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Sixty-three years ago today, Israel was brought to fruition by the Zionist movement when David Ben-Gurion, acting on behalf of the Jewish Agency, declared Israel's independence. The following day, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq attacked the nascent, tiny country - its very existence a spike in the heart of Islamic triumphalism. It is amazing to me that Israel still stands today. It does so as the ancestral homeland of Judaism, as the only successful democracy in the Middle East, and as a bulwark against the craven, genocidal animals who embrace Wahhabi/Salafi and Khomeinist Islam. It does so despite the fact that Jews were stateless and persecuted throughout the world for virtually all of the prior two millennia.
And despite this history, Jews have not merely survived, they have thrived, much to the benefit of the world. Members of the Jewish faith have made contributions to bettering humanity on a scale vastly outweighing their numbers.
I would recommend that you visit Seraphic Secret to see his post on Israel's Independence Day. He relies on the Elder of Ziyon to celebrate this day by explaining Zionism in anecdotal form.
Happy Independence Day, Israel. May you be celebrating this day until the end of time.
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
Happy Independence Day Israel
Newt, The NYT, & The Presidential Scarlet Letter
Newt Gingrich is poised to announce his bid for the Presidency, likely today. And as to be fully expected, this event is celebrated in the pages of the NYT with a lengthy column, though it is a column that seems drawn in inspiration from the pages of Nathaniel Hawthorne's magnum opus, The Scarlet Letter. Titling their first real hit job of the 2012 Presidential season "Gingrich Set to Run, With Wife in Central Role," the NYT revels in . . . . well, you guess. Is it, (A), a news worthy analysis of what makes Newt a viable candidate to challenge Obama? Or is it (B), a lengthy walk down the memory lane of Newt's marital infidelities? For the answer, let's go to the opening paragraphs of the NYT announcement of Newt's presidential aspirations:
Callista Bisek’s friends from rural Wisconsin were stunned when, well over a decade ago, she confided that she was secretly dating an older, married man: Newt Gingrich.
Still in her 20s when they met, Ms. Bisek had been raised in a town of 1,500, the only child of a meat packer and a secretary. A churchgoing Roman Catholic, she had attended a Lutheran college where she practiced piano five hours a day. “Is this the wisest course for you to be taking?” Karen Olson, her best friend, recalled asking. . . .
I think this piece may be even too low brow for the Enquirer. They at least have some journalistic standards. How long before this left wing rag finally goes into bankruptcy?
Monday, May 9, 2011
Fox News, Enhanced Interrogation, "The Question" - & Totally Missing The Issue
On Fox News Sunday, Chris Wallace asked Obama's former Dep. National Sec. Advisor Tom Donilon why shooting an unarmed man in the face is legal and proper while waterboarding is not? Donilon tapped dance all over the place. Watch and enjoy.
Since that played, I have heard it replayed endlessly on O'Reilly, Hannity, etc. The question and the response both miss the point, as do the talking heads on Fox who are playing it up.
Donilon blew an easy answer. There is a bright line between an enemy combatant, armed or unarmed, and a detainee.
Under the rules of war, we can kill any enemy combatant who has not surrendered. Whether he is armed or not is immaterial. Bin Laden hadn't attempted to surrender before the SEALS pulled the trigger. But once an enemy combatant attempts to surrender, a whole new set of rules apply. Unless it is believed a ploy (such as the individual is holding up his hands and walking forward while holding the detonator on a suicide vest), we are bound by the laws of war to accept the surrender. The question then becomes, how must we treat a detained person. Shooting them in the head would be murder, pure and simple. Equally unlawful would be actually torturing them - something which, in accord with the clear terms of the UN Convention on Torture and U.S. laws based thereon, waterboarding is not.
The real issue is whether it is moral to place the well being of these homicidal terrorists over the health and safety of Americans whom they threaten with slaughter on a massive scale. It is not, but that is precisely what the Obama administration has done in gutting our ability to interrogate, let alone effectively interrogate, high level al Qaeda detainees. Chris Wallace should have been focused on that. His "question," being endlessly replayed by Fox's talking heads, is simply a red herring.
