Obama has changed the United States position on this matter since the Arab nations attacked Israel [again] in 67′. Between Obama’s outreach to the neo-Nazi Islamist group, The Muslim Brotherhood, and this, one wonders just how long we have left?
President Barack Obama is endorsing the Palestinians’ demand for their future state to be based on the borders that existed before the 1967 Middle East war, in a move that will likely infuriate Israel. Israel says the borders of a Palestinian state have to be determined through negotiations.
In a speech outlining U.S. policy in the Middle East and North Africa, Obama on Thursday sided with the Palestinians’ opening position a day ahead of a visit to Washington by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu is vehemently opposed to referring to the 1967 borders.
Until Thursday, the U.S. position had been that the Palestinian goal of a state based on the 1967 borders, with agreed land swaps, should be reconciled with Israel’s desire for a secure Jewish state through negotiations.
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
The Sage lays down the law! I have to admit, I am changing the way I think and speak of Obama’s choice to kill Osama. Great portion from his show! Can’t recommend it enough, or becoming an Eldorado: For more clear thinking like this from Larry Elder… I invite you to become an Eldorado: larryelder.com/
Michael Medved has a way of putting into perspective good news. This is often overlooked in the the political skirmishes that often make up the political junkies world — good news that is. Medved also takes disagreeing calls from the listeners as to what we won/lost in this most recent budget battle. These calls from concerned conservative allow for deeper understanding as to what we won in this first step to dealing with our fiscal crisis. And it is a crisis.
The following is from the guest filler to the Michael Medved Show from the afternoon before the averted shutdown who took the reigns of the show due to Medved running late because of travel delays. He made a point with a caller that was very, very forceful:
While Republicans wanted to cut more spending in Saturday’s early morning compromise to keep the government open, they think they got the better of the deal.
Here’s why: HR1 was originally to seek spending cuts of $32 billion until Tea Party conservatives insisted on more than $ 60 billion. House Speaker John Boehner won more cuts than he originally sought and got the Senate to agree to votes to defund the health care reform law and groups like the nation’s largest abortion provider Planned Parenthood – once votes Senate Majority leader Harry Reid said he’d never allow to come to the floor.Back on February 3, Reid called $32 billion in cuts “extreme” and “draconian.”
At a news conference New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., agreed, “I happen to think some of their cuts are extreme and go overboard. But every week they keep upping the ante and proposing extreme cuts.”
Over the next decade the cuts are expected to save hundreds of billions of dollars.
The deal mandates a host of studies and audits of Obama administration policies. It also blocks additional funds for the IRS sought by the Obama administration and bans federal funding of abortion in Washington, D.C.
The history of offers on this bill goes something like this. Democrats first offered no cuts, then $4 billion, then $6.5 billion, then $33 billion, then settled at $38.5 billion.
Boehner made numerous adjustments to his offer in recent days too, but started at $32 billion, then with a Tea Party push went to $62 billion, then dropped to $40 billion, then $38.5 billion.
Democrats claimed they met Republicans halfway after the $10 billion in cuts that already passed this year were approved. They settled late Friday night at three and a half times more.
Boehner came in $8.5 billion higher than the halfway point between his high offer of $61 billion in cuts and the Democrats opening bid of zero cuts.
It was not a totally lopsided bargain. Dems have some silver linings. There were no votes on defunding the EPA or PBS and NPR. Democrats fought for and won a $2 billion cut from the Department of Defense, knocking the military appropriation for the rest of the year down to $513 billion.
But the GOP had to be able to see this as a win in the end, because it is puny compared to what they want to do next.
But the resolution is a non-binding roadmap for the committees to use as they approve tax and spending bills for next year, the resolution will never be signed into law by the president.
The next battle with consequences begins in a matter of two short weeks when the accumulated U.S. debt will be nearing it’s $14 trillion legal limit. So Congress will have to vote to raise the ceiling so Uncle Sam can borrow still more money.
The administration has said it will need to be raised between April 15 and May 31 or the U.S. could default and create a new fiscal crisis of unknowable magnitude. Fiscal hawks plan to demand strict, enforceable spending caps, triggers for across the board cuts, and austerity measures in exchange for raising the debt limit.
Samantha Power is the architect of Obama’s Libyan “war” policy. Which is at odds with her previous views considering she is a huge fan of Noam Chomsky, who talks incessantly about America’s hegemonic attitude towards the world. In a review of one of Chomsky’s books, Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance (The American Empire Project), where she states that,
With the United States increasingly suspect around the world — a recent Gallup poll found that 55 percent of citizens in Britain thought the United States ”posed a threat to peace,” while a June BBC survey found that 60 percent of Indonesians, 71 percent of Jordanians and even 25 percent of Canadians viewed the United States as a greater threat than Al Qaeda…. ‘Hegemony or Survival” is a raging and often meandering assault on United States foreign policy and the elites who shape it. Drawing upon case after historical case of violent meddling (Iran, Cuba, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Kosovo, etc.), Chomsky argues that the Bush administration’s war on terrorism builds upon a long tradition of foreign interventions carried out in the name of ”liberation” or ”counterterror,” of special interests run amok and of disdain for international institutions that dare to challenge American hegemony.
