They’re heeeeeeeeere…..

In House Judiciary Committee testimony, Mueller was asked about cells of Al Qaida in the country. 
 
“As to your first question as to whether we have found affiliates or, as you would call them, cells of Al Qaida in the United States, yes, we have. Again, I cannot get into it in public session, but I would say yes, we have.”

LINK

Perhaps President Obama will ask his FBI Director who they are so he can invite them to the White House to talk?  You know, like FDR did to Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo.

Not everyone is a political junkie, and even few political junkies even like reading the government reports on this or that.  However, when it comes to war, shouldn’t we all have some sort of documented list of reasons for war as well as periodic updates?  I don’t just mean members of Congress (the body that declares and authorizes war) or the President (the man who gets several detailed, classified updates throughout every day).  I mean every American.   I’d like to see us all get copies of it in the mail with the checks the Democrats’ Congress is sending us for economic stimulus. Read the rest of this entry »

Well, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to get the message Siobhan Gorman at The Wall Street Journal is trying to convey (although, do a google search for Gorman and you come up with dozens of stories from him on intelligence gathering, it appears to be a pet peeve of his, how dare our intelligence agencies collect intelligence!). In a nutshell, telecom companies should not be given immunity because they already give up too much info:

Five years ago, Congress killed an experimental Pentagon antiterrorism program meant to vacuum up electronic data about people in the U.S. to search for suspicious patterns. Opponents called it too broad an intrusion on Americans’ privacy, even after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

But the data-sifting effort didn’t disappear. The National Security Agency, once confined to foreign surveillance, has been building essentially the same system. Read the rest of this entry »

Take a guess which finger I’m giving them?

This is why politicians on both sides of the aisle should piss you off:

Hoyer said in his weekly press conference that he hoped to wrap up work on an update to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act; “towards the end of this week or the beginning of next week.” Read the rest of this entry »

Poor lefties. They ride into Congress in 2006 with the glee of having vanquished the big bad ole’ Republicans. They rub their hands in anticipation that two of the bestest lefties they have, now leading their respective Houses, will run from Iraq, roll back all the legislation intended to secure this country, and “drain the swamp.” Remember….their slim majority was suddenly a “mandate.”

But what happened? The Patriot Act is still around and working well. We still have troops in Iraq, and hell, we sent even more in for The Surge. And now the Protect America enhancements to FISA are about to be enacted. But only if Democrats can play a shell game to protect themselves from those poor, sad little lefties: (via Hot Air) Read the rest of this entry »

The big issues for the Democrat led Congress? To investigate steroid use by sports players and to force a contempt citation on the executive branch. Both BIG losers of time, money, and brain cells.

But at least Mukasey didn’t take long:

On Thursday afternoon, Pelosi had asked Mukasey to order an investigation of whether Chief of Staff Josh Bolten and former White House Counsel Harriet Miers should be prosecuted for contempt of Congress for refusing to testify about the controversial firings of U.S. attorneys. Read the rest of this entry »

Yes, we’ve heard since 2000 that President Bush should be impeached, and probably for as long that Vice President Cheney should be impeached. We hear it exclusively from people who are uber-partisan, seeking personal political gain, or ignorant of the facts, but we do hear it. Congressman Dennis Kucinich was nice enough to actually draft and submit three articles of impeachment for Vice President Cheney (I guess he and his supporters either want President Bush to stay President or don’t feel he’s committed any high crimes and misdemeanors after all). Since the articles were formally submitted, few people who keep track of the historical record or who are left of Howard Dean have taken the time to actually read Congressman Kucinich’s rantings. This weekend, I did, and I found the articles to be purely partisan, lacking factual substance, and (in the case of Article III) lacking common sense. Read the rest of this entry »

In this post yesterday I helped show the various shady dealings going on between Nancy, Hillary, and Obama with big pharma….that evil scourge, as they enjoy likening it to. But even worse is the shady dealings going on between some Democrats and the trial lawyers that are putting our country at grave risk.

