Obama’s Response To Attack Is Amazingly Quick
Jan 1, 2010 Political
The United States was attacked on Christmas Day in what turned out to be a failed attempt at blowing up an aircraft. The response from the Obama people was disjointed and insincere. Obama was informed of the attack a few hours after it happened and he responded three days later. Some folks have made a big deal about the time it took to respond but that is not as important as what was said when the response actually arrived. Obama contradicted his Homeland Defense Secretary and became increasingly irate at the accusations that he was weak. Regardless of how long Obama waited to respond the real problem was that his response looked more like damage control than national security.
George Bush did not respond until six days after the shoe bomber made his fatal attempt. I do not know if there were legal reasons (the shoe bomber is an American citizen and perhaps they could not make statements that would jeopardize the investigation) or if the White House Press Secretary said anything prior to Bush. When Bush finally addressed it I don’t recall it being about damage control. I just remember that I had to start taking my shoes off every time I went through airport security.
News for TSP, I am not taking my underwear off because of this incident…
Regardless of the time involved, Obama should have been more concerned with the incident and not worried about damage control and he should not have had to clean up the gaffes of his DHS Secretary. Obama and his people (including his media wing at the MSM) should have spent less time defending how long it took Obama to say something with childish comparisons to how long it took Bush and spent more time telling people how they would be kept safe and at the same time inconvenienced as little as possible during the heavy holiday travel period.
One thing that Obama and his people were quick about responding to were the attacks on Obama. Team Obama responded nearly instantaneously when Dick Cheney came out with his criticisms of Obama. Dick Cheney is not a threat to airline safety, terrorists with underpants bombs are. If it took three days to address the real threat it should have taken longer to address Cheney. It should have taken longer to address the other criticisms leveled at the Obama administration. I think Cheney was spot on but that does not mean he could not be ignored by the administration until after they addressed the threat.
By taking its time with addressing the threat but responding in near real time to criticisms the Obama team comes off as being in campaign mode and not in leadership mode. Being president is a tough job no matter who is in there and if it takes them a while to address a situation then when they do address it they should look like they know what is going on. Obama was hurt by the ineptitude of Napolitano. That made them look more inept and added fuel to the fire.
We have already figured out that Obama does not do anything regarding leading the country quickly. It has taken him days or months to come to decisions (except for the crisis spending bills) and while his supporters like to claim he is a deliberative person he does not appear as such when he is able to immediately respond to criticism.
It also did not help the cause for Obama to say; “We will not rest until we find all who were involved and hold them accountable” and then leave his press conference to play golf. I realize he is on vacation so it might have been prudent to maybe leave that “we will not rest” part out of the speech and save it for a time when he is not, you know, resting…
The left was quick to point out George Bush discussing the seriousness of the terrorism threat while playing golf but remain silent about Obama’s very similar situation.
Sources:
Washington Examiner
Swamp Politics
UPDATE: Excellent article by Charles Krauthammer.
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Tags: Bush, campaign mode, cheney, Obama, terror
Democrats And National Security
Dec 30, 2009 Political
The Democrats are quick to point out that 9/11 happened on Bush’s watch and therefore he is responsible for it. Fair enough though it is just as true that the policies of the Clinton Administration led to the attacks of that day. Bush was tagged with it but Clinton made it happen.
The failed terrorist attack of Christmas Day took place on Obama’s watch and he is responsible for it. Democrats believe that it is our belligerence that causes us to be attacked and that their methods of diplomacy are the correct ones. I think it is safe to put that myth to rest. Despite the Obama view that he will usher in a new world and that people will like us if we extend an open hand the attacks continue. The people who want to do us harm do not care much about the nice talk. They have a goal and that goal is to destroy us.
No external force can defeat us. Our defeat, if we suffer one, will come from forces within and those forces are manifested in the Obama Administration and the Democrat Congress. Their policies and their positions make us weaker and will get Americans killed.
David Horowitz has a piece out at FrontPageMag.com which is entitled; “Who Will Be Responsible for the American Dead?” He answers the title’s question as follows:
The answer to the question posed above is that liberals will be responsible when the next bomber actually succeeds in killing Americans. Liberals have fought the very idea that we are at war (and should use security measures appropriate in wartime) although our enemies have declared war on us. Liberals have fought to close the Guantanamo Bay holding center and to release its terrorists back onto the battlefield.
