…Cuomo apparently didn’t know the attorney general of the United States had the authority to decide whether charges should be filed, or he was being supremely disingenuous. “[W]hat your friend did is not just by the book. He took it on himself to decide this rule. He didn’t have to do that,” he bitterly declared.
Continuing his crusade against Attorney General William Barr, Cuomo wrongly stated that the special counsel was “separate from the DOJ” and insisted Congress had the power to indict.
Mukasey had to undo the damage Cuomo was doing to his audience and called his host out for misleading people:
MUKASEY:Of course he had to do it.
CUOMO: Why?
MUKASEY:Who was going to decide if we were going to indict or not?
CUOMO:Congress, as a political matter. Leave it to them.
MUKASEY: They decide whether to impeach or not. They don’t decide–
CUOMO:And Mike, you’re skipping the big point, which you taught me about very early on.
MUKASEY: That is the big point.
CUOMO: They can’t indict him. That is the opinion from the OLC so there’s nothing to decide on that level. It’s purely political. It always would be.
MUKASEY: Congress doesn’t indict. Congress can impeach.
CUOMO:I’m using it as just a metaphor here.
MUKASEY:But you’re misleading a lot of people.
After Mukasey had to explain all the other ways Special Counsel Robert Mueller could have taken action against the President if he had the goods, Cuomo put on his rhetorical tin foil hat and accused Barr of being part of a cover-up:
CUOMO:AD Barr didn’t need to do it for that reason. He needed to do it to protect the President. That’s why he did it.
MUKASEY: Protect the President from what? When he can’t be indicted?
CUOMO:From criticism in the open question and giving Congress that kind of momentum. That’s why he did it.
MUKASEY: Oh, come on.
CUOMO:That’s why he did it. That’s why he wrote the letter the way he did. That’s why he gave the press conference the way he did. That’s why he misled us to what the report would look like the way he did…..
Below is an interview of Michael Rubin by Hugh Hewitt. Some frank discussion about the Iran deal occurs by a historian on such negotiations. I believe we have our own Chamberlain moment… brought to you by the kind people on the American Left.
Michael Rubin's Input
…It appears Iran has not made any deal that would curtail its nuclear ambition. As described, the framework upon which U.S. and Iranian negotiators appear to agree fails to resolve those issues of most concern to regional states. Obama has unilaterally waived Security Council resolutions demanding a complete enrichment cessation. There may be some enrichment suspension at key sites but, as Rouhani bragged in 2009, he used an early suspension to install new and better centrifuges. And while Iran might convert some more highly enriched uranium to less usable fuel rods, it has backtracked its own earlier proposals to ship fissile material abroad.
Of even more strategic concern, the deal does not address Arak. On Thursday, a German court sentenced four businessmen who sold components to Iran for that plutonium-producing plant. When Arak becomes operational within a year, it can produce enough plutonium for two bombs per year. Nor has Iran made any concession on Parchin, where Iran conducted weapons research. In short, Kerry can arrive back from Geneva and declare triumphantly, “I have in my hand a paper signed by Mohammad Javad Zarif,” but the agreement does not stop Iran from assembling the material or know-how needed to make a bomb. There is no truth and reconciliation component to the deal: Iran needs not come clean on its previous activities. If the regime had truly has a change of heart, such transparency should not be an issue.
Diplomats may celebrate a deal, but a bad deal can be worse than no deal. Sometimes, the hangover is not worth the celebration.
Besides Debka calling these secret meetings to the public’s attention back in 2012, they also note some glaring loop-holes in the deal:
Debkafile’s intelligence and military sources list seven of the most glaring loopholes in the first-step accord:
1. Parchin: This long-suspected facility remains out of UN oversight. President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry boasted after the signing that daily IAEA inspections will take place at Fordo and Natanz. However, cameras are already fixed at both those facilities without an agreement, whereas Tehran’s consistent denial of IAEA access to Parchin is not addressed.
