How depressing. From Kim Preistap at Wizbang.com:
I guess we can take War on Terror off of the Wizbang category list as Barack Obama has determined that we should no longer aggressively pursue our enemies and has put an end to the War on Terror with his executive orders. He insists of course that counter terrorism efforts will continue, but they sound purely defensive. It sounds like he will respond after we are attacked instead of aggressively preventing an attack. I may be misinterpreting that, but when he halts all efforts to find the terrorists who who are plotting against us before they attack, I’m not sure what else you’d call it.
Kim is referring to this Washington Post article from last Friday.
President Obama yesterday eliminated the most controversial tools employed by his predecessor against terrorism suspects. With the stroke of his pen, he effectively declared an end to the “war on terror,” as President George W. Bush had defined it, signaling to the world that the reach of the U.S. government in battling its enemies will not be limitless.
Key components of the secret structure developed under Bush are being swept away: The military’s Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, facility, where the rights of habeas corpus and due process had been denied detainees, will close, and the CIA is now prohibited from maintaining its own overseas prisons. And in a broad swipe at the Bush administration’s lawyers, Obama nullified every legal order and opinion on interrogations issued by any lawyer in the executive branch after Sept. 11, 2001.
I never thought I’d think this, but perhaps the two friends I lost in the terror attacks of 9/11 have, in fact, died in vain.
That said, if the USA is attacked now — the fault clearly will lie in the lap of President Obama who has moved us back to the Clinton Era of Denial and political correctness in the face of a declared war on the US by the jihadists.
Say what you want, at least President Bush kept our nation safe.
-Bruce (GayPatriot)
UPDATE (from Dan): Remember in the first debate when John McCain proposed to “spending freeze on everything but defense, veteran affairs and entitlement programs” in order to compensate for the then-massive outlays for the bailout?
Obama countered that the “problem with a spending freeze is you’re using a hatchet where you need a scalpel.” Isn’t that what he’s doing now, using a hatchet instead of a scalpel?
I feel safer already — not.
Guess I really need that FID.
Preserving liberal smugness will always take precedence over saving American lives.
So, how will Chairman 0 respond the first time an American is killed by a detainee released from U.S. custody under his new policies?
I know, he’ll just say, “I won.”
I really do wish Obama well, as the nation needs to get back on track. However, his first actions closing Gitmo, is pure political payback, and I think it could endanger our men and women. I think and wrote on my blog that his first move may be his ” Willie Horton ” moment. As when we release one of these terror guys and he hurts Americans here or over there the blow back is directly to him. Zebra’s can’t change their stripes.
My temporary “British citizenship” looks better and better every day. It seems that O has given an interview to a Muslim interviewer to be broadcast in the Muslim world.
Ending the Bush Admin’s formalized torture regime means the war on terror is over?
Weird
And torturing innocent people made us safer?
Double weird.
And we all know what a swell job Bush did with tracking down Osama Bin Laden. Is this really the best republicans can do to snipe at Obama? This is really pathetic.
hey gillie… Your beloved WaPo says so.
So, he takes his oath without the Bible, stresses his middle name, and gives his first interview to a Muslim station stressing how he wants to build bridges with Muslims. I used to think the “secret Muslim” idea was just a conspiracy theory–now, I’m beginning to think there may be more to it. I wonder if he’ll move the desk in the Oval Office so it faces east.
Granted I didn’t watch the Inauguration closely, but didn’t The One use the same Bible that Lincoln used in 1861? I’m not following you here Asphenaz. Also, I wasn’t bothered by Obama using his middle name. It’s…um…part of his actual name so who cares? I was more startled by “Bill Clinton” becoming “William Jefferson Clinton” at his inauguration than “Barack Hussein Obama”. Not that it was a big deal to me, it just odd after getting used to “Bill Clinton” during the campaign.
Also, there’s no evidence that any real “innocents” were ever really “tortured.” But, that doesn’t matter to gillie because, well … and this is not name-calling this is an objective assessment… he’s an idiot.
#6 it also says this:
While Obama says he has no plans to diminish counterterrorism operations abroad, the notion that a president can circumvent long-standing U.S. laws simply by declaring war was halted by executive order in the Oval Office.
So more accuratly the “War on the Constitution” is over.
# 9
Keep building your cocoon!
