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Barack Obama’s Dangerous Game Starts the Process Toward Our Deaths
I have previously said Barack Obama changing the Bush administration policies on terror would get many of us killed.
They will. Barack Obama, with his orders to shut down Gitmo and bar enhanced interrogation techniques, is already headed toward Lady MacBeth syndrome (or should that be Pontius Pilate Syndrome). Within the next several years he is going to be repeated having to wash American blood off his hands because of his actions.
More proof comes from the New York Times today.
The emergence of a former Guantánamo Bay detainee as the deputy leader of Al Qaeda’s Yemeni branch has underscored the potential complications in carrying out the executive order President Obama signed Thursday that the detention center be shut down within a year. The militant, Said Ali al-Shihri, is suspected of involvement in a deadly bombing of the United States Embassy in Yemen’s capital, Sana, in September. He was released to Saudi Arabia in 2007 and passed through a Saudi rehabilitation program for former jihadists before resurfacing with Al Qaeda in Yemen. His status was announced in an Internet statement by the militant group and was confirmed by an American counterterrorism official. “They’re one and the same guy,” said the official, who insisted on anonymity because he was discussing an intelligence analysis. “He returned to Saudi Arabia in 2007, but his movements to Yemen remain unclear.”
The previous administration did not lightly make the decision to house terrorists at Gitmo. This administration would rather pander to the left than keep us safe.
Barack Obama’s Dangerous Game Will See Many of Us Killed
The media, let’s face it, want Barack Obama to succeed. They’ll want him to succeed until the moment Americans start getting slaughtered again in American streets by terrorists. And then they’ll want him to succeed even more.
But we must be prepared to set the record straight.
I am deeply concerned that Leon Panetta, a man with no prior intelligence experience, is Obama’s pick for CIA. Obama was scared to make a legitimate pick because the anti-American left opposed John O. Brennan.
And it is crucial to understand this point. Whatever else the CIA may be, it’s not simple. And because the American people entrusted the presidency to someone who needs to learn on the job, we cannot afford for critical advisers to also be learning on the job.
General Michael Hayden and John O. Brennan are career guys. They are not partisans. I could not tell you if either one was a Republican or Democrat or even if they voted.
They are professionals. But because they are connected to the Bush administration and the War on Terror, Obama is throwing them out.
These are the men who have kept us safe and alive for eight years. It was not Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld forcing policy positions on the intelligence community. It was the intelligence community making recommendations that were embraced by Cheney, Rumsfeld, and ultimately the President.
Make no mistake. Leon Panetta is a good man. But the CIA is not the OMB. Lives are at stake, not dollars. It is going to be very difficult for Leon Panetta to get up to speed on the way the CIA works. Leon Panetta is a political guy, not an intelligence guy.
That Obama is sweeping out career intelligence officers is a clear sign he intends to clear out the policies these intelligence officers advocated and implemented — the very same policies that kept us safe for eight years.
But there is an additional, very serious issue at stake here.
The low level guys, the Jack Bauers if you will, are seeing all of this. They see a President right now who made tough decisions in secret and stood by those decisions when they became public, even though those decisions were hugely unpopular. The low level guys intrinsically knew they could kill bad men in undisclosed locations and be supported if the lights came on.
These same men see the incoming President unwilling to stand behind one of their own — a career CIA officer in John O. Brennan. It is an unspoken message to all of them that should they take the bold action needed to keep freedom secure, they may not be backed up by President Obama should the actions come to light.
They will therefore return to their state of being prior to 9/11. And darkness will again start creeping from the shadows.
Barack Obama is playing a dangerous game; a game that will probably see many of us killed. And we should not be shy about saying so.
The Eleventh Hour of the Eleventh Day of the Eleventh Month of 1918
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
— Lt.-Col. John McCrae
DNC bloggers ride short bus to Iraq
I must say, the boys at the DNC really aren’t that bright.
They’ve tried to take me to task over my email blast yesterday in which I wrote:
Someone should ask the Democrats if they think we’re still at war with the confederacy, the Germans, and the Japanese given all the standing American armies in the South, Germany, and Japan.
