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 Foreign Policy: Miranda Rights For Terrorists

It’s no longer a “war on terror,” and we are no longer dealing with “terrorism” or “terrorists.” Oh, no. Obama will give a 6,000 word speech in Egypt on American-Islamic issues and NEVER use any of those hateful terms.

Nope.  We’re now a nation that is managing an “overseas contingency operation,” rather than fighting a war on terror.  We’re trying to reduce “man-caused disasters” rather than terrorism (at least while my lawsuit against DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano for sexually discriminating by calling it “man-caused” rather than “human-caused” is still pending).  And, whatever you want to call the people who are launching murderous attacks against innocent and unarmed civilians, don’t you DARE call them “terrorists.”

Well, whatever we choose to call them (I like “meanies,” because it avoids all those hateful politically incorrect words, but still says they’re mean), Obama has stopped waterboarding them and started mirandizing them.

I feel so cozy and safe under Barack Obama.  If we ever suffer a massive overseas contingency man-caused disaster, we can know that he will give a really cautiously-worded speech in retaliation.  And who would want something like THAT directed against them?

Miranda Rights for Terrorists

When 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammad was captured on March 1, 2003, he was not cooperative. “I’ll talk to you guys after I get to New York and see my lawyer,” he said, according to former CIA Director George Tenet.

Of course, KSM did not get a lawyer until months later, after his interrogation was completed, and Tenet says that the information the CIA obtained from him disrupted plots and saved lives. “I believe none of these successes would have happened if we had had to treat KSM like a white-collar criminal – read him his Miranda rights and get him a lawyer who surely would have insisted that his client simply shut up,” Tenet wrote in his memoirs.

If Tenet is right, it’s a good thing KSM was captured before Barack Obama became president. For, the Obama Justice Department has quietly ordered FBI agents to read Miranda rights to high value detainees captured and held at U.S. detention facilities in Afghanistan, according a senior Republican on the House Intelligence Committee. “The administration has decided to change the focus to law enforcement. Here’s the problem. You have foreign fighters who are targeting US troops today – foreign fighters who go to another country to kill Americans. We capture them…and they’re reading them their rights – Mirandizing these foreign fighters,” says Representative Mike Rogers, who recently met with military, intelligence and law enforcement officials on a fact-finding trip to Afghanistan.

Rogers, a former FBI special agent and U.S. Army officer, says the Obama administration has not briefed Congress on the new policy. “I was a little surprised to find it taking place when I showed up because we hadn’t been briefed on it, I didn’t know about it. We’re still trying to get to the bottom of it, but it is clearly a part of this new global justice initiative.”

That effort, which elevates the FBI and other law enforcement agencies and diminishes the role of intelligence and military officials, was described in a May 28 Los Angeles Times article.

The FBI and Justice Department plan to significantly expand their role in global counter-terrorism operations, part of a U.S. policy shift that will replace a CIA-dominated system of clandestine detentions and interrogations with one built around transparent investigations and prosecutions.

Under the “global justice” initiative, which has been in the works for several months, FBI agents will have a central role in overseas counter-terrorism cases. They will expand their questioning of suspects and evidence-gathering to try to ensure that criminal prosecutions are an option, officials familiar with the effort said.

Thanks in part to the popularity of law and order television shows and movies, many Americans are familiar with the Miranda warning – so named because of the landmark 1966 Supreme Court case Miranda vs. Arizona that required police officers and other law enforcement officials to advise suspected criminals of their rights.

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 speak to an attorney, and to have an attorney present during any questioning. If you cannot afford a lawyer, one will be provided for you at government expense.

A lawyer who has worked on detainee issues for the U.S. government offers this rationale for the Obama administration’s approach. “If the US is mirandizing certain suspects in Afghanistan, they’re likely doing it to ensure that the treatment of the suspect and the collection of information is done in a manner that will ensure the suspect can be prosecuted in a US court at some point in the future.”

But Republicans on Capitol Hill are not happy. “When they mirandize a suspect, the first thing they do is warn them that they have the ‘right to remain silent,’” says Representative Pete Hoekstra, the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee. “It would seem the last thing we want is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed or any other al-Qaeda terrorist to remain silent. Our focus should be on preventing the next attack, not giving radical jihadists a new tactic to resist interrogation–lawyering up.”