2. Secret nuclear locations: Under the heading “Possible Military Dimensions,” the last IAEA report noted: “Since 2002, the Agency has become increasingly concerned about the possible existence in Iran of undisclosed nuclear related organizations, including activities related to the development of a payload for a missile.”
The watchdog has received information indicating activities “relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device.” This was further corroborated by new information obtained since November 2011.
Tehran’s non-cooperation for investigating these findings is not mentioned in the Geneva interim accord, nor was it addressed in the negotiations.
3. Dirty bombs: Iran doesn’t need a full-scale nuclear bomb or missile warhead for attacking Israel. For decades, Tehran has been working on perfecting hundreds of dirty bombs as part of its nuclear program, by adding plutonium or enriched uranium to conventional bombs. These weapons are easy to make and easy to use. In the hands of Hizballah or other Shiite terrorist organizations in Syria or Iraq, for instance, they could be used to strike Israel without leaving a trail to Tehran.
This peril too was ignored by the six powers in Geneva.
4. Rollback. While President Obama has presented the deal as a first step toward freezing or even rolling back “key aspects” of Iran’s nuclear program. The fact remains that, so long as Iran is permitted to enrich uranium, even though this is restricted to a low 5 percent grade, it is free to produce as much fissile material as it wants, whenever it wants. This seems more like roll forward than roll back.
5. Enrichment. Obama and Kerry said the new deal does not recognize Iran’s right to enrich uranium. They were contradicted by the Iranian president and senior negotiator as well as Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. So what is the truth? If Iran won recognition for this right, it blows the bottom out of the Non-Proliferating Treaty because, in no time, all the signatories may start enriching uranium with permission from the big powers. Neither is there any point in making Iran join the NPT’s Additional Protocol for snap inspections.
6. Centrifuges. Iran has undertaken not to add new centrifuges to its enrichment facilities, according to President Obama, but there is nothing to stop it from keeping up their production. In the six-month interregnum for negotiating a comprehensive nuclear deal, Tehran wins time to turn out enough centrifuges to substantially expand its production of enriched uranium.
7. A leap to breakout: Far from being static or in freeze, as the Americans claim, Iran is free to step up centrifuge production and boost its stock of 3.5 percent enriched uranium, thereby accumulating enough material to enhance its capacity for producing enough weapons-grade uranium to break through to a nuclear bomb rapidly enough to defy detection by the IAEA or Western intelligence until it is too late.
The first loophole appeared hours after the new accord was signed:
Iran’s lead negotiator, Deputy Foreign Minister Seyed Abbas Araghchi, announced that his country’s enrichment rights had been recognized in the negotiations, after which Iranian President Hassan Rouhani praised the supreme leader’s guidelines for achieving world power recognition of Tehran’s “nuclear rights.”
However, Secretary of State John Kerry in his first appearance after the signing denied this concession had been made. He said: “The first step, let me be clear, does not say that Iran has a right to enrich uranium.”
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov lined up solidly behind the Iranian version of the accord, confirming world recognition had been extended for Iran’s right to peaceful nuclear energy, including the right for enrichment.
When McCain ran for office, I heard the Left say he was senile and too old to make points and decisions. Now, the Left is using his words as authoritative, to which I could merely respond that I do not accept the words of a senile old man. But I won’t, hence, this post.
In the following video and linked Op-Ed by Sen. John McCain, you will see some personal thoughts from John McCain as well as misstatements of what and how we interrogate and how he was interrogated.
