Jan 13 2009
As Israel Fights Terrorists, Obama Plans To Free Terrorists
Obama has so far been a major disappointment to the radical left. He has selected a lot of centrist democrats, has left the major players in place at the Pentagon and is dumping his radical liberal policies in the face of a serious economic crisis (even to the point of proposing massive tax cuts). Very few radical liberals are in positions of power. And those that have fancy new titles (like the Global Warming Czar – or Queen of hot air) will probably turn out to be figure heads spouting rhetoric with no progress to be seen.
So what does Obama do to throw the far left a bone? He takes the dumb and risky step of closing GITMO:
President-elect Barack Obama plans to issue an executive order on his first full day in office directing the closing of the Guantánamo Bay detention camp in Cuba, people briefed by Obama transition officials said Monday.
So his first official, high profile act of office will be to free the killers there? We know there will be an uptick in terrorist attacks, they have to send Obama a message (they would do it to whomever was coming in as President). I can tell by the unprecedented security and closing of bridges across the Potomac this inauguration is looking like a celebration under siege. DC is turning into the Green Zone in Baghdad – not a good sign. And certainly not a sign of power and strength.
So what does closing GITMO mean? Where will these killers go?
One transition official said the new administration expected that it would take several months to transfer some of the remaining 248 prisoners to other countries, decide how to try suspects and deal with the many other legal challenges posed by closing the camp.
…
“I thought he was trying to manage expectations of how quickly those detainees who remain can be sorted into two categories: those who will be released and those who will be prosecuted,†Ms. Mendelson said.
Here’s the legal rub. Most of these people were arrested on the field of battle. Others were literally kidnapped at gun point where evidence was collected. And of course some where water-boarded (which is done to our fighting forces as part of their training against rough interrogation techniques). There was no torture in the literal sense, but the media blitz has provided a lot of defense ammunition that will drag trials on forever.
As I noted in my Democrat Contract With al Qaeda back in February 2006, the left is still making good on its promises to help our enemies:Â
SECOND, We will enact legislation to release all Al Qaeda members now held in custody in the GITMO Gulag, while providing legal counsel to all who have been unfairly detained during this unfortunate international misunderstanding between Al Qaeda and America. We will ensure all detainees have options for bail and parole so they can continue with their life’s efforts while the legal issues surrounding their detention are worked out. Every ex-detainee will be provided the services of an ACLU lawyer.
And who can forget how the other Senator from Illinois – Dick Durbin – compared our US forces detaining these killers to Nazis and other mass murders? Of the original nine promises to al Qaeda I predicted the Dems would enact only a few are still left undone, and efforts have been made across all of them. It is a sad state to watch supposed leaders kow tow to those who killed so many of us on 9-11. But that is the way of the liberal – appeasement at any cost.
This is really a dumb move by a neophyte politician trying to gain acceptance in all corners – no matter how incoherent the actions are. Why does the plight of 248 Jihadist killers warrant the attention of the President, superseding the 100’s of thousands now in harms way on the battle field? Why do these thugs deserve to be the focus of the first act of our new President while many Americans are struggling to survive economically? Why is this more important than any other issue?
Obama is going to be the classic liberal disaster. If his first message is to the detainees in GITMO he has already started off way down the wrong path.
Guy’s lecture on moral relativism reminded me of a discussion I had with an old soldier who had spent 3+ years in a Japanese POW camp. He was one of the men who survived the death march in the Philippines. Let me tell you this Guy, Gitmo is no Japanese POW camp. One of the reasons that the Japanese were tried for war crimes, was that the brutal treatment our men received at their hands was not some isolated case of waterboarding of three soldiers..it was years of beatings, torture, starvation, isolation, forced labor, which usually ended in violent death. There is no comparison between the Imperial Japanese and Gitmo. If you think there is you need to brush up on some history.
History like the rape of Nanking, or the use of biological weapons on Chinese peasants… Or the slaughter of Australian nurses and the imprisonment and torture of British civilians many of which were women and children.
In the years immediately following 9/11, Congress sanctioned the use of aggressive techniques. They did not change their minds on that until it was politically advantageous to do so.
Terrye:
Now, why do I find that hard to believe? Can you please name source for these “dozen opportunities”?
And wow – if Clinton had a dozen chances to kill Bin Laden (but chose not to), then he was WAY better at this than Bush, who apparently has not had even a single opportunity.
I mean, they both had 8 years: Clinton finds him a dozen times, and Bush can’t find him even once? Sounds to me like Bush is doing it wrong.
Tell ya what, Terrye – you go back and find the spot where I said that Gitmo and Japanese WWII camps were the same, and I’ll concede your point.
