President Bush vetoed an intelligence authorization bill sent to him by Congress today, and during his weekly radio address to the nation he explained why:
The bill Congress sent me would take away one of the most valuable tools in the War on Terror — the CIA program to detain and question key terrorist leaders and operatives. This program has produced critical intelligence that has helped us prevent a number of attacks.
The program helped us stop a plot to strike a U.S. Marine camp in Djibouti, a planned attack on the U.S. consulate in Karachi, a plot to hijack a passenger plane and fly it into Library Tower in Los Angeles and a plot to crash passenger planes into Heathrow Airport or buildings in downtown London. And it has helped us understand Al Qaeda’s structure and financing and communications and logistics.
Were it not for this program, our intelligence community believes that Al Qaeda and its allies would have succeeded in launching another attack against the American homeland.
The main reason this program has been effective is that it allows the CIA to use specialized interrogation procedures to question a small number of the most dangerous terrorists under careful supervision.
The bill Congress sent me would deprive the CIA of the authority to use these safe and lawful techniques. Instead, it would restrict the CIA’s range of acceptable interrogation methods to those provided in the Army Field Manual.
Think about it: The Democrats in Congress are perfectly fine with terrorists flying planes into buildings, just as long as the CIA didn’t use harsh interrogation techniques in an attempt to stop them. Do you really think that these people have the safety of the American people as their first priority?
Some Democrats went on the record with their thoughts on Bush’s veto:
This president had the chance to end the torture debate for good, yet he chose instead to leave the door open to use torture in the future,” said Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the nation’s ability to lead the world depends on its morality, not military might. “We will begin to reassert that moral authority by attempting to override the president’s veto next week,” said Pelosi, D-Calif.
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Sen. Jay Rockefeller, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said he had heard nothing to suggest that the CIA, through enhanced interrogation methods, had obtained information to thwart a terrorist attack. “On the other hand, I do know that coercive interrogations can lead detainees to provide false information in order to make the interrogation stop,” said Rockefeller, D-W.Va.
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“The president’s refusal to sign this crucial legislation into law will undermine counterterrorism efforts globally and delay efforts to rebuild U.S. credibility on human rights,” said Elisa Massimino, Washington director for Human Rights First.
Do you notice anything missing from the above statements? Not one of these Democrats said anything about the safety of the United States or it’s citizens. They mention “our credibility” with other nations. Rockefeller, without, of course, citing any sources, openly calls Bush a liar when he says that these techniques have not provided any information which proved to be useful. In typical Democrat fashion, instead of addressing a policy issue the Senator instead uses the issue to make a personal attack on the President. Does that sound like someone who cares about your safety? No, it doesn’t. What it sounds like is just another liberal whose hatred of George Bush has so infected his thought process that everything he says or does must make the President look bad. BSD at it’s worst.
If the worst happens this November and a Democrat is elected, the one change you can bet money will happen is this: The War on Terror will be lost by a bunch of liberal buffoons who are more interested in their own political power and what other countries think of us than they are about the safety of this country and it’s citizens. When they’re finished stripping the military of the funds needed to keep them equipped and ready to fight, and instead using that money to fund more and more entitlement programs, the country will suffer another terrorist attack of the magnitude of 9/11 or bigger.
But hey, that’s OK, right? At least we will not have mistreated any terrorists trying to find anything out. Remember, according to the Democrats, that is what is most important.
March 10th, 2008 at 1:27 pm
Come on, Nick, get a grip.
How can we have a serious political discussion if you are going to throw out outrageous, offensive and insulting garbage such as this:
The Democrats in Congress are perfectly fine with terrorists flying planes into buildings…
If that is truly what you believe, then there is not much more I can say. You’ve jumped head first into the Kool-Aid tank.
But I would urge you to check out the latest edition of Washington Monthly if you have any interest whatsoever in looking at the other side of this issue.
I am NOT being “nice to the terrorists” by refusing to stoop to their level and sanctioning torture. We do not torture people, regardless of who they are, because WE are better than that. It is not about who THEY are, it is about who WE are.
March 10th, 2008 at 4:17 pm
Refusing to do what is necessary to protect your citizens and your country against an enemy who will stop at nothing to kill you is not only stupid, it’s insane. While its nice to have principles and be able to tell others that “we’re better than them because we won’t do that,” it’s going to be hard to say that if we’re dead.
This is an enemy who beheads children in the middle of a marketplace to make a point. This is an enemy who uses pregnant women as suicide bombers. This is an enemy who is known to kill women for no other reason then because she went outside without a male family member in attendance. In short, we’re not talking about rational, sane people. We’re not talking about people with whom you can reason or debate or persuade. In fact, we’re not talking about people. We’re talking about savages who are consumed with blood lust, bent on converting the world to Islam.
