This vainglorious administration is so self-absorbed that it refuses to keep secrets if it can in any way benefit politically from them regardless of the cost. Obama is so bent on preening he seems not to have any concern at all for those who actually make the sacrifices. First Joe Biden outs SEAL Team 6 as those who participated in the Bin Laden raid and then Leon Panetta outed the doctor who helped provide intelligence for the raid. That was catastrophic for the doctor.

First he and his wife were fired for engaging in a “fake” vaccination program.

In a notification issued in this regard, the health department said that Afridi’s services were terminated under the Efficiency and Disciplinary (E and D) Rules for being involved in anti-state activities, the Express Tribune reports.

Earlier, 15 lady health workers who were part of the alleged fake vaccination campaign, were were also sacked from their jobs.

It was reported earlier this month that Dr Afridi was dismissed from his post, along with four LHVs.

Earlier, Dr. Shakeel’s wife, Imrana Ghafoor was also removed from her post. She was the principal of the Government Girls Degree College in Darra Adam Khel.

Now he has been jailed for 33 years for treason:

PESHAWAR, Pakistan — A Pakistani surgeon recruited by the CIA to help find Osama bin Laden was on Wednesday sentenced to 33 years in prison for treason, officials said.

Shakil Afridi, who was sacked as a government doctor two months ago, was found guilty under the tribal justice system of Khyber district, part of Pakistan’s semi-autonomous tribal belt.

In addition to his jail sentence, he was fined 320,000 rupees ($3,500). The doctor had worked for years as a surgeon in lawless Khyber, part of the Taliban and al-Qaeda infested tribal belt.

Afridi was not present in the court and not given a chance to defend himself, officials said. Under the tribal system, he would not have had access to a lawyer.

“He has been sentenced for 33 years on treason charges and has been moved to Peshawar central jail after the verdict was announced by the local court,” said Mohammad Siddiq, spokesman for the administrative head of Khyber.

In January, U.S. Defence Secretary Leon Panetta confirmed Afridi had worked for U.S. intelligence by collecting DNA to verify bin Laden’s presence and expressed concern about Pakistan’s treatment of him.

He was arrested shortly after U.S. troops killed the al-Qaeda leader on May 2, 2011 and in October a Pakistani commission recommended that he be tried for treason.

Golly, given this event who wouldn’t want to want to come to the aid of America? The left has not had word of complaint- not about this nor about the unprecedented access to classified material offered to filmmakers in the process of Obama idolatry.

Contrast that to the phony kerfuffle over Valerie Plame and the scorn wrongly heaped upon George Bush.

A Blast From The Past...This Is How The Left Viewed Bush Then

As I wrote about in an earlier post, the hypocrisy of the left in regards to Obama’s policy of allowing assassinations of United States citizens is quite telling.

Take for example this speech given by our Attorney General in 2004:

With all due respect to President Reagan, the problem is not government. The problem is with those who run the government. In the struggle against terrorism, these people have made a mockery of the rule of law…

And yet a disturbing pattern has emerged. Lawyers for this administration have attempted to sanction the wholesale roundup and extended detention of Middle Eastern men on routine immigration violations, and the indefinite detention of American citizens with minimal judicial supervision, and without access to legal counsel.

Now I understand that we live in difficult times, and that we face an extraordinary, unprecedented threat. We cannot be naive in how we expect to conduct this struggle. This is not a time for the liberal community to see our enemy for anything other than what they are: murderers bent on the destruction of our way of life, which is superior to that which they seek to impose. We must be aggressive in the conduct of the war, and in the interrogation of prisoners taken in that war. But this Administration’s view, that the President’s authority as Commander-in-Chief can almost always overcome what it views as burdensome laws, restrictive International treaties, and tired old customs is extremely dangerous.

Our history is replete with scandals and miscues that are tied to the unrestricted exercise of Executive Branch power, in peace and in war. We must employ techniques in the current struggle that are consistent with the spirit of our founding documents, and that will also stand the test of time. We must feel comfortable, fifty years from now, looking back at our actions in a way that we do not when we examine for instance, the detention of American citizens during World War II.

Now let me be clear. This is not to equate American al-Qaeda sympathizers with law abiding Japanese-American citizens. But citizenship must mean something. The guarantees that come with it must be respected.

The war on terrorism can be won and our tradition of respect for civil liberties can be respected. The tension that this administration sees existing between the two simply is not correct.

That was then, this is now:

WASHINGTON — Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. asserted on Monday that it is lawful for the government to kill American citizens if officials deem them to be operational leaders of Al Qaeda who are planning attacks on the United States and if capturing them alive is not feasible.

“Given the nature of how terrorists act and where they tend to hide, it may not always be feasible to capture a United States citizen terrorist who presents an imminent threat of violent attack,” Mr. Holder said in a speech at Northwestern University’s law school. “In that case, our government has the clear authority to defend the United States with lethal force.”

…While Mr. Holder is not the first administration official to address the targeted killing of citizens — the Pentagon’s general counsel, Jeh Johnson, did so last month at Yale Law School, for example — it was notable for the nation’s top law enforcement official to declare that it is constitutional for the government to kill citizens without any judicial review under certain circumstances. Mr. Holder’s remarks about the targeted killing of United States citizens were a centerpiece of a speech describing legal principles behind the Obama administration’s counterterrorism policies.