This should not be difficult to understand: Torture. Is. Wrong. And here’s the key point – it does not matter who is being tortured. It’s wrong if it’s done to an American GI, it’s wrong if it’s done to someone abducted by the KGB, and yes – it’s even wrong when it’s done to a terrorist.
We’re supposed to be above that kind of thing. We’re supposed to be the good guys. Somewhere, you all forgot that.
Now, please — all of you feel free to lie about what I just wrote, and insinuate that “not believing in torturing terrorists” is exactly the same as “loving the terrorists”. Go on, I know you’re all dying to do it – it’s all you’ve got anyway.
Guy:
Did I say torture was right? You made an issue of talking about how Japanese were tried for war crimes for doing what we bad Americans were doing, if that is not moral relativism..what is
The point is that if all the Japanese had done was waterboard 3 soldiers I doubt very much if there would have been war crime tribunals. My other point was that the techniques used on these particular men, years ago…saved lives. So what would you prefer? It is easy to sanctimoniously and piously announce that you would never ever do something…but what if the lives of thousands were in the balance? That was the situation they were looking when they used that technique on 3 people, it was not routine, nor was it done lightly nor has it been done in years. And I doubt if it will ever be done again.
Actually Guy, it was not a dozen, it has a half a dozen opportunities and google it yourself. It is common knowledge. My typing may suck but it is no secret that Clinton had several opportunities to take out Osama and did not. I would imagine that if he had known what was going to happen, he would have. I think that he thought the attacks would mostly be on foreign soil and not huge…and there for not worth the trouble.
Here is a link
Here is another link to you tube, where Bill talks about not taking Bin Laden when he had the chance.
Oh, I almost missed my favorite part of AJ’s post:
“This is really a dumb move by a neophyte politician trying to gain acceptance in all corners – no matter how incoherent the actions are.”
Yes, indeed – only a neophyte politician would ever propose closing GITMO.
The fact that John McCain, Robert Gates, Henry Kissinger, James Baker, Warren Christopher, Madeleine Albright and Colin Powell have all said it should be closed just proves that, I guess.
AJ,
You seem to be under the mistaken impression that Obama will be the first president to release prisoners from Gitmo. Do you not realize that Bush has released without charge approximately 65% of the prisoners detained at Gitmo after 9/11 ?
Do you not realize that Bush has cleared the release of 20% of the remaining 250 prisoners, with the only hold up being that we cannot find countries to take them? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guantanamo_Bay_detention_camp
So what do you think happened? Did Bush willingly release over 500 terrorist and clear the release of 50 more thereby jeopardizing our countries safety? Or did he realize that maybe they weren’t terrorist or significant enough players to warrant their indefinite detention? I’m guessing the later.
Bush has already proven that the sky will not fall if prisoners are released from Gitmo since he released or cleared the release of the vast majority of them. So all of you Chicken Littles can take a deep breath.
Terrye,
I think I finally understand your logic about Clinton’s responsibility for 9/11.
Clinton had opportunities to take out Bin Laden and therefore 9/11 was his fault.
Which means – Bush had 8 years to take out Bin Laden, and therefore any future Al Qaeda attacks on the US are his fault.
Boy, Bush sure better hope that there are no Al Qaeda sponsored terrorist attacks occur during Obama’s administration or it will be really difficult to defend his legacy.
Terrye,
I actually looked at the links you provided about Clinton’s opportunities to get Bin Laden and it is clear to me you don’t know what you are talking about. The supposed Youtube link is a link to AJ’s Jan. 2007 post about Obama. Nothing to do with Clinton.
The other link is an article about Clinton, but it is clear you didn’t actually read it. The central premise of the article is about how CIA Director George Tenet was the real problem, not Clinton. Here is the key part of the article:
“But what troubles me most is Tenet’s handling of the opportunities that CIA officers gave the Clinton administration to capture or kill bin Laden between May 1998 and May 1999. Each time we had intelligence about bin Laden’s whereabouts, Tenet was briefed by senior CIA officers at Langley and by operatives in the field. He would nod and assure his anxious subordinates that he would stress to Clinton and his national security team that the chances of capturing bin Laden were solid and that the intelligence was not going to get better. Later, he would insist that he had kept up his end of the bargain, but that the NSC had decided not to strike.
Since 2001, however, several key Clinton counterterrorism insiders (including NSC staffers Richard A. Clarke, Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon) have reported that Tenet consistently denigrated the targeting data on bin Laden, causing the president and his team to lose confidence in the hard-won intelligence. “We could never get over the critical hurdle of being able to corroborate Bin Ladin’s whereabouts,” Tenet now writes. That of course is untrue, but it spared him from ever having to explain the awkward fallout if an attempt to get bin Laden failed. None of this excuses Clinton’s disinterest in protecting Americans, but it does show Tenet’s easy willingness to play for patsies the CIA officers who risked their lives to garner intelligence and then to undercut their work to avoid censure if an attack went wrong.”