According to Mike Rogers, that is precisely what some human rights organizations are advising detainees to do. “The International Red Cross, when they go into these detention facilities, has now started telling people – ‘Take the option. You want a lawyer.’”

Rogers adds: “The problem is you take that guy at three in the morning off of a compound right outside of Kabul where he’s building bomb materials to kill US soldiers, and read him his rights by four, and the Red Cross is saying take the lawyer – you have now created quite a confusion amongst the FBI, the CIA and the United States military. And confusion is the last thing you want in a combat zone.”

One thing is clear, though. A detainee who is not talking cannot provide information about future attacks. Had Khalid Sheikh Mohammad had a lawyer, Tenet wrote, “I am confident that we would have obtained none of the information he had in his head about imminent threats against the American people.”

Posted by Stephen F. Hayes on June 10, 2009 02:05 PM | Permalink

I liked hearing “You have the right to remain silent” from Sgt. Joe Friday on Dragnet; I HATE hearing it from Obama to a terrorist who knows the murderous plans of his terrorist buddies (Sorry: I meant to say “meanie”).

Stephen Hayes cites George Tenet because he was a CIA Director who had been appointed by Democrat Bill Clinton.  A corroborating source is fellow career intelligence professional and former CIA Director General Michael Hayden, who said, “fully half of the government’s knowledge about the structure and activities of al Qaeda came from those interrogations [of terrorists Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah, and Ramzi bin al Shibh].”

What do you truly think we would have learned from these hard-core terrorist murderers if we’d given them lawyers instead of an invitation to experience some pain?  I mean, seriously, if you think that being nice to these guys in the presence of their lawyers would have yielded intelligence information, then I can paint string yellow and sell it to you as 24k gold chains.

This is amazing folly on an unimaginable scale.

“The problem is you take that guy at three in the morning off of a compound right outside of Kabul where he’s building bomb materials to kill US soldiers, and read him his rights by four, and the Red Cross is saying take the lawyer – you have now created quite a confusion amongst the FBI, the CIA and the United States military. And confusion is the last thing you want in a combat zone.”

Can you even imagine this?

Only a couple of weeks after the FBI managed to infiltrate and interdict a domestic terrorist attack by African-American Muslims radicalized in the prison system, and only days after an African-American convert to Islam who changed his name to Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad murdered an unarmed American soldier to punish the military for their “insults” to Islam.  we are putting a Gitmo terrorist (named Ahmed Ghailani) on trial in the US court system.

What in the hell is going on?  Two wildly divergent theories:

President Barack Obama has said keeping Ghailani from coming to the United States “would prevent his trial and conviction.” Taking a drastically different stance, House Republican leader John Boehner of Ohio labeled Tuesday’s move “the first step in the Democrats’ plan to import terrorists into America.”

But no.  We’re going to let them in under Obama.  We’re going to let them make a mockery of our court system.  We’re going to let them in to radicalize more and more of our inmates into the ways of terrorist jihad.

Obama’s new foreign policy is a disgrace.  Giving foreign terrorists captured on the battlefield miranda protections and providing them with lawyers is an insult to our warriors who hunt these killers down.

Waterboarded 183 Times? Mainstream Media’s ‘Big Lies’

The American Media have read their copies of Mein Kampf, underlined key passages, and put them to use in their propaganda.

Recently the media, the pundits, the late show comics, and prominent Democrats – including the Teleprompter of the United States – have repeatedly advanced the completely false charge that “90 percent of the guns that are picked up in Mexico and used to shoot judges, police officers and mayors … come from the United States.”  It’s a complete lie.  A lie that Democrats have tried to use for political effect.

In reality, the overwhelming majority of guns confiscated from drug cartels come from foreign countries, or from Mexico itself.  Of the small percentage that had serial numbers submitted to the United States, 90% OF THOSE GUNS came from the U.S.  And those guns were legal handguns, rifles, and shotguns – NOT assault rifles [WHY would drug cartels want semi-automatic “assault weapons” from the U.S. when they could buy the full-auto real deal somewhere else?]

Now we learn about another massive lie that liberals have used to great political effect:

Despite Reports, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Was Not Waterboarded 183 Times
The number of times Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded was the focus of major media attention — and highly misleading.

