Showing posts with label osama bin laden. Show all posts
Paths of Glory: The Continuing CIA "Torture" Investigations
As delighted as we all can be with the death of Osama Bin Laden, we continue to have a Democratic Party that is of two minds on waging the war on terror. On the one hand, they are delighted to accept applause for killing Osama. On the other, they continue to maintain the politically convenient fiction that the United States engaged in "torture," this despite the fact that information gathered during the Bushhitler years was crucial in the Bin Laden hunt. Worst of all, AG Holder continues to investigate CIA interrogators for torturing terrorists, and Holder's boss is just fine with that. At least one person managed to ask the president about this: Debra Burlingame, who had a brief encounter with the president at Ground Zero.
(Burlingame) told Fox News: 'I was very upfront, I said Mr President, I've been one of your most ardent critics, but on Sunday night I was very proud of you, I was very appreciative of what you helped make happen, and I was very proud of America.
'And then he hugged me, but then I said I have a question for you.'
She said: 'As a former attorney I know you can't tell the Attorney General what to do, he said, "No, I can't."
But I said "we - that shouldn't stop you from giving your opinion. We wouldn't be here today if they hadn't done their jobs. Can't you at least give them your opinion."
And he said "no I won't," and he turned around and walked away.'
Burlingame has a lot more guts than most members of the news media, who would never ask such a question. More important, shouldn't Republicans be asking such a question a little louder? The Left spent the Bush years making civil rights martyrs out of dubious cause celebre's like Jose Padilla and Mumia Abu-Jamal. Can't the Right do the same for heroic CIA interrogators (apparently some of the few effective CIA employees out there) who elicited invaluable intelligence about al-Qaeda?
These men are not being persecuted because they tortured people. The AG and the president are going after them to protect the loudest Democratic talking point of the last 10 years: that dastardly Republicans tortured people and it was only brave progressives who were able to save the Constitution from the shredder. Sure, the intelligence they developed through painstaking effort led to the death of Bin Laden, but on the other hand Democratic politicians don't want to look like hysterical ninnies. It's no different than the old WW1 practice of pulling a few random privates from the ranks and execute them whenever the troops started acting reluctant to go over the top, and about as repugnant.
Left Foot, Right Foot
Still glad that Osama is dead, regardless of the lame post-raid "burial at sea" and other machinations. But, the Obama administration's approach in the aftermath reminds me why I can never be a liberal.
Conservatives are often accused of having a simple-minded, Manichean view of the world. But, at least, we didn't spend 8+ years excoriating legitimate law enforcement and military activity in the pursuit of our enemies. At least we didn't turn around and use those exact same techniques, or at least the fruits of those techniques, to find Osama. At least we didn't create a legal mish-mash out of our once-straightforward legal precedents about the treatment of enemy combatants, such that targeted killings are the only option left. At least our multi-cultural vanity doesn't cause us to bury people at sea in accordance with some sort of "Islamic law" that no one has ever heard of (I know camels are the ships of the desert, but Arabs are not known as sea faring people). And so on.
Worst of all is the idea that we shouldn't see the Osama death photos because they would enflame the Middle East (which is normally quiescent and calm as a Tea Party rally) due to fears of our seeming to be "spiking the football." That's according to our scold-in-chief, who reveals himself all too well with that comment. It's a cliche' among transnational sophisticates that yokel Americans are dull-witted apes who care only about God, guns, and football. That may be true- hey, we like to enjoy ourselves, we Americans - but that doesn't mean we don't know how to be serious. And if you're talking about 9/11 and the evil men who were responsible for that terrible day, we are dead serious, even when we're making "72 virgin jokes" and chanting "USA! USA!"
Hunting down Bin Laden and his cohort was serious business, something that Pres. Bush never failed to make clear. But, he had to contend with a determined fifth column, virtually the entire left wing of American politics, which demagogued and delayed virtually every effective measure taken to prosecute the war on terror (or so-called "war on terror" in the parlance of the Left). And the extent to which the formerly strident "defender of the Constitution" adopted the Bush-era policies he once criticized would be laughable if it was so profoundly deceptive. Indeed, the extent to which Democrats are now desperately trying to maintain the political fiction that waterboarding is "torture" shows how much they want people to forget all of that noble rhetoric, which became inoperative on 1/21/2009.