BHO won the election. The Democrats control both houses of Congress. If Obama wants to change or even totally withdraw from the war on terror…this is a representative republic. His and the Dems challenge is they now own the WOT. Any attack will be judged thru the prism of their ongoing decisions. Closing GITMO, disallowing wire taps of terror calls, not freezing the funds of terror organizations etc. The results will be on their hands. Good luck. I for one hope and pray their are no attacks on Americans. If there are, we can compare the safety of Americans during Bush 43 and Obama 44.
At least now the War of Terror will go back to being the War on Terror. I think it was Nietzsche that said something about abysses and staring into them. I applaud America for returning to its founding principles and no longer sacrificing them on the altar of expedience.
To Obama and others on the Left, America has no enemies. Only countries we have yet to apologize to.
I knew we were in for a long and bumpy ride with Obama when the very first full day as acting President, he rolls out of bed and calls for an executive order to shut down Guantanamo Bay. Of all of pressing matters he has to address as President, Gitmo was priority one?! It really shows you where Obama’s head is.
He is in for a rude awakening.
gillie, funny, I seem to remember congressional resolutions, not executive orders declaring war.
Oh wait, that’s reality, no wonder you don’t understand it.
#6: “Is this really the best republicans can do to snipe at Obama? This is really pathetic.”
Parris, all you’re proving is that liberals believe that any criticism of Obama is a presumptively illegitimate, false, petty smear. 3000 Americans were killed on 9/11 and policies were put in place to fight terrorism as a result. For the remaining 7 years of Bush’s Presidency we were not attacked on our own soil. I’m sure you consider that fact to be just some random coincidence or luck of the draw, but for those of us who live in the real world, our nation’s protection didn’t just “happen.” It was the direct result of the policies that Obama has cavalierly trashed during his first week in office. This blog post and some of the comments express legitimate concerns about our nation’s continuing safety under an Obama administration. I don’t expect you to share those concerns because you’re obviously an ignorant, Obama-zombified fool and that is your right. But the criticism of Obama for closing Gitmo and nullifying our country’s best tools to prevent future terrorist attacks is not “SNIPING.” A “snipe” at Obama would be, for example, condemning him and his Presidency for wearing an ugly tie.
And it is also not surprising that you’re too obtuse to conceal your own stupidity and hypocrisy by calling the criticisms of Obama’s national security (non-)policies “pathetic snipes” and in the same breath condemning Bush for failing to track down Osama Bin Laden. So, based on your “logic,” if Obama doesn’t capture or kill OBL during his Presidency, I guess that will make him incompetent too, right? But no need to worry about that–Obama’s brilliant strategy of pretending that terrorists don’t exist is clearly a foolproof way to track down that Islamo-Nazi menace. I’m sure OBL is TERRIFIED of Obama. Perhaps our heroic, new President will use his powers of flight or invisibility to go after OBL! I feel safer already!
Ugggg! Filtered for the third time this week! Please help!
“Obama countered that the “problem with a spending freeze is you’re using a hatchet where you need a scalpel.†Isn’t that what he’s doing now, using a hatchet instead of a scalpel?”
Actually, GP, I have a difficult time picturing Obama using anything that even vaguely resembles a weapon. Based on his policy decisions concerning national security during his first week in office, the only accessory I can picture Obama with is a blindfold.
“The results will be on their hands. Good luck. I for one hope and pray their are no attacks on Americans. If there are, we can compare the safety of Americans during Bush 43 and Obama 44.”
Lest we all forget, 9/11 happened on Bush 43’s watch. And it is beyond the capacity of reason to imagine that information obtained under extreme physical duress and psychological malaise somehow made us safer. Obama has not closed the book on interrogation, just the inhumane and ineffective methods peddled by Justice Dept.’s “torture memo” that had no basis in the law. True Republicans value our separation of powers and the intent of our founding fathers ensure no one branch of government might exert undue influence on the other. Well, the internment of “enemy combatants” and now infamous “torture memo” were not the result of a deliberation regarding how to best defend our country, but rather the sad result of power-hungry President who governed from a “my way, or the highway” perspective. Even worse, the Justice Dept. knew what the President wanted and delivered: torture is OK if you call it something else. Detainees are outside the protection of due process, civilized law, and even the parameters of logic and reason… those frustrating mental faculties so often associated with the radical left that any Republican in possession of them is labeled an apostate and instantly vilified. The President’s authority is close to absolute. Anyway, no court can review him. (On this last point, the Supreme Court disagreed.)