The DNC dimwit writes:
If I were to make a list of places that have some sort of connection to American presence in Iraq — places that were remotely similar — somehow I don’t think the US being in Alabama
Um, well, he has clearly missed my point as much as he has missed McCain’s point.
Obama equates a standing army’s presence with being at war. In addition to showing his total ignorance of military issues, it’s how he has justified misquoting McCain. My point is that we have military bases in the southern U.S., Japan, and Germany. That does not mean we are at war with any of them. But, using Barack Obama’s logic, we could certainly suppose that we are still at war with each one.
The DNC dimwit, though, goes on:
t makes about as much sense as John McCain’s talking point about how being in Iraq for 100 years is just fine, because there will be no casualties.
Apparently he never learned the difference between cause and condition in grade school. McCain said “if,” not “because.” There is a huge difference.
Likewise, the guy was joined by some other blogger who wrote
he confederate states were readmitted back into the Union during Reconstruction, so any “standing” ‘Union’ armies in the South are not occupiers.
It seems to me we are not occupiers in Germany, Japan, or Iraq. In fact, everyone in the administration has been clear that should the Iraqi government ask us to leave, we would leave. And considering we’ve pretty much handed over to the Iraqi government approval for various operations in the country, we can’t really be considered occupiers.
None of that will stop the Democrats from lying though.
McCain,100 Years, Obama, and the Democrats
The Obama campaign and lefties everywhere are still pushing the story that John McCain said he wanted to keep fighting in Iraq for 100 years or 1000 years or 10,000 years. Despite the fact that major nonpartisan organizations are saying that is a total distortion of the record, the lefties and a bunch of journalists are keeping on. What McCain actually said is, well, hear him in his own words responding to a question about keeping Americans in Iraq for 50 or 100 years:
“We’ve been in Japan for 60 years, we’ve been in South Korea for 50 years, that’d be fine with me as long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed. That’s fine with me and I hope it would be fine with you if we maintained a presence in a very volatile part of the world where Al Qaeda is training and recruiting and equipping people.”
Contrast that with what Barack Obama is accusing McCain of, which is that McCain would be in favor of 100 more years of war.
It shows an utter lack of military knowledge on the part of the Democrats that they would equate a standing military presence in a country with war. If we follow their logic, we must still be at war in Japan and Germany and Korea. Heck, we must still be at war with the confederacy given all the standing armies in the South.
Nuts.
Snow in Baghdad
Naturally we can thank global warming.
For a couple of hours anyway, a city where mortar shells routinely zoom across the Tigris River to the Green Zone became united as one big White Zone. There were no reports of bloodshed during the snowstorm. The snow showed no favoritism as it dusted neighborhoods Shiite and Sunni alike, faintly falling (with apologies to James Joyce) upon all the living and the dead.
But what a sight. What calm.
This is way too funny
The Enemies Within
Some days I think there are more enemies of this country inside the country than outside of it. Consider this:
San Francisco is, once again, the center of a controversy over how city leaders treat the U.S. military. This time, it involves an elite group of Marines who wanted to film a recruitment commercial in San Francisco on the anniversary of 9/11. . . . . The U.S. Marine Silent Drill Platoon performed Monday morning in New York’s Times Square. They filmed part of a recruitment commercial through the start of the morning rush hour — something they could not do in San Francisco on the anniversary of 9/11. “It’s insulting, it’s demeaning. This woman is going to insult these young heroes by just arbitrarily saying, ‘no, you’re not going to film any Marines on California Street,” said Captain Greg Corrales of the SFPD Traffic Bureau. . . . He says Film Commission Executive Director Stefanie Coyote would only allow the Marine’s production crew to film on California Street if there were no Marines in the picture. They wound up filming the empty street and will have to superimpose the Marines later.
The War
If you haven’t seen The War on PBS, I highly recommend you start watching. Christy and I saw the first part last night. It is extremely well done. I can’t tell you how impressed I am in general with what Ken Burns does. The War is another masterpiece.
And it speaks well of it that the New York Times doesn’t like it. The Times says the documentary is too “American,” choosing to focus on the United States’ war effort instead of the whole world’s.
Pffft.