Liberals have fought the idea that we are at war. This is a true statement and is reflected by the replacement of the phrase “War on Terror” with the phrase “Overseas Contingency Operations” and “Terrorism” with “Man Made Disaster.” This is a mindset that will get people killed and is a mindset that demonstrates weakness. The Christmas Day bomber felt no love for America or Obama and his open hand. This person felt a hatred for us and everything we believe in and felt so strongly that he was willing to take his own life in order to murder a bunch of innocent people.
Dick Cheney says that Obama is pretending that this does not exist but that pretending will not make it go away. Politico reports these words from the former Vice President:
“As I’ve watched the events of the last few days it is clear once again that President Obama is trying to pretend we are not at war. He seems to think if he has a low key response to an attempt to blow up an airliner and kill hundreds of people, we won’t be at war. He seems to think if he gives terrorists the rights of Americans, lets them lawyer up and reads them their Miranda rights, we won’t be at war. He seems to think if we bring the mastermind of 9/11 to New York, give him a lawyer and trial in civilian court, we won’t be at war.
“He seems to think if he closes Guantanamo and releases the hard-core al Qaeda trained terrorists still there, we won’t be at war. He seems to think if he gets rid of the words, ‘war on terror,’ we won’t be at war. But we are at war and when President Obama pretends we aren’t, it makes us less safe. Why doesn’t he want to admit we’re at war? It doesn’t fit with the view of the world he brought with him to the Oval Office. It doesn’t fit with what seems to be the goal of his presidency – social transformation—the restructuring of American society. President Obama’s first object and his highest responsibility must be to defend us against an enemy that knows we are at war.”
This is a very astute observation by Mr. Cheney. He has Obama completely pegged and his assessment is spot on. Obama pretends that things do not exist because they do not fit into the view he has of the world. Obama is like a child who believes that if something is not seen (or in his case acknowledged) then it does not exist. The saying that what you can’t see can’t harm you is a dangerous one indeed. While Obama pretends that there are no enemies and that we are not at war we are being targeted by those who are at war with us.
Recently, Obama gave himself a B+ grade for his work so far. Toby Harnden of the Telegraph UK has a post up indicating that Obama gets an F for protecting Americans. Mr. Harnden states:
There is no more solemn duty for an American commander-in-chief than the martialling of “all elements of American power” – the phrase Obama himself used on Monday – to protect the people of the United States. In that key respect, Obama failed on Christmas Day, just as President George W. Bush failed on September 11th (though he succeeded in the seven years after that).
Yes, the buck stops in the Oval Office. Obama may have rather smugly given himself a “B+” for his 2008 performance but he gets an F for the events that led to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab boarding a Detroit-bound plane in Amsterdam with a PETN bomb sewn into his underpants. He said today that a “systemic failure has occurred”. Well, he’s in charge of that system.
Yes, Obama is in charge of the system that failed and he is in charge of securing this country. Unfortunately, while he pretends that all is well the wolves are at the door.
The sad truth is that the door leads to a house made of straw.
Related:
History News Network; SYSTEM WORKED; OBAMASPHERICS FAILED
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Tags: cheney, harnden, horowitz, national security, Obama, terror
Bald Faced Liars
Aug 25, 2009 Political
Yep, that’s the Resident and his little posse of second- rate hucksters that trail behind him, begging for scraps- all liars. How can they even talk with each other? Would you trust anyone who has lied as much as this administration? God knows I do not.
The Resident has lied about 1)- the “stimulus”, 2)- THE “TARP”, 3)-Cap & Tax, 4)-the deficit, 5)- healthcare, and 6)- now, the CIA “investigation”, in which he claimed to want to look ahead.
His lackey, Eric Holder, the attorney general, apparently has gone off of the plantation in his investigation of the CIA. This will have a chilling effect on our ability to gather intelligence, but it seems as if Holder doesn’t know what intelligence is, because he surely isn’t displaying any.
The Justice Department released a long-secret report Monday chronicling abuses inside the Central Intelligence Agency’s overseas prisons, showing how interrogators choked a prisoner repeatedly and threatened to kill another detainee’s children.
In response to the findings, Attorney General Eric H Holder Jr. chose John H. Durham, a veteran prosecutor from Connecticut who has been investigating the C.I.A.’s destruction of interrogation videotapes, to determine whether a full criminal investigation of the conduct of agency employees or contractors was warranted. The review will be the most politically explosive inquiry since Mr. Holder took over the Justice Department in February.
nytimes.com
Why would ANY real American go this route? Why destroy the intel capacity of the CIA at a time that we need to have ALL the facilities at peak performance? All because a couple of Al-Qaida scumbags got wet? Personally, I do not care how wet they got- indeed, I don’t care if they had their skin flayed off in long, slow strips- just so we got the intel.