Okay, firstly, there is a huge difference between what McCain went through and what these CIA guys did. In McCain’s case, they were straight torturing hi to get his to sign a confession and get simple operational info from him. This is not the case in regards to the enhanced interrogations, three of which included water-boarding. A great example is the wealth of information just found at Osama’s compound. The U.S. intelligence apparatus is going to digest, separate, collate this info which includes names, pseudo-names, places, operations, phone numbers, addresses, and the like. When they catch someone of interest, they will sleep deprive them, give false and misleading promises info to trip up said persons stated outline because the info taken from a previous source shows this persons thesis to be a lie.Here is what McCain thinks it is:
I know from personal experience that the abuse of prisoners sometimes produces good intelligence but often produces bad intelligence because under torture a person will say anything he thinks his captors want to hear — true or false — if he believes it will relieve his suffering. Often, information provided to stop the torture is deliberately misleading. (Post Opinions)
They [the CIA interrogators in this case] will bring to the table an aspect they wish to get information on from this cache of info to get reactions, to get admissions, etc. Admissions to ALREADY existing details and knowledge (in whole or part) about the truth of the matter. Not signing an admission for the North Vietnamese Communists to use as propaganda and allow the Left in that day to sympathize with these brutal killers and Marxist animals:
The aim of the torture was usually not acquiring military information;[7] rather, it was to break the will of the prisoners, both individually and as a group.[7][14] The goal of the North Vietnamese was to get written or recorded statements from the prisoners that criticized U.S. conduct of the war and praised how the North Vietnamese treated them.[7] Such POW statements would be viewed as a propaganda victory in the battle to sway world and U.S. domestic opinion against the U.S. war effort.[7][10] In the end, North Vietnamese torture was sufficiently brutal and prolonged that virtually every American POW so subjected made a statement of some kind at some time.[15] (WIKI)
So McCain’s speech and op-ed really didn’t deal with this difference. And as much as McCain is a hero, he is really preferring non-sequiturs which the Left love and tun with. in other words, I was brutally tortured [to sign a statement], ergo, all interrogations are illegal. You see, McCain views these interrogations as illegal. Most of the people involved in this debate on my side of the aisle do not. Not to mention that this water-boarding technique used is very different from even what the Japanese did in WWII, which caused many deaths. In this interrogative technique, the person can be — within minutes — standing next to their interrogators (not to mention a medical team on call outside the door). In fact, KSM was water-boarded 183 times! He didn’t die. What McCain calls “enhanced interrogation” in Vietnam, torture, did kill many. BIG DIFFERENCE. One that Dennis Miller in Novemeber of 2006 speaks to:
So McCain is really off in this moral equivalency. Not to mention it worked in WWII, for the scholar:
A slight air of unreality has permeated the debate over “enhanced interrogation techniques” in the war against terror, with historians embarrassedly studying their toecaps over the issue. For the truth is that there has not been a war in history in which torture has not been employed in some form or another, and sometimes to excellent effect. When troops need information about enemy capabilities and intentions—and they usually need it fast—moral and ethical conventions (especially the one signed in Geneva in 1929) have repeatedly been ignored in the bid to save lives.
In the conflict generally regarded today as the most ethical in history, World War II, enhanced interrogation techniques were regularly used by the Allies, and senior politicians knew it perfectly well, just as we now discover that Nancy Pelosi did in the early stages of the war against terror. The very success of the D-Day landings themselves can largely be put down to the enhanced interrogation techniques that were visited upon several of the 19 Nazi agents who were infiltrated into Great Britain and “turned” by the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) between 1939 and 1945. Operation Fortitude—the deception plan that fooled the Germans into stationing 450,000 Wehrmacht troops 130 miles north of the Normandy beaches—entirely depended upon German intelligence (the Abwehr) believing that the real attack was going to take place at the Pas de Calais instead. The reason that Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the head of the Abwehr, was utterly convinced of this, was because every single one of his 19 agents, who he did not know had been turned, told him so.
If anyone believes that SIS persuaded each of these 19 hard-bitten Nazi spies to fall in with Operation Fortitude by merely offering them tea, biscuits, and lectures in democracy, they’re being profoundly naïve. An SIS secret house located in Ham Common near Richmond on the outskirts of London was the location where the will of those agents was broken, using advanced interrogation techniques that reportedly started with sleep deprivation but went on to gross mental and physical abuse. The result? Many thousands of Allied servicemens’ lives were saved because the German 15th Army stayed well away from beaches such as Omaha, Utah, and Sword. And another 100,000 others were stationed in Norway for another attack that never came.