Steyn On Handwringing, Heads & The Unchecked March Of Radical Islam
Yes, we got bin Laden. Then we buried him in accordance with Muslim tradition - though I think we should be demanding to know of what that "tradition" consisted, since it appears that a traditional Muslim ceremony includes prayers that Islam triumph completely over Christianity and Judaism.
And as Mark Steyn points out in his latest missive, the death and post-death treatment of bin Laden encapsulates in a nutshell everything that is wrong with our approach to this war against "radical Islam." We are engaging in the physical war, but not the war of ideas. Indeed, in the latter, we lay prostrate, not merely failing to engage, but showing great concern for the sensibilities of those who would slaughter us. Steyn's two points - one, we could use a lot more Kitchner and a lot less Obama; two - the Muslim radicals are winning the war of ideas, here and everywhere. And it is that only that war that ultimately counts.
This from Mr. Steyn:
The belated dispatch of Osama testifies to what the United States does well – elite warriors, superbly trained, equipped to a level of technological sophistication no other nation can match. Everything else surrounding the event (including White House news management so club-footed that one starts to wonder darkly whether its incompetence is somehow intentional) embodies what the United States does badly. Pakistan, our "ally," hides and protects not only Osama but also Mullah Omar and Zawahiri, and does so secure in the knowledge that it will pay no price for its treachery – indeed, confident that its duplicitous military will continue to be funded by U.S. taxpayers. . . .
. . . On Sept. 12, 2001, Gen. Musharraf was in a meeting "when my military secretary told me that the U.S. secretary of state, Gen. Colin Powell, was on the phone. I said I would call back later." The milquetoasts of the State Department were in no mood for Musharraf's I'm-washing-my-hair routine, and, when he'd been dragged to the phone, he was informed that the Bush administration would bomb Pakistan "back to the Stone Age" if they didn't get everything they wanted. Musharraf concluded that America meant it.
A decade later, we're back to Sept. 10. Were Washington to call Islamabad as it did a decade ago, the Pakistanis would thank them politely and say they'd think it over and get back in six weeks, give or take. They think they've got the superpower all figured out – that America is happy to spend bazillions of dollars on technologically advanced systems that can reach across the planet but it doesn't really have the stomach for changing the facts of the ground. That means that once in a while your big-time jihadist will be having a quiet night in watching "Dancing With The Stars" when all of a sudden Robocop descends from the heavens, kicks the door open, and it's time to get ready for your virgins. But other than that, in the bigger picture, day by day, all but unnoticed, things will go their way.
In the fall of 2001, discussing the collapse of the Taliban, Thomas Friedman, the in-house thinker at The New York Times, offered this bit of cartoon analysis:
"For all the talk about the vaunted Afghan fighters, this was a war between the Jetsons and the Flintstones – and the Jetsons won and the Flintstones know it."
But they didn't, did they? The Flintstones retreated to their caves, bided their time, and a decade later the Jetsons are desperate to negotiate their way out.
When it comes to instructive analogies, I prefer Khartoum to cartoons. If it took America a decade to avenge the dead of 9/11, it took Britain 13 years to avenge their defeat in Sudan in 1884. But, after Kitchener slaughtered the jihadists of the day at the Battle of Omdurman in 1897, he made a point of digging up their leader the Mahdi, chopping off his head and keeping it as a souvenir. The Sudanese got the message. The British had nary a peep out of the joint until they gave it independence six decades later – and, indeed, the locals fought for King and (distant imperial) country as brave British troops during World War Two. Even more amazingly, generations of English schoolchildren were taught about the Mahdi's skull winding up as Lord Kitchener's novelty paperweight as an inspiring tale of national greatness.
Not a lot of that today. It's hard to imagine Osama's noggin as an attractive centerpiece at next year's White House Community Organizer of the Year banquet, and entirely impossible to imagine America's "educators" teaching the tale approvingly. So instead, even as we explain that our difficulties with this bin Laden fellow are nothing to do with Islam, no sir, perish the thought, we simultaneously rush to assure the Muslim world that, not to worry, we accorded him a 45-minute Islamic funeral as befits an observant Muslim.
