health care plan is self-destructing, his own liberal base is falling away, and all of a sudden the Obama White House and a following-like-a-puppy mainline media is redirecting our attention to why we should supposedly be angry at the CIA so we won’t think about why we should be angry at Obama’s attempt to take over our health care.  As reported:

The US attorney general, Eric Holder, is poised to order a special criminal investigation into CIA agents who may have gone too far in the interrogation of al-Qaida and other suspects taken after the 9/11 attacks, it emerged today.

Holder’s intention to push ahead with an investigation came on the day that the CIA was ordered by the court to release hundreds of pages of previously hidden documents detailing how interrogations were conducted.

The attorney general’s imminent decision to order the investigation runs counter to the wishes of the CIA director, Leon Panetta, who was appointed by Barack Obama, and has argued in favour of looking forward rather than back.

Leon Panetta apparently didn’t react well to the Democrats’ ideological and politically timed demonization of his agency:

Obama White House v. CIA; Panetta Threatened to Quit
Tensions Lead to CIA Director’s “Screaming Match” at the White House
By MATTHEW COLE, RICHARD ESPOSITO and BRIAN ROSS
August 24, 2009

A “profanity-laced screaming match” at the White House involving CIA Director Leon Panetta, and the expected release today of another damning internal investigation, has administration officials worrying about the direction of its newly-appoint intelligence team, current and former senior intelligence officials tell ABC News.com.

Amid reports that Panetta had threatened to quit just seven months after taking over at the spy agency, other insiders tell ABCNews.com that senior White House staff members are already discussing a possible shake-up of top national security officials.

“You can expect a larger than normal turnover in the next year,” a senior adviser to Obama on intelligence matters told ABCNews.com.

It is fitting that Obama would decide to unleash this show-trial investigation just days after this tearjerker of a moment when Libyan leader Gaddafi treated a terrorist bomber to a hero’s welcome and embraced him:

Come on, America!  THAT’S how to treat a terrorist!!!

Rather than ask tough questions of terrorists, like Obama now wants to criminalize, it is apparently far better to just let them go, like Scotland did with the Lockerbie Pan Am Flight 103 bomber.  He murdered 270 people, including 189 Americans.  Eleven days per murdered victim seems perfectly appropriate.

Don’t you dare be tough on these poor, poor terrorists.  Come on, demonstrate your liberalism by showing that famous brand of misplaced egalitarian compassion for the terrorist.

It doesn’t matter if waterboarding saved lives.  It doesn’t matter if Khalid Sheik Mohammed – who had previously refused to cooperate – turned into a human Rolodex of terrorists after a few sessions on the waterboard.  It doesn’t matter if the very memo that Eric Holder claims to be basing his “investigation” on said that “the program was considered an ‘absolute success.'”

Right now, Obama intelligence officials are engaging in shouting matches, and the morale at the CIA is at a thirty year low according to at least six agency insiders.  As one retired case officer says, “We’ve gone from chasing the bad guys to being portrayed as the bad guys ourselves.”

The CIA is no longer trusted to interrogate terrorists.  Now, the White House will be taking over:

WASHINGTON — The White House says it will directly supervise a new unit that is being set up to interrogate high value terror detainees. The announcement came Monday as the Obama administration named a federal prosecutor who will investigate past cases of detainee mistreatment.

For years, the Central Intelligence Agency stood at the forefront of U.S. efforts to extract information from terror suspects in the post-9/11 era. That role is changing, according to White House spokesman Bill Burton.

What’s going to happen?

But oh, happy, happy day for jihadist murderers the world over who may chance to hear from Samantha Power’s own lovely lips: “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney present during questioning. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you. Do you understand these rights?”

Obama might as well just abolish the CIA and be done with it.  He’s gutted their effectiveness as an organization by now.

