“we will be reading Miranda rights to the corpse of Osama bin Laden,”
-Attorney General, Eric Holder, March 16, 2010
President Obama may have felt squeamish about the belly slap and facial holds implemented by the CIA on 30% of the 100 or so graduates of the CIA program (that gave us upward of 60% of what we learned about al Qaeda), including the 3 waterboardees, but he certainly has no qualms over the killing of 400-500 militants, along with those civilians unfortunate enough to have been in the vicinity of Drone attacks. The latest to bite the dust is Hussein al-Yemeni, an al Qaeda trainer believed to have had a role to play in the suicide bombing that killed 7 CIA officers (Pakistani Taliban chief Hakimullah Mehsud who claimed credit as well may or may not be dead from a previous strike).
Killing Mr. al-Yemeni was very important to the CIA because of his status in al Qaeda and his involvement in the Khost attack, Mr. Panetta said. Mr. Panetta didn’t speak directly to the circumstances of the death; the CIA doesn’t discuss covert action.
“Anytime we get a high value target that is in the top leadership of al Qaeda, it seriously disrupts their operations,” Mr. Panetta said. “It sent two important signals,” Mr. Panetta said. “No. 1 that we are not going to hesitate to go after them wherever they try to hide, and No. 2 that we are continuing to target their leadership.”
No tears shed, certainly. And I’m glad for the parts of the Bush-era counter-terrorism programs that President Obama has chosen to retain. However, criticism persists that the Obama approach is to kill over capture.
Ms. Paulin-Ramirez’s interest in Islam “came out of left field,” said her mother, Christine Holcomb-Mott, in an interview at her home Friday, wearing a blue sweatsuit with a silver cross around her neck.
How out of left field?
Mr. Mott, a convert to Islam himself, says he went to Denver to find his stepdaughter but couldn’t track her down.
This woman is married to a Muslim, but neither she nor her husband can grok where in the world their murder-plotting daughter/step-daughter ever got exposed to this worrisome religion that subducts so many of its followers into terrorism.
Their disgust at daughter Jamie sounds sincere, but their blatant dishonesty about how she could have gotten interested in Islam suggests otherwise. It is possible, however, that The Wall Street Journal’s paraphrase is not precise. If put on the spot, Holcomb-Mott would likely clarify that she has no idea how her daughter ever got interested in murder-cult Islam. Read the rest of this entry »
The Justice Department has admitted that Eric Holder failed to tell Congress during his confirmation process that he had contributed to a legal brief which argued that the President lacks authority to hold Jose Padilla, a U.S citizen declared an “enemy combatant,” indefinitely without charge. The Justice Department has also acknowledged what is obvious — that “the brief should have been disclosed as part of the confirmation process.”
DOJ contends that the failure to disclose was not intentional. It says that “In preparing thousands of pages for submission, it was unfortunately and inadvertently missed.”
Some Senators will view this claim with skepticism. The Padilla case was, after all, an extremely high profile matter. Moreover, as Andy McCarthy notes, Holder wrote a letter to Senator McConnell a few months ago discussing the Padilla case at length and in a manner similar to the arguments in the brief he had worked on. This event should have reminded Holder of his involvement with that brief and should have prompted him to correct his erroneous statement during the confirmation process.
A suburban Pennsylvania woman known by the alias “Jihad Jane” has been arrested and charged with trying to recruit Islamic fighters and for plotting to assassinate a Swedish cartoonist who made fun of the Prophet Mohammed, according to a federal indictment unsealed today.
Colleen R. LaRose, 46, of Montgomery, Pa., described by neighbors as an average “housewife,” is better known to federal authorities as “Fatima Rose” or “Jihad Jane.”
The indictment, obtained by ABC News, charges LaRose with conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists and conspiracy to kill in a foreign country.
She is also accused of making false statements to a government official and of attempted identity theft, a passport she allegedly stole with the intention of giving to an Islamic fighter. The court papers claim that LaRose reached out through the Internet to jihadist groups saying she was “desperate to do something to help” suffering Muslim people, and that she desired to become a martyr.
Impeach Bush. War criminals. Cheney, Halliburton and torture. Illegal war. Spying on Americans. Secret prisons. shredding of our Constitution. Sacrificed our values. Bush lied, people died. Waterboarding is torture.