That's why Pakistani big shots harbored America's mortal enemy and knew they could do so with impunity. Bin Laden was a Saudi with money, and there are a lot of those about funding this and that from South Asia to the Balkans to Dearborn, Mich. They've walked their petrodollars round the Western world buying up everything they need to, from minor mosques to major university "Middle Eastern Studies" departments. By comparison with his compatriots, Osama squandered his dough. In that long-ago Spectator piece, I wrote, "Junior's just a peculiarly advanced model of the useless idiot son – a criticism routinely made of Bush but actually far more applicable to Osama, who took his dad's fortune and literally threw it down a hole in the ground."
A lot of American policy followed it. A decade on, our troops are running around Afghanistan "winning hearts and minds" and getting gunned down by the very policemen and soldiers they've spent years training. Back on the home front, every small-town airport has at least a dozen crack TSA operatives sniffing round the panties of grade-schoolers. Meanwhile, at the UN, the EU, at the Organization of the Islamic Conference, in the "Facebook revolutions" of "the Arab spring," the Islamization of the world proceeds: Millions of Muslims support bin Laden's goal – the submission of the Western world to Islam – but, unlike him, understand that flying planes into buildings is entirely unnecessary to achieving it. Will being high-flying Jetsons with state-of-the-art gizmos prove sufficient in a Flintstonizing world? The Pakistanis are pretty sure they know the answer to that.
Dick Cheney On the CIA, Enhanced Interrogation, Obama & Osama
Obama has gutted the CIA's Enhanced Interrogation program that ultimately gave us bin Laden. He has taken the CIA completely out of the business of interrogating high level detainees. And on top of that, outrageously, Obama continues to investigate those CIA employees who in fact applied enhanced interrogation, despite all of them having been cleared in a prior investigation by a career Justice Dept. employee. Dick Cheney discusses each of these points while explaining why we need the CIA's program reconstituted on Fox News Sunday.
Obama did not capture bin Laden, I am convinced, because he did not want to have to deal with bin Laden within the gutted, ridiculous framework for high level detainees that he is responsible for since coming to office. Nonetheless, the fact is that our soldiers did walk away from the bin Laden compound with a treasure trove of intelligence that will likely lead us to the identities of many new people in the war on terror. The irony is that our ability to to exploit that information is, thanks to Obama, seriously constrained. As Michael Mukasey put it in his recent WSJ article:
But policies put in place by the very administration that presided over this splendid success promise fewer such successes in the future. Those policies make it unlikely that we'll be able to get information from those whose identities are disclosed by the material seized from bin Laden.
Sunday, May 8, 2011
Thomas Sowell's "Basic Economics"
Last weekend, I began reading the recently released 4th edition of Thomas Sowell's tome, "Basic Economics.". It has been a number of years since I took economics in college. It turns out that I haven't forgotten any of the basic principles. But that said, the degree to which Sowell's book has enhanced my understanding of those principles surprised me greatly. Indeed, it did so to the point that I am writing this post to recommend his book to everyone who doesn't hold a PhD in economics (or who does hold one and is named Paul Krugman). Giving example after example of the basic principles of free market economics - and market distortions - in practice, Sowell eviscerates essentially every left wing economic meme of the past half century. It is an invaluable resource.
For but one of thousands of examples from "Basic Economics," Sowell addresses, on page 227, income differential between races in the U.S., pointing out that:
While gross statistics show large income differences among American racial and ethnic groups, finer breakdowns usually show much smaller differences. For example, black, white, and Hispanic males of the same age (29) and IQ (100) have all had average annual incomes within a thousand dollars of one another. In New Zealand, while there are substantial income differences between the Maori population and the white population, these differences likewise shrink drastically when comparing Maoris with other New Zealanders of the same age and with the same skills and literacy levels.
One other notable aspect of this book is how Sowell traces the ripples through the economy of market distortions. At any rate, this book should be required reading for every American. I can't recommend it strongly enough.
Saturday, May 7, 2011
Cry Havoc And Let Slip The Cats Dogs Of War
Among the highly trained soldiers sent to dispatch bin Laden to meet his 72 sturgeons, one had 4 legs, canine teeth - and it wasn't a cat. According to reports, it was a Belgian Malinois named Cairo, though his precise mission in the bin Laden raid is not known.
So why was Cairo there and not Felix the cat? Rob Long, writing at Ricochet, states the obvious - you "don't bring a cat to kill a terrorist," explaining:
[I]n the debate of Dog v. Cat, case closed. Dogs are fierce warriors, loyal friends, hard chargers, face lickers, snack lovers, and, clearly, patriots.