So please, the next time I have to listen to another simpleton Republican argument for why Obama is a pansy who is going to deliver us to the jihadists on a silver platter, remember that 9/11 happened on 43’s watch. And please, please, please, do not tell me I sound like a liberal… I find it heartwrenchingly offensive, and would entreat you read a book on Republican values (that’s right, values… NOT ideology).
I see that gillie is still busily peddling his anti-American lies.
gillie – Can’t you ever muster up one ounce of real concern for real victims of real torture? Just once?
This article explains why coercive interrogations, done properly, are a good thing. It contains too many big words and advanced level concepts for gillie, but it makes the case quite well for the rest of us.
Summary: Saving innocent lives > Ensuring terrorist comfort.
Next Obama will gut the military budget, just you wait and see. Won’t do much good keeping people like Gaits on from the Bush admin if they don’t have the tools to fight.
I ask myself allot lately, do I really want to come home now?
It is what the American people voted for…
If they claim that they didn’t know this was going to happen then they should have paid closer attention to “That One’s” rhetoric before they voted for him.
I know this is exactly what I expected under an Obummer administration.
We have to hope that his extended hand to the clinched fist appeasement experiment is successful. RIGHT! It’s gonna work.
V, thanks for the article. Good link.
Your summary is really too simple, though, even dumbing it down for gillie. The article makes this key point about the CIA interrogation program: It was necessary (for saving innocent life, as you say), it was limited and it was restrained.
Therefore it was not torture, period. gillie is engaged in outright slander when he/she/it claims otherwise. It is wrong to suggest (and not that you meant to, but your words could be taken this way, and I have seen others such as NDT or MM say it explicitly before) that there somehow some kind of a tradeoff between torturing terrorists and saving lives, where it’s OK to torture terrorists to save lives. No, no, no. Torture, by definition, is always immoral. It excludes moral restraint. It excludes having a moral purpose of saving lives.
When techniques that inflict discomfort are done with the greatest of moral caution and restraint, purely and exclusively to protect life, by definition they are not and cannot be torture. They are, say, standard medical practice. Or standard police interrogation. Or morally appropriate terrorist interrogation. The word “torture”, by definition, refers to (and should be reserved for) morally inappropriate actions, like, oh, drowning a guy’s family in acid in order to terrorize him and the populace (something Saddam Hussein’s torturers did).
gillie doesn’t reserve the word, course, mis-using it in order to slander the good guys. Because, evidently, he hates America that much. And has that little concern for real victims of real torture.
(P.S. Just to pre-empt a certain demented misunderstanding of my position: Obviously I don’t suggest that waterboarding has anything to do with standard medical practice. Neither should heart surgery have anything to do with terrorist interrogation. If you ‘interrogate’ a terrorist by giving him a live angioplasty, or if you ‘treat’ heart disease with waterboarding, you are torturing in both cases. But if you treat heart disease cautiously, with a last-resort angioplasty, or if you interrogate a terrorist cautiously, with a last-resort waterboarding, you aren’t torturing in either case. The terrorist interrogation *may* be more moral than treating heart disease if, and because, it saves a far greater number of lives.)
(P.P.S. And let that be my answer to Christopher Hitchens and others who claim that waterboarding is somehow ‘per se’ torture. No, it isn’t. Or if it is, then so are angioplasties, field amputations, cavity fillings and root canals. In reality, they’re just techniques; not ‘per se’ anything. The moral determinant is the *application* in which they’re used, i.e., the moral purpose. And purity of moral purpose, in turn, may be tested or measured by the presence or absence of moral caution and restraint.)
#25
That is perhaps the most “tortured†analogy I have ever seen.
#24
ILC have seen the Senate Armed Services Committee’s report?
It shows that indeed we do torture. In fact a torture victim named McCain has signed on to this report.
From that report:
“[torture] damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral authorityâ€
John McCain was attempting to pander to pathetic leftists like you, gillie, and he failed.
ILC is right. Were you, gillie, opposed to torture, you would have argued for the removal of Saddam Hussein. You in fact argued against it and denied that what Saddam was doing was torture. That alone demonstrates the twisted and convoluted nature of your definition of torture, making it painfully obvious that your only concern about torture is when you can attempt to use it to bash Bush.
