Playing Politics With The CIA

Jonah Goldberg wrote on the website Townhall.com:

^{_{As we've heard from so many witnesses, throughout the 1990s the CIA, FBI and Justice Department were actively - not passively - impaired in their work to a scandalous extent. The CIA was told that it couldn't work with individuals with dubious "human rights" records. Unfortunately, people with ties to terrorists are not captains of their Mormon bowling leagues.}}

^{_{as we learned from John Ashcroft's testimony, the Clinton Administration took its trowel and cemented a new layer of bricks to that wall of separation. In 1995, the FBI was instructed that intelligence and criminal investigations had to be separated even further than "what is legally required" to avoid "the unwarranted appearance" that our intelligence operatives were - shriek! - sharing their information with prosecutors, and vice versa.}}

^{_{The author of this directive? Clinton's Deputy Attorney General (and Al Gore confidant) Jamie Gorelick, who now sits in self-righteous judgment on the 9/11 commission - when she should be called before it to explain herself.}}

Today as I read the Drudge report I wonder to myself, have the democrats started the path to the next large scale terrorist attack within the borders of the United States?

Several months ago Nancy Pelosi was telling the main stream media that she was lied to by the CIA.

 Team Obama has adopted new policies in the treatment of terrorists.

_{WASHINGTON (AP) - President Barack Obama has approved creation of a new, special terrorism-era interrogation unit to be supervised by the White House, a top aide said Monday, further distancing his administration from President George W. Bush's detainee policies.}

_{The new unit does not mean the CIA is now out of the interrogation business, deputy White House press secretary Bill Burton told reporters covering the vacationing Obama at Oak Bluffs on Martha's Vineyard, Mass.}

_{Burton said the unit will include "all these different elements under one group," and it said that it will be situated at the FBI headquarters in Washington. The unit would be led by an FBI official, with a deputy director from somewhere in the government's vast intelligence apparatus, and members from across agencies. It will be directly supervised by the White House.}

As I read the AP story I am disturbed. Seems everything these days is going to be run by the White House. The Census needs to be run by the White House. General Motors and banks being run by the White House and now intelligence gathering will be run by the White House.

_{The new group and new directives to rely soley on the Army Field Manual when interrogating prisoners is an attempt by the administration to separate itself from allegations that the previous administration tortured some prisoners. While the practice of waterboarding - simulated drowning - already has been banned, the directive to stick only to procedures in the field manual means other harsh tactics, such as subjecting prisoners to loud music for long periods and sleep deprivation, are also now a thing of the past.}

Loud music is considered torture? Sleep deprivation is torture? That means that my children torture me on a daliy basis. Do I file my complaint with the White House?

 “Janet Napolitano testified before the Homeland Security Committee a few weeks ago and never once used the word terrorism. Nowhere in her statement was the word terrorism. According to the new administration the use of the words terror  and terrorism just generates fear and hysteria.

Will Americans sit by and watch silently as President Obama and his administration continue to apologize for the actions of the people who were assigned to protect Americans from terrorist attacks? Do the people in the current administration believe that treating extremist radicals with kid gloves will make them stop wanting to kill us?

President Obama has been talking about the investigation into the CIA over the last several days now. He tells the main stream media..."It's in the hands of Attorney General Holder now." Do you think possibly that Holder has been getting heat from the likes of Nancy Pelosi? Nancy Pelosi is the woman who has told Americans "I was busy trying to get democrats elected to congress". Even though she was a member of the comittee that was told of the intelligence tactics used by the CIA....she left that to her staff. Getting Democrats elected to a majority was more important than national security.

I just wonder if a family member of Nancy Pelosi was being held hostage by radical extremists...or one of Obama's children....would they change their tune? Would loud music and sleep deprivation still be considered torture?

_{Defenders of the practice say the waterboarding of Al Qaeda leader Khalid Sheik Mohammed produced information that allowed the U.S government to thwart a planned attack on Los Angeles in 2002.}

_{According to a previously classified May 30, 2005, Justice Department memo that the Obama administration released last week, before he was waterboarded, when KSM was asked about planned attacks on the United States, he ominously told his CIA interrogators, “Soon, you will know.”}

_{After the "enhanced techniques," which the agency used on him 183 times, KSM -- the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks -- told investigators about a "second wave" of terrorists from East Asia who planned to crash a hijacked airliner into a building in Los Angeles.}

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was a member of Osama Bin Laden's al-Qaeda organization, although he lived in Kuwait rather than Afganistan, heading al-Qaeda's propaganda operations from sometime around 1999. According to the 9/11 Commission Report he was "the principal architect of the 9/11 attacks." He is also thought to have had, or has confessed to, a role in many of the most significant terrorist plots over the last twenty years, including the World Trade Center 1993 bombings, the Operation Bojinka plot, an aborted 2002 attack on the U.S. Bank Tower in Los Angeles, the Bali nightclub bombings, the failed bombing of American Airlines Flight 63, the Millennium Plot, and the murder of Daniel Pearl.

Reads to me that he should have been waterboards 183 times.