True. All true. And as one commenter to Rob's post cogently adds, "if we depended on cats to protect us we would all be in burqas by now."
Today's military canines perform a wide variety of tasks, from security and capture to sniffing out IED's. But dogs have been used in warfare since antiquity. Indeed, prior to the invention of gunpowder, and for several centuries thereafter, war dogs have been used to fight as part of armies. This from Wiki gives a good overview:
War dogs were used by the Egyptians, Greeks, Persians, Sarmatians, Alans, Slavs, Britons, and the Romans. The Molossian 'Canis Molossus' dog of Epirus was the strongest known to the Romans, and was specifically trained for battle. However, when fought against the broad-mouthed, powerful mastiff of Britannia, they were outmatched. The Romans exported many of this breed of mastiff to Rome and then disseminated them over the known world. Often war dogs would be sent into battle with large protective spiked metal collars and coats of mail armor. The Romans had attack formations made entirely of dogs. Native Americans also used dogs, though not on this scale.
During the Late Antiquity, Attila the Hun used giant Molosser dogs in his campaigns. Gifts of war dog breeding stock between European royalty were seen as suitable tokens for exchange throughout the Middle Ages. Other civilizations used armored dogs to defend caravans or attack enemies. The Spanish conquistadors used armoured dogs that had been trained to kill and disembowel when they invaded the land controlled by South American natives. The British used dogs when they attacked the Irish and the Irish in turn used Irish Wolfhounds to attack invading Norman knights on horseback. Two wolfhounds, or even a single one were often capable of taking a mounted man in armour off his horse, where the lightly armed handler would finish him off if necessary.
Later on, Frederick the Great used dogs as messengers during the Seven Years' War with Russia. Napoleon would also used dogs during his campaigns. Dogs were used up until 1770 to guard naval installations in France . . .
Bottom line, I agree with Rob, if I have to go to war, its going to be with my hounds by my side - no cats need apply.
Shhhhhhhh . . . . warrior sleeping.
Intelligence, Interrogation, Obama & Osama
I explained in the post here how enhanced interrogation was directly tied to our finding bin Laden, and how Obama, with his warped sense of morality, has gutted our ability to gain such intelligence in the future. Former U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey has penned an article in the WSJ making precisely the same points as he argues that the enhanced interrogation program put in place by President Bush should be reconstituted. This from Mr. Mukasey:
Osama bin Laden was killed by Americans, based on intelligence developed by Americans. . . .
But policies put in place by the very administration that presided over this splendid success promise fewer such successes in the future. Those policies make it unlikely that we'll be able to get information from those whose identities are disclosed by the material seized from bin Laden. The administration also hounds our intelligence gatherers in ways that can only demoralize them.
Consider how the intelligence that led to bin Laden came to hand. It began with a disclosure from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), who broke like a dam under the pressure of harsh interrogation techniques that included waterboarding. He loosed a torrent of information—including eventually the nickname of a trusted courier of bin Laden. . . .
Abu Zubaydeh was coerced into disclosing information that led to the capture of Ramzi bin al Shibh, another of the planners of 9/11. Bin al Shibh disclosed information that, when combined with what was learned from Abu Zubaydeh, helped lead to the capture of KSM and other senior terrorists and the disruption of follow-on plots aimed at both Europe and the United States.
Another of those gathered up later in this harvest, Abu Faraj al-Libi, also was subjected to certain of these harsh techniques and disclosed further details about bin Laden's couriers that helped in last weekend's achievement.
The harsh techniques themselves were used selectively against only a small number of hard-core prisoners who successfully resisted other forms of interrogation, and then only with the explicit authorization of the director of the CIA. Of the thousands of unlawful combatants captured by the U.S., fewer than 100 were detained and questioned in the CIA program. Of those, fewer than one-third were subjected to any of these techniques.
Former CIA Director Michael Hayden has said that, as late as 2006, even with the growing success of other intelligence tools, fully half of the government's knowledge about the structure and activities of al Qaeda came from those interrogations. The Bush administration put these techniques in place only after rigorous analysis by the Justice Department, which concluded that they were lawful. Regrettably, that same administration gave them a name—"enhanced interrogation techniques"—so absurdly antiseptic as to imply that it must conceal something unlawful.