“Some have argued that the president is required to get permission from a federal court before taking action against a United States citizen who is a senior operational leader of Al Qaeda or associated forces,” Mr. Holder said. “This is simply not accurate. ‘Due process’ and ‘judicial process’ are not one and the same, particularly when it comes to national security. The Constitution guarantees due process, not judicial process.”

I agree wholeheartedly with Bush’s practice of fighting this war on terror and I agree wholeheartedly with Obama’s new policy.

But the hypocrisy is mindboggling.

I never thought I would link to Glenn Greenwald but he is especially pissed at the hypocrisy from his side of the aisle:

(1) The willingness of Democrats to embrace and defend this power is especially reprehensible because of how completely, glaringly and obviously at odds it is with everything they loudly claimed to believe during the Bush years. Recall two of the most significant “scandals” of the Bush War on Terror: his asserted power merely to eavesdrop on anddetain accused Terrorists without judicial review of any kind. Remember all that? Progressives endlessly accused Bush of Assaulting Our Values and “shredding the Constitution” simply because Bush officials wanted to listen in on and detain suspected Terrorists — not kill them, just eavesdrop on and detain them — without first going to a court and proving they did anything wrong. Yet here is a Democratic administration asserting not merely the right to surveil or detain citizens without charges or judicial review, but to kill themwithout any of that: a far more extreme, permanent and irreversible act. Yet, with somerighteous exceptions, the silence is deafening, or worse.

How can anyone who vocally decried Bush’s mere eavesdropping and detention powers without judicial review possibly justify Obama’s executions without judicial review? How can the former (far more mild powers) have been such an assault on Everything We Stand For while the latter is a tolerable and acceptable assertion of war powers? If Barack Obama has the right to order accused Terrorists executed by the CIA because We’re At War, then surely George Bush had the right to order accused Terrorists eavesdropped on and detained on the same ground.

That the same Party and political faction that endlessly shrieked about Bush’s eavesdropping and detention programs now tolerate Obama’s execution program is one of the most extreme and craven acts of dishonesty we’ve seen in quite some time.

He goes on write and link to my post, saying “By stark contrast, right-wing leaders, pundits and bloggers are being commendably consistent”

Yup. We have.

I agreed with the policy then and do now.

And I completely agree with Glenn when he writes that the hypocrisy of the left is “the most extreme and craven acts of dishonesty we’ve seen in quite some time.”

Obama in 2006:

The bottom line is this: Current procedures under the CSRT are such that a perfectly innocent individual could be held and could not rebut the Government’s case and has no way of proving his innocence.

I would like somebody in this Chamber, somebody in this Government, to tell me why this is necessary. I do not want to hear that this is a new world and we face a new kind of enemy. I know that. I know that every time I think about my two little girls and worry for their safety–when I wonder if I really can tuck them in at night and know that they are safe from harm. I have as big of a stake as anybody on the other side of the aisle and anybody in this administration in capturing terrorists and incapacitating them. I would gladly take up arms myself against any terrorist threat to make sure my family is protected.

But as a parent, I can also imagine the terror I would feel if one of my family members were rounded up in the middle of the night and sent to Guantanamo without even getting one chance to ask why they were being held and being able to prove their innocence.

This is not just an entirely fictional scenario, by the way. We have already had reports by the CIA and various generals over the last few years saying that many of the detainees at Guantanamo should not have been there.

But it’s ok to assassinate that person without judicial review now eh?

Where’s the terror for your family members now?

H Y P O C R I S Y

In a sign that the left’s hypocrisy may not be going over so well is this editorial from the NYT’s today:

Perhaps most disturbing, Mr. Holder utterly rejected any judicial supervision of a targeted killing.

We have said that a decision to kill an American citizen should have judicial review, perhaps by a special court like the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which authorizes eavesdropping on Americans’ communications.

Mr. Holder said that could slow a strike on a terrorist. But the FISA court works with great speed and rarely rejects a warrant request, partly because the executive branch knows the rules and does not present frivolous or badly argued cases. In Mr. Awlaki’s case, the administration had long been complaining about him and tracking him. It made an earlier attempt to kill him.

Mr. Holder said such operations require high levels of secrecy. That is obvious, but the FISA court operates in secret, and at least Americans are assured that some legal authority not beholden to a particular president or political party is reviewing such operations.

Mr. Holder argued in his speech that judicial process and due process guaranteed by the Constitution “are not one and the same.” This is a straw man. The judiciary has the power to say what the Constitution means and make sure the elected branches apply it properly. The executive acting in secret as the police, prosecutor, jury, judge and executioner is the antithesis of due process.

While the NYT’s editorial pages maybe coming around to their hypocrisy, we do not hear the wailing and the crying from the rest of our media, the rest of the Democrat party, the rest of the liberals.

H Y P O C R I S Y

James Taranto points out an incongruent position in regards to the New York Times editorial page:

Then:

* “The documents appear to have been acquired illegally and contain all manner of private information and statements that were never intended for the public eye, so they won’t be posted here.”–New York Times, on the Climategate emails, Nov. 20, 2009

Now:

* “The articles published today and in coming days are based on thousands of United States embassy cables, the daily reports from the field intended for the eyes of senior policy makers in Washington. . . . The Times believes that the documents serve an important public interest, illuminating the goals, successes, compromises and frustrations of American diplomacy in a way that other accounts cannot match.”–New York Times, on the WikiLeaks documents, Nov. 29, 2010

But of course no surprises here! After all, this is the same revered and respected newspaper read by millions all over the globe who proudly published leaked information damaging to our national security and defended that decision.