The wartime SIS being what it was, full firsthand details of the enhanced interrogation techniques have not emerged, either from the British or the German side since the war. In a country where the very existence of the wartime decryption operation known as Ultra was successfully kept secret until 1971, it was never likely that former SIS officers would have revealed precisely how the Abwehr agents were turned, but the talk and gossip in the intelligence community is another matter. Ham Common undoubtedly saw gross violations of the Geneva Conventions, as every means was used—fair and foul—to ensure the safety of Great Britain. Today Fortitude is generally considered to be the most successful strategic deception operation in the history of warfare.
Elsewhere, one only has to read George MacDonald Fraser’s excellent autobiography, Quartered Safe Out Here, with its description of the ill treatment of Japanese POWs by Indian soldiers of the 17th Division, to recognize that not all torture was committed by the Axis in WWII.
Did Winston Churchill know what was going on in the cellar-dungeons of the house in Ham? Of course he did, but like Nancy Pelosi and other politicians he understandably preferred not to dwell on this less auspicious side of the defense of freedom. As I show in my recently published book, Masters and Commanders—reviewed here yesterday by Michael Korda—Churchill always advocated the toughest option in any issue that came before his War Cabinet, be it over the bombing of German cities, allowing Mahatma Gandhi to die in his hunger strike, retaliating over the destruction of the Czech village of Lidice, and so on. The idea that he would have balked on ethical grounds over the breaking and turning of Abwehr agents—knowing how vitally necessary that was for the liberation of Europe—is ludicrous.
So, when we wring our hands about the waterboarding that took place at the hands of the CIA and their proxies in secret locations around the world, let us not pretend that such techniques are in any way historically exceptional, for in fact they constitute the norm. The only surprising thing is the extent of the information that we have been given about such unpleasant but ultimately necessary practices. Sometimes the defense of liberty requires making some pretty unpalatable decisions, but it was ever thus.
Now, onto the rebuttal by a person brought up by name via McCain:
In short, it was not torture or cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of detainees that got us the major leads that ultimately enabled our intelligence community to find Osama bin Laden. I hope former Attorney General Mukasey will correct his misstatement.
Senator McCain described as “false” my statement that Khalid Sheik Mohammed broke under harsh interrogation that included waterboarding, and disclosed a torrent of information that included the nickname of Osama bin Laden’s courier. He strongly implied in the remainder of his column in the Washington Post that this harsh interrogation was not only useless but also illegal. He is simply incorrect on all three counts.
KSM disclosed the nickname – al Kuwaiti – along with a wealth of other information, some of which was used to stop terror plots then in progress. He did so after refusing to answer questions and, when asked if further plots were afoot, said that his interrogators would eventually find out. Another detainee, captured in Iraq, disclosed that al Kuwaiti was a trusted operative of KSM’s successor, abu Faraj al-Libbi. When al-Libbi went so far as to deny even knowing the man, his importance became obvious.
Both former CIA Director Michael Hayden and former Director of National Intelligence Admiral Michael McConnell have acknowledged repeatedly that up to 2006, many of the valuable leads pursued by the intelligence community came from the three prisoners who were subjected to harsh techniques that included waterboarding in order to secure their cooperation.
So far as the waterboarding technique used by CIA operators, as outlined in the memoranda released by the Department of Justice, it was entirely legal at the time, which is to say before the passage of later statutes in 2005 and 2006, by which time it was no longer in use and under which it has not been evaluated.
In other words, the harsh interrogation techniques were both effective and lawful.
So again, just as with Rumsfeld, the Democratic Left has taken a sound bite, not parsed through the “it does not follow” portions of it, misapplied it, and morally equated it to fit their argument. This time this is partly McCain’s fault as well. Another fail if you ask me. A fail how, the Left continues to misread what is being said by people like myself. Bil Whittle whittles this down for the reader:
From video description:
This is a smaller portion of this entire presentation found on Bill Whittles FIREWALL posting: http://youtu.be/MiYk8bxO7zQ