Let’s get to the heart of why this is being done:

[Michael] Steele also suggested that the timing was suspicious. “Now this becomes a part of the national focus and debate while we try to deal with their failure to address sufficiently, and I think smartly, the health care issue that the nation is currently confronted with,” he said, adding that “every time they find themselves up against the wall…they find a boogey man.”

“They want to make George Bush and his administration a continual boogey man and at this point I say. ‘Get over it, move on.’ ”

But what Michael Steele doesn’t realize is that Barack Obama and his fellow Democrats are one-trick ponies.  All they’ve GOT is demagoguery; and if that fails, they’re left with pumping sunshine.  They have to keep demagoguing and demonizing every single scapegoat they can find, because otherwise the American people will see how incompetent Democrats actually are.

Obama is desperate, and he’s flailing around for anything that might change the downward-spiralling dynamic.   He’s hoping that he can convince his base that he isn’t the sellout they increasingly sense he is so that they’ll put their weight behind him, and he’s closing his eyes and rolling the dice.

Let’s just hope that the dice don’t turn up the snake eyes of a major terrorist attack.

Partisan Political Hack Leon Panetta Demonizes Dick Cheney

Leon Panetta is proving what a partisan political hack Americans always should have known he is and always has been.  I first called Panetta a “partisan political hack” back in January when he was first nominated.  And Panetta’s outrageous cheap-shot at Dick Cheney is nothing short than the tactics of a partisan political hack.

The difference between the CIA and the KGB has always been that the one was geared toward intelligence, while the latter was geared toward enforcing political ideology.  At least until Barack Obama came along, that is.  Now we’ve got our first “communist show trials” since the days of McCarthy and the latter days of the USSR in the works.

And now we’ve got Obama’s Homeland Security defining “rightwing extremists” in terms of Obama’s conservative political opponents (not to mention returning combat veterans), and we’ve also got Leon Panetta demonizing political disagreement by personally attacking the motives of conservatives.

Cheney: I Hope Panetta Was ‘Misquoted’ in Claiming My Wish for Attack
After the CIA director apparently told The New Yorker that he thinks the former vice president is crossing his fingers for another attack on America, Dick Cheney says he hopes his “old friend” didn’t really say those words.

FOXNews.com
Monday, June 15, 2009

Dick Cheney says he wants to know if he heard Leon Panetta correctly.

After the CIA director apparently told The New Yorker that he thinks the former vice president is crossing his fingers for another attack on America, Cheney said Monday he hopes his “old friend” didn’t really say those words.

“I hope my old friend Leon was misquoted,” Cheney said, in a written statement to FOX News. “The important thing is whether the Obama administration will continue the policies that have kept us safe for the past eight years.”

Others were not quite willing to give Panetta the benefit of the doubt, as his politically charged quote stirred controversy on Capitol Hill.

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., called on Panetta to “retract immediately” his statement, arguing that the director crossed the line.

“I disagreed with the Cheney policy on interrogation techniques, but never did it cross my mind that Dick Cheney would ever want an attack on the United States of America,” the former GOP presidential candidate told FOX News Monday. “And it’s unfair, and I think that Mr. Panetta should retract, and retract immediately.

“By the way, I hear morale is not at an all-time high over at the CIA under Mr. Panetta’s leadership,” he said.

Panetta, a long-time Washington insider with scant intelligence experience, has been caught in the middle of a political war during his first few months on the job. First, he had to deal with morale issues as President Obama cracked down on the rules for detainee interrogations. Then he stepped up to dispute House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s allegation that the CIA misled Congress about the use of “enhanced” interrogation techniques.

This time, he’s firing back against Cheney’s frequent media appearances in which he’s accused Obama of making America less safe.

According to The New Yorker, Panetta said Cheney “smells some blood in the water” on the security issue.

“It’s almost, a little bit, gallows politics. When you read behind it, it’s almost as if he’s wishing that this country would be attacked again, in order to make his point. I think that’s dangerous politics,” he said, according to the piece.