Given that Bush has blamed the entire “disappointment” of not finding WMDs in Iraq on the CIA and other intelligence agencies, don’t you think that Clinton is entitled to the same excuse?
Con,
Clinton’s 8 years weren’t the same as Bush’s 8 years. We were at war during Bush’s, so Bin Laden has been more careful to stay hidden.
Yes, the burden is on Obama to keep us safe. You can’t blame Bush for intelligence firewalls, missed opportunities and dismantled intelligence gathering. Obama faces a stern test. Bush passed the test.
“Bush passed the test.”
Far, far more people died on U.S. soil from terrorist attacks while Bush was in office, than all other Presidents combined.
Plus, he’s leaving office with two still-ongoing wars, and with the domestic economy in freefall.
You have a strange definition of the word “passed”.
Con,
For the recidivist rate, at Gitmo, see:
http://gatewaypundit.blogspot.com/2009/01/pentagon-61-released-gitmo-detainees.html
Wikipedia is OK for some things, but a poor source when debating here. LOL
Macker:
If your point is that a long stay in GITMO, with the sleep deprivation, forced standing, and freezing cold 8-foot-square cells, could actually turn someone into a terrorist – you’ll get no argument from me.
Guy, Guy, Guy,
911 was partly attributable to:
• The Church Commission which dismantled our intelligence capabilities.
• Janet Reno and Jamie Gorelick forbidding the sharing of intelligence between agencies.
• Clinton’s treating prior terrorism as a “law enforcement” problem
• Clinton’s negligence in pursuing Bin Laden.
•Gore and the Dems contesting the election and preventing Bush from getting his people in place. Even Nixon didn’t do that!
“ongoing wars” – nearing victory and 50 million people liberated.
“economy in freefall” – Bush inherited a recession and even this one was Dem caused. Check out Dodd, Frank, Raines and Schumer.
Bush passed the test of history!!
Excerpt from Bush interview:
… I’m in the Oval Office and I am told that we have captured Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the professionals believe he has information necessary to secure the country. So I ask what tools are available for us to find information from him and they gave me a list of tools, and I said are these tools deemed to be legal? And so we got legal opinions before any decision was made. And I think when people study the history of this particular episode, they’ll find out we gained good information from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in order to protect our country.
Excerpt on Congressional Approval:
In September 2002, four members of Congress met in secret for a first look at a unique CIA program designed to wring vital information from reticent terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. For more than an hour, the bipartisan group, which included current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA’s overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.
[…]
With one known exception, no formal objections were raised by the lawmakers briefed about the harsh methods during the two years in which waterboarding was employed, from 2002 to 2003, said Democrats and Republicans with direct knowledge of the matter. The lawmakers who held oversight roles during the period included Pelosi and Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) and Sens. Bob Graham (D-Fla.) and John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), as well as Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.) and Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan).
Individual lawmakers’ recollections of the early briefings varied dramatically, but officials present during the meetings described the reaction as mostly quiet acquiescence, if not outright support. “Among those being briefed, there was a pretty full understanding of what the CIA was doing,” said Goss, who chaired the House intelligence committee from 1997 to 2004 and then served as CIA director from 2004 to 2006. “And the reaction in the room was not just approval, but encouragement.(emphasis added)”
http://wizbangblog.com/content/2009/01/13/bush-admits-authorizing-torture-or-did-he-1.php
The Church Commission??? Are you high? The fact that the FBI can no longer eavesdrop on civil rights leaders (like they were doing to Martin Luther King, Jr.) was somehow “partially responsible” for 9/11? You’re saying that if the President was still able to illegally spy on his political enemies, we could have prevented that attack?
To point out the Church Commission as a FAILURE in this country’s history proves that you truly don’t know who the enemy is.
Also, please name one political appointee (“his people in place”) that was prevented, or even delayed past Jan 2000, by “Gore and the Dems”.
Your other bullet points are at least debatable. But you are truly delusional if you believe those two.
Frogg:
You will get no argument from me on those points. I fully believe that we will never get true investigations into the “torture regime”, precisely because the top leadership of both parties were fully aware of what was going on. Pelosi, Rockefeller, possibly Reid – they all knew what was going on, and raised no significant objections.
That doesn’t make it right, however – it just means that, as usual, politicians will do whatever they can to cover their own asses, and sweep it all under the rug. There will never be a true reckoning, because it would take down too many people in power.
McCain did a 180 and voted against the bill to ban waterboarding.
http://thinkprogress.org/2008/02/13/mccain-waterboarding-fail/
I think McCain’s actual stand was to have very principled guidelines on the treatment of prisoners……..but, to give authority to the President to use harder interrogation tactics with prisoners known to have information that could save lives.
I’m pretty sure I once heard Obama agree with that.