In order to defeat this enemy, we will have to eliminate them. In order to eliminate them, we will need to wring every piece of information we can out of the ones we capture. Frankly, if some terrorist has to suffer so that we can get usable information or actionable intelligence from him, I couldn’t care less. They’ve already done things such as drag the dead bodies of our soldiers through the streets; do you really think if we are nice to them they’ll just one day turn a new leaf and start telling us everything we want to know? Are you that naive?
The point is, this whole bill is supposed to be about keeping America and Americans safe. The Democrats, in an attempt to soothe the kook left fringe of their party, are refusing to give the people charged with protecting us the tools they need to get the job done. I have little or no tolerance for people who are willing to sacrifice the safety of this country to make a point.
Finally, as to who we are, the message that should be sent is this: If you kill Americans or our allies, we shall have our vengeance, in this life or the next. Anything else will just encourage these people to keep killing us.
Just curious, but what exactly do you think this bill says to those who would do us harm?
March 11th, 2008 at 12:53 am
Our enemies in the War On Terror are not judgmental. They are fanatical. They do not understand diplomacy. They do not understand morality. They do not understand negotiation. They do not understand reason. They understand only one thing. Violence. So, in order to defeat them, we need to take it to them. Give them their own medicine, as it were.
Reminds me of something General Schwartzkopf said. This may not be exact but close enough…
“I am not here to judge you, only God can judge you, I am here merely to arrange the meeting.”
March 11th, 2008 at 7:30 am
You guys certainly are experts on who “they” are. You know for a fact that all these people are guilty of these heinous crimes?
Listen to how you sound:
“we’re not talking about people. We’re talking about savages who are consumed with blood lust…”
“They are fanatical. They do not understand diplomacy. They do not understand morality. They do not understand negotiation. They do not understand reason.”
I swear, y’all sound like the Nazis talking about the Jews. Or at least you sound like al-Qaeda fanatics talking about The Great Satan of the West.
Have you heard of the documentary film “Taxi to the Darkside” that recently won the Academy Award for Best Documentary? Do you know what it is about? It’s about a taxi driver in Baghdad who was picked up by U.S. forces shortly after an insurgent bomb attack and taken to Abu Gharib where he was TORTURED TO DEATH.
And then they determined a bit later that he was totally innocent and that it was all a big mistake. Oopsy! Golly gee, sorry about that whole torturing you to death thing. Better luck next time. But, you know, we have to “do what is necessary to protect (our) citizens and (our) country against an enemy who will stop at nothing to kill (us).” Doing anything less would be “insane”.
You know, what is really “insane” is allowing fear to transform you into a monster.
March 11th, 2008 at 9:04 am
Innocents die in war, and make no mistake, we are at war. We do the best we can to limit the amount of innocents who get hurt or killed, but when you are dealing with an enemy who hides among the civilian populace and uses them for shields, it can hardly be avoided.
Also, I didn’t say that ALL of them were like this. I said the enemy was, which in this case is radical Islamic terrorists. They flat out tell us that they are going to destroy our civilization and convert the entire world to Islam. Will they actually have to do it before you realize that they are not kidding?
Frankly, I’m offended by the Nazi remark. Left wingers like yourself seem to start calling conservatives Nazis anytime they do or say something you don’t agree with. I am not now, nor have I ever been a Nazi, and nothing I have said even remotely resembles Nazi propaganda. The fact is that the Nazis were lying about the Jews when they spread their hate-filled propaganda. I am not lying about radical Islam; I am pointing out their actions and their own words.
Finally, maybe you won’t mind growing a beard, wearing a turban, or beating your wife once you’ve converted to radical Islam, but I sure as hell will. I am not prepared to sit back and allow these thugs the room to get a foothold in Western Society for the sole purpose of destroying it. I mean, all you have to do is look at Great Britain and France to see what will happen. The Muslims over there riot in the streets, beat their women, and ignore the law in favor of their own radical Islamic law.
I wonder, are you the President of the Neville Chamberlain Club?
March 11th, 2008 at 10:35 am
Alright. Strike the Nazi analogy. I did not mean to imply that you are a Nazi, just that the language you are using is indicative of the kind of war propaganda that has been used throughout history to vilify one side or the other in a conflict and to justify subsequent atrocities - whether it’s the Nazis and the Jews, the Cowboys and the Indians, the Hutus and the Tsutsis, or the Hatfields and McCoys. When you start referring to broadly defined categories of people as being subhuman then you are crossing into that territory where torture and mass executions and concentration camps suddenly become plausible.
