• If you are having problems logging in please use the Contact Us in the lower right hand corner of the forum page for assistance.

Comments on Obama's National Security speech

hypocritexposer

Well-known member
Barack Obama, Deconstructionist
Peter Wehner - 05.22.2009 - 10:27 AM

I commented earlier on President Obama’s national security speech. In reading it over, though, I was struck by something else: the contradiction between what Obama says and what he does. Let’s start with the most obvious: he lectures us against “pointing fingers at one another” — and gives a speech that includes more than two dozen critical comments (direct or implied) against the Bush Administration. For a fellow who constantly speaks about wanting to move forward, Obama spends an awful lot of time looking back. But there is more. President Obama pretends to be providing a quantum break from his predecessor — but, as Charles Krauthammer points out in his column, “Obama has adopted with only minor modifications huge swaths of the entire, allegedly lawless Bush program.”

The president continually made reference to the importance of “transparency” in his speech — yet he will not release enhanced interrogation techniques memoranda showing what information we extracted by using these techniques. Compounding this hypocrisy is Obama feeling no reluctance to release previously classified memos that dealt with the methods of interrogation.

In his speech, Obama argued that President Bush’s anti-terrorism policies did not and, indeed, could not keep this country safe (because, Obama insists, they were at odds with our most fundamental values) — yet Bush’s policies, which in fact were not at odds with our most fundamental values, did exactly that. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, there was an overwhelming consensus that we would be hit again, and probably sooner rather than later. Al Qaeda certainly tried. Yet during the remaining seven-and-a-half years of the Bush presidency, our homeland was kept safe. Such things do not happen by accident.

President Obama spoke about his passionate concern for a “legitimate legal framework, with the kind of meaningful due process and rights for the accused that could stand up on appeal.” Yet in the same speech — just a few paragraphs later — Obama said, “even when this process is complete, there may be a number of people who cannot be prosecuted for past crimes, but who nonetheless pose a threat to the security of the United States.” So Obama endorsed the idea of indefinite detention without trial for some people he believes to pose a threat.

President Obama says that waterboarding “serve[d] as a recruitment tool for terrorists, and increase[d] the will of our enemies to fight us.” Yet key metrics of the last few years — from the increasing unpopularity of al Qaeda and bin Laden in the Muslim world, to rising sentiment against killing innocent civilians, to key clerics who were once allies of jihadists turning against them — show the appeal of Islamic militancy is waning. The reason, in large part, is because the surge has been succeeding in Iraq and Bush’s polices had terrorists on the run in many parts of the world. Iraq turned out to be the birthplace of the Muslim rise against militant Islam. The way to dampen enthusiasm for terrorists is to defeat them, to turn them into the “weak horse” rather than the “strong horse.” And if Obama had his way while serving in the Senate — he both opposed the surge and declared he would withdraw all American combat troops from Iraq by March 2008 — we would have lost the war. And that loss would have been the greatest jihadist recruitment tool imaginable.

By all accounts, Barack Obama’s personal life is admirable, meaning that in this respect he is completely different from Bill Clinton. But what is becoming increasingly clear is that Obama shares with Clinton the tendency to routinely, almost promiscuously, use straw-men to strengthen his case. He employs smooth and persuasive words which, upon close inspection, are at odds with reality. Deconstructionism might go over well when you’re a professor at an Ivy League school; as President, though, it can eventually get you in trouble.
 

fff

Well-known member
Comments on Dick Cheney's speech:

Former Vice President Dick Cheney’s defense Thursday of the Bush administration’s policies for interrogating suspected terrorists contained omissions, exaggerations and misstatements.

In his address to the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative policy organization in Washington, Cheney said that the techniques the Bush administration approved, including waterboarding — simulated drowning that’s considered a form of torture — forced nakedness and sleep deprivation, were "legal" and produced information that "prevented the violent death of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of innocent people."

He quoted the Director of National Intelligence, Adm. Dennis Blair, as saying that the information gave U.S. officials a "deeper understanding of the al-Qaida organization that was attacking this country."

In a statement April 21, however, Blair said the information "was valuable in some instances" but that "there is no way of knowing whether the same information could have been obtained through other means. The bottom line is that these techniques hurt our image around the world, the damage they have done to our interests far outweighed whatever benefit they gave us and they are not essential to our national security."

A top-secret 2004 CIA inspector general’s investigation found no conclusive proof that information gained from aggressive interrogations helped thwart any "specific imminent attacks," according to one of four top-secret Bush-era memos that the Justice Department released last month.

FBI Director Robert Muller told Vanity Fair magazine in December that he didn’t think the techniques disrupted any attacks.

Some other omissions and misstatements by Cheney in his Thursday speech:

— Cheney said that President Barack Obama’s decision to release the four top-secret Bush administration memos on the interrogation techniques was "flatly contrary" to U.S. national security, and would help al-Qaida train terrorists in how to resist U.S. interrogations.

However, Blair, who oversees all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies, said in his statement that he recommended the release of the memos, "strongly supported" Obama’s decision to prohibit using the controversial methods and that "we do not need these techniques to keep America safe."

— Cheney said that the Bush administration "moved decisively against the terrorists in their hideouts and their sanctuaries, and committed to using every asset to take down their networks."