Asked about the statement, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs ducked.

“I’m not going to get into motivations. That’s not what our business is. The president’s concern is keeping the American people safe,” Gibbs said Monday.

FOX News’ Mike Emanuel contributed to this report.

Maybe Gibbs isn’t “going to get into motivations.”  But his fellow liberal hack – CIA Director Leon Panetta – sure will.

Maybe the CIA has some kind of “motive analyzer” that Panetta zapped Dick Cheney with.  In the liberal tradition, I must ask, “Doesn’t Panetta need some kind of warrant to zap private citizen Cheney with his spook motive-detector gizmo?  Liberals and the ACLU should be crawling out of the woodwork.  Don’t forget, that’s what they did when they found out that the government was listening in to calls made to or from people on the terrorist watch list to or from this country.

This is classic liberal politics of demonization and demagoguery.  This is classic Nancy Pelosi.  This is classic Barack Obama.

A quote from an earlier article about the LAST TIME liberals hatefully and viciously teed-off on Dick Cheney should serve to show just how often Obama has demagogued – and hypocritically demagogued at that – Bush-era policies:

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.

For instance, President Obama has reserved unto himself the right to order the use of enhanced interrogation should he deem it appropriate.  Given that President Bush used the technique against only three individuals shortly after the worst disaster in US history, how is Obama any different?  In fact he’s worse, because Bush and Cheney never demagogued the issue as Obama has repeatedly done.

Obama demonized Bush over the Bush policy on rendition.  But now this demagogue is quietly continuing to carry out the same rendition policy – abducting terrorist suspects and sending them to countries that will use harsh interrogation methods – even as he congratulates himself in front of a fawning media for his being better than Bush.  But Obama isn’t better than Bush and Cheney; he’s worse.  Because he’s a hypocrite and a demagogue.

In the words of the New York Times, military commissions was “a concept he criticized bitterly as a presidential candidate.”  But now the hypocrite and demagogue is going to quietly use them himself.

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.

Dick Cheney is often called “Darth Vader” by the left.  But I think in Cheney’s gracious response to Panetta’s vicious, hateful, and evil comment who the REAL “Darth Vaders” are.  Panetta savagely attacked Cheney’s motives; Cheney responded by politely pointing at policy disagreement.

Now that liberals have opened the door wide to attacking people based on their motives and their politics, let me do a little “motive assessment” of my own: Maybe Leon Panetta is aware that the morale of his agency is at a shocking low after the butchery Democrats have done to its credibility.  And maybe he is aware – due to the “depressed, sullen, and enraged” morale at the CIA in the wake of the Obama administration’s and Democrat’s attacks against them – that the United States is now exposed to another massive terrorist attack.

From a Newsweek article on the poor morale of the CIA:

[T]he CIA better change their mission to “CYA,” because our government is not going to stand behind you.”

Those concerns were echoed by a retired undercover operative who still works under contract for the agency (and asked to remain anonymous when discussing internal agency politics). Clandestine Service officers are both demoralized and angry at Obama’s decisions to release the memos and ban future agency use of aggressive interrogation tactics, the former operative said. “It embarrasses our families. You just can’t keep hitting us. Sooner or later we’re going to stop going out and working.” The official added that “a lot of offense was taken” among some Clandestine Service veterans when Obama declared that the interrogation practices the agency employed under Bush were wrong, even though the new Administration would not prosecute operatives for carrying them out.

Just maybe Panetta and his boss realize that the only way to avoid blame for such an upcoming attack will be to try to preemptively blame and scapegoat  conservatives by saying that THEY are somehow more responsible than the Democrats who totally undermined our war on terror at every single turn because conservatives might have somehow hoped for it.

On Keith Olbermann’s Deceitful and Depraved Attack of Dick Cheney

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:

Transcript of Keith Olbermann’s remarks on MSNBC:

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.