To add to Taranto’s case, here’s the NYTimes editorial from January 4, 2006:

Given the Bush administration’s appetite for leak investigations (three are under way), this seems a good moment to try to clear away the fog around this issue.

A democratic society cannot long survive if whistle-blowers are criminally punished for revealing what those in power don’t want the public to know – especially if it’s unethical, illegal or unconstitutional behavior by top officials. Reporters need to be able to protect these sources, regardless of whether the sources are motivated by policy disputes or nagging consciences. This is doubly important with an administration as dedicated as this one is to extreme secrecy.

~~~

When the government does not want the public to know what it is doing, it often cites national security as the reason for secrecy. The nation’s safety is obviously a most serious issue, but that very fact has caused this administration and many others to use it as a catchall for any matter it wants to keep secret, even if the underlying reason for the secrecy is to prevent embarrassment to the White House. The White House has yet to show that national security was harmed by the report on electronic spying, which did not reveal the existence of such surveillance – only how it was being done in a way that seems outside the law.

Leak investigations are often designed to distract the public from the real issues by blaming the messenger. Take the third leak inquiry, into a Washington Post report on secret overseas C.I.A. camps where prisoners are tortured or shipped to other countries for torture. The administration said the reporting had damaged America’s image. Actually, the secret detentions and torture did that.

Illegal spying and torture need to be investigated, not whistle-blowers and newspapers.

Yes, the world is a much safer place because we can trust the NYTimes to make the editorial decisions on what classified information is and what is not worthy of being leaked to the general public.

Charles Krauthammer makes a great point below regarding the leaks from WikiLeaks. During the Bush years Reporters were given Pulitzers for leaking the classified information. Now that Obama is the President it’s a bad thing.

You also see Colby King from the Washington Post taking a position that you know was completely different during Bush….the classified information doesn’t belong to the leaker so they should give it back.

Puhlease.

And just last week Gibbs said during a White House Presser that leaks like the recent one shouldn’t happen, people should register their disapproval with policy in a lawful way.

QUESTION: The head of Wikileaks tells us that he — he won’t identify the source of the material. He actually says we still don’t know who the source is. But if it was Private First Class Manning, who is already in custody, the head of Wikileaks says, “He’s a hero.” What does the president say to Wikileaks and those who believe that they are doing the right thing…

GIBBS: Well, look…

QUESTION: … in outing the policy they disagree with?

GIBBS: Well, I think there are ways in which one can disapprove a policy without breaking the law and putting in potential danger those who are there to keep us safe.
Again, if I were to have handed one of you these documents, I would be breaking the law.

I think there are certainly better ways to — to discuss and register one’s opposition, rather than putting people in potential harm’s way.

Hey, I think we all agree with that but where was the disapproval from Obama and pals when the NYT’s and the WaPo were leaking materials that undermined our war against terror? Where were the calls to silence such a lawbreaking leak?

There weren’t any, instead there was adulation and applause from the left side of the aisle.

Hypocrites one and all.

Julian Assange doesn’t look like your typical Taliban operative. He’s an Australian born blond haired pasty white guy who looks like he’s quite unfamiliar with the sun. Truth be told, he’s not actually an operative. In all honesty he probably doesn’t like those guys much. Nonetheless, he is working for them as much as if he were on their payroll.

Last week, the website he co-founded, WikiLeaks, released 90,000 pages of secret tactical American military reports in conjunction with the New York Times, Germany’s Der Spiegel and Britain’s Guardian. Despite being historical in nature (7 months old being the most recent) they will do as much harm to American troops and efforts in the region as if he had provided Al Jazeera with the actual coordinates of troop positions currently out in the field. As such, Assange deserves to be declared an enemy combatant and the United States should use every legal tool at its disposal to put their hands on him and try him in a military tribunal. Given that Guantanamo is still open perhaps that would be an appropriate venue.

Assange defends his release of the documents with the accusation that (Defense) “Secretary Gates has overseen the killings of thousands of children and adults in these two countries (Afghanistan and Pakistan)“, drawing a moral equivalence between unintended collateral causalities of war and the certain vicious murder of informants at the hands of the Taliban and their Al Qaeda brethren. Lest anyone might miss the connection, Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told Britian’s Channel 4 News that they were studying the documents and the names and “If they are US spies, then we know how to punish them.” Assange apparently dislikes the killing of innocents, but only the unintended collateral types. Those intentional, premeditated murders by Islamist fascist types he has no problem with and even contributes to.

Assange discusses WikiLeak’s “harm minimization” standards of conduct in a rambling exchange with Channel 4:

Channel 4: There is an awful amount of material here that you couldn’t have looked through personally. Could it cost lives? Is it putting people in danger publishing this?
Assange: We’ve gone through the material and reviewed it and looked for cases where innocent informers, ie an old man saying next door there is a Taliban, or what he believes is Taliban, so we’ve looked for those cases and there’s a particular type of report that frequently has that – those have been withheld and also the source says they have done some work in doing this as well. So I think it’s unlikely that that will happen. We’ve worked hard to make sure there’s not a significant chance of anybody coming to harm.

But you can’t guarantee it?
Any information can be abused for another purpose so we can’t guarantee it. But our understanding of the material is that it’s vastly more likely to save lives than cost lives.

So you’ve actually removed stuff from this leak?
Yes.

Is that a first for Wikileaks?
Sources know when they submit material that we go through a “harm minimisation” process.

That harm minimisation process is not about removing material it’s about minimising harm. We have a number of ways to do that. The way we have done it in the past and it’s always been effective – notify and delay. Notify the people concerned, and delay the publication as a result. So we have retained some of this material for the harm minimisation process. No, because it’s really impossible for us to notify the Afghanis in their villages about this material – we will have to do a redaction of some of it.