I utterly, completely and thoroughly reject the notion that we have to torture people in order to keep our nation or our citizens safe. It has been demonstrated time and time again that you do not get usable intelligence through means of torture. It’s worthless. The claims by this administration that we have prevented terror attacks based on intelligence obtained through torture are nothing but baseless lies meant to cover their rearends.
Furthermore, this is not a black or white issue. It’s not torture them, or do nothing. We are not going to walk away and not combat terrorism because of a policy against torture.
Sure, innocents die in times of war. But there is absolutely no excuse for innocent people who have been taken into custody, where they are disarmed and not a threat to anyone, should ever die as a result of being subjected to punitive interrogation techniques.
Furthermore, this notion that we are on the verge of being forced to abide by Sharia law is ridiculous nonsense. Nobody in Great Britain or anywhere in Europe is being forced to grow a beard or any of that crap. You really need to get some better sorces of information if you are falling for this nonsense. You are being manipulated by people who want to exploit your paranoia and fear for their own political purposes.
March 11th, 2008 at 2:12 pm
Mike, exactly what is it about the way radical Islamic terrorists (RITs) act that you see as redeeming? RITs, by their very actions, call into question their qualifications for membership in the human race. You don’t have to take my word for it; simply watch the evening news. Also, read this, written by Edwin A. Locke of the Ayn Rand Institute.
As for claims that useful information was obtained through torture being “baseless lies”, I direct you here. Maybe you should check your own sources, and read something other than propaganda from Human Rights Watch.
And by the way, absolutely no one has advocated for “torture or nothing.” Torture, if it is to be used at all, should always be used as a last resort in an attempt to obtain highly important information from a prisoner who has not responded to other methods of information extraction. I mean, come on, we’re talking about maybe two or three times a year at most, on people who would gladly kill innocent people for no reason whatsoever. I’m not loosing any sleep over this guy being water-boarded.
Finally, as the riots in France last year showed, a huge portion of the Muslims who are moving there are refusing to assimilate into the European culture. Instead, they follow their own religious law and customs. Hell, it’s even happening here. Did you read about the so-called “Honor killing” in Dallas earlier this year? A Muslim father killed his two daughters because he thought one of them was dating an American boy, and was therefore disgracing the family. He simply pulled a gun and shot them. At this point in time, we are not on the verge of being overtaken by the terrorists and converted to Islam. However, the way that Multiculturalists are bending over backward to accomodate their every request frightens me.
March 11th, 2008 at 4:24 pm
You throw out terms like RIT as if it represents some identifiable group. As if they wear uniforms and attend an annual convention of something. That is ridiculous.
How about I make up a category that is just as good. I’ll call them Really, Really Bad People (RRBPs) and then we can declare war on them. Wouldn’t the world be a better place if we got rid of all the RRBPs? Heck, why stop with terrorism? Why don’t we declare war against everything that is bad? We’ll call it the War on Eeeevilll!!!
Do you know an RIT when you see one? Can you tell an RIT from, say, a Baghdad taxi driver? Or my neighbor across the street who happens to be from Pakistan?
Somehow I doubt it.
Certainly there are radical Islamisists who mean to do us harm. But that is like saying there are murderers out there who intend to kill us, or there are theives out there who intend to steal from us. We can do things to protect ourselves, but we can’t go out and round up all the potential murderers and theives in advance so that no crimes are ever committed.
I found Edwin Locke’s article to be particularly uninformative with regards to his understanding and perception of Islam. The man is an objectivist for Christ sake. An Ann Rayndian cultist. He not only rejects Islam, he rejects all religions including Christianity. His little screed written just a few weeks after 9-11 told me nothing except that he is filled with rage and hatred for all Muslims whose religion he holds in contempt.
As for the Alan Dershowitz article, I’m not sure why you made me read it. He did not provide a single example of a case where torturing someone resulted in useful information, and in fact, he acknowledged that the Israelis gave up on the practice for that very reason. By the way, I used to like Dershowitz and have several of his books, but he went totally nuts after 9/11 and has never been the same.
Here is a good article that shows how we can extract the information we need without torturing people. If it is reliable and accurate intelligence you want, this is the route to go. When you torture someone, they will tell you whatever they think you want to hear and it doesn’t matter if it is true or not. Our waterboarding of those early al-Qaeda agents only produced a bunch of wild goose chases and false leads, and now because we tortured them, it is very likely that we will not be able to prosecute them in a court of law.
