Posted on 04/26/2009 12:29:43 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Set aside for now the troubling changes in the Obama administration’s position on whether former Bush officials should be prosecuted for suggesting tough interrogation tactics against terrorists. Set aside the manifest unfairness of prosecuting lawyers merely for doing their job of giving legal advice. Set aside the raft of other reasonable objections to the proposed prosecutions, including a justifiable aversion to witch-hunts.
Instead, consider how flagrantly President Barack Obama violated his repeated promises that he would run a transparent and honorable administration. His administration’s selective and highly prejudicial release of only partial information about CIA interrogations clearly was designed to gin up outrage against former Bush officials. The release of the information was a pure political hit job masquerading as an act of openness.
The administration ignored near-uniform pleadings by respected intelligence professionals to keep the interrogation descriptions classified, yet refused to declassify the evidence that the interrogations saved countless American lives. Obama highlighted the alleged sins while withholding (often directly redacting) the context, the justifications, and the practical benefits gained. Then his administration went even farther. Not only did it refuse to declassify the exculpatory intelligence, but also it selectively and misleadingly edited a memo by its own national intelligence director about the program.
As reported by the New York Times’ Peter Baker, intelligence director Dennis Blair wrote a memo that included these lines: “High value information came from interrogations in which those methods were used and provided a deeper understanding of the al Qa’ida organization that was attacking this country.” Baker then reported: “Admiral Blair’s assessment that the interrogation methods did produce important information was deleted from a condensed version of his memo released to the media last Thursday. Also deleted was a line in which he empathized with his predecessors who originally approved some of the harsh tactics after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.”
That last deleted line read as follows: “I like to think I would not have approved those methods in the past,” he wrote, “but I do not fault those who made the decisions at that time….”
Without Baker’s reporting, those highly important judgments by Obama’s own appointee would have been buried from public view, thus stacking the deck against those whom Blair would absolve. Such dishonesty from a White House borders on the Nixonian – and violates every reasonable American’s innate sense of justice.
This will come out along with everything else soon enough and the Dims will be finished for a very long time.
Just hope we can take 0ut the Rihnos with them.
–--fixed it
Hard to behave honorably when the word “honor” is just a word to you...
All he has to do is smile, and we'll have to read about how girls are fainting again.
The media and Hollywood love him. They want him to succeed almost as much as they wanted Bush to fail. Anything negative will be downplayed and ignored if possible. Everything positive will be played up to the max. Even today they throw snowball questions, despite there being more than enough good hard questions to ask regards taxes, debt, Iran, Venezuela, and national defense.
The news media media and Hollywood will act as Obama's unofficial public relations instrument.
This disgusting bunch of ^#$@^% are playing games with American, and others, lives. They are strutting to and fro making pronouncements about the world as they wish it were, or as they wish to make it, not dealing with the world as it is. This is true in both their “foreign policy” and in their “economic policy.”
When those lives are forfeit the few in washington dc who still have any credibility had better be prepared to lay the blame where it belongs ... and we had better be prepared to “encourage” them to do so.
The Rev. Jeremiah Wrong
That's a slander against Nixon. These tactics are reminiscent of all other dictatorial/tyrannical reigns in history. If the progress of this communist juggernaut is not stopped, we are all lost.
Declaring war on the CIA is a sure way for Zero to crash and burn. I hope the Magic Zero does more of THIS!!!!
The CIA has the goods on Obama.
One hopes they do and that they release it soon.
Con-artists have to win people over before they can con. BHO is an accomplished con-artist...and that's about all!
If he isn't able to make that call he's is the wrong man for the job. What a clown.
And if they haven't, they'll be looking in every nook and cranny now.
OK America, what can we do to stop this?
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