Despite Assange’s heroic “harm minimization” efforts, in just two hours the Times of London found dozens of names and villages of Afghanistanis who had provided information to the Americans. As a result of WikiLeaks there are likely hundreds of individual Afghanistanis’ and thousands of their fellow villagers who will be targeted by the Taliban and Al Qaeda. In addition, the Taliban will likely trail many of those informants and use that information to ambush American and coalition troops.

In addition, these leaks will make foreign governments and their intelligence agencies, from Pakistan to Britain and everywhere in between far less likely to share their intelligence with the United States because they are rightly concerned that it might end up on the front page of the New York Times. That withholding of information will cause further deaths as well.

While Assange is the face of this treachery, he is not the only one who should be in the Pentagon’s sights. The New York Times, Der Spiegel and the Guardian should be looked at as well. Not only did they give Assange a far bigger stage than his obscure website might have otherwise provided, they may be complicit in providing actionable information to the Taliban. Although Arthur Sulzberger and Bill Keller should probably have been prosecuted for the Times’ SWIFT banking and domestic wiretapping stories, they will likely escape prosecution here simply because they limited the content they actually published.

Then of course there is the source itself. At first blush it appears as if the primary source for the leaked documents was Bradley E. Manning, an Army private who is being held for the release of the Apache video earlier this year. Manning may have had civilian accomplices and they should share his fate whatever that might be. At this point one might also ask how an E-3 might have put his hands on so much highly sensitive information.

In the modern world of moral relativism, where the peace-loving left has no problem betraying American secrets and putting bull’s-eyes on the backs of Afghanistanis who simply seek to rid their country of the Islamo fascists in their midst, this is a rare moment of clarity. There will likely be American and Afghanistani blood shed as a result of these WikiLeaks actions. Julian Assange, Private Manning and their enablers should be held accountable for their actions and should pay whatever price is appropriate. We can’t unring the 90,000 page bell they’ve rung, but hopefully their punishments will provide sufficient disincentive that others decide not to follow their lead.

Are the NYT’s and James Risen at fault here?

Investigators of the failed car bombing in Times Square are looking for a money courier they say helped funnel cash from overseas to finance a Pakistani-American’s preparations to blow up the crude gasoline-and-propane bomb in the heart of New York, a law enforcement official told The Associated Press.

Investigators have the name of the courier they believe helped Faisal Shahzad pay for the used SUV and other materials to rig up a car bomb that would have caused a huge fireball in Times Square if it had gone off, the official told the AP. The official didn’t know how much money may have changed hands.

A money courier?

Now where would they have learned that this money couldn’t be tracked?

From Powerline:

“First, Shahzad used a disposable cell phone to communicate—the NSA leak may very well explain why he did that. Second, according to the AP this morning, he received funds from abroad via a courier. A courier!!! The SWIFT leak is almost certainly implicated here.”

As I wrote in 2006:

The complete arrogance and stupidity of the press is mindboggling. The arrogance to believe that they should be the keepers of secrets. They should decide what to disclose and what not to. The stupidity in believing that printing a article which describes a secret tracking program will not affect our war against terror.

It HAS affected it, and by pure luck many deaths were averted.

And essentially made it clear that it was both effective and necessary, telling the CIA interrogators that “You must do this to all the brothers.”

This past Valentine’s Day….

Former VP Cheney’s ABC This Week:

KARL: But you believe they should have had the option of everything up to and including waterboarding?

CHENEY: I think you ought to have all of those capabilities on the table. Now, President Obama has taken them off the table. He announced when he came in last year that they would never use anything other than the U.S. Army manual, which doesn’t include those techniques. I think that’s a mistake.

From VP Biden’s appearance on CBS’ Face the Nation:

Schieffer: “Can you Mr. Vice President envision a time where waterboarding can ever be used on anyone?”

Biden: “No, no, it’s not effective”

Schieffer: “It’s not effective?”

Biden: “It’s not effective”

Abu Zubaydah disagrees with Joe Biden. He is living proof that waterboarding worked. Not only that, but he endorsed waterboarding with a personal stamp of approval.

Last April, I posted an excerpt from Ron Kessler’s The Terrorist Watch, regarding the chapter detailing Abu Zubaydah:

Abu Zubaydah mentioned that KSM used the moniker “Mukhtar,” which allowed analysts to comb through previously collected intelligence and develop leads that eventually led to his capture.

Soon after that, Abu Zubaydah stopped cooperating.

When Zubaydah gave up KSM, he did so unwittingly (detailed in my link to the excerpt from Kessler’s book) while in his hospital bed, recovering from injury sustained in his capture. As he regained his health, he grew resistant to questioning.

Propelled by fear that another attack was in the works, the CIA began developing coercive interrogation techniques- water-boarding high value terrorists or subjecting them to ear-splitting music or to icy temperatures and forcing them to stand for hours.

“We weren’t getting very much from him at all,” Grenier says. “And that’s when we began the process of putting together a properly focused interrogation process. It was refined a good deal subsequently, but he was the test.”

Before the interrogation procedures were employed, the Justice Department reviewed them and determined that they were legally permissible. After a few months, the CIA began using some of the techniques on Abu Zubaydah. As the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah and other detained terrorists progressed, the agency briefed the chairs, ranking members, and majority and minority staff directors of the House and Senate intelligence committees on the details of the procedures used.

Marc Thiessen has an important new book out, Courting Disaster that clears up some of the mystique and mythologizing about the CIA program that has successfully kept America safe since 9/11. Former CIA Director Hayden writes (thanks Missy!):

I opposed the release of the Office of Legal Council memos on the CIA interrogation program last April. I opposed the release of additional memos and the report of the CIA inspector general on the interrogation program last August. But whatever their release did to reveal American secrets to our enemies, it did inject something into the public debate on this program that had been sorely missing—facts.

