by Arnold Ahlert
The hypocrisy is breathtaking. While the Left wrings its collective hands about “torture,” they remain silent to Barack Obama’s drone program. One that has not only killed terrorists, but America citizens, Samir Khan, and Anwar al-Awlaki. Both men were traitors, but they were executed without the due process the Left supposedly reveres so much in the case of terrorist detainees. So was Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, as well as innocents who were victims of collateral damage. No one was reported to have been killed by the Bush administration’s enhanced interrogation techniques, yet somehow Bush and former Vice President Dick Cheney are routinely referred to as “war criminals” while Obama largely gets a pass.
On
Tuesday, the Senate Intelligence Committee released the 500-page
executive summary of the report on the CIA’s enhanced interrogation of
terrorist detainees. Democrats, the media and Republican Sen. John
McCain (R-AZ) are using it as an opportunity to hammer the CIA and the Bush administration, while American embassies, military units and other U.S. interests are preparing for
possible reprisals. But adding further threats to Americans already in
harm’s way matters not. Beleaguered congressional Democrats are
desperate for a political boon and have turned to an old standby:
sabotaging national security and sacrificing American lives.
Since their betrayal of the Iraq war,
Democrats, particularly in the Senate, have panned the techniques used
by the CIA to garner critical information in the days following 9/11 as
“torture,” and have claimed that they yielded no useful intel. Though
the use of these techniques was long known to Democrats — with virtual
indifference toward them at the outset — many Democrats have since
claimed they were unaware of what was occurring, which explains their
lack of opposition to their government supposedly engaging in “torture.”
Leading the way on the latter fabrication was
then-House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA). Her ongoing denials
regarding knowledge of the CIA’s waterboarding of terrorists were
ultimately undone by Pelosi herself in 2009, when she finally admitted she
had known about the program since 2003. Yet even as she admitted it,
she continued to promote the “Bush lied, people died” lie, insisting
that “the C.I.A. was misleading the Congress and at the same time the
administration was misleading the Congress on weapons of mass
destruction.”
Those would be the same weapons of mass destruction whose existence was acknowledged by the New York Times last October.
As for so-called torture, the report cited sleep
deprivation, threatening subjects with death, “rectal feeding” or
“rectal hydration” described by the CIA’s chief of interrogations as a
way to exert “total control over detainees,” and waterboarding, as in
simulating near drowning. The report further stated that former CIA
directors George J. Tenet, Porter J. Goss and Michael V. Hayden hyped
the value of those techniques in secret briefings with the White House
and Congress.
Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne
Feinstein admitted that she “could understand the C.I.A.’s impulse to
consider the use of every possible tool to gather intelligence and
remove terrorists from the battlefield, and the C.I.A. was encouraged by
political leaders and the public to do whatever it could to prevent
another attack,” but that “such pressure, fear and expectation of
further terrorist plots do not justify, temper or excuse improper
actions taken by individuals or organizations in the name of national
security. The major lesson of this report is that regardless of the
pressures and the need to act, the intelligence community’s actions must
always reflect who we are as a nation, and adhere to our laws and
standards.”
The hypocrisy is breathtaking. While the Left wrings its collective hands about “torture,” they remain silent to Barack Obama’s drone program. One
that has not only killed terrorists, but America citizens, Samir Khan,
and Anwar al-Awlaki. Both men were traitors, but they were executed
without the due process the Left supposedly reveres so much in the case
of terrorist detainees. So was Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, as well as
innocents who were victims of collateral damage. No one was reported to
have been killed by the Bush administration’s enhanced interrogation
techniques, yet somehow Bush and former Vice President Dick Cheney are
routinely referred to as “war criminals” while Obama largely gets a pass.
The Washington Post’s Bill Gerson cuts
right through the double-standard, noting intelligence personnel now
being excoriated received the same “direction and protection,”
consisting of presidential approval, congressional briefing, lawfulness
determined by the U.S. Attorney General and target value determined by
the CIA Director as those currently participating in the drone program.
“Some may argue a subtle moral distinction between harshly interrogating
a terrorist and blowing his limbs apart,” Gerson writes. “But
international human rights groups and legal authorities generally look
down on both. The main difference? One is Obama’s favorite program. A
few years from now, a new president and new congressional leaders may
take a different view.”
