Was Hillary's Iraq ploy treason?

Worldnetdaily ^ | December 11, 2003 | Kenneth R. Timmerman

[mil-vet]

Former Clinton White House adviser Dick Morris called it Hillary's "badwill tour of Iraq." Certainly Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's grousing to the troops brought no wild cheers, unlike the scene when President George W. Bush showed up unannounced on Thanksgiving Day to serve turkey to servicemen and women on combat duty in Baghdad. According to some reports, she is so unpopular among the armed forces that her Pentagon minders had to assign soldiers to greet her.

The former first lady, touted by many Democrats as their best hope at wresting the presidency from Bush in 2004, insisted that she had come to Baghdad to tell the troops that "Americans are proud" of them. But, she added, back home "many question the administration's policies." Then she launched into a personal attack on the president for having been "obsessed with Saddam Hussein for more than a decade." It was not exactly what you'd call a morale booster, and the troops hated it.

Al-Jazeera, the Qatar government's own jihad TV network, broadcast her remarks immediately in Arabic translation. To our enemies, the propaganda value of having a member of the U.S. Senate, who sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee, come to a war zone to criticize her president and express doubts about the leadership of the U.S. military was crystal clear. Al-Jazeera also gave prominent play to comments by her companion, fellow Democratic Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, who opined that the administration's justification for the war was "tenuous at best" and that Americans "could look back and see the decision to attack Iraq was one that ended up being very, very costly."

Former police captain Anwar Ibrahim is Iraq's deputy minister of interior. Asked about earlier blasts against the president and t he U.S.-led reconstruction effort by Democratic presidential contenders back in the United States, he told former New York City police commissioner Bernard Kerik that the Democrats would do better to keep their mouths shut.

"Our enemies all have satellite television and they are watching," Kerik recalls Ibrahim saying. "When they hear this kind of thing, they think they are winning." Such delusions cost American lives.

Kerik, who recruited Ibrahim to head up the effort to build a new Iraqi police department to fight the Ba'ath Party remnants on the ground, sharply criticized Congress for politicizing the postwar efforts. Every day Congress debated whether to consider the $20 billion for Iraqi reconstruction a loan or a grant spawned new U.S. casualties on the ground, he said, by delaying the training of new Iraqi recruits.

"We lost at least eight weeks of training – that's 3,000 recruits," he told an audience at the American Enterprise Institute.

Kerik recalled taking visiting NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw on a nighttime tour of downtown Baghdad at a time w when U.S. TV networks were portraying the Iraqi capital as a nightmare of looting and lawlessness and where U.S. troops were sitting targets. Instead, Kerik says, they drove down street after street lined with refrigerators, air conditioners and other merchandise for sale with no guards and no looters anywhere in site.

"In the U.S., what we don't hear is the successes of our people in fighting the Ba'athists," he said. "It is essential for the American people to know that we are not losing the battle; we are winning it."

So were Sens. Clinton and Reed aiding and abetting the enemy in a replay of actress Jane Fonda's infamous "Hanoi Jane" stunt at the peak of the Vietnam War?

Not so fast, says lawyer and author Henry Mark Holzer, who has written a book on Fonda's exploits during the Vietnam War and published a recent monograph, "Why Not Call It Treason?"

What the former first lady did in Baghdad "may be comfort to the enemy, but it's not treason," he tells Insight. There have been no treason prosecutions in the United States since the World War II era trials of broadcasters Tokyo Rose and Axis Sally.

"Nobody has been charged with treason since," Holzer points out, "not even Aldrich Ames or John Walker Lindh," the U.S. Taliban recruit whom Holzer called "a poster boy for treason."

Clinton's trip to Baghdad "was a bit like a U.S. senator going to Omaha Beach just after D-Day and attacking President [Franklin D.] Roosevelt and the war effort," Holzer says. "It was typically Clintonesque. It was overtly political, it was disloyal and it was pathetic. But it was not treason." For stunts such as hers, the only possible remedy is at the ballot box. "It's the price we pay for the First Amendment," he says.

[mil-vet]

Since the ruthless half of the 'toons decided to take a trip to Bagdad, and spent time doing "her" Hanoi Jane wannabe routine, I thought she might have earned a like name; I was thinking of "Bagdad B..." oops, I mean "Witch...." (NOT).

Shame on me, I guess, but I really do prefer the alliterative title.

Hope this isn't a duplicate posing - my "search" skills are terrible - LOL!

[Doug Loss]

It was typically Clintonesque. It was overtly political, it was disloyal and it was pathetic. But it was not treason.

Okay, explain to poor benighted me now it wasn't treason. It fits all the definitions.

[CROSSHIGHWAYMAN]

HILLARY GETS A FREE RIDE FOR ANYTHING EXCEPT POSING NUDE IN PLAYBOY.

[John H K]

It fits all the definitions of second-string wanna-be Ann Coulters seeing she sold a lot of books and got really popular calling every Democrat a traitor, and hoping to do the same, lobbying for an "anyone who disagrees with what I think is best for the country is a traitor" defintion of treason.

Applying such a broad definition of treason would have meant anyone criticizing the bombing campaign against Serbia, or saying it wouldn't work, would have been treasonous, too, of course.

It's an inescapable fact that anyone criticizing any US military action in some way, however small, makes it more likely that that US military action will not succeed.

However, the long-term danger of calling all such people "Traitors" is a far greater danger to our country than the danger that such criticism will cause the military action to fail.

