Obama’s first 48: Do you feel safer yet?
Barack Obama has been president for all of 48 hours, and I already feel less safe. In one of his first official acts as president, Obama ordered the detention facility at Guantanamo closed “within a year”, and officially outlawed any “enhanced interrogation” techniques that fall outside of the U.S. Army Field Manual. In a signing ceremony attended by all the usual liberal suspects, the new president said that we would confront global violence without sacrificing “our values or our ideals”. After years of criticizing the Bush Administration, Obama and the Democrats will now have a chance to do it “their way”.
Democrats, of course, have always put a premium on high minded ideals — preferring things to look good, sound good and feel good — even if they don’t work well (or at all) in practice. The notion of fighting a war against a brutal enemy — that decapitates its prisoners and seeks to wipe us from the face of the earth — with the high ideals of our democratic laws and rules is both naive and dangerous. It reflects the fact that most on the left have never seen the fight against Islamic extremism as a real war, but rather as a difficult issue that can be dealt with through diplomacy, so-called “soft power” and conventional law enforcement techniques. In this upside down view of the world, Miranda rights, Habeus corpus and all other protections for terrorist detainees makes perfect sense.
The immediate result of closing Guantanamo is that it will now fall on the U.S. justice system to figure out what to do with the 250 detainees that remain there. For many on the left, this presents something of an academic question; there is a common narrative among opponents of Guantanamo that those imprisoned there are mostly innocent sheep herders and others caught up in the net of American power, and thus unjustly held without trial. Nothing could be further than the truth: the majority of prisoners at Guantanamo are hardened killers who if released will take up terrorism against us again, and present a real and pressing threat to the United States.
Obama’s move to close Guantanamo comes as no surprise, of course, having been a central theme of his campaign. In fact, Obama has been on record as favoring a conventional legal remedy for terrorists ever since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled last year in Boumediene v Bush that Guantanamo terrorists should be granted access to the U.S. courts:
“I mean, you remember during the Nuremberg trials, part of what made us different was even after these Nazis had performed atrocities that no one had ever seen before, we still gave them a day in court and that taught the entire world about who we are but also the basic principles of rule of law. Now the Supreme Court upheld that principle yesterday”.
Now, as president, Obama is acting to put his view of “terrorist rights” into effect. In ruling that interrogation techniques be limited to the U.S. Army Field Manual, which limits questioning to “please” and “thank you” kind of questions, Obama has effectively tied the hands of CIA and other interrogators who seek vital intelligence about Al Qaeda and other terrorists in the field. Unlike the salons of Paris, London or now Washington, D.C., the CIA and U.S. military operate in the real world, where innocent lives may depend on extracting information from evil doers intent on destroying us.
But that apparently doesn’t matter to Obama, who with a swipe of his pen, has decided that he and the other liberals now in charge of our national security apparatus know more about security than does the current head of the CIA, General Michael Hayden, who has testified repeatedly in front of Congress that enhanced interrogation techniques are critically important to our security. Rather than study the issue from the inside and take some time to make the right decision on this important issue, Obama has placed politics over public safety in unilaterally disarming our intelligence officials as a grand act of political theater.
The left believes that some quid pro quo will exist between us and our enemies; that somehow us living up to our ideals will make a difference with those who seek our destruction and are willing to go to any lengths to ensure it. It is hard to believe that smart people can be so naive as to the real nature of the threats arrayed against us.
I’ve said many times that the left lives in a fantasy world of their own making, and this is further proof that with the Democrats in charge we will be in greater danger because of it.
The author can be reached at kgdavenport@aol.com
Speaking of feeling safer and closing Gitmo, the AP is reporting today that an ex-Gitmo detainee, Said Ali al-Shihri, is purportedly the 2nd-in-command of al-Qaeda’s Yemen branch.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090123/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_yemen_al_qaida
I’m certainly reassured of Obama’s plans to close Gitmo by that fact, aren’t you?
by Jimmy Sengenberger | Friday, Jan 23, 2009 | 9:18 amI would put the hajiis in restraints (better yet, palletize and shrink-wrap them) on an old, C-130 loaded with just 1000 pounds of fuel and a pilot equipped with a chute, have him set it on auto-pilot with a 90 degree heading and cruise altitude of 20,000, jump shortly after take-off onto the deck of a waiting carrier, and let them experience what those on the 9/11 jets experienced in the minutes before their deaths as they nose-dive into shark-infested seas. The ultimate Disney World ride.