Thiessen has taken these documents, as well as his own extensive interviews and research, and created for the first time a public account of a program previously hidden from public view. Prior to this, some opponents of the program could create whatever image they wanted to create to support the argument of the moment. And those who were in government at the time were near powerless to correct the record. No longer.

There will still be those who remain adamantly opposed to the interrogation effort, but now they must be opposed to the program as it was, not as they imagined or feared or—dare I say, for some—expected it to be.

I’m about 300 pages into the book. A book that Thiessen describes as one that he should not have been able to write and we should not have been able to read. Obama’s declassification of internal documents and media leaks have made this book possible, out of the necessity of setting the record straight. Because it isn’t such things as Guantanamo and so-called “torture” that has made America “less safe” and created more terrorists; but rather, the wild, irresponsible distortions and fabrications.

America’s image abroad wasn’t damaged by President Bush, but by his political opponents.

By Thiessen’s account,

the first terrorist to be subjected to enhanced techniques, Zubaydah, told his interrogators something stunning. According to the Justice Department memos released by the Obama administration, Zubaydah explained that “brothers who are captured and interrogated are permitted by Allah to provide information when they believe they have reached the limit of their ability to withhold it in the face of psychological and physical hardship.” In other words, the terrorists are called by their religious ideology to resist as far as they can — and once they have done so, they are free to tell everything they know.

Several senior officials told me that, after undergoing waterboarding, Zubaydah actually thanked his interrogators and said, “You must do this for all the brothers.” The enhanced interrogation techniques were a relief for Zubaydah, they said, because they lifted a moral burden from his shoulders — the responsibility to continue resisting.

The importance of this revelation cannot be overstated: Zubaydah had given the CIA the secret code for breaking al-Qaeda detainees. CIA officials now understood that the job of the interrogator was to give the captured terrorist something to resist, so he could do his duty to Allah and then feel liberated to speak. So they developed techniques that would allow terrorists to resist safely, without any lasting harm. Indeed, they specifically designed techniques to give the terrorists the false perception that what they were enduring was far worse than what was actually taking place.

Much of the power of waterboarding and the other approved enhanced interrogation techniques was psychological. Such as the belief that drowning was taking place, as was the case of waterboarding; or that one was getting shoved hard (“walling”) by hitting a flexible, false wall that made a loud sound to give the illusion that what was happening was worse than it actually was. As Thiessen puts it in an interview he did on the Dennis Prager Show, “Most of the techniques are psychological tricks, for the most part. They didn’t depend upon physical pain to get the people to cooperate.” They were like mentalist/magic tricks whose effectiveness, once revealed, loses their power.

This is why, since President Obama (selectively) released the OLC “torture” memos (more properly identified as “how not to torture” memos) last April, a couple of things have occurred:

1)It’s basically provided al Qaeda with valuable intell information. Now they know what to train specifically against (were the CIA program still in operation).

2)It’s made the enhanced interrogation techniques described in detail in the declassified documents obsolete.

Waterboarding (performed on only 3 terrorists in the program) is now pretty much useless as a psychological tool; making Obama’s EO banning its use rather redundant (especially since waterboarding had been suspended already, under the Bush Administration). It’s just gratuitous PR that “Obama banned torture” (Bush and Cheney were against torture, too). What he did was ban the tools that provided the CIA with valuable intell that would not have been gained through standard interrogation procedures. KSM, especially, was described by one official as “superhuman” in his resistance to traditional interrogation. It was clear that he had received extensive training in counter-interrogation. And he was smart: He figured out exactly how long his interrogators were allowed to pour the water shortly after only being waterboarded a few times, and would count off on his hand the number of seconds that would elapse, “1…2….3…”

Under the Obama Administration, the business of intelligence-gathering has taken a back seat in favor of prosecuting terrorists or simply killing them rather than capturing.

Thiessen’s entire Prager interview is excellent, and you can listen to it here:

Remember this from May of last year:

Since the release of his new book, Courting Disaster, Marc Thiessen has been on fire, making his rounds to promote the book (which is a GREAT thing), while also writing articles to set the record straight on the issue of the CIA and enhanced interrogations. It is critical that the American public understands that we did not compromise our core values, that our CIA did not torture, that media leaks and President Obama’s release of the OLC memos damages our national security and benefits al Qaeda; and that the CIA program is the reason why another 9/11 attack has not been successfully carried out (yet).

Yesterday, in the Washington Post, Thiessen writes a devastating article on Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi:

In mid-2004, then-House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi learned something from a CIA briefing that made her blood boil. Pelosi reportedly “came unglued” at the revelation and had “strong words” with national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, demanding that the CIA abandon its plans. As a result, a top-secret finding that President George W. Bush signed to authorize the CIA’s activities was revised. Pelosi succeeded in stopping the agency from moving forward with the controversial operation.

What drove Pelosi to action? Not the CIA’s waterboarding of suspected al-Qaeda terrorists

In a 2009 interview, a former senior Bush administration official directed me to a little-noticed item from Time magazine. According to this 2004 report, Pelosi objected to a CIA plan to provide money to moderate political parties in Iraq ahead of scheduled elections, in an effort to counter Iran, which was funneling millions to extremist elements. “House minority leader Nancy Pelosi ‘came unglued’ when she learned about what a source described as a plan for ‘the CIA to put an operation in place to affect the outcome of the elections,’ ” Time reported. “Pelosi had strong words with National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice in a phone call about the issue. . . . A senior U.S. official hinted that, under pressure from the Hill, the Administration scaled back its original plans.” (Her role was also reported on this page by David Ignatius in 2007.)