I can cite the political polls of our soldiers to show that they overwhelmingly supported the conservative agenda and opposed the liberal one.  We find that 68% of active duty military personnel supported John McCain, versus only 23% for Barack Obama.  But it’s better to simply let you see another story that features a video as to how our Marines felt about George Bush versus how they felt about Barack Obama.

Another example occurred just this morning on The View, with two veterans who lost legs to roadside bombs answering Barbara Walters’ “was it worth it” question by saying without hesitation that they would both return to the fight if they could.  Barbara Walters was clearly stunned by their answer, and didn’t say another word.  Our veterans are NOT victims of Bush or Cheney or anyone else; and every attempt to portray them as such is a contemptible lie.

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.

Most of these attacks were revealed to have clearly been done under the direction of Osama bin Laden by his al Qaeda terrorist organization.  In spite of this fact, President Clinto repeatedly passed up on opportunities to take bin Laden into custody even when Somalia literally offered his head on a platter.

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.

Olbermann is simply lying here.  CIA director George Tenent – who was appointed to his position by Bill Clinton – said that the enhanced interrogations by themselves were “Worth more than the FBI, CIA and NSA put together.” Career intelligence professional and CIA Director General Michael Hayden said, “fully half of the government’s knowledge about the structure and activities of al Qaeda came from those [harsh] interrogations.” In fact, President Obama’s very own Director of National Intelligence, Admiral Blair, put it this way: “High value information came from interrogations in which those methods were used and provided a deeper understanding of the al-Qaeda organization that was attacking this country.” A Justice Department memo of May 30, 2005 notes that “the CIA believes ‘the intelligence acquired from these interrogations has been a key reason why al Qaeda has failed to launch a spectacular attack in the West since 11 September 2001.’ . . . In particular, the CIA believes that it would have been unable to obtain critical information from numerous detainees, including [Khalid Sheik Mohammed] and Abu Zubaydah, without these enhanced techniques.”

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.

For instance, President Obama has reserved unto himself the right to order the use of enhanced interrogation should he deem it appropriate.  Given that President Bush used the technique against only three individuals shortly after the worst disaster in US history, how is Obama any different?  In fact he’s worse, because Bush and Cheney never demagogued the issue as Obama has repeatedly done.

Obama demonized Bush over the Bush policy on rendition.  But now this demagogue is quietly continuing to carry out the same rendition policy – abducting terrorist suspects and sending them to countries that will use harsh interrogation methods – even as he congratulates himself in front of a fawning media for his being better than Bush.  But Obama isn’t better than Bush and Cheney; he’s worse.  Because he’s a hypocrite and a demagogue.

In the words of the New York Times, military commissions was “a concept he criticized bitterly as a presidential candidate.”  But now the hypocrite and demagogue is going to quietly use them himself.

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.

Why Fellow Liberal Panetta Forced To Call Pelosi A Liar

There has been some degree of speculation as to why Nancy Pelosi has engaged in this bizarre demagoguery which began with her demanding Bush officials be prosecuted for their waterboarding “torture” and has (with two or three versions of her story in-between) since morphed into a claim that the entire CIA is lying about the fact that she was fully briefed on the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation techniques” and accepted it.

It’s really not that much of a surprise that Nancy Pelosi would engage in such demagoguery.  After all, it worked to perfection during the last election, when Democrats were able to successfully lie and demagogue Republicans regarding blaming them for the financial collapse.

The difference was that then, Democrats, along with a dishonest and biased media propaganda machine, were demagoguing Republicans.  But when Barack Obama opened the gates of partisan hell by releasing only those memos that he intended to use to attack Republicans, a few Democrats like Nancy Pelosi got caught in the same net.  And when Nacy Pelosi was ultimately forced to either admit she was lying or apply her demagoguery to the CIA, she was likewise attacking even more liberals.