As for the riots in France, I’m sure there were many factors that led up to them and not so simple as “their refusal to assimilate”. Heck, we have communities here in Texas where everybody still speaks Chzechoslovakian, and some of the older people don’t even know English. People aren’t just going to give up their culture and their lifestyle. Assimilation takes time, sometimes generations, and you just have to work with it.
As for the “honor killing” in Dallas, that only proves that we had a RRBP who also happened to be a Muslim. Did you hear about the Christian man who killed his entire family before turning the gun on himself? Yeah, which one? Too many to keep track of. That doesn’t mean that Christianity is a bad religion.
Did you hear about all the Muslim and Christian people who DID NOT kill their families? Quite of few of them I do believe.
The sky is not falling, Nick.
March 12th, 2008 at 10:43 pm
Mike Thomas wrote:
“You guys certainly are experts on who “they” are. You know for a fact that all these people are guilty of these heinous crimes?”
I am not referring to all of them. I am referring to our enemy. I do know who they are. That’s one.
Mike Thomas wrote:
“I swear, y’all sound like the Nazis talking about the Jews. Or at least you sound like al-Qaeda fanatics talking about The Great Satan of the West.”
I resent the Nazi comparison. Besides, as Nick has already pointed out, it is not the same. Typical of you liberal types to go personal instead of sticking to the issue. That’s two.
Mike Thomas wrote:
“You know, what is really “insane” is allowing fear to transform you into a monster.”
A monster? The monsters are the ones who condone the use of young women as suicide bombers. The monsters are the ones who kill innocent men, women and children when they explode theirs bombs in crowed market squares, shopping centers, trains, train stations, etc. The monsters are the ones who flew three commercial jet aircraft into three buildings in this country killing over three thousand innocent people. That’s three.
Three incorrect assumptions you have made about me. You disappoint me.
March 13th, 2008 at 10:42 am
Radical Islamic Terrorists are people who pervert their religion into an excuse for killing innocent people. Can you tell a RIT from a regular Muslim? Probably not on looks alone. So, what do you suggest? Since we can’t readily identify them and round them up for appropriate action, should we just stop trying to find them and allow them to continue to kill thousands? You’re very good at shooting other people’s ideas down, but you fail to suggest any alternatives. It’s easy to say, “Don’t do anything, just leave them alone.” It’s much harder to figure out a solution so that thousands of innocent people don’t get killed.
Seriously, what do you suggest as a way to eliminate the terrorist threat?
As to your article from the Washington Monthly site (yet another liberal site whose first sentence in it’s Mission Statement mentions the “imperial Bush White House”), for every article like that I can produce one like this.
Finally, as to the riots in France, there were many “causes” including lack of economic opportunity, however the root cause was failure to assimilate. Because the Muslims refused to adapt to the European culture, they found themselves unemployable, isolated, and unable to improve their position in European society. So, instead of adapting, they instead chose to riot and destroy property. Obviously assimilation takes time, but if you’re outright refusing to assimilate the problems it causes will be around forever.
No, the sky isn’t falling. However, you still have a responsibility to watch the sky to see what is there, and to deal with it if it endangers your well-being. If a giant meteor is heading for Earth, do you simply ignore it because all of the other meteors didn’t hit the Earth? Of course not; you take preemptive action to remove the threat. Same thing with radical Islam; are you going to ignore the threat because not all Muslims are terrorists? Are you suggesting that we need to wait until terrorists kill innocent people before we do something about them?
March 13th, 2008 at 1:11 pm
First, let me extend my apology for the Nazi analogy to Martin as well.
Second, in response to the John Kiriakou story I would direct you to this post which discusses it.
Now on to your question about what to do. I don’t think you can “eliminate the terrorist threat” any more than you can eliminate the criminal threat. Terrorism is a verb, not a noun. It’s a criminal action, like kidnapping, suicide bombing and mass murder. You can do things to prepare for it and hopefully prevent it, but unless you go into the realm of science fiction (aka “Minority Report”) you can’t expect to eliminate it.
But back to what to do. I never said don’t do anything, leave them alone. I said don’t torture people who you “suspect” of being the enemy. Not only might they be innocent, but even if they are guilty you are unlikely to get useful intelligence by torturing them.
As Ron Suskind reported in his book “The One Percent Doctrine” with respect to the Abu Zubaydah interrogation:
They strapped Abu Zubaydah to a water-board, which reproduces the agony of drowning. They threatened him with certain death. They withheld medication. They bombarded him with deafening noise and harsh lights, depriving him of sleep. Under that duress, he began to speak of plots of every variety — against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. With each new tale, “thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each … target.” And so, Suskind writes, “the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered.”