It is interesting that Chomsky and other leftists (like Samantha) do not want the U.S. to be involved in world affairs for natyional security reasons like terror or energy, rather — as Stanley Kurtz explains — these leftists expect to dabble in world affairs for the following reason:
Superficially, Power’s chief concern is to put a stop to genocide and “crimes against humanity.” More deeply, her goal is to use our shared horror at the worst that human beings can do in order to institute an ever-broadening regime of redistributive transnational governance.
Liberal foreign-policy expert Steve Clemons actually calls Power “the primary architect” of our Libyan intervention. The New York Times has gone so far as to characterize our humanitarian action as “something of a personal triumph” for Power.
How can these elitists say one thing and then change their tune in just a couple of years. It seems that the major difference between Republicans and Democrats in their foreign policy is that Republicans act militarily and as a leader in regards to national security (Constitutional). Democrats seem to act only with humanitarian offenses happen while giving away command and control to other nations and bodies (not Constitutional). In regards to this humanitarian intervention, she says that we must “must forswear up front . . . commercial or strategic interests in the region.” While we do not get much oil from Libya, our coalition does, which leads Kurtz to point out that:
Arguments that Power developed to support past interventions are proving a poor fit for our Libyan operation. She dismissed claims that the Rwandan genocide was merely a case of “civil war” or “tribal violence.” Now her critics argue that Libya is not a Rwanda-style genocide, and that Power’s eagerness for a humanitarian showcase has led us to intervene in what really is a tribal civil war.
And what of her stringent conditions? In practice, she seems to have stretched her own standards of “large-scale crimes against humanity” to produce a specimen case, in an effort to entrench her favored doctrines in international law. Who knows if more people will now be casualties in the extended civil war enabled by our intervention than would have been killed in Benghazi last month? Power worried just after 9/11 that an America soon to be militarily overstretched might give up on humanitarian interventions. Now she has helped to entangle us in an expensive and open-ended adventure at a time when we truly are at our limits — and at a time when dangers continue to spread in countries far more strategically significant than Libya.
And why should we be scared to death of Powers?
A long conversation with Power in 2003 convinced 1960s revolutionary Tom Hayden that she was a fellow-traveler of sorts, even if Power was not as systematically suspicious of American military force as a true Sixties-vintage radical would be. In Hayden’s assessment, Power’s originality was “to see war as an instrument to achieving her liberal, even radical, values.” Hayden was right. The important thing about Power is not that she favors humanitarian intervention, but that she seeks to use such military actions to transform America by undoing its sovereignty and immobilizing it, Gulliver-style, in an unfriendly international system.
Power’s aforementioned second book, Chasing the Flame, celebrates the life of a United Nations diplomat, Sergio Vieira de Mello, who died in a terrorist attack in Iraq in 2003. Vieira de Mello was a Sixties radical of international scope. Hailing from Brazil, he became a committed Marxist while studying at the Sorbonne. He was among the violent protesters arrested during the student uprising in Paris in 1968. His first published work was a defense of his actions.
Vieira de Mello went from student radicalism straight to a job with the U.N. in 1969, and brought his intense anti-Americanism and anti-capitalism with him. Later he became a bitter critic of Israel. A United Nations “patriot,” he carried around a well-worn copy of the U.N. Charter the way an American senator or Supreme Court justice might take a copy of the U.S. Constitution wherever he went. Vieira de Mello’s colleagues used to say that his blood ran U.N. blue. As the U.N.’s most charismatic and effective diplomat (said to be “a cross between James Bond and Bobby Kennedy”), Vieira de Mello is the hero around whom Power attempts to build a following for her ideals of global governance.
Power explains that Vieira de Mello never really surrendered his Sixties ideals, even as he transformed himself from a passionate ideologue into a “ruthless pragmatist.” The young America-hating Vieira de Mello grew into a mature diplomat who could charm Pres. George W. Bush, even while lecturing the commander-in-chief on the follies of Guantanamo Bay. In other words, Vieira de Mello learned to manage his public persona, appealing to American leaders with arguments (allegedly) based on American national interest.
This is clearly Power’s ideal for herself. In fact, she tells us in her acknowledgments that the point of the book is also “the point of my career.” Power even cites the uncanny resemblance between Vieira de Mello and Obama. Of course, Obama’s Alinskyite training stressed the need for community organizers to advance their quietly held leftist ideological goals through “pragmatic” appeals to the public’s “self-interest.” (For more on that, see my study of Obama.)