The current president ran for election on the promise to do away with them even before he became aware, if he ever did, of what they were. Days after taking office he directed that the CIA interrogation program be done away with entirely, and that interrogation be limited to the techniques set forth in the Army Field Manual, a document designed for use by even the least experienced troops. It's available on the Internet and used by terrorists as a training manual for resisting interrogation.
In April 2009, the administration made public the previously classified Justice Department memoranda analyzing the harsh techniques, thereby disclosing them to our enemies and assuring that they could never be used effectively again. Meanwhile, the administration announced its intentions to replace the CIA interrogation program with one administered by the FBI. In December 2009, Omar Faruq Abdulmutallab was caught in an airplane over Detroit trying to detonate a bomb concealed in his underwear. He was warned after apprehension of his Miranda rights, and it was later disclosed that no one had yet gotten around to implementing the new program.
Yet the Justice Department, revealing its priorities, had gotten around to reopening investigations into the conduct of a half-dozen CIA employees alleged to have used undue force against suspected terrorists. I say "reopening" advisedly because those investigations had all been formally closed by the end of 2007, with detailed memoranda prepared by career Justice Department prosecutors explaining why no charges were warranted. Attorney General Eric Holder conceded that he had ordered the investigations reopened in September 2009 without reading those memoranda. The investigations have now dragged on for years with prosecutors chasing allegations down rabbit holes, with the CIA along with the rest of the intelligence community left demoralized.
Immediately following the killing of bin Laden, the issue of interrogation techniques became in some quarters the "dirty little secret" of the event. But as disclosed in the declassified memos in 2009, the techniques are neither dirty nor, as noted by Director Hayden and others, were their results little. As the memoranda concluded—and as I concluded reading them at the beginning of my tenure as attorney general in 2007—the techniques were entirely lawful as the law stood at the time the memos were written, and the disclosures they elicited were enormously important. That they are no longer secret is deeply regrettable.
It is debatable whether the same techniques would be lawful under statutes passed in 2005 and 2006—phrased in highly abstract terms such as "cruel, inhuman and degrading" treatment—that some claimed were intended to ban waterboarding even though the Senate twice voted down proposals to ban the technique specifically. It is, however, certain that intelligence-gathering rather than prosecution must be the first priority, and that we need a classified interrogation program administered by the agency best equipped to administer it: the CIA.
We also need to put an end to the ongoing investigations of CIA operatives that continue to undermine intelligence community morale.
Acknowledging and meeting the need for an effective and lawful interrogation program, which we once had, and freeing CIA operatives and others to administer it under congressional oversight, would be a fitting way to mark the demise of Osama bin Laden. . . .
Friday, May 6, 2011
"Evil Does Not Die Of Natural Causes"
Charles Krauthammer today makes another of his insightful observations, this time in regards to bin Laden and those who, in the wake of bin Laden's demise, now claim that the the War on Terror was an unnecessary overreaction to the 9-11 attacks. Such individuals are not merely historical revisionists on a grand scale, but likewise credentialled fools who do not understand the ideological well-spring that gave rise to bin Laden and that will continue to threaten all of Western Civilization with slaughter until the war of ideas - the most important part of the war on terror - is won. This from Dr. Krauthammer:
. . . The bin Laden operation is the perfect vindication of the war on terror. It was made possible precisely by the vast, warlike infrastructure that the Bush administration created post-9/11, a fierce regime of capture and interrogation, of dropped bombs and commando strikes. That regime, of course, followed the more conventional war that brought down the Taliban, scattered and decimated al-Qaeda and made bin Laden a fugitive.
Without all of this, the bin Laden operation could never have happened. Whence came the intelligence that led to Abbottabad? Many places, including from secret prisons in Romania and Poland; from terrorists seized and kidnapped, then subjected to interrogations, sometimes “harsh” or “enhanced”; from Gitmo detainees; from a huge bureaucratic apparatus of surveillance and eavesdropping. In other words, from a Global War on Terror infrastructure that critics, including Barack Obama himself, deplored as a tragic detour from American rectitude.