The Protect America Act FISA enhancements expired last week and now we are back to the 1978 bill that was so out of date it took special action by congress to allow it to even recognize things like email and cellphones. Read the rest of this entry »

Technorati Tags: director of national intelligence, fisa, foreign intelligence surveillance act, helen thomas, intelligence surveillance, listen, protect america act, scott stanzel, terrorism, War On Terror

Excellent rundown of how the Democrats have made our country less safe by allowing FISA to lapse from the Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell, who, as he pointed out in the interview, has worked with both parties in various intelligence capacities for over 40 years but now is being labeled as partisan: (h/t Hot Air)

A partial transcript: Read the rest of this entry »

Technorati Tags: , director of national intelligence, fisa, fisa court, mike mcconnell, terrorism

From Austin Bay

Something that needs to be read and understood.

On Feb. 1, two remotely detonated terror bombs killed 99 shoppers in Baghdad’s pet and bird markets. It was Baghdad’s biggest mass murder since April 2007.

According to the Iraqi military, al-Qaida in Iraq’s (AQI) twin terror atrocities had several particularly grisly twists: The radio-detonated high explosives were strapped to the waists of two women who may not have been aware of their mission to murder.

Amid the carnage of animal cages, animal carcasses and dead human beings, Iraqi police found the detached head of one of the bomb carriers. Al Bawaba, an Arab press service, quoted Baghdad police as saying the dead woman had “sold cream in the mornings at the market and was known to locals as ‘the crazy lady.’”
Read the rest of this entry »

Republicans in a show of unity walked out of Congress today due to a few things. First, the Democrats continually dragging their feet on the FISA bill. Here is the video of the walkout and the GOP holding a press conference.

Read the rest of this entry »

Technorati Tags: congress today, contempt charges, critical legislation, political game, procedural votes, sense of urgency, shananigans, somber memorial, statuary hall, tom lantos

Late to the game on this one folks due to work but here is the news, if you’ve been hiding under a rock all day:

The Justice Department opened a full criminal investigation Wednesday
into the destruction of CIA interrogation videotapes, putting the
politically charged probe in the hands of a mob-busting public
corruption prosecutor with a reputation as being independent.

Attorney General Michael Mukasey announced that he was appointing
John Durham, a federal prosecutor in Connecticut, to oversee the
investigation of a case that has challenged the Bush administration’s
controversial handling of terrorism suspects.

The CIA acknowledged last month that in 2005 it destroyed videos of
officers using tough interrogation methods while questioning two
al-Qaida suspects. The acknowledgment sparked a congressional inquiry
and a preliminary investigation by Justice into whether the CIA
violated any laws or obstructed congressional inquiries such as the one
led by the Sept. 11 Commission.

“The Department’s National Security Division has recommended, and I
have concluded, that there is a basis for initiating a criminal
investigation of this matter, and I have taken steps to begin that
investigation,” Mukasey said in a statement released Wednesday.

Here we go again, another Plame fiasco that produces no crime, at least related to the investigation, but does spend millions of taxpayers money on a fruitless witchhunt.

So lets take a look at this story.  The CIA interrogated two of the worst of the worst regarding 9/11 using waterboarding, rightly so, and received some great information from their hard work.  So they ensured the important data was recorded in report format and forwarded all of that to Congress and the intelligence committees.  They had the videos of the interrogations but knew it could be used for political and anti-American groups throughout the world to their own benefit AND they did not want the identites of the agents who conducted the interrogations known so they advised the leadership in Congress that these tapes would be destroyed.

Two years later they did just that.

TWO YEARS!

Now this is somehow a crime?

Give me a break.

This is another case of the Democrat led Congress watching their approval numbers disintegrate even further so why not start another fruitless investigation.  Yes, yes, I know it wasn’t Congress who initiated this investigation but you know as well as I that their “outrage” over the incident led to this moment.