Why is this important? Because on May 14, 2009, Pelosi, now speaker of the House, declared in a Capitol Hill news conference that she had opposed CIA waterboarding but was powerless to stop it. A former senior intelligence official told me in 2009 that he was shocked by Pelosi’s claim because, he said, “Speaker Pelosi herself has stopped covert action programs that she has been briefed on by going to the White House. In that very same time frame [after she learned about waterboarding] Pelosi had gone back to the White House [over] a separate covert action program, expressed strong opposition to it. And the remarkable part to me, the White House backed off the program, changed one aspect of the program . . . she was particularly opposed to. And literally, the finding was pulled back and revised.” If Pelosi had truly opposed waterboarding, he said, she had numerous ways to stop it — but she didn’t try.

At the time of her press briefing, Pelosi had been forced to acknowledge that she had learned in February 2003 that waterboarding was being used. Why, reporters asked, did she not object? Flustered, Pelosi claimed that it was not her place to complain because she was no longer the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee. “A letter raising concerns was sent to CIA general counsel Scott Muller by the new Democratic ranking member of [the] committee [Jane Harman], the appropriate person to register a protest.” She made this claim five times during the briefing.

In fact, Harman’s letter, since declassified, did not “register a protest”; it asked “what kind of policy review took place” and urged the agency not to destroy interrogation tapes. Moreover, when Pelosi made this claim, she knew that in 2004, when she was no longer the committee’s ranking member, she had personally intervened with the White House to stop different covert action. She did not defer to Harman; she herself took action. Why was it “appropriate” for her to intervene then but not in the case of waterboarding?

Pelosi was asked by a reporter, “Do you wish now that you had done more? Do you wish it had been your own letter?” Pelosi replied, “No, no, no, no, no, no . . . No letter or anything else is going to stop them from doing what they’re going to do.” She made this claim three times during the briefing. All the while knowing that her phone call to Rice in 2004 had stopped the CIA from “doing what they were going to do” in a different covert operation.

As one of the top four leaders on Capitol Hill, Pelosi had numerous tools at her disposal if she had truly wanted to block waterboarding. She could have threatened to put a hold on funding for the CIA interrogation program, or held up funding for other administration priorities, or worked with her Senate counterparts to hold up nominees for senior CIA positions, or simply called the national security adviser — as she reportedly did in the case of the Iraq program. Pelosi did none of those things when she learned about waterboarding. By her silence, Pelosi gave her consent — and then misled the media by claiming she was powerless to act.

Journalists did not question Pelosi’s claims — and then they stopped questioning her. Pelosi announced that she would not take more questions on the topic, and the media complied. Reporters who relentlessly chased the Valerie Plame leak let the story drop. Pelosi’s role in stopping another covert operation gives lie to her claims that she was powerless to stop waterboarding — but the Washington press corps failed to “connect the dots.” Now that the truth is out, will they continue to let her get away with not answering questions? We’ll learn the answer at her next press briefing.

The press had her on the ropes, then gave her breathing room when she bared her fangs the following week. She told them to drop the topic, and they did.

It’s time to light her up, again.

Some previous posts:

Nancy Pelosi Admits Knowledge Of Waterboarding….BUT Didn’t Think The CIA Would Use It

Republican Asks Dept of Justice to Investigate Pelosoi and Others Over Torture Briefings

Nancy Pelosi was an accomplice to ‘torture.’

ABC, CBS and NBC Ignore Pelosi’s Torture Hypocrisy

Krauthammer – Pelosi At War With CIA & Will Lose The Fight

Sputtering, “Spooked” Speaker Spins Shaky Story on Torture AGAIN!

VIDEO: Pelosi Says Interrogations OK in 2006

Newt Gingrich Dumps on Nancy Pelsoi

Nancy Pelosi Running Scared…Blames Bush For Her Lies

There Once Was a Speaker Named Nancy

What Did Nancy Know?

Democrats Accusation Of CIA Lying An Attempt To Defend Intelligence Bill Provision?…Or Was It The Evil Dick Cheney?

Coming on the heels of Cheney’s FOX News Sunday interview, in which the former Vice President leveled criticism toward the current President that he is increasing America’s vulnerability to terrorism, is an interview by Jake Tapper with the president’s National Security Adviser, Gen. Jim Jones (Ret.). Jones claims that under the Obama Administration, we have been more successful in putting terrorists out of business and in improving international relations:

“This type of radical fundamentalism or terrorism is a threat not only to the United States but to the global community,” Jones said. “The world is coming together on this matter now that President Obama has taken the leadership on it and is approaching it in a slightly different way – actually a radically different way – to discuss things with other rulers to enhance the working relationships with law enforcement agencies – both national and international.”

Jones said that “we are seeing results that indicate more captures, more deaths of radical leaders and a kind of a global coming-together by the fact that this is a threat to not only the United States but to the world at-large and the world is moving toward doing something about it.”

The former Marine General didn’t provide any specific numbers to back up his claim, but he said “there is an increasing trend and I think we seen that in different parts of the world over the last few months for sure.” He added that he was not “making a tally sheet saying we are killing more people, capturing more people than they did — that is not the issue.”

But the numbers are going up, he said. “The numbers of high value targets that we are successfully reaching out to or identifying through good intelligence” from both the CIA and intelligence agencies from US allies has made the difference, he said. “We have better human intelligence; we know where the terrorists are moving. Because of the dialogue and the tone of the dialogue between us and our friends and allies…the trend line against terrorism is positive, and that’s what we want. If we have a positive trend line we have a safer country.”

All this was going on under the Bush Administration. The Obama Administration is an inheritor of those successes, including cooperation amongst foreign nations in the GWoRIT.

Many of the tools and policies put in place in waging the Overseas Contingency Operations are Bush era creations, which President Obama has kept in place in his continuation of “Bush’s War(s)”.