Gillie,
I’m sorry, you truly are an ignorant idiot. LAWS cannot change the Constitution. It doesn’t matter how long a law has been around, only a constitutional amendment can change the Constitution. The president’s constitutionally mandated powers do not change because congress writes a law, and they dont change depending on whether we are at war or not. And that you think they do only proves how very much smarter President Bush is than you.
Look we all know that leftists and Dems are whimps. After 9/11 America chose to go on the offensive and quit taking punches from these ignorant low life terrorists. Now the current Administration wants to go in another direction. It is their right. I think we should hold them accountable and if an attack happens….it’s on Obama and the leftists. The honeymoon could be over very quickly. Even Dems got some onions right after 9/11. Once they counted up the dead and found they didn’t lost any family members, most of them went back to being critics and blaming America for the world’s ills. I remember. It didn’t take but a few days and 30% of the public fragmented and started to ask why we didn’t negotiate with terrorists living in caves. Why didn’t we talk to the terrorists? The answer was…because they wanted us to take away womens rights and not educate girls. Dems are so dumb. They never learn from history.
And please, please, please, do not tell me I sound like a liberal… I find it heartwrenchingly offensive, and would entreat you read a book on Republican values (that’s right, values… NOT ideology).
You’re right; anti-Bush bigotry, such as you exhibit, comes from all portions of the spectrum. However, that doesn’t make it right, and the fact that you indulge in it makes it obvious that you have nothing reasonable or rational to contribute to the discussion.
See you later, moby.
Note gillie’s interpolation in the square brackets. Translation: It didn’t say that. I know that gillie is capable, in principle, of substituting “torture” for some completely different word.
And, by the way, the report is wrong even if it did say exactly that. I don’t have authority figures, or wannabe-authorities like Senate Democrats, do my thinking for me. Only crypto-fascists, who are generally America-hating people as well such as gillie, do.
Ditto.
gillie, I’ve called on you again and again to demonstrate one half-ounce of geniune concern for victims of torture. I’m still waiting.
This just in: Obama declares the economic crisis over.
Feel free to walk about the country. No terrorism. No economic turmoil. The candy man just made a rainbow. Cow flatulence is now beneficial to the climate and cures arthritis, little twisty light bulbs will power our airplanes and there is religious unity among the bagworms and in the temples of secular Hollywood pre-Scientologists. It is Easter morning for the little letter people.
The enemy is in our midst. I do wish good health to Obama, though — think of the alternatives: the Biden or PELOSI!!!!!
I still maintain that the only thing he has said right was to address the young men of America by saying “Pull up your pants”.
Sheesh.
A small thing but I’d feel a lot better about my President if he wasn’t so arrogant and strut onto the stage each time he had an oral nugget to utter.
the exact quote I think was “brothers need to pull up their pants”, and I too loved it. I think Bill Cosby smiled as well.
So I guess Chairman Obama’s going back to fucking interns as a form of protecting our country?
Double fucked.
Can’t help but notice that the “messiah” hasn’t produced him yet. Thanks for the underhanded slap of our soldiers, Pamela.
Now that’s beyond the capacity of reason.
Looks like you chose to forget that the beloved lord BJ didn’t do a damn thing to stop bin Laden or al-Qaeda for 8 years and left it for somebody else to worry about. Where’s your “capacity of reason” on that one?
Was lord BJ absolved of any responsibility when he poked his finger at Chris Wallace, or was it after Sandy Burglar removed incriminating evidence from the National Archives?
The second time he took the oath, the time he got it right, he didn’t use a Bible. All of his actions suggest a friendliness towards Muslims which perplexes me.
Obama stands for the opposite of every position he expressed. He is a con man. He will support Muslim world domination and giving away huge sums of cash to help the third world. I was quite ill watching the fiasco of his election. He used huge funding from secret friends and bought the votes of blacks, women and young people, who are not politically savy. Very sad.
It would be great for the black people of the U.S. to have a black president. But this is not the guy!
#11:
My dear gillie (whether you be he, she, or it),
When the Democrats stop their promotion of judicial activism to maintain the fictional constitutional right to abortion and other leftist tropes, then the War on the Constitution will have ended. Not before.