Though, the practical effect will simply likely to be to render the word "traitor" essentially worthless since it gets applied to half the country.

Here's an ACTUAL traitor (unfortunately, acquitted in court):

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/duel/peopleevents/pande13.html


"Entrusted with the control of the newly acquired territory of Louisiana, this Revolutionary War hero was a double agent on the Spanish payroll and a co-conspirator with the traitor Aaron Burr.

Wilkinson served honorably in the Revolution under General Horatio Gates. Following the war, he decamped to Kentucky, where he founded the community of Frankfort and worked to gain statehood for Kentucky.

In 1787 Wilkinson turned traitor and began a long-lasting relationship as a secret agent of Spain. He was known to his Spanish contacts as Agent 13. After Thomas Jefferson purchased Louisiana from Napoleon Bonaparte, Wilkinson was named territorial governor of northern Louisiana. He also served as the commander in chief of the U.S. Army.

By this time, Wilkinson had already begun to engage in a plot with Aaron Burr. While complete details of the plot are still open to debate, they probably included plans to separate Louisiana from the U.S. and perhaps even to conquer Mexico. Burr gathered and began to train an army, on the assumption that Britain would provide him with warships and monetary support.

When support failed to appear, Wilkinson betrayed Burr to Jefferson and facilitated Burr's capture. In the treason trial that followed, Wilkinson's story aroused suspicion. Nonetheless, he was acquitted of treason and rose to the rank of major general. Following a devastating defeat at Montreal during the War of 1812, Wilkinson retired in disgrace."

[ladyinred]

"Our enemies all have satellite television and they are watching," Kerik recalls Ibrahim saying. "When they hear this kind of thing, they think they are winning." Such delusions cost American lives.

Kind of says it all.

If this ain't treason, nothing is, and obviously these days, nothing is. Witch.

[LanaTurnerOverdrive]

The words "traitor" and "treason" get tossed around so much these days they are beginning to lose their "gravitas."

[Cicero]

Criticizing your country here in your own country is protected. It's a lot more questionable to travel abroad and criticize your country. And it's even more questionable to travel to a war zone, criticize your country, and deliberately undermine the morale of the troops. Probably this doesn't quite rise to the level of treason, but it's dishonorable and disgusting. What's even more disgusting is the media ignore these people.

How about all those senators who traveled to Baghdad before the war to kiss Saddam? If it's not treason, it certainly deserves to be condemned in the strongest terms by any right-thinking person. It undoubtedly helped give Saddam the impression that he could continue to thumb his nose at us, because important people in our government were virtually telling him that.

[jraven]

When people use "treason" and "traitor" so lightly they do several things:
a)the scare away swing voters who are on the fence - the voters both of these nearly evenly divided parties need to garner to win an election
b)they demean what a real traitor or real treason is.
c)they indicate that there's a desire to lower the bar on hundreds of years of US history, if you go back to WWI, WWII, Vietnam etc and basically make very strong disagreement on policies a crime against the country.
I think that right is what the people who died in WWI, certainly in WWII and in Korea, Vietnam, various other wars including Desert Storm and Iraq died to protect and defend.
If someone feels that our policy is such that people are dying unnecessarily due to poor planning of incompentence and says so, that is their right.
I detest Hillary (and don't think she'll ever win over swing voters) but she didn't commit treason. Some people are just trying to lower the political bar on what people can disagree with.
The problem is the shoe can be on the other foot. If we say someone who vehemently opposes our policies is a traitor, the Democrats when they are power can say it about us. Similarly, Clinton got his justly deserved ridicule when he was in office. If the Demmies go after GWB, that's their right too -- and ridicule doesn't require years in prison or make someone against the country...unless the country IS everything the president says, wears, does, etc. In which case we'd be in a different era than the framers of the constitution had in mind, or what those who died defending this country felt they were defending.

[Diverdogz]

Good post.

[Lucky2]

For hillary clinton to go the the war zone, blast her fat, foul mouth off against our President and to criticize our troops is nothing but treason. My tagline says it all. I only hope some day these traitorous scum are executed for their crimes and I hope I live long enough to see it!

[winker]

The actions of her trip more closely follow the President's definition of a TERRORIST. Al Jazeria's close follow up made it appear everything was being edited to be included as a update to their training manuals on how to do Treason more effectively! With the clintoons it is not always easy to separate fact from fiction!

[RISU]

If premeditation is a requirement to prove treason she is probably off the hook.

She has never thought of anyone but herself in her whole life I bet.

It probably never ocurred to her that she was an Official of the Government visiting troops at war. To her it is all one glorious photo-op.

[TaxRelief]

We live in a free country, and like it or not, Hillary is allowed to travel anywhere she wants and to say anything she wants. That's what FREE means.

If there are so few senators going on these trips that is makes it seem like it is significant when the Hildebeast goes, then the obvious solution is to send them all over for a little glimpse of reality. 100 senators parading in and out of Iraq will mean that Al Jazeera will not have any story left to print.

[TaxRelief]

However, the long-term danger of calling all such people "Traitors" is a far greater danger to our country than the danger that such criticism will cause the military action to fail

This message must be repeated again and again. Even I have been called a "traitor" for supporting and believing in Free Trade. How ironic is that.

[GrandMoM]

BUMP

[buffyt]

Put Hitlery on trial with Hussein.