Steve Schippert writes:

Someone is going to point to Pakistan to help him out here, where Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud was finally introduced to the working end of a Hellfire missile.

That’s a load of garbage the instant anyone attempts to take that easy way out. The cooperation within Pakistan has got jack to do with President Obama’s suddenly deft foreign policy prowess nor his wild popularity with global media and resulting coverage – which is to be astutely distinguished from wild popularity among world leaders. Pakistan’s cooperation was being lined up mostly by the Taliban itself, which made its insurgency against the government of Pakistan so bold that the Pakistanis could push it off no longer. They simply had to deal, and have been for the better part of the year.

Predator drone attacks? Those began under President Bush and continue on under President Obama. Under Musharraf and during the Bush tenure, Pakistani authorities handed over to us, Abu Zubaydah and KSM. How have relations improved under Obama’s watch?

The GWoRIT has not been waged ONLY militarily and ONLY in Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s been waged globally, with kills and captures of leaders and operatives happening all the time, in 102 different countries, in cooperation with our CIA and FBI and our military. This all happened under President Bush.

Cowboy diplomacy and “go-it-alone” unilateralism? “You’re either with us, or with the terrorists”? America’s standing harmed; we’re hated all over the world….spin and the stuff of talking point mantra myth-perceptions.

“There is no military solution.”

So sick of this strawman! When had the Bush Administration ever claimed its solution to fighting terrorism was strictly a military one? When was its approach to Iraq and Afghanistan ever strictly a military solution?!

Reaching out to the Muslim community? Not exclusively unique to President Obama.

Closing Gitmo? Really?!? Please wake me when it actually happens.

The War in Iraq? President Obama rode in on the coattails of the surge success he opposed and is merely surfing the waves of SOFA, signed under President Bush.

The War in Afghanistan? He’s acting more like Bush, than not.

NSA warrantless wiretaps much criticized under Bush continue under Obama (partial list of plots averted under Bush)….Rendition programs begun under Clinton, leaked under Bush (which did harm our relations by embarrassing allies implicated in cooperation with the Bush Administration on the GWoRIT- but that’s thanks to the NYTimes, USAToday, and WaPo. We just can’t be trusted with keeping secrets), continue under Obama….

So this was the reason for all the hub-bub?

On June 23, 2009, Director of Central Intelligence Leon Panetta learned of a highly compartmentalized program to assassinate al Qaeda operatives that was launched by the CIA in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. When Panetta found out that the covert program had not been disclosed to Congress, he canceled it and then called an emergency meeting June 24 to brief congressional oversight committees on the program. Over the past week, many details of the program have been leaked to the press and the issue has received extensive media coverage.

That a program existed to assassinate al Qaeda leaders should certainly come as no surprise to anyone. It has been well-publicized that the Clinton administration had launched military operations and attempted to use covert programs to strike the al Qaeda leadership in the wake of the 1998 East Africa embassy bombings. In fact, the Clinton administration has come under strong criticism for not doing more to decapitate al Qaeda prior to 2001. Furthermore, since 2002, the CIA has conducted scores of strikes against al Qaeda targets in Pakistan using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) like the MQ-1 Predator and the larger MQ-9 Reaper.

These strikes have dramatically increased over the past two years and the pace did not slacken when the Obama administration came to power in January. So far in 2009 there have been more than two dozen UAV strikes in Pakistan alone. In November 2002, the CIA also employed a UAV to kill Abu Ali al-Harithi, a senior al Qaeda leader suspected of planning the October 2000 attack against the USS Cole. The U.S. government has also attacked al Qaeda leaders at other times and in other places, such as the May 1, 2008, attack against al Qaeda-linked figures in Somalia using an AC-130 gunship.

A program being set in place to kill the leadership of our enemy….and somehow, someway, this is shocking to people. Why in the world would we NOT have a program like this set up?

As early as Oct. 28, 2001, The Washington Post ran a story discussing the Clinton-era presidential finding authorizing operations to capture or kill al Qaeda targets. The Oct. 28 Washington Post story also provided details of a finding signed by President George W. Bush following the 9/11 attacks that reportedly provided authorization to strike a larger cross section of al Qaeda targets, including those who are not in the Afghan theater of operations. Such presidential findings are used to authorize covert actions, but in this case the finding would also provide permission to contravene Executive Order 12333, which prohibits assassinations.

In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Bush and the members of his administration were very clear that they sought to capture or kill Osama bin Laden and the members of the al Qaeda organization. During the 2004 and 2008 presidential elections in the United States, every major candidate, including Barack Obama, stated that they would seek to kill bin Laden and destroy al Qaeda. Indeed, on the campaign trail, Obama was quite vocal in his criticism of the Bush administration for not doing more to go after al Qaeda’s leadership in Pakistan. This means that, regardless of who is in the White House, it is U.S. policy to go after individual al Qaeda members as well as the al Qaeda organization.

But now a real lightweight scared little politician, in one Leon Panetta, has blown the whistle and caused it’s demise. And we fall farther back into the realm of September 10th, 2001. Just asking to be attacked.

Hell, even Time writer Robert Baer, a CIA veteran, is calling this controversy bulls&*t:

But like many of these stories, there’s less to it than meets the eye. The unit conducted no assassinations or grabs. A former CIA officer involved in the program told me that no targets were picked, no weapons issued and no one sent overseas to carry out anything. “It was little more than a PowerPoint presentation,” he said. “Why would we tell Congress?”

That’s a good question, especially since the program was an open secret. On Oct. 28, 2001, the Washington Post ran an article with the title “CIA Weighs ‘Targeted Killing’ Missions.” And in 2006, New York Times reporter James Risen wrote a book in which he revealed the program’s secret code name, Box Top . Moreover, it is well known that on Nov. 3, 2002, the CIA launched a Hellfire missile from a Predator drone over Yemen, killing an al-Qaeda member involved in the attack on the U.S.S. Cole. And who knows how many “targeted killings” there have been in Afghanistan and Iraq?