The thing about the CIA, as anyone smarter than Nancy Pelosi understands, is that there are an awful LOT of liberals at Langley:

One complaint often heard privately within law enforcement circles is that the Central Intelligence Agency over the years has morphed into a Liberal think tank rather than maintaining its role as a strategic and tactical intelligence agency. An even bigger concern is that the agency has become overly politicized and prone to leaking information to the mainstream news media in order to have an impact upon the political climate within the Beltway.

And liberals, as much as they love demagoguing, hate being the victims of demagoguery.  And so they tend to fight back.  And media propagandists are suddenly forced to choose which liberals they want to defend.

Doctrinaire career liberal Leon Panetta, for instance, was forced to choose between Nancy Pelosi and his agency.  And Panetta and many of the liberals in the CIA who have been leaking information to the media to hurt Republicans for years have their own media sources.

This isn’t like your standard political squabble, in which the mainstream media know immediately who to knee-jerk demagogue (Republicans) and who to knee-jerk defend (Democrats).

Pelosi foolishly thought her attack on the CIA could somehow be limited to “the Bush CIA.”  But there is no such thing: the overwhelming majority of CIA employees span administrations.  And Panetta and a few others aside, “the Bush CIA” is largely identical to “the Obama CIA.”

So I have a slightly different take than the typical “Nancy Pelosi shouldn’t have taken on the CIA.”  Rather, Nancy Pelosi shouldn’t have exposed the liberals at the CIA to criticism in the course of her demagoguery.  Because they can demagogue right back.  AND GET ON THE NEWS!

CIA Chief Rebuts Pelosi on Briefings

WASHINGTON — The Central Intelligence Agency’s chief fought back Friday against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s assertion that the CIA “was misleading” Congress, issuing a memo defending the integrity of its employees and contradicting her assertion that she wasn’t told about the agency’s use of waterboarding to interrogate suspected terrorists.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said at a press conference Thursday that Congress was misled by the CIA in regards to questions about waterboarding.

Later in the day, Ms. Pelosi tried to defuse what has turned into an unusual open feud between Congress and the spy agency, with a statement praising the work of intelligence officers and redirecting her rhetorical fire toward the Bush administration.

Apart from the institutional contretemps, the matter has put Ms. Pelosi in conflict with CIA director Leon Panetta, a former colleague when both belonged to California’s Democratic congressional delegation.

“CIA officers briefed truthfully on the interrogation of al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah, describing ‘the enhanced techniques that had been employed,'” Mr. Panetta wrote in a memo to agency employees. He was referring to an alleged senior al Qaeda detainee in CIA custody in September 2002, when Ms. Pelosi attended a briefing in her capacity as the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.  Other intelligence officials also contradicted Ms. Pelosi’s account of the briefing, saying her assertion that she wasn’t told waterboarding was in use at the time is wrong. “That’s 180 degrees different from what the CIA’s records show,” an intelligence official said.

For the record, the article states that Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded “83 times.”  But that’s just another example of the mainstream media’s pro-Democrat and anti-Republican bias:

Pours, not waterboards.

A close look at a Red Cross report on the interrogations makes the numbers even clearer.

As the Red Cross noted: “The suffocation procedure was applied [to Abu Zubaydah] during five sessions of ill-treatment … in 2002. During each session, apart from one, the suffocation technique was applied once or twice; on one occasion it was applied three times.”

The total number of applications: between eight and 10 — not the 83 mentioned in the Times.

The media were selectively dense because they realized that if they took out “pours” and replaced the word with “times,” “183” would sound like a lot more than “8.”  And the higher number DID make Bush sound like a real rat bastard, after all.

If Nancy Pelosi were caught red-handed with $90,000 in FBI sting money hidden in her freezer, she would be completely safe.  After all, liberals would rush to her aid from all sides to defend her from conservative attacks and use the same sort of shenanigans that they came up with to transform “8” waterboardings into “183” waterboardings.

As it is, she committed the unpardonable sin of tarnishing other liberals.