This double standard puts the lie to
Democrats’ seriousness toward the claim that the Bush administration
engaged in “torture,” illegality and human rights abuses in its mission
to thwart terrorist attacks against the homeland. In truth, the campaign
against tough interrogation is a political cudgel that Democrats have
employed to bludgeon their political enemies, no matter the national
security cost. It amounts to nothing less than a revisionist effort to
turn those entrusted with protecting the country in the immediate
aftermath of the worst domestic attack in American history into pariahs,
even as the war remains ongoing. As Gerson so rightly notes, the
report’s release is an act of “exceptional congressional recklessness”
engineered by Feinstein, whose “legacy is a massive dump of intelligence
details useful to the enemy in a time of war.”
Our allies are equally appalled. ”Foreign
leaders have approached the government and said, ‘You do this, this will
cause violence and deaths,”’ warned Rep.
Mike Rogers (R-MI), Chairman of the Permanent Select Committee on
Intelligence. “Our own intelligence community has assessed that this
will cause violence and deaths.”
White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest
acknowledged such concerns, but insisted the administration “strongly
supports the release of this declassified summary of the report.”
No doubt. The release neatly coincided with ObamaCare mega-consultant Jonathan Gruber’s Congressional testimony regarding
his contempt for the American public, and the deception employed to get
the ACA passed. Thus, the administration has once again employed a bait
and switch effort to distract the public, despite the fact that
distraction imperils Americans and our allies.
CIA veteran Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., who ran the enhanced interrogation program, destroys the
contention that Democrats were out of the loop, and that the enhanced
interrogation techniques yielded no useful information. “The leaders of
the Senate and House Intelligence Committees and of both parties in
Congress were briefed on the program more than 40 times between 2002 and
2009,” he reveals, noting those same lawmakers “urged us to do
everything possible to prevent another attack on our soil.” He was
equally forthright about the intel that was garnered. “After
extraordinary CIA efforts, aided by information obtained through the
enhanced-interrogation program, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the
self-proclaimed architect of the 9/11 attacks, was captured in
Pakistan,” he explains.
He is especially critical of “hypocritical” Democrats. He cites Feinstein’s 2002 assertion that “we have to do some things that historically we have not wanted to do to protect ourselves,” as well as an interview between
CNN’s Wolf Blitzer and Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-WVA), then the
ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee. In response to
Blitzer’s question about whether Khalid Sheik Mohammed might be turned
over to friendly countries with no restrictions on torture, the Senator
admitted it was possible. “I wouldn’t take anything off the table where
he is concerned, because this is the man who has killed hundreds and
hundreds of Americans over the last 10 years,” he replied.
Rodriguez then adds a dose of devastating
perspective to the mix. “If Feinstein, Rockefeller and other politicians
were saying such things in print and on national TV, imagine what they
were saying to us in private….Our reward, a decade later, is to hear
some of these same politicians expressing outrage for what was done and,
even worse, mischaracterizing the actions taken and understating the
successes achieved,” he states.
Current and former CIA leaders bitterly contested the
report. Bush-era CIA Director George Tenet labeled it “biased,
inaccurate, and destructive,” adding that it “does damage to U.S.
national security, to the men and women of the Central Intelligence
Agency, and most of all to the truth.” CIA Director John Brennan said
the agency made mistakes, but insisted “the record does not support the
study’s inference that the agency systematically and intentionally
misled each of these audiences on the effectiveness of the program.” A website launched by a number of intelligence officials blasted the report:
The recently released Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) Majority report on the CIA’s Rendition, Detention, and Interrogation Program is marred by errors of facts and interpretation and is completely at odds with the reality that the leaders and officers of the Central Intelligence Agency lived through. It represents the single worst example of Congressional oversight in our many years of government service.
Cheney also remains resolute about
the necessity and legality of the program. “What I keep hearing out
there is they portray this as a rogue operation, and the agency was way
out of bounds and then they lied about it,” he said in a telephone
interview with the New York Times. “I think that’s all a bunch of
hooey. The program was authorized. The agency did not want to proceed
without authorization, and it was also reviewed legally by the Justice
Department before they undertook the program.” Cheney also had nothing
but praise for those who participated. “As far as I’m concerned, they
ought to be decorated, not criticized,” he added.
The alternative viewpoint? “Showing respect
even for ones enemies. Trying to understand and in so far as
psychologically possible, empathize with their perspective and point of
view,” said Secretary
of State and likely presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Americans
have a choice to make between competing worldviews. The wrong choice
will have deadly consequences.
Arnold Ahlert is a former NY Post op-ed columnist currently contributing to JewishWorldReview.com, HumanEvents.com and CanadaFreePress.com. He may be reached at atahlert@comcast.net.
Source: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/the-senate-cia-report-and-democratic-treachery/
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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