The CIA knows how to get intel without flaying the skin off of these pigs, but now, even a little water is too much for the pantywaists at the Justice department. It is either that, or they are flat out traitors intentionally sabotaging our intelligence capacity- I know which choice I think these people are.
The attorney general said his decision to order an inquiry was based in part on the recommendation of the Justice Department’s ethics office, which called for a new review of several interrogation cases.
In what appeared to be a response to the Justice Department’s release, the C.I.A. later on Monday released previously secret agency reports from 2004 and 2005 that detailed intelligence scoops produced by the interrogation program.
One of the reports calls the program “a crucial pillar of U.S. counterterrorism efforts” and describes how interrogations helped unravel a network headed by an Indonesian terrorist known as Hambali. The other report details information elicited from Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, chief planner of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, saying it “dramatically expanded our universe of knowledge on Al Qaeda’s plots.”
Those reports, which former Vice President Dick Cheney had sought to have released earlier this year, do not refer to any specific interrogation methods and do not assess their effectiveness.
nytimes.com
It is not the job of the CIA to be gentle- it is the job of the CIA to obtain information, and there are times where more coercive techniques need to be used. These are also, I might remind people, enemies that cut off our soldier’s heads after our soldiers have been captured. If we make them a little moist in our quest for info, that should not concern any American who cares for our citizens and soldiers.
If you have no problem with our soldiers heads being cut off, perhaps you need to be waterboarded too, because no self- respecting American allows that without some reprisal.
As we can now see, Eric Holder is no self- respecting American, but a traitor bent on destroying the CIA and its intelligence capacity. He is not alone in this, however, since the Resident could tell Holder to cease, as he says he wanted to. The fact that he does not only reveals him to be Pontius Pilate in a suit, washing his hands while Holder crucifies the CIA.
In another session of questioning, the report said, one C.I.A. interrogator told investigators that Mr. Mohammed was told that if there was another attack on American soil, the C.I.A. would “kill your children.” Mr. Mohammed’s young sons were in the custody of Pakistani and American authorities at the time.
Among a litany of C.I.A. tactics, the report describes the “hard takedown,” when a detainee was grabbed and thrown to the floor before being moved to a sleep-deprivation cell. It details baths given to Mr. Nashiri, saying he was sometimes scrubbed with “the kind of brush one uses in a bath to remove stubborn dirt” to induce pain. In July 2002, the report says, a C.I.A. interrogator grabbed a detainee’s neck to restrict the prisoner’s carotid artery until he began to faint. Another officer then “shook the detainee to wake him,” and the “pressure point” technique was repeated twice more.
Interrogators also staged a mock execution in 2002 to intimidate a detainee. C.I.A. officers began screaming outside the room where he was being interrogated. When leaving the room, he “passed a guard who was dressed as a hooded detainee, lying motionless on the ground, and made to appear as if he had been shot to death.”
In 2003, C.I.A. officers began using another technique — called “water dousing” — that involved laying a detainee on a plastic sheet and pouring water over him for 10 to 15 minutes.
According to the report, an interrogator believed this was an effective technique, and sent a cable back to C.I.A. headquarters requesting guidelines.
A return cable explained that a detainee “must be placed on a towel or sheet, may not be placed naked on the bare cement floor, and the air temperature must exceed 65 degrees if the detainee will not be dried immediately.”
nytimes.com
Now, in all of these techniques, not one of them involved separation of one’s head from one’s body– it is not the job of the CIA to be gentle, and I do not want to place undue restrictions on them. Would I like to endure this treatment? Oh hell no- but then, I am not the one who is trying to wage terrorism against soldiers of the United States, or wanting to commit terror attacks in the US against innocent men, women, and children. These people do, and they should not be treated gently- they should be ground down until we have gotten every bit of information we can, and they are nothing but empty, blubbering husks of flesh that we can safely discard.
Then we can take them back to their country of origin and dump them into the kind and gentle hands of others who might like to speak with them also.
Now that is justice.
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Tags: cowards, eric holder, intelligence, terror, traitors, waterboarding
Obama Once Again Takes Lead From Bush
Jul 9, 2009 Political
Remember during the campaign when Obama said that Bush did everything wrong in the war on terror. We should not be in Iraq, Gitmo should be closed and we should not be holding the people for no reason. That is when Barry was the candidate and had to appeal to the anti war left in order to be different from the other Democrats who voted for the war. Hillary had to be hawkish in order to show a woman could be tough. Obama, the metrosexual, showed he was the learned one on such matters.