Had that not happened, this whole “waterboarding” fiasco would have played out as the typical communist show trial.  But as soon as a few liberal CIA officials began to get dragged in, the whole thing turned into a bizarre new retelling of Arthur Miller’s “Crucible,” in which sordid liberal characters began to accuse other liberals of “waterboarding witchcraft” as a ploy to save themselves.

Either Nancy Pelosi Should Resign, Or The ‘Lying’ CIA Should Be Disbanded

We have a real crisis of credibility going on.  The bottom line: someone is telling a great big fat giant lie that is so damaging that it threatens the institutions of this nation.  Either it is Nancy Pelosi as leader of Congress, or it is the Central Intelligence Agency as the leading agency of our intelligence establishment. One of them has to go.

Pelosi’s FIFTH different story has taken her demagoguery to a whole new level.  During her weekly press conference today, she had this exchange with a journalist:

QUESTION: Madam Speaker, just to be clear, you’re accusing the CIA of lying to you in September of 2002?PELOSI: Yes, misleading the Congress of the United States, misleading the Congress of the United States. I am.

QUESTION: And also — and doing it again now, as they’ve released this list of briefings that says you were briefed on the interrogation tactics that were used.

In other words, it’s not just the CIA under Bush (along with the many career operatives who serve through both Democrat or Repbulican administrations), it is also Leon Panetta and the CIA under Obama that is continuing to lie if Nancy Pelosi should be believed.

Either Nancy Pelosi needs to resign, or the CIA needs to be disbanded.  Barack Obama could replace the agency with a herd of winged unicorns that fly hither and thither, gathering information and conveying it to him by means of their magical powers. That way, Obama would be able to obtain all the intelligence data the country needs to remain safe without ever doing a single unpleasant thing to any terrorist murderer ever again.

The CIA lies to people for a living, and they are still far more trustworthy than Nancy Pelosi.

After demagoguing the waterboarding issue as a partisan attack on Republicans, Nancy Pelosi finally got hung up on her own petard.  First she said she hadn’t been told about waterboarding; then she said she was told, but only that it “could be employed.”  Then she acknowledged that she had been told it had been employed, but felt that she shouldn’t protest because she didn’t want to step on any toes (and, after all, she was also busy trying to undermine the Bush administration so Democrats could win); then she basically waffled that she hadn’t been told after all; and now she’s saying that everyone and their little dogs too lied to her.

Here’s an article on the story via the AP.

Karl Rove offers a great take on this in the Wall Street Journal:

Congress and Waterboarding: Nancy Pelosi was an accomplice to ‘torture.’

By KARL ROVE    MAY 15, 2009

Someone important appears not to be telling the truth about her knowledge of the CIA’s use of enhanced interrogation techniques (EITs). That someone is Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. The political persecution of Bush administration officials she has been pushing may now ensnare her.

Here’s what we know. On Sept. 4, 2002, less than a year after 9/11, the CIA briefed Rep. Porter Goss, then House Intelligence Committee chairman, and Mrs. Pelosi, then the committee’s ranking Democrat, on EITs including waterboarding. They were the first members of Congress to be informed.

In December 2007, Mrs. Pelosi admitted that she attended the briefing, but she wouldn’t comment for the record about precisely what she was told. At the time the Washington Post spoke with a “congressional source familiar with Pelosi’s position on the matter” and summarized that person’s comments this way: “The source said Pelosi recalls that techniques described by the CIA were still in the planning stage — they had been designed and cleared with agency lawyers but not yet put in practice — and acknowledged that Pelosi did not raise objections at the time.”

When questions were raised last month about these statements, Mrs. Pelosi insisted at a news conference that “We were not — I repeat — were not told that waterboarding or any of these other enhanced interrogation methods were used.” Mrs. Pelosi also claimed that the CIA “did not tell us they were using that, flat out. And any, any contention to the contrary is simply not true.” She had earlier said on TV, “I can say flat-out, they never told us that these enhanced interrogations were being used.”