For the entertainment of their countrymen on Al-Jazeera, I would also place a few cameras on board so their demise could be viewed by remote video feed.
“Gee, y’all, accidents do happen.”
“Shucks, Hajii, sometimes life can be a real bummer, huh? But, I guess you’ll understand, since you and your buddies think it’s great fun to cut off the heads of Jewish journalists and kids on TV and broadcast their lonely, hideous deaths on the internet?”
Better yet, why not send the hajiis on a Caribbean cruise with the extended families and colleagues of the firefighters killed on 9/11, or with the families and colleagues of Marines and 3rd and 4th ID troopers murdered by IEDS in Iraq and Afghanistan, or both?
Then, I would know that Obama is not the Chamberlainesque weanie he seems to be.
Of course, to the contrary, the new Administration, influenced or controlled by traitorous Anti-Christian Lawyers’ Union worms, will probably buy the poor, oppressed hajiis first-class seats on Gulf Air, pay them $5 million per head reparations, and issue an embossed letter of apology on White House letterhead for their inconvenience.
The ACLU pinheads and Reno acolytes are, after all, the same people who, on the one hand, were responsible for Waco and sending storm troopers into Elian Gonzales’ grandparents home so he could be forcibly returned to the workers’ paradise of Cuba, and, on the other, issued FISA guidance during the Clinton Administration so stringent that FBI field agents in Phoenix and Minneapolis were prevented by SES FBI and Justice weanies from following their instincts in going after Moussaoui and others like him after sound tips by flight schools.
They were also the ones who hounded New York FBI Counter-Terrorism Task Force Chief Agent John O’Neill out of the FBI in retaliation for threatening oil company concessions and other State Department-protected business interests by pressing the Saudis and Yemenis too hard for access to imprisoned al-Qaeda operatives from whom he would have gained information that could have quite possibly have helped prevent the 9/11 attacks in which he was killed after taking job as head of security for the World Trade Center.
Now that they are back in power, their limp-wristed delicacy in the face of evil will significantly increase the likelihood of more, and much more devastating, attacks on Americans on American soil.
As liberal Democrats (e.g., Wilson, FDR, Truman, LBJ, Carter, Clinton) always do, they will communicate weakness that will prompt our enemies to try to have their way with us all over the world, and will thereby force us into wider wars that might have been prevented had they ruthlessly shown resolve, and shown and used cold steel to good effect from the beginning.
Bush’s error was not that he went too far, but that, given the predominance of his Yalie weanie side over his red-blooded Texas patriot side, did not go nearly far enough.
Obama is already playing into the hands of our enemies by snatching defeat from the jaws of victory in strategically vital Iraq by drawing down our forces and inviting renewed Civil War there, in order to make the catastrophic blunder of widening the war in strategically insignificant Afghanistan and Pakistan, where our brave kids are forced to fight with one hand tied behind their back among a hostile population, in terrain that completely negates the benefits of their superior weaponry and technology, a hellishly arid and mountainous desert analog to Vietnam that brought the mighty Soviet Army, and, in turn, Soviet Union, to its knees.
The only way to deal with those parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan that truck with our enemies is to visit Biblical plagues upon them for their treachery.
Bush lacked the stones. So does Obama. Therefore, better to get the hell out of Afghanistan and Western Pakistan, erase them from the face of the Earth, if need be (as we did much of Japan and Germany), and focus our energies on Iraq, where we have already won but could easily lose if we take our eye off the real prize: strategic dominance of the Persian Gulf.
Of course, that would require a leader of Pattonesque or LeMayesque vision and ruthlessness.
America doesn’t make them like that, any more, or, if it does, they almost never make it far enough up the food chain to make a difference.
Instead, we usually get the dismal likes of Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, or Obama.
Once Obama screws it all up, as he inevitably will, perhaps another Reagan will come along to set things straight, at least for a little while.
Sadly, it will only come after the American people are reminded by another 9/11, on a much larger scale, that the economy is NOT the top priority, after all, and that the only reason they feel comfortable with a leftist weanie like Obama is that, for all his many faults, Bush did one thing very well: he prevented another 9/11.
by Mark Brennan | Friday, Jan 23, 2009 | 12:28 pm