This continued in the general election campaign when he linked McCain to Bush and said that McCain would just give us more of the same. Obama and his minions even took a McCain statement out of context and convinced people that McCain said it would be OK to be in the war for 100 years (a blatant lie).
Since being elected Obama has taken many of the same positions as Bush with regard to the war. He is now employing a surge in Afghanistan (where are the MSM with the body counts and Code Pink burning effigies), he has adjusted his time line and now he is even taking the Bush stance on prisoners. He wants to close Gitmo but he thinks it will be OK to keep people, even those found not guilty, if they are deemed to be a threat to us:
The Obama administration said Tuesday it could continue to imprison non-U.S. citizens indefinitely even if they have been acquitted of terrorism charges by a U.S. military commission.
Jeh Johnson, the Defense Department’s chief lawyer, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that releasing a detainee who has been tried and found not guilty was a policy decision that officials would make based on their estimate of whether the prisoner posed a future threat.
Like the Bush administration, the Obama administration argues that the legal basis for indefinite detention of aliens it considers dangerous is separate from war-crimes prosecutions. Officials say that the laws of war allow indefinite detention to prevent aliens from committing warlike acts in future, while prosecution by military commission aims to punish them for war crimes committed in the past. WSJ
All those people who voted for Obama and said it would be great to have anyone but Bush in office now have someone who is closely following Bush with regard to the war on terror.
Obama found out fast that it is different when you are looking from the inside.
His supporters who thought he was going to end all of this must be delusional. I, on the other hand, predicted this would happen. Obama will say or be anything to get into office.
Funny thing is Obama said McCain would be George Bush’s third term. Looks like Obama is now holding Bush’s third term.
Maybe we will get lucky and all his supporters will stroke out over this war mongering hero they voted for.
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What A Difference A Messiah Makes
Jun 27, 2009 Political, Terrorism
When George Bush was president he had the terrorists who were caught on the battlefield held at various prisons and they were supposed to be tried under military commissions. Some were not, others were just held without being charged and others were deemed not to be a threat but no country would take them including the ones from which they came. Some said they could not go back or they would be executed (and people complain about how our government treats them).
The liberal left and their sock puppets at the ACLU were beside themselves. How dare Bush hold these people indefinitely without a trial or charges. We picked them up on a battlefield so let’s call them prisoners of war. We can hold them for a long time like until the war is over. The left did not like that and I can sympathize. This is not like a normal war where our enemy wears uniforms and represent a country. The terrorists are cowards who sneak around and fight for the cause regardless of what country they are from or which one they are in. But is it our fault no one will take them? Is it our fault that they were caught on a battlefield? If you don’t want to get caught don’t be on the battlefield.
Barack Obama said he would close Gitmo by January 2010 but he is finding it difficult to get rid of the detainees. He is learning that campaign rhetoric is one thing but when you actually have the information in front of you that things are a lot different. However, Obama is about to take care of this. The administration is carefully crafting an Executive Order allowing the indefinite imprisonment of some Gitmo detainees who are deemed to dangerous to send to trial or to release.
What was that? Obama is going to sign an Executive Order allowing the same thing that Bush did. Well where is the outrage by the left? The ACLU is up in arms but where are the morons at Kos? Where are the HuffPo blowhards? Where are the Code Pink twits? Where are all these groups that had epileptic seizures over this issue?
Seems that there is not much opposition when the messiah decides to do this. However, it is not final and the story hit just before the weekend, a classic way to avoid scrutiny and it was released at a time the news is dominated by the death of pop culture idol Michael Jackson.
Let’s see how this plays out. Will the Democrats oppose this? Will they lose their minds or will they embrace it? Will they do like that moron Olberman who praises Obama for things that Bush did and which earned the scorn of the dork at PMSNBC?
I think we should hold them as long as we need to. If they can be released we need to keep looking for places that will take them (the USA is not an option) just like Bush did. If we have people who can be tried then we should have a trial and if they win they get to go home, not stay here.
We also need to tell our troops that capturing these people on the battlefield is not an option. Shoot to kill them all and we will not have to worry about this.
However, the issue here is Obama and his endorsement of the policies of George Bush and the relatively little notice it has gotten. If Obama keeps endorsing the tactics of Bush then Bush’s place in history will be a good one that Democrats cannot debate (it will be good regardless).
Where is that fickle left? I want to see the outrage from the same groups that went after Bush. I want to see them have some guts and stand up for what they say they believe in.
Fat chance. They voted for this piker and they will do everything to make sure he is a “success.”
Source:
Yahoo News
Salon (one lefty loon who is opposed)
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Tags: detainees, hypocrisy, indefinite hold, michael jackson, no trial, Obama, terror