The Obama administration’s CIA director, Leon Panetta, and Mr. Goss have both disputed Mrs. Pelosi’s account.

In a report to Congress on May 5, Mr. Panetta described the CIA’s 2002 meeting with Mrs. Pelosi as “Briefing on EITs including use of EITs on Abu Zubaydah, background on [legal] authorities, and a description of the particular EITs that had been employed.” Note the past tense — “had been employed.”

Mr. Goss says he and Mrs. Pelosi were told at the 2002 briefing about the use of the EITs and “on a bipartisan basis, we asked if the CIA needed more support from Congress to carry out its mission.” He is backed by CIA sources who say Mr. Goss and Mrs. Pelosi “questioned whether we were doing enough” to extract information.

We also know that Michael Sheehy, then Mrs. Pelosi’s top aide on the Intelligence Committee and later her national security adviser, not only attended the September 2002 meeting but was also briefed by the CIA on EITs on Feb. 5, 2003, and told about a videotape of Zubaydah being waterboarded. Mr. Sheehy was almost certain to have told Mrs. Pelosi. He has not commented publicly about the 2002 or the 2003 meetings.

So is the speaker of the House lying about what she knew and when? And, if so, what will Democrats do about it?

If Mrs. Pelosi considers the enhanced interrogation techniques to be torture, didn’t she have a responsibility to complain at the time, introduce legislation to end the practices, or attempt to deny funding for the CIA’s use of them? If she knew what was going on and did nothing, does that make her an accessory to a crime of torture, as many Democrats are calling enhanced interrogation?

Senate Judiciary Chairman Pat Leahy wants an independent investigation of Bush administration officials. House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers feels the Justice Department should investigate and prosecute anyone who violated laws against committing torture. Are these and other similarly minded Democrats willing to have Mrs. Pelosi thrown into their stew of torture conspirators as an accomplice?

It is clear that after the 9/11 attacks Mrs. Pelosi was briefed on enhanced interrogation techniques and the valuable information they produced. She not only agreed with what was being done, she apparently pressed the CIA to do more.

But when political winds shifted, Mrs. Pelosi seems to have decided to use enhanced interrogation as an issue to attack Republicans. It is disgraceful that Democrats who discovered their outrage years after the fact are now braying for disbarment of the government lawyers who justified EITs and the prosecution of Bush administration officials who authorized them. Mrs. Pelosi is hip-deep in dangerous waters, and they are rapidly rising.

Nancy Pelosi is a documented liar and demagogue.  She has no business serving as the Speaker of the House.  She needs to go.

I truly hate to say this, but I am quickly reaching the point where I no longer particularly care whether this country gets nailed by a massive terrorist attack or not.  With leaders like Nancy Pelosi in power, who has repeatedly demonized the very people who tried to keep the country safe, we frankly deserve to get hit.  We are literally playing Russian roulette with our future.  And Democrats are now turning the demagoguery and slander that they had previously been reserving for Bush officials onto the Central Intelligence Agency.

Given this level of shocking moral stupidity, I must confess to a growing sense of apathy.  Between repeated instances of frankly treasonous actions by the Democrats; unsustainable mind-boggling spending on pork projects and socialism as Obama nearly doubles the 11 trillion national debt with well over $9 trillion of his own deficits; genuinely fascist takeovers of one sector of the economy after another; and coming heavy taxation that will punish productivity while rewarding sloth, I am seeing increasingly little chance that this country will survive.  And it seems to me that we will have destroyed our own way of life long before terrorism ever could.

What I DO know is that if we DO get hit again, it will be ENTIRELY due to the contemptible efforts of the Obama administration to undermine virtually every single measure that successfully protected us, and Democrats like Nancy Pelosi, Jack Murtha, and many others who have been far more interested in demagoguery than defense, partisanship than patriotism, and slander than security.