It was all not just un-American, now say the revisionists, but also unnecessary.
Really? We could never have pulled off the bin Laden raid without a major military presence in Afghanistan. . . .
Even the war in Iraq played an (unintended) role. After its rout from Afghanistan, al-Qaeda chose the troubled waters of Iraq as the central front in its war on America — and suffered a stunning defeat, made particularly humiliating when its fellow Sunni Arabs rose up to join the infidel Americans in subduing it.
Bin Laden declared war on us in 1998. But it was not until 9/11 that we took him seriously. At which point we answered with a declaration of war of our own, offering the brutal, unrelenting and ferocious response that war demands and that police work prohibits.
Including bin Laden’s execution. It’s clear there was no intention of capturing him. And for good reason. Doing so would have been insane, gratuitously granting him a second life of immense publicity on a worldwide stage from which to propagandize.
We came to kill. That is what you do in war. Do that in police work and you’ve committed murder. The Navy SEAL(s) who pulled the fateful trigger would be facing charges, not receiving medals.
You want to say we’ve now won the war? Fine. It’s at least an arguable proposition. After all, the war on terror will end one day, and we will return to policing the odd terrorist nut case. I would argue, however, that while bin Laden’s death marks an extremely important inflection point in the fight against jihadism, it’s far too early to declare victory.
Now, it is one thing to have an argument about whether it’s over. It’s quite another to claim that our reaching this happy day — during which we can even be debating whether victory has been achieved — has nothing to do with the war on terror of the previous decade. Al-Qaeda is not subsiding on its own. It is not retiring from the field, having seen the error of its ways. It is not disappearing because of some inexorable law of history or nature. It is in retreat because of the terrible defeats it suffered once America decided to take up arms against it, a campaign (once) known as the war on terror.
Thursday, May 5, 2011
Enhanced Interrogation & The Death Of Bin Laden
The fact that we found bin Laden has had an unfortunate consequence for the left - it has shined a spotlight on the fact that Obama has virtually gutted our most important tool in the war on terror - the ability to gain intelligence by interrogating high level terrorists. The unassailable fact is that the seeds that allowed us to finally locate bin Laden arose out of interrogations of high level detainees who had been subject to the CIA's Enhanced Interrogation Techniques. Probably no one does a better job of laying this out than Ace at Ace of Spades:
1. 2003: Enhanced Interrogation of Khalid Sheikh Mohammad Results in the Nom De Guerre of bin Ladin's Courier. . . .
2. 2004: Enhanced Interrogation of al-Qahtani Confirms the Nom De Geure of bin Ladin's Courier. . . .
3. 2006 (?): Enhanced Interrogation of an Al Qaeda Captured in Iraq, Ghul, Produces the Real Name of the Courier. . . .
4. 2006-2009: NSA Begins Furiously Intercepting Any And All Communications Made By Anyone "al-Kuwaiti" Has Ever Known. . . .
5. Late 2010 (?): al-Kuwaiti Places a Very Ill-Advised Phone Call [that gives away his location]. . . .
6. 2011: Surveying Abbottabad, We Grow Confident We've Found Bin Ladin's Hideout. . . .
Do read the whole post as it both goes into detail while responding to the NYT and others who are busy indeed trying to pretend that enhanced interrogation played no or minimal role in finding bin Laden. (Likewise is this post from Ace on the same topic.)
Honestly, watching the left trying to spin this is like watching small children with their fingers in their ears stamping their feet in a tantrum while they scream: "Enhanced Interrogation is TORTURE, it is EVIL, and it had NO BEARING on our ability to find bin Laden." It would be merely pathetic were it not that our national security is very much at issue.
As a threshold matter, it bears repeating ad infinitum that, despite the labeling by the left, none of the CIA enhanced interrogation techniques - including waterboarding - rose to the level of "torture" as defined by the UN Convention Against Torture and U.S. law. It is also worth a reminder just how Obama and the left have gone about completely gutting our ability to interrogate high level al Qaeda detainees. As I wrote in a post last year:
Obama superimposed his warped morality on the mosaic of our national security. Obama baldly – and wrongly - slapped a label of “torture” on waterboarding and all the techniques of enhanced interrogation. In his effort to demonize the right and establish himself as the nation's Arbiter of Morality In Chief, he began to war on the CIA.