Obama may get a "bounce" out of this. But, the days following one of the few genuine triumphs of the last 3+ years show how much of a deceptive unamerican leftist he and his followers remain.
A Job Well Done: Bin Laden Taken Down At Last
At last, an Obama Administration initiative that I can get behind. A team of Navy SEALS has killed Osama Bin Laden
Helicopters descended out of darkness on the most important counterterrorism mission in U.S. history. It was an operation so secret, only a select few U.S. officials knew what was about to happen.
The location was a fortified compound in an affluent Pakistani town two hours outside Islamabad. The target was Osama bin Laden.
Intelligence officials discovered the compound in August while monitoring an al-Qaida courier. The CIA had been hunting that courier for years, ever since detainees told interrogators that the courier was so trusted by bin Laden that he might very well be living with the al-Qaida leader.
Nestled in an affluent neighborhood, the compound was surrounded by walls as high as 18 feet, topped with barbed wire. Two security gates guarded the only way in. A third-floor terrace was shielded by a seven-foot privacy wall. No phone lines or Internet cables ran to the property. The residents burned their garbage rather than put it out for collection. Intelligence officials believed the million-dollar compound was built five years ago to protect a major terrorist figure. The question was, who?
The CIA asked itself again and again who might be living behind those walls. Each time, they concluded it was almost certainly bin Laden
This is a great day, of course. (and I know that the hunt for Bin Laden was not an exclusive effort by the Obama administration. Far from it), but too long in coming. Hard to believe, but it's been nearly 10 years since 9/11. Should it really have taken so long to find this guy? We not only had missed opportunities on the battlefield. We had the entire left side of the American political spectrum working against the intelligence and military communities that were tasked with finding the Bin Laden needle in the Af-Pak haystack. Maybe that's just the way democracy works: it's messier than you might like. OK, but does fealty to democratic principles mean we had to listen to Dick Durbin and others call US troops "Nazis," among other scurrilous moments? Other reax:
1. Our military, especially the Special Forces, is one of the few institutions in American society that still works as advertised. That the Navy SEALS have to compete for funds with ACORN and Planned Parenthood is a sign of how far conservatives have to go to re-balance and re-organize the government.
2. Not sure how "gutsy" it was for Obama to make the call to kill Bin Laden - what else could he have done? - but give him a lot of credit for sending in a team to shoot Bin Laden in the head, rather than dump a Clintonesque pile of ordinance into his lap.
3. Bin Laden was a cartoon villain to the end. He ever used a woman as a human shield, just like Snidely Whiplash! Why didn't he tie her to the railroad tracks?
4. Would I have preferred that Bin Laden had been killed during the Bush-Cheney years? Sure, but sometimes things don't work out that way. We can take grim satisfaction in seeing the Left's "constitution shredders" celebrate a killing that was brought about by the sort of enhanced interrogations and secret prisons that pompous leftists spent years actively working against .
5. I thought this USA Today headline was ... peculiar
First of all, there's the unfortunate Obama/Osama parallel. Then there's the peculiarly dismissive tone. "Obama says" Osama is dead? Was Obama alone in taking this singular position? Did Bin Laden issue a denial? A simple "Death Of Bin Laden" headline would have been more appropriate.
6. We may be close to going through the looking glass in our relationships with many Muslim nations. Pakistan was harboring Bin Laden. Can there be any doubt about this? Some are already suggesting that there was never an al-Qaeda, but rather a series of front groups for the ISI and other Middle Eastern intelligence services.
7. What a peculiar life Bin Laden led. After a few years attacking US interests, and then inspiring the greatest ever act of terrorism on American soil, he spent a couple years on the run, gamely carrying on the Hassan i Sabbah "Man In The Mountains" role, before retiring to his Pakistani mansion/compound. What did he do all day? Raise pigeons? He certainly wasn't fomenting further terrorist activity.
8. As with the end of the Cold War, liberals are standing around taking credit for a result they largely resisted every step of the way.
9. Buried at sea????? In accordance with Islamic Law???? Did the Obamites have Islamic burial rites confused with a Viking funeral? This was the one fiasco in this affair. We should have at least displayed the body to (1) deflate the Osama Myth and (2) show proof of death. We've missed both chances.
10. Is this the end of the war of terror? Dunno, but it sure feels like something has come to an end.