For a better take on how to deal with Al Qaeda, I would look to people like Richard Clarke whose book “Against All Enemies” is highly recommended, by the way.
One other point, while we are on the subject. You can’t assume that all Islamic fundamentalists would commit acts of terrorism. That’s like assuming that all hardline conservative Christians would go out and bomb an abortion clinic or gun down a doctor who does abortions. We are talking about a tiny segment of the population here. You can’t round up all the Islamic fundamentalists to prevent future acts of terror any more than you could round up all the Christian fundamentalists to keep the abortion clinics safe.
If you have reason to think that someone is going to commit a crime, then by all means keep an eye on them. Democrats are not opposed to wiretapping suspected terrorists. We simply want to maintain the safeguards in the form of judicial oversight (after the fact if necessary) to prevent the kinds of abuses that occurred in the past under J. Edgar Hoover and Richard Nixon.
March 14th, 2008 at 4:08 pm
Mike:
OK, I understand that you don’t think we should not do anything. But, what actions do you advocate? Richard Clarke, a political enemy of the Bush Administration, did nothing but make a lot of accusations prior to the 2004 Election which were politically motivated. Why should I look to him rather than General Petraeus or the other Generals on the ground in the theater of operations?
As for Ron Suskind, do you ever read anything which isn’t written by an author who hates President Bush? What he describes may or may not have happened. He, like most other journalists, use “anonymous sources” for these stories, which means that there is no way to verify their veracity. However, if he used named sources for this, I would be interested in knowing who the sources were and if the sources were actually in the room when the interrogation took place.
Finally, I never said I assumed that all Muslim Fundamentalists were terrorists. I said RADICAL ISLAMIC TERRORISTS. These are the people who have perverted the Koran (sp?) into nothing more than a book of excuses to kill people they don’t like or who endanger their ability to do whatever they want to whomever they want. As for rounding them up, that isn’t needed. In the current War in Iraq, they are coming to us in Iraq. I’d rather fight them there than fight them in the middle of New York or Los Angeles.
As for the warrantless wiretaps, talk to your buddy Nancy Pelosi, who instead of working to pass the FISA bill after the Senate passed it, went off to tend personal matters rather than do her job. Is it really a mystery why conservatives have absolutely no trust whatsoever in liberals when it comes to National Defense?
March 16th, 2008 at 12:58 pm
Richard Clarke started out working for the Reagan and Bush I adiministrations. He’s an enemy of the Bush administration only in the sense that the little boy in the story about the emperor with no clothes could be considered an enemy of the emperor. He simply spoke the truth. Bush II is a moron and did NOTHING about terrorism before 9/11 happened.
And Ron Suskind is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who worked at the Wall Street Journal, hardly a bastion of the “so called liberal media.”
Suskind’s primary source for his book was CIA Director George Tenet, the guy Bush gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom to.
Both Clarke and Suskind are good sources of information and not “Bush haters”, unless you define that to mean anyone outside the rapidly shrinking pool of right-wing Bush cheerleaders.
Is it your assumption that we are primarily fighting “Radical Islamic Terrorists” in Iraq? Because the truth is quite different. About 90 percent of the attacks on our troops are coming from Sunni (and sometimes Shiite) insurgents - the former Baathists. You will recall that we supported the Baathists back in the Reagan-Bush I years precisely because they are NOT fundamentalists and we wanted them to counter the Islamic fundamentalist influence from Iran. Now that we have knocked them out of power, the Shiites who are closely aligned to Iran have taken charge. Only a small percentage of the people we are fighting are foreign fighters motivated by religion. Most see us as an invading army helping to prop up a government they are opposed to.
Here is an excellent article about al-Qaeda http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/03/07/opinion/edroy.php?page=1 that cuts through all the myths propigated by the Bush administration.
Finally, the FISA bill has been passed multiple times in the House only to be vetoed again and again by Bush because he’s desperately trying to cover up illegal activity by his good buddies in the telecom industry. So don’t tell me that Pelosi is not doing her job. Bush apparently thinks protecting the rear ends of his corporate contributors is more important than passing the bulk of the FISA bill.
As for what to do about the terrorist threat, we should start by extricating ourselves from the Iraqi quagmire as quickly as possible and then redirecting our attention to tracking down Osam bin Laden (remember him?)
Oh, yes. And stop torturing people.
March 17th, 2008 at 8:40 pm
What to do is spelled out in detail here.