By Joseph Abrams
FOX NEWS
Tuesday, April 28, 2009

The New York Times reported last week that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11 terror attacks, was waterboarded 183 times in one month by CIA interrogators. The “183 times” was widely circulated by news outlets throughout the world.

It was shocking. And it was highly misleading. The number is a vast inflation, according to information from a U.S. official and the testimony of the terrorists themselves.

A U.S. official with knowledge of the interrogation program told FOX News that the much-cited figure represents the number of times water was poured onto Mohammed’s face — not the number of times the CIA applied the simulated-drowning technique on the terror suspect. According to a 2007 Red Cross report, he was subjected a total of “five sessions of ill-treatment.”

“The water was poured 183 times — there were 183 pours,” the official explained, adding that “each pour was a matter of seconds.” […]

The confusion stems from language in the Justice Department legal memos that President Obama released on April 16. They contain the numbers, but they fail to explain exactly what they represent. […]

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.

Mohammed similarly told the Red Cross that “I was also subjected to ‘water-boarding’ on five occasions, all of which occurred during the first month.” Those were his five “sessions”; the precise number of applications is not known but is a fraction of the 183 figure.

All of those individual pours were scrupulously counted by the CIA, according to the memos, to abide by the procedures set up for the waterboardings.

“[I]t is important that every application of the waterboard be thoroughly documented: how long each application (and the entire procedure) lasted, how much water was used in the process,” read a memo from May 10, 2005. […]

The media picked up this distortion and – for their own ideological purposes – ran with it rather than fact check it.  Ordinary bloggers realized that the numbers simply didn’t add up:

Bloggers who read the memos last week noted that the CIA’s math “doesn’t add up” … and they could barely even guess how the detainees could have been waterboarded an astounding 286 times in one month.

Are we seriously supposed to believe that these cynical, hardened professional journalists had absolutely no idea that something was desperately wrong with what they were reporting?

The media – and the Obama administration – deliberately perpetuated falsehoods because they wanted to convey two false “truths”: 1) the waterboarding of two terror suspects (266 times!!!) “clearly” constituted torture.  And 2) the waterboarding technique “obviously” had no effect since it had to be used so many times.

There’s something very troubling.  President Obama deliberately released confusing memos, made absolutely no effort to clarify to the American people what those memos actually meant, and then refused to provide any more information that would have put those carefully selected memos into context.  It was all a giant lie.

We come back to the FACT of the subheading of an article:  “The former head of the CIA told FOX News last year that five years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, 60 percent of the knowledge of the U.S. intelligence community about Al Qaeda came from enhanced interrogation techniques.”

In other words, the CIA under Bush learned 60% of everything they gathered on al Qaeda by basically waterboarding.  And Barack Obama has just left the US intelligence community more than half blind as a result of his naive, politically correct moralizing hypocrisy.

But the propagandists of both the Obama administration and the media didn’t want us to know this; what they wanted us to “know” was the LIE that terror suspects were waterboarded 266 times.

They want the story to be about “Who practiced torture, and who is pledging to restore American virtue?” rather than, “Who kept us safe, and who is going to place this country at terrible risk?”

Adolf Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf (James Murphy translation, page 134):

“All this was inspired by the principle – which is quite true in itself – that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.  These people know only too well how to use falsehood for the basest purposes.”

Hitler’s minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, summarized Hitler’s “big lie” theory, saying that if a lie is repeated enough times it would become widely accepted as truth.

This is exactly what the Obama administration and the ideological leftwing mainstream media (both in the “news” and in the opinion-shaping late night programs) have repeatedly been doing.

Mark Twain famously said,

“A lie can be half-way round the world before the truth has got its boots on.”

And this story that these two suspects were repeatedly, tortuously waterboarded 266 times is now all over the world, thanks to our Liar-in-Chief and his Joseph Goebbels minions.

And Hitler said,

For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.

Our professional liars – who call themselves “journalists” – understand that, and know that their lies will continue to wield impact even long after they are demonstrated to have been false all along.

Barack Obama, his Democrat lackeys, and the mainstream media, are FAR more evil in deliberately misrepresenting the truth for political partisan purposes than the Bush officials and the CIA interrogators who tried to keep this country safe after it suffered its worst attack in history.

And thus we descend into the Fascist States of America.ir