#19:
This tells us nothing, Reasonable Republican. Bush was a very new president, trying to get the nation and its political leaders to take al Qaeda seriously after the foolishness of the Clinton years.
No,it isn’t. And it is pure bullsh*t for you to assert otherwise.
There is no a priori reason why information obtained under physical or mental duress is automatically bad information.
Whether you think waterboarding is torture or not, or think it is a proper technique for use on terrorist or not, the fact is that info obtained from waterboarded terrorist leaders did help foil terrorist plots.
You can argue about the morality and ethics of interrogation techniques all you want. You have no right to invent your own facts, however.
Continuing with “Reasonable Republicans” rant at #19:
Given that Bush allowed Ted Kennedy to write the education bill and caved on the McCain-Feingold incumbent protection act, if he was a “power-hungry President,” he certainly did a good imitation of the opposite.
I do not know just how much deliberating the Justice Department did with regard to the “Torture Memo,” however I can state with confidence that Bush did act with the security of the United States and the destruction of al Qaeda in mind, and not the enlarging of his own power. It is pure Bush Derangement Syndrome to suggest otherwise. (Which contradicts the “Reasonable” in your moniker, doesn’t it?)
You put the term enemy combatants into scare quotes. Why? What the hell do you think they are? Misunderstood peace activists?
People who take up arms against us are enemy combatants. We can detain them — and try them for war crimes — under the law of war. You should have known this fact before writing your little screed.
I suggest you change your pseudonym to Unreasonable Republican. That title suits you much better. 😉
Lest we all forget, the 9/11 commission blamed 9/11 on the “wall” that prevented the FBI from talking to the CIA — you know, the wall expanded by Clinton hack Jamie Gorelick, the same woman who is partly to blame for destroying Fannie Mae and the financial industry by giving herself multi-million dollar bonuses for the more bad loans she forced banks to accept?
Lets not also forget that the planning was all taking place during the Clinton administration right here in America, that the terrorists were learning to fly, but not land, commercial aircraft during the Clinton administration, right here under their noses in America, that the terrorists were detained and released while Clinton was president, that Bin Ladens head was offered to Clinton on a silver platter and refused, multiple times, lest it make Billy boys approval ratings go down, that Clinton criminal crony Sandy Berger stole and destroyed top secret national security documents that belong to the American people to prevent the people from learning the full extent of Clintons incompetence, negligence and liabilty…
and lets not also forget that unlike Bush’s transition to Obama which he handled with unprecedented grace and cooperation, Al Gore and the Clintonites delayed Bush’s transition for weeks in their attempts to steal Florida, and their subsequent trashing of the White House.
#44: Excellent points all, AE. But you’re casting your pearls to a herd of swine. 9/11 happened on Bush’s watch. Irrational Republican said it TWICE, thereby conclusively establishing Bush’s culpability. End of story. The rule for establishing responsibility for 9/11 is “whatever poor slob just happens to be living in the White House at the moment of impact.” Of course, I’m sure you’re well aware that the foregoing rule expired on 1/20/09 and certainly will have no application to the slob currently residing in the White House if, God forbid, there is another terrorist attack on US soil.
Obama has declared the end of the war on terror. He´s reverting back to his primary campaign rhetoric and moving the nation further toward socialism. Next comes the war on the Constitution, curtailing our rights under the First and Second Amendments with the Fairness Doctrine and gun control. That is what the radical left did in Cuba and Venezuela. If he should be lucky enough to be elected to a second term don´t be surprised at a proposed constitutional amendment to repeal the 22nd Amendment to allow him to seek a thir and forth term, ala Chavez, Correa and Morales. If there whould be another terrorist attack on the U.S. it will be on his watch and he will have to answer for it.
…under Clinton’s CIA director (George Tenet), and after Bush had had less than 8 months to compensate for 8 years of Clinton gutting national security; failing to warn anyone or respond effectively to the al Qaeda attacks of 1993, 1996, 1998 and 200; etc.
Now in 2009, it’s different. 9-11 already happened, the nation has been warned, Bush has successfully protected the nation, and yet Obama is gutting national security anyway, in his first week! Any terrorist attacks that happen on his watch, Obama should and will receive the true blame for.
Great points guys. As Obama dismantles the safeguards afforded Americans in the WOT, Obama takes responsibility for the results. He thinks he has a better way. Fine. We’re watching.