He allowed a witch hunt to go forward against the Office of Legal Council (OLC) attorneys who authored legal opinions responsive to questions asked by the CIA. The subject of those opinions was the legality of certain interrogation techniques. Obama thus ensured that, perhaps for decades to come, we will have risk averse intelligence agencies and that no OLC attorney in their right mind will ever again give legal approval to anything remotely controversial, regardless of what the law and precedent may be.
Obama's next step, in April [2010], was his decision to declassify those portions of the OLC opinions that suited his purpose of attacking the Bush regime. But Obama withheld – and does so even to this day – fully unredacted copies of memos showing that the enhanced interrogation techniques were at the heart of our success in the war against terror during the Bush years.
Assuming that a recent Rasmussen poll regarding U.S. attitudes towards waterboarding and interrogation of the undiebomber is accurate, Obama has clearly failed to convince the nation that his morality should trump his duty to use all legal means to see to the safety of Americans. Yet Obama, ever the ideologue, in his most recent speech, chastised his critics for their moral failings in disagreeing with him.
Obama further damaged the standing and morale of the CIA when, after Nancy Pelosi called the CIA liars over the substance of her briefings on waterboarding, Obama remained silent and allowed the charges to stand. By all accounts, morale at the CIA is at its nadir.
Not satisfied with merely ending the “waterboarding,” Obama went far beyond that. Almost as soon as he took office, Obama not only tossed out all of the techniques of “enhanced interrogation used by the CIA, he limited future interrogations to those 19 techniques used in the Army Field Manual. But the reason enhanced interrogation techniques were developed in the first place was because those techniques set out in the field manual, while they had historically yielded results in over 90% of interrogations since the WWII, proved near worthless when it came to interrogating the religiously motivated fighters of al Qaeda and the Taliban.
Ultimately, Obama took the step of taking the CIA out of the interrogation business. As of August, 2009, all high level interrogations were solely to be carried out by a team controlled by the FBI and under direct White House oversight.
The death of bin Laden should in fact bring the issue of interrogation and enhanced interrogation front and center. Since Obama took office, we have not interrogated a single high level al Qaeda operative. Obama would much rather kill them than have to deal with interrogating them. Nothing proves that more than raid on the bin Laden compound, where only one of the four men, all al Qaeda operatives, was armed and fired on the SEALS. Nonetheless, all four men on the compound were killed. Why were none, including bin Laden and his wife, captured? They could have been captured easily we now know. Unfortunately, by doing otherwise, we cost the U.S. the single greatest intelligence find we could possibly ever have grasped. It is a travesty.
We can either have the argument about enhanced interrogation now, or we can have it later, following the next major successful terrorist attack from al Qaeda or its clones. To date, the two major attacks, the Times Square Bomber and the Undiebomber, were thwarted not by the Obama administration acting on intelligence, but rather by some combination of the grace of God or terrorist incompetence. The only thing of which we can be sure is that more similar attempts will be made. Nonetheless, Obama and the left hope to put the argument off until after the 2012 election, irrespective of what that means for our national security.
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
In The Absence Of Pictures, Multiple Choice Question
Obama told us today that he will not authorize the release of any of the death photos of bin Laden, including, apparently, even those taken of his burial at sea. With that in mind, let's play multiple choice. Which of the following statements are false:
A. Having authorized a ground raid against Osama bin Laden in order to insure that we had evidence that he was killed, it makes no sense whatsoever to now hide thst evidence.
B. By witholding pictures of bin Laden's death because it might inflame some Muslims, the Obama administration is prioritizing concern for Muslims, and in particular radical Muslims, over concern for what is best for Americans generally.
C. Those Muslims who would be inflamed by pictures of bin Laden's death are the same Muslims who are already inflamed and ready to do violence because of the Crusades, the Reconquista, Napoleon's forays into Egypt, and a million other reasons, of which the fact that we killed bin Laden is simply one more.
D. A gruesome photo of Osama bin Linden in the ultimate position of weakness, having had the will of America imposed upon him, is how we want everyone, including the Muslim world, to remember him when they ponder whether to follow his example.
E. None of the above.
If you answered "E," congratulations, you are more intelligent than our moralizer in