Rather than seeing things in terms of “policy differences”, those further to the left of President Obama (hard to believe that’s possible, I know- but now he has to govern) still seek to appease their moveon.org… base by prosecuting persecuting those they believe participated in criminal activity under the Bush Administration. They believe that Bush hurt America’s moral standing in the world.
Also last Wednesday, while all eyes were turned to the healthcare summit, Rep. Jim McDermott tried by means of Intelligence Committee Chairman Sylvester Reyes “manager’s amendment”, to slip unnoticed into the House intelligence authorization bill a provision entitled “Cruel, Inhuman, and Degrading Interrogations Prohibition Act of 2010”. This amendment would criminalize future interrogators (up to including the death penalty) for what has already been abolished by President Obama: enhanced interrogations.
In a day when we confront an enemy that has no state, wears no uniform and can not be appeased or negotiated with using diplomatic or economic means a new challenge was met by President George W. Bush with renewed reliance on the historic and evolving use of executive power. We all remember the battles Bush had with Congress over the use of Executive authority to combat terrorism after September 11th. John Yoo was at the epicenter of those battles. From 2001-2003, he served as a deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel of the U.S. Department of Justice, where he worked on issues involving foreign affairs, national security, and the separation of powers.
In 2002, on the heels of 9/11, the Office of Legal Counsel determined that the interrogation practices of the CIA were lawful. This gave the CIA legal confidence on where the line was drawn so that they could carry out their duty of protecting the country without fear of criminal and professional prosecution down the road.
For the last 5 years, the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility has been conducting an investigation into the rulings held by Yoo and Bybee.
Last Friday, House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers released their report:
Richard Lehner, a spokesman for the Missile Defense Agency, insists that the striking similarity between MDA’s website logo and Obama’s campaign logo is just coincidence. He says the MDA logo was created for a recruiting campaign that preceded the 2008 election, which is confirmed by an October 2008 recruiting ad in MIT’s campus newspaper. There it is on page 17 (large PDF warning), MDA’s Obama-esque configuration of circles and crescents, complete with waves of grain:
MDA logo, left. Circles, crescents, and red-and-white waves of grain (or rocket exhaust), just like Obama’s logo.
The MIT ad means that the MDA logo is not a product of the Obama administration, but that doesn’t mean it is not an offshoot of the Obama logo, which was introduced in early 2007. Unless the MDA recruiting campaign goes back that far, the MDA design could still have been influenced by Obama’s design, or directly created by an Obama supporter. It’s hard to believe it wasn’t, but unless Obama’s own people had some inside influence with the logo designers at TMPgovernment (not an impossibility) any intentional similarity would be a product of the designers’ own initiative, not the Obama team’s orchestration. Big deal. Obama can’t help what his supporters do.
More worrisome is how a branch of the Department of Defense can overlook the overt Islamic symbol shape
The classic Islamic crescent (based on later flags of the Ottoman Empire) is defined by its circular inner and outer arcs. Contrast this to a crescent moon, which has an elliptical inner arc (when projected onto two dimensions). Several jihadist organizations use a full circle-in-circle crescent in their insignias, just like the one in the MDA logo.
Much better, substantive debate than Thiessen’s previous appearance where Lawrence O’Donnell frothed and foamed at the mouth and had to be tranquilized and put back in his kennel.
Even good questions from the MSNBC Morning Joe hosts (all points addressed in Thiessen’s book, Courting Disaster). Thiessen comes very well armed for debate.
Ali Soufan wouldn’t come on to defend and debate (Ali Soufan is the FBI agent- not evil, just wrong and a hero in my book- who has been lionized by the left for his opposition to the CIA interrogation program) so he is represented by Daniel Freedman, the Director of Policy Analysis and Communications of the Soufan Group (also served on Giuliani’s campaign as a foreign policy analyst).
National Archives
An exclusion order posted at First and Front Streets in San Francisco directing removal of persons of Japanese ancestry.
On Feb. 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. There was no mention of relocation centers in the EO, because initially none were envisioned. The purpose was for those of Japanese ancestry to relocate voluntarily, anywhere within the interior, away from the West Coast and areas of strategic military importance.
