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Security Before Politics

hypocritexposer

Well-known member
Security Before Politics

By Porter J. Goss
Saturday, April 25, 2009

Since leaving my post as CIA director almost three years ago, I have remained largely silent on the public stage. I am speaking out now because I feel our government has crossed the red line between properly protecting our national security and trying to gain partisan political advantage. We can't have a secret intelligence service if we keep giving away all the secrets. Americans have to decide now.

A disturbing epidemic of amnesia seems to be plaguing my former colleagues on Capitol Hill. After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, members of the committees charged with overseeing our nation's intelligence services had no higher priority than stopping al-Qaeda. In the fall of 2002, while I was chairman of the House intelligence committee, senior members of Congress were briefed on the CIA's "High Value Terrorist Program," including the development of "enhanced interrogation techniques" and what those techniques were. This was not a one-time briefing but an ongoing subject with lots of back and forth between those members and the briefers.

Today, I am slack-jawed to read that members claim to have not understood that the techniques on which they were briefed were to actually be employed; or that specific techniques such as "waterboarding" were never mentioned. It must be hard for most Americans of common sense to imagine how a member of Congress can forget being told about the interrogations of Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed. In that case, though, perhaps it is not amnesia but political expedience.

Let me be clear. It is my recollection that:

-- The chairs and the ranking minority members of the House and Senate intelligence committees, known as the Gang of Four, were briefed that the CIA was holding and interrogating high-value terrorists.

-- We understood what the CIA was doing.

-- We gave the CIA our bipartisan support.

-- We gave the CIA funding to carry out its activities.

-- On a bipartisan basis, we asked if the CIA needed more support from Congress to carry out its mission against al-Qaeda.

I do not recall a single objection from my colleagues. They did not vote to stop authorizing CIA funding. And for those who now reveal filed "memorandums for the record" suggesting concern, real concern should have been expressed immediately -- to the committee chairs, the briefers, the House speaker or minority leader, the CIA director or the president's national security adviser -- and not quietly filed away in case the day came when the political winds shifted. And shifted they have.

Circuses are not new in Washington, and I can see preparations being made for tents from the Capitol straight down Pennsylvania Avenue. The CIA has been pulled into the center ring before. The result this time will be the same: a hollowed-out service of diminished capabilities. After Sept. 11, the general outcry was, "Why don't we have better overseas capabilities?" I fear that in the years to come this refrain will be heard again: once a threat -- or God forbid, another successful attack -- captures our attention and sends the pendulum swinging back. There is only one person who can shut down this dangerous show: President Obama.

Unfortunately, much of the damage to our capabilities has already been done. It is certainly not trust that is fostered when intelligence officers are told one day "I have your back" only to learn a day later that a knife is being held to it. After the events of this week, morale at the CIA has been shaken to its foundation.

We must not forget: Our intelligence allies overseas view our inability to maintain secrecy as a reason to question our worthiness as a partner. These allies have been vital in almost every capture of a terrorist.

The suggestion that we are safer now because information about interrogation techniques is in the public domain conjures up images of unicorns and fairy dust. We have given our enemy invaluable information about the rules by which we operate. The terrorists captured by the CIA perfected the act of beheading innocents using dull knives. Khalid Sheik Mohammed boasted of the tactic of placing explosives high enough in a building to ensure that innocents trapped above would die if they tried to escape through windows. There is simply no comparison between our professionalism and their brutality.

Our enemies do not subscribe to the rules of the Marquis of Queensbury. "Name, rank and serial number" does not apply to non-state actors but is, regrettably, the only question this administration wants us to ask. Instead of taking risks, our intelligence officers will soon resort to wordsmithing cables to headquarters while opportunities to neutralize brutal radicals are lost.

The days of fortress America are gone. We are the world's superpower. We can sit on our hands or we can become engaged to improve global human conditions. The bottom line is that we cannot succeed unless we have good intelligence. Trading security for partisan political popularity will ensure that our secrets are not secret and that our intelligence is destined to fail us.

The writer, a Republican, was director of the CIA from September 2004 to May 2006 and was chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence from 1997 to 2004.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/24/AR2009042403339_pf.html
 

Sandhusker

Well-known member
Mike said:
Funny how so many Democrats can have selective memories. :roll:

You can use the politically correct term of "selective memory" or you can communicate effectively and call a spade a spade and call it "lying their asses off".
 

hypocritexposer

Well-known member
This guy should know what he's talking about he was present with Pelosi, when they were briefed.

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).

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.
 

Tam

Well-known member
Like I said ask yourself would the CIA waste time having meeting to inform the Committee on something they had no intention of using. Pelosi knew and didn't object and now she is lieing to save herself from the truth committee investigation. If being dumb is a defence She has lots of evidence in her favor. :wink:
 

Tam

Well-known member
hypocritexposer said:
didn't Obama cancel any truth committee after he found out the facts of who knew what?
Well according to the news he did. BUT he did, then he didn't, then he did again so can you trust he will not have his strings pulled by Soros and Leftwingnuts that he seems to think more of than national security and change his mind again. I don't trust the man to do the right thing :wink:
 

hypocritexposer

Well-known member
but he's such a great man, with only the best of intentions?

