Tag: Torture

Amusing

CIA: Pelosi Was Briefed on Use of ‘Enhanced Interrogations’


I’m going to say this as nice as I can. Impeach the corrupt lying Bitch!

Intelligence officials released documents this evening saying that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was briefed in September 2002 about the use of harsh interrogation tactics against al-Qaeda prisoners, seemingly contradicting her repeated statements over the past 18 months that she was never told that these techniques were actually being used.

In a 10-page memo outlining an almost seven-year history of classified briefings, intelligence officials said that Pelosi and then-Rep. Porter Goss (R-Fla.) were the first two members of Congress ever briefed on the interrogation tactics. Then the ranking member and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, respectively, Pelosi and Goss were briefed Sept. 4, 2002, one week before the first anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

The memo, issued by the Director of National Intelligence and the Central Intelligence Agency to Capitol Hill, notes the Pelosi-Goss briefing covered “EITs including the use of EITs on Abu Zubaydah.” EIT is an acronym for enhanced interrogation technique. Zubaydah was one of the earliest valuable al-Qaeda members captured and the first to have the controversial tactic known as water boarding used against him.

The issue of what Pelosi knew and when she knew it has become a matter of heated debate on Capitol Hill. Republicans have accused her of knowing for many years precisely the techniques CIA agents were using in interrogations, and only protesting the tactics when they became public and liberal antiwar activists protested.

In a carefully worded statement, Pelosi’s office said today that she had never been briefed about the use of waterboarding, only that it had been approved by Bush administration lawyers as a legal technique to use in interrogations.

“As this document shows, the Speaker was briefed only once, in September 2002. The briefers described these techniques, said they were legal, but said that waterboarding had not yet been used,” said Brendan Daly, Pelosi’s spokesman.

Pelosi’s statement did not address whether she was informed that other harsh techniques were already in use during the Zubaydah interrogations.

In December 2007 the Washington Post reported that leaders of the House and Senate intelligence committees had been briefed in the fall of 2002 about waterboarding — which simulates drowning — and other techniques, and that no congressional leaders protested its use. At the time Pelosi said she was not told that waterboarding was being used, a position she stood by repeatedly last month when the Bush-era Justice Department legal documents justifying the interrogation tactics were released by Attorney General Eric Holder.

The new memo shows that intelligence officials were willing to share the information about waterboarding with only a sharply closed group of people. Three years after the initial Pelosi-Goss briefing, Bush officials still limited interrogation technique briefings to just the chairman and ranking member of the House and Senate intelligence committees, the so-called Gang of Four in the intelligence world.

In October 2005, CIA officials began briefing other congressional leaders with oversight of the intelligence community, including top appropriators who provided the agency its annual funding. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a prisoner-of-war in Vietnam and an opponent of torture techniques, was also read into the program at that time even though he did not hold a special committee position overseeing the intelligence community.

A bipartisan collection of lawmakers have criticized the practice of limiting information to just the “Gang of Four”, who were expressly forbidden from talking about the information from other colleagues, including fellow members of the intelligence committees. Pelosi and others are considering reforms that would assure a more open process for all committee members.

Source…

Amusing

Michael Scheuer – Osama, Obama and Torture

This piece by Michael Scheuer is very powerful because it reflects the truth, especially the last paragraph.

Say It’s Osama. What If He Won’t Talk?

In surprisingly good English, the captive quietly answers: ‘Yes, all thanks to God, I do know when the mujaheddin will, with God’s permission, detonate a nuclear weapon in the United States, and I also know how many and in which cities.” Startled, the CIA interrogators quickly demand more detail. Smiling his trademark shy smile, the captive says nothing. Reporting the interrogation’s results to the White House, the CIA director can only shrug when the president asks: “What can we do to make Osama bin Laden talk?”

Americans should keep this worst-case scenario in mind as they watch the tragicomic spectacle taking place in the wake of the publication of the Justice Department’s interrogation memos. It will help them recognize this episode of political theater as another major step in the bipartisan dismantling of America’s defenses based on the requirements of presidential ideology. George W. Bush’s democracy-spreading philosophy yielded the invasion of Iraq and set the United States at war with much of the Muslim world. Bush’s worldview thereby produced an enemy that quickly outpaced the limited but proven threat-containing capacities of the major U.S. counterterrorism programs — rendition, interrogation and unmanned aerial vehicle attacks.