On April 25, 1992, as a UCLA student, I went by bus from campus on a pilgrimage to Manzanar, 230 miles northeast of Los Angeles on the 50th Anniversary of the internment of 110,000 Japanese-Americans into relocation camps during WWII.
Biden struck first, declaring that Cheney’s attacks on Obama’s commitment to fighting terrorism ignored the facts.
“We’ve eliminated 12 of their top 20 people. We have taken out 100 of their associates,” said Biden. “They are in fact not able to do anything remotely like they were in the past. They are on the run. I don’t know where Dick Cheney has been. Look, it’s one thing, again, to criticize. It’s another thing to sort of rewrite history. What is he talking about?”
What is Joe Biden talking about, “rewrite history”? Much of al Qaeda’s original leadership and many of its operatives were killed and captured in the years since 9/11 and before the Age of Obama. Furthermore, Obama has inherited many of the tools developed during the Bush years that has kept America safe. Even many of his lefty allies understand that much of the war on terror success OBiden can boast of in his first year in office is due to the perpetuation of Bush-era policies that they so despised and reviled.
But where Obama departs from Bush is where he endangers America most…
March 2002: President Bush authorizes the indefinite detention of enemy combatants.
April 2010: President Obama keeps that program intact.
Watch as the left heads explode:
The White House is considering endorsing a law that would allow the indefinite detention of some alleged terrorists without trial as part of efforts to break a logjam with Congress over President Barack Obama’s plans to close the Guantanamo Bay prison, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said Monday…
Civil liberties advocates and many who back Obama’s effort to close Guantanamo have opposed a preventive detention law as a departure from the tradition of prosecuting and punishing individuals for specific crimes. Some critics have also expressed worries that such a law would be hard to limit and could be extended well beyond Al Qaeda operatives. Read the rest of this entry »
KARL: But you believe they should have had the option of everything up to and including waterboarding?
CHENEY: I think you ought to have all of those capabilities on the table. Now, President Obama has taken them off the table. He announced when he came in last year that they would never use anything other than the U.S. Army manual, which doesn’t include those techniques. I think that’s a mistake.
From VP Biden’s appearance on CBS’ Face the Nation:
Schieffer: “Can you Mr. Vice President envision a time where waterboarding can ever be used on anyone?”
Biden: “No, no, it’s not effective”
Schieffer: “It’s not effective?”
Biden: “It’s not effective”
Abu Zubaydah disagrees with Joe Biden. He is living proof that waterboarding worked. Not only that, but he endorsed waterboarding with a personal stamp of approval.
CHENEY: I do see repeatedly examples that there are key members in the administration, like Eric Holder, for example, the attorney general, who still insists on thinking of terror attacks against the United States as criminal acts as opposed to acts of war, and that’s a — that’s a huge distinction.
~~~
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised by my friend, Joe Biden. I’m glad he now believes Iraq is a success. Of course, Obiden and — Obama and Biden campaigned from one end of the country to the other for two years criticizing our Iraq policy.
They opposed the surge that was absolutely crucial to our getting to the point we’re at now with respect to Iraq. And for them to try to take credit for what’s happened in Iraq strikes me as a little strange. I think if — if they had had their way, if we’d followed the policies they’d pursued from the outset or advocated from the outset, Saddam Hussein would still be in power in Baghdad today.
So if they’re going to take credit for it, fair enough, for what they’ve done while they’re there, but it ought to go with a healthy dose of “Thank you, George Bush” up front and a recognition that some of their early recommendations, with respect to prosecuting that war, we’re just dead wrong. Read the rest of this entry »
This story, about a U.S. soldier who abused his child by holding her head under water for not saying her abc’s, is disgusting:
An Army sergeant who served in Iraq for 15 months has been restricted to his Washington military base after being accused of waterboarding his 4-year-old daughter because she refused to recite her ABCs.
But what I’d like to take umbrage with is how the media has decided to take this act of child abuse and water torture to draw an equivalence to the CIA enhanced interrogation program, which included the waterboarding of 3 known high-value terrorists, resistant to standard interrogation methods.
Although I’m linking to ABC News, it’s not just ABC that’s headlining this story as “waterboarding”, drawing equivalence to the CIA program, and featuring a photo of protesters re-enacting their version of CIA waterboarding. See here and here and here.