But at least we’re gonna see some subpoenas being issued to Democrats on the Senate & House Intelligence Communities.

ABC News is leading their newspage with the headline “Harriet Miers Knew of Destruction of Interrogation Tapes.”  Wow, OMG!  The left will scream “the White House knew about it and did nothing?”  Ahem:

Three officials told ABC News Miers urged the CIA not to destroy the tapes.

But they did anyways. 

As for myself, I could care less.  KSM and his buddy deserved nothing less then waterboarding, and I think that technique let them off the hook too easy to be frank.

But the left and the right is starting to pile on and they do make some valid points.  Like the timing of this news:

The news just happens to be perfectly timed as the Supreme Court hears a Gitmo case and, as the WaPo,
notes, on the same day “House and Senate negotiators reached an
agreement on legislation that would prohibit the use of waterboarding
and other harsh interrogation tactics by the CIA and bring intelligence
agencies in line with rules followed by the U.S. military.”

Oh no, the MSM would never hold on to this kinda news just to influence legislation would they? 

Hoekstra and Reyes are coming out swinging:

The CIA did not tell Congress about the destruction in 2005 of
videotapes recording aggressive CIA interrogations of two Al Qaeda suspects
until this year, the top two members of the House Intelligence Committee said in
an angry letter Friday to CIA Director Michael V. Hayden.

Anticipating an upcoming New York Times article revealing the destruction,
Hayden said in a memo to employees on Thursday that congressional oversight
committees had been notified about the existence of the tapes and plans to get
rid of them.

“Based upon available records and our best recollection, this simply is not
true,” said a joint letter from House Intelligence Committee Chairman Silvestre
Reyes (D-Texas) and the committee’s ranking member and former chairman, Rep.
Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.).

Oh come on.  They told Congress about the tapes existence and their plans to destroy them. No stink was raised, no investigations, no hoopla.  Jane Harmon has already gone on record stating she was told about them.

Rep. Jane Harman of California, then the senior Democrat
on the House Intelligence Committee, was one of only four members of
Congress in 2003 informed of the tapes’ existence and the CIA’s
intention to ultimately destroy them.

“I told the CIA that destroying videotapes of interrogations was a
bad idea and urged them in writing not to do it,” Harman said. While
key lawmakers were briefed on the CIA’s intention to destroy the tapes,
they were not notified two years later when the spy agency actually
carried out the plan. Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Jay
Rockefeller, D-W.Va., said the committee only learned of the tapes’
destruction in November 2006.

So you have the White House counsel and the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee telling the CIA it wasn’t a good idea to destroy the tapes.  But they did anyway and now you have the Democrats yelling and screaming with selective outrage, as Marty Lederman describes:

Jay Rockefeller is constantly learning of
legally dubious (at best) CIA intelligence activities, and then saying
nothing about them publicly until they are leaked to the press, at
which point he expresses outrage and incredulity — but reveals nothing.

…Jane Harman also knew of the intention to destroy
the tapes, and she at least “urged” the CIA in writing not to do it.
(Where were her colleagues?) But when she found out the CIA had
destroyed the tapes, where was Harman’s press conference? Where were
the congressional hearings?

But now its outrageous.

Just like the Plame episode prior to the election the timing of this whole thing stinks.

But beside all that my question is why would they videotape the damn things anyways? 
Waterboard them, I don’t care.  Those scum deserved much worse.  But to
videotape it?

UPDATE

You just have to listen to John Gibson today….he was on fire: (18 minutes long)

Check out Kevin Drum crying for al-Qaeda:

So here’s what the tapes would have shown: not just that we had
brutally tortured an al-Qaeda operative, but that we had brutally
tortured an al-Qaeda operative who was (a) unimportant and low-ranking,
(b) mentally unstable, (c) had no useful information, and (d)
eventually spewed out an endless series of worthless, fantastical
“confessions” under duress.

Idiots.