The former vice president didn’t point out that Osama bin Laden and his chief lieutenant, Ayman al Zawahri, remain at large nearly eight years after Sept. 11 and that the Bush administration began diverting U.S. forces, intelligence assets, time and money to planning an invasion of Iraq before it finished the war in Afghanistan against al-Qaida and the Taliban.

There are now 49,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan fighting to contain the bloodiest surge in Taliban violence since the 2001 U.S.-led intervention, and Islamic extremists also have launched their most concerted attack yet on neighboring, nuclear-armed Pakistan.

— Cheney denied that there was any connection between the Bush administration’s interrogation policies and the abuse of detainees at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, which he blamed on "a few sadistic guards ... in violation of American law, military regulations and simple decency."

However, a bipartisan Senate Armed Services Committee report in December traced the abuses at Abu Ghraib to the approval of the techniques by senior Bush administration officials, including former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

"The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of ’a few bad apples’ acting on their own," said the report issued by Sens. Carl Levin, D-Mich., and John McCain, R-Ariz. "The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality and authorized their use against detainees."

— Cheney said that "only detainees of the highest intelligence value" were subjected to the harsh interrogation techniques, and he cited Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks.

He didn’t mention Abu Zubaydah, the first senior al-Qaida operative to be captured after Sept. 11. Former FBI special agent Ali Soufan told a Senate subcommittee last week that his interrogation of Zubaydah using traditional methods elicited crucial information, including Mohammed’s alleged role in Sept. 11.

The decision to use the harsh interrogation methods "was one of the worst and most harmful decisions made in our efforts against al-Qaida," Soufan said. Former State Department official Philip Zelikow, who in 2005 was then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s point man in an internal fight to overhaul the Bush administration’s detention policies, joined Soufan in his criticism.

— Cheney said that "the key to any strategy is accurate intelligence," but the Bush administration ignored warnings from experts in the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the State Department, the Department of Energy and other agencies, and used false or exaggerated intelligence supplied by Iraqi exile groups and others to help make its case for the 2003 invasion.

Cheney made no mention of al-Qaida operative Ali Mohamed al-Fakheri, who’s known as Ibn Sheikh al-Libi, whom the Bush administration secretly turned over to Egypt for interrogation in January 2002. While allegedly being tortured by Egyptian authorities, al-Libi provided false information about Iraq’s links with al-Qaida, which the Bush administration used despite doubts expressed by the DIA.

A state-run Libyan newspaper said al-Libi committed suicide recently in a Libyan jail.

— Cheney accused Obama of "the selective release" of documents on Bush administration detainee policies, charging that Obama withheld records that Cheney claimed prove that information gained from the harsh interrogation methods prevented terrorist attacks.

"I’ve formally asked that (the information) be declassified so the American people can see the intelligence we obtained," Cheney said. "Last week, that request was formally rejected."

However, the decision to withhold the documents was announced by the CIA, which said that it was obliged to do so by a 2003 executive order issued by former President George W. Bush prohibiting the release of materials that are the subject of lawsuits.

— Cheney said that only "ruthless enemies of this country" were detained by U.S. operatives overseas and taken to secret U.S. prisons.

A 2008 McClatchy Newspapers investigation, however, found that the vast majority of Guantanamo detainees captured in 2001 and 2002 in Afghanistan and Pakistan were innocent citizens or low-level fighters of little intelligence value who were turned over to American officials for money or because of personal or political rivalries.

In addition, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Oct. 5, 2005, that the Bush administration had admitted to her that it had mistakenly abducted a German citizen, Khaled Masri, from Macedonia in January 2004.

Masri reportedly was flown to a secret prison in Afghanistan, where he allegedly was abused while being interrogated. He was released in May 2004 and dumped on a remote road in Albania.

In January 2007, the German government issued arrest warrants for 13 alleged CIA operatives on charges of kidnapping Masri.

— Cheney slammed Obama’s decision to close the Guantanamo Bay prison camp and criticized his effort to persuade other countries to accept some of the detainees.

The effort to shut down the facility, however, began during Bush’s second term, promoted by Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

"One of the things that would help a lot is, in the discussions that we have with the states of which they (detainees) are nationals, if we could get some of those countries to take them back," Rice said in a Dec. 12, 2007, interview with the British Broadcasting Corp. "So we need help in closing Guantanamo."

— Cheney said that, in assessing the security environment after Sept. 11, the Bush team had to take into account "dictators like Saddam Hussein with known ties to Mideast terrorists."

Cheney didn’t explicitly repeat the contention he made repeatedly in office: that Saddam cooperated with al-Qaida, a linkage that U.S. intelligence officials and numerous official inquiries have rebutted repeatedly.

The late Iraqi dictator’s association with terrorists vacillated and was mostly aimed at quashing opponents and critics at home and abroad.

The last State Department report on international terrorism to be released before Sept. 11 said that Saddam’s regime "has not attempted an anti-Western terrorist attack since its failed plot to assassinate former President (George H.W.) Bush in 1993 in Kuwait."

A Pentagon study released last year, based on a review of 600,000 Iraqi documents captured after the U.S.-led invasion, concluded that while Saddam supported militant Palestinian groups — the late terrorist Abu Nidal found refuge in Baghdad, at least until Saddam had him killed — the Iraqi security services had no "direct operational link" with al-Qaida.


http://www.bostonherald.com/news/us_politics/view.bg?articleid=1174119&srvc=rss

More: http://www.freep.com/article/20090522/NEWS15/90521105
 
Top