It’s amazing. We found Osama bin-Laden because of the Enhanced Interrogation Techniques authorized by the prior administration. Because of the captured terrorists imprisoned at Gitmo. Because of the intelligence agents who worked tirelessly, using all the techniques authorized by Bush, to find Osama.
And to this day Obama has discontinued placing prisoners in Gitmo, discontinued EIT’s, and is investigating the agents who got the information that allowed Obama to order the execution of Osama.
Oh, but putting a few bullets into the head of the man is a-ok. Just don’t go waterboarding anyone.
“It is an outrage that we would go after the people who deserve the credit for keeping us safe for seven and a half years.”
Obama turned his back on his own supposed ideals and the supposed ideals of his followers by ordering the hit. Good for him. I fully support his decision and believe it was the one that should have been made.
But we know how it came to be, Enhanced Interrogation Techniques:
So if Obama can use the product of these interrogations, and ok the execution of Osama, then why not convince those same followers that we NEED Enhanced Interrogation Techniques. That we need those agents on the job instead of being investigated by Holder.
Well, I’ll tell you why. The left is a bit upset that Obama ok’d this and seeing as how the left has been on a crusade against the CIA and our intelligence apparatus for decades, there ain’t no way in hell they will allow Bush-light to ok EIT’s
Arthur Herman writing in August of 2009:
How posterity will view the CIA’s use of enhanced interrogation tactics during the anxious years of 2002 and 2003, when the real possibility of another 9/11 attack loomed, may depend less on what we learn about the results of the interrogations themselves than on the Obama administration’s conduct in determining their appropriateness and legality.
The appointment of a special prosecutor is just one of a series of administration attacks on the CIA. Those attacks have included the release—over the objections of his own CIA head, Leon Panetta—of the classified 2004 CIA Inspector General Report revealing which enhanced interrogation methods were actually used on which suspects (including threatening to seize members of one suspect’s family and intimidating another suspect with a power drill). The administration has also created a new “High Value Detainee Interrogation Group,” effectively stripping the CIA of responsibility for interrogating important terrorist suspects and handing it over to the vastly more constrained FBI.
This assault on the CIA might seem strange considering that just two years ago, Democrats and the media were expressing outrage over the Bush administration’s alleged “outing” of a supposedly covert operative named Valerie Plame. A special prosecutor was then tasked with finding out who had been so “un-American” (as Senator John Kerry termed it) as to leak the name of a CIA employee. Now we have a special prosecutor who may not only “out” CIA interrogators but also work hard to throw them into prison.1
So what if the 2004 Inspector General’s Report explicitly states that the waterboarding and other fully authorized techniques used on al-Qaeda detainees like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed were effective and yielded valuable, actionable information that may have saved thousands of lives? Never mind that when Justice Department career lawyers scrutinized the Inspector General’s Report in 2006 looking for evidence of wrongdoing worthy of prosecution, they could find none. The argument that the United States and those in the government’s employ behaved in reprehensible ways in the aftermath of 9/11 deserving of legal sanction has become standard issue among Democrats and liberals, and when a Democratic liberal ascended to the White House, it was no longer an argument. It is now policy.
In all this, Obama and the Democrats are not just attempting to delegitimize the conduct of the past eight years. They are also reverting to type. For the past 35 years, American liberals have attacked and vilified the CIA with a fervency that borders on holy war.
Read the whole article because it’s an excellent history of the liberal assault against the CIA.
In one breath Obama thanks our intelligence agents
“We give thanks to the countless intelligence and counterterrorism professionals who’ve worked tirelessly to achieve this outcome.”
And then allows an investigation of those same professionals.
Hypocrites
See author page