~~~

So why all the fuss? Very likely because of that word assassination. I found out the weight of the term in Washington when I was still in the CIA. In the spring of 1995 I was in charge of a small unit in northern Iraq. It was a time when it appeared that with only a little push, Saddam Hussein would fall. There were plans for a military coup, which were quickly twisted into rumors of a plan to assassinate Saddam. The Clinton White House picked up the assassination part and called the CIA to check. My team and I were pulled back to Washington. The FBI investigated, decided no one had planned to assassinate anyone, and dropped the matter. Eventually the Department of Justice sent a letter to the CIA “declining” to prosecute us for attempted murder.

And now this may very well kill the CIA, and our security with it:

I think we’re going to find out that the CIA’s assassination program was dealing in pure hypotheticals, ones it intended to tell Congress about if they became real possibilities. (I won’t try to guess what Cheney would have done.) Yet however overblown the story, if a full-fledged investigation into it does occur, it could be the last nail in the CIA’s coffin. This Congress could succeed where the Church Committee failed. Even if things are not that dire — people are always talking about abolishing the CIA — it will undermine morale for years.

The mind boggles. Everyone, even the far left, whined that we had not assassinated Osama. When was it going to happen they asked. Why hadn’t Bush got it done they whined.

But now that a program existed, and which may have become operational sometime soon, it’s trashed….and the CIA with it.

Stratfor explains why this program was so compartmentalized:

Because of the physical risk to the officers involved in such operations, and the political blowback such operations can cause, it is not surprising that the details of such a program would be strictly compartmentalized inside the CIA and not widely disseminated beyond the gates of Langley. In fact, it is highly doubtful that the details of such a program were even widely known inside the CIA’s counterterrorism center (CTC) — though almost certainly some of the CTC staff suspected that such a covert program existed somewhere. The details regarding such a program were undoubtedly guarded carefully within the clandestine service, with the officer in charge most likely reporting directly to the deputy director of operations, who reports personally to the director of the CIA.

As trite as this old saying may sound, it is painfully true. In the counterterrorism realm, leaks destroy counterterrorism cases and often allow terrorist suspects to escape and kill again. There have been several leaks of “sources and methods” by congressional sources over the past decade that have disclosed details of sensitive U.S. government programs designed to do things such as intercept al Qaeda satellite phone signals and track al Qaeda financing. A classified appendix to the report of the 2005 Robb-Silberman Commission on Intelligence Capabilities (which incidentally was leaked to the press) discussed several such leaks, noted the costs they impose on the American taxpayers and highlighted the damage they do to intelligence programs.

But as Baer said, it was a powerpoint presentation. They wanted it to move forward and it was moved up the chain of command, Panetta, and he kills it. Announcing to al-Qaeda that they no longer have to fear being killed.

The USA is once again a paper tiger.