He wouldn't have lobed a political football into the ring, would he?

He's too experienced for that!

We better give him the benefit of the doubt, for a bit longer!
 

Tam

Well-known member
but he's such a great man, with only the best of intentions? Don't make me laugh :lol:

He wouldn't have lobed a political football into the ring, would he? No he wouldn't do that would he :wink: :lol:

He's too experienced for that! Just what besides campaigning is he experienced again? :?

We better give him the benefit of the doubt, for a bit longer!When he starts giving people the benefit of the truth, I'll think about giving him the benefit of the doubt :wink:
 

hypocritexposer

Well-known member
It's all that mean old Bush's fault. Why did he even go and ask for legal advice on the subject.

He's destroyed his reputation with me, that's for sure. I thought he was a law-breaking, devil worshipping cowboy!

Now I find out he respected the law enough to ask the question, and had the Audacity to follow it!
 

Tam

Well-known member
hypocritexposer said:
It's all that mean old Bush's fault. Why did he even go and ask for legal advice on the subject.

He's destroyed his reputation with me, that's for sure. I thought he was a law-breaking, devil worshipping cowboy!

Now I find out he respected the law enough to ask the question, and had the Audacity to follow it!

He followed the laws when dealing with the terrorist, and by doing so he stopped an further attacks on US soil. Add to that he tried to warn the Congress countless times about the risk in the banking sector that evenually brought down the economy do to the fact the Congress stood in the way of any regulations. AND it wouldn't surprise me at all if he paid he taxes. So with this on his record it is completely understandable why the Dems hate the man and wouldn't want him around. Just paying his taxes sets him apart from most of those that Obama has appointed to his administration. :wink:
 

hypocritexposer

Well-known member
Maybe those Alinsky tactics and "Obama’s lack of testicular fortitude" were more effective back in Illinois?

Rasmussen Reports says that fifty-eight percent (58%) believe the Obama administration’s recent release of CIA memos about the harsh interrogation methods used on terrorism suspects endangers the national security of the United States. The latest national telephone survey found that 28% believe the release of the memos helps America’s image abroad.

Buried deep within the Washington Post’s front-page story on the decision to release the OLC memos, Barack Obama’s motivation gets revealed. Former VP Dick Cheney’s criticism that Obama’s policies had made America less safe apparently stung more than the White House admitted. Unfortunately, Obama may have gone a long way towards proving Cheney’s point in allowing himself to get baited (via Michael Goldfarb):

Several Obama aides said the president’s decision was in line with his frequent criticism during the campaign of President George W. Bush’s policies on interrogations at secret prisons. On his second day in office, Obama banned the prisons and the tactics in an executive order.

The aides also said they hope the memos’ release will focus public attention on the coldness and sterility of the legal justifications for abusive techniques, with Obama telling reporters in the Oval Office on Tuesday that the documents demonstrate that the nation lost its “moral bearings” in the Bush years.

A source familiar with White House views said Obama’s advisers are further convinced that letting the public know exactly what the past administration sanctioned will undermine what they see as former vice president Richard B. Cheney’s effort to “box Obama in” by claiming that the executive order heightened the risk of a terrorist attack.

Rather than doing that, though, it prompted members of his own administration to publicly corroborate Cheney. The White House tried to suppress the key part of Dennis Blair’s memo that acknowledged the success of the interrogations in thwarting at least one major terrorist attack against the US, the “Second Wave” airliner attacks after 9/11 aimed at Los Angeles. The CIA separately insisted that its actions protected America from attack. Cheney himself went back on the attack, describing some of the memos that Obama didn’t declassify, and launched a high-profile campaign to get them released.

On Capitol Hill, Obama’s strategy also backfired. Republicans balked at the limited disclosure. Pete Hoekstra has demanded that the White House release the memos from Congressional briefings on the interrogations, which will show that Democratic leadership knew exactly what was happening and didn’t object at all to it. Even one of Obama’s few allies in the GOP on this issue, John McCain, warned Obama that he was setting up a “witch hunt” that would turn America into a “banana republic”.

Instead of the headlines being about what the Bush administration sanctioned, they became about Nancy Pelosi’s denial and then non-denial of her knowledge on waterboarding interrogations, the success of the interrogations in preventing an attack, and Obama’s lack of testicular fortitude in sticking with his original position to let sleeping dogs lie. Small wonder that he began backtracking in earnest yesterday when meeting with Congressional leaders.

Now we have confirmation that Obama planned this all along as a political attack against a man who hardly matters on the national political scene any longer – or at least he didn’t until Obama decided to pick a fight with him. Just as with his strange attack on Rush Limbaugh, all it did was elevate his opponent and diminish himself.
 
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