Now, in a single week, President Obama has eliminated two-thirds of that successful-but-not-sufficient national defense troika because his personal ideology — a fair gist of which is “If the world likes us more we are more secure” — cannot tolerate harsh interrogation techniques, torture or coercive interviews, call them what you will. Surprisingly, Obama now stands alongside Bush as a genuine American Jacobin, both of them seeing the world as they want it to be, not as it is. Whereas Bush saw a world of Muslims yearning to betray their God for Western secularism, Obama gazes upon a globe that he regards as largely carnivore-free and believes that remaining threats can be defused by semantic warfare; just stop saying “War on Terror” and give talks in Turkey and on al-Arabiyah television, for example.

Americans should be clear on what Obama has done. In a breathtaking display of self-righteousness and intellectual arrogance, the president told Americans that his personal beliefs are more important than protecting their country, their homes and their families. The interrogation techniques in question, the president asserted, are a sign that Americans have lost their “moral compass,” a compliment similar to Attorney General Eric Holder’s identifying them as “moral cowards.” Mulling Obama’s claim, one can wonder what could be more moral for a president than doing all that is needed to defend America and its citizens? Or, asked another way, is it moral for the president of the United States to abandon intelligence tools that have saved the lives and property of Americans and their allies in favor of his own ideological beliefs?

Before enthroning Obama’s personal morality as U.S. defense policy, of course, some dirty work had to be done. Last Sunday, Obama’s hit man and White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel led the charge by telling the American people that the interrogation techniques are a major recruiting tool for al-Qaeda and its Islamist partners. Well, no, Mr. Emanuel, that is not at all the case. The techniques surely are not popular with our foes and their supporters — should that be a concern in any event? — but they do not even make the Islamists’ hit parade of anti-U.S. recruiting tools. That list is headed by Washington’s support for Arab tyrannies in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, its presence on the Arabian Peninsula and its unqualified support for Israel. Still, Emanuel’s statement surely sounded plausible to Americans who have received no education about our Islamist enemy’s true motivation from Obama, George W. Bush, Clinton or George H.W. Bush.

Next, the president used his personal popularity and the stature of his office to implicitly identify as liars those former senior U.S. officials who know — not “argue” or “contend” or “assert” but know — that the interrogation techniques have yielded intelligence essential to the nation’s defense. The integrity, intellect and reputations of Judge Michael Mukasey, Gen. Michael V. Hayden and others have now been besmirched by Obama because their realistic worldview and firsthand experience do not mesh with the president’s desire to install his personal “moral compass” as the core of U.S. foreign and defense policy. And after visiting CIA headquarters last week, the president made it clear that he rejected statements surely made by CIA officers who risked their careers to tell him how many successful covert operations against al-Qaeda have flowed from interrogation information. As with all Jacobins, Obama cannot allow a hard and often brutal reality — call it an inconvenient truth — to impinge on his view of how the world should and must be made to work.

And so as the Justice Department memos farce plays out over the coming weeks, Americans can be confident that both parties will play politics to the hilt while letting the nation’s safety take the hindmost. Obama and his team will “reluctantly” agree to a congressional investigation of former Bush officials and serving CIA officers, politically targeted indictments from Holder’s minions and perhaps even a truth commission to prove that even the United States can aspire to be a half-baked Third World country.

Republicans will welcome the Democrats’ actions as a chance to reclaim their mantle as the most reliable protectors of U.S. national security. They will seek to prove that Obama and his party are eager to persecute the men and women who defend America and will denounce Democratic actions as a “witch hunt.” Those words were used last week by Sen. John McCain, a man who seems to have forgotten that as a presidential candidate he, more than anyone, persuaded Americans that the interrogation techniques amounted to torture and gloried in calling the CIA and its officers a “rogue institution.”

Americans and their country’s security will be the losers. The Republicans do not have the votes to stop Obama, and the world will not be safer for America because the president abandons interrogations to please his party’s left wing and the European pacifists it so admires. Both are incorrigibly anti-American, oppose the use of force in America’s defense and — like Obama — naively believe that the West’s Islamist foes can be sweet-talked into a future alive with the sound of kumbaya.

So if the above worst-case scenario ever comes to pass, Americans will have at least two things from which to take solace, even after the loss of major cities and tens of thousands of countrymen. First, they will know that their president believes that those losses are a small price to pay for stopping interrogations and making foreign peoples like us more. And second, they will see Osama bin Laden’s shy smile turn into a calm and beautiful God-is-Great grin.

Source…

Amusing

Let’s Declassify Obama’s Birth Certificate Along With the ‘Torture’ Memos


Brilliant!

In the Obama administration, a lot of information has been recently declassified and publicly distributed. Memos detailing enhanced interrogation tactics of Jihadist terror detainees (or, as the left defines it, torture) and photos that allegedly show the abuse of these detainees by their American captors are the first – but not likely the last – in the declassification queue.

The intent, in the eyes of our president and his advisors, is noble: to introduce “transparency” and to “make up” for the mistakes of the Bush administration. After all, we want al Qaeda and its copycat Jihadist terror organizations to like us. What better way than to put on the public relations equivalent of a hair shirt and prostrate ourselves in front of those against whom we have “sinned”?

So what if it besmirches our military and puts into jeopardy everything they and our intelligence community have fought for long and hard? All of that amounts to a hill of beans next to our new image of the kinder, caring, more submissive America. Out with superiority – in with inferiority. Bowing down to royal despots and slapping the backs of tin pot dictators are all a part of the grand plan to cut America down to size. Tired of the Ugly American stereotype? Then you’ll love the Subservient American.

I, for one, have reason to rejoice in this new era of dirty laundry airing. As long as we’re creating a paper trail a mile long and a mile wide, Obama might want to keep the momentum going and release that long form birth certificate we keep hearing so much about. It’d be a great excuse for him to fly back out to the old Hawaiian homestead (not that he needs a reason to gas up Airforce One and fly the friendly skies – that plane gets more use than Nancy Pelosi’s Botox needle) and ask the governor to take it out of its vault, the location of which is a bigger secret than that of the Bat Cave.

Hey, if it’s no problem to release classified documents, the birth certificate should be an easy call, as to my knowledge it’s not classified. Neither are his undergraduate records. If he’s as brilliant as everyone keeps saying he is, why not prove it by showing off his stellar grades? What articles did he write while editor of the vaunted Harvard Law Review? Inquiring minds want to know. Speaking of Harvard, how did he pay for his high priced law degree? Let’s not forget that trip during college to Pakistan in 1981, the one that supposedly provided Obama with his foreign policy credentials. There has been a lot of controversy about whether Americans were allowed to travel to Pakistan at that time due to the strife, violence and martial law within that nation at the time. Yet he, an unconnected college student, managed to travel there and stay for three weeks. (Is this just more evidence of miracles wrought by The One?) A call to the State Department by one of my colleagues yielded Pakistan travel information on the early 1980s but not 1981. Hmmm…

All of these questions are easily answered, and would put the minds of many Americans at ease to know that our president is exactly who he says he is as prescribed by the Constitution – a natural born citizen – whose brainpower would, we hear tell, put Albert Einstein to shame. How often have we heard that it’s nice to have a smart guy in the White House instead of that dummy George W. Bush?

Americans have asked nicely. Pretty please with sugar on top? Some have even filed lawsuits, a number of which have been summarily dismissed, while others have been the cause of threatening letters by the lawyer representing President Obama and Vice President Joe “Gaffe-o-Matic” Biden. Robert F. Bauer wrote a letter to attorney John Hemenway threatening “sanctions, including costs, expenses and attorneys’ fees” if Hemenway does not withdraw the appeal of his “frivolous” lawsuit demanding the release of the birth certificate. Gee, that’s friendly. Are threats to private citizens on behalf of our elected officials some of the “change” we were promised?

Now really. For Obama, a man who talks about sharing and caring more than those sickeningly sweet Care Bears, you’d think that sharing a little information with an adoring public would be a priceless opportunity to practice what he preaches.

Come on, Barry. Come clean. Take that certificate out from its hidey hole and wave it proudly for your fellow Americans to see, then frame it and display it next to your signed copy of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals in the Oval Office. The American people are getting in to this transparency thing. Don’t disappoint us. You’re the change we’ve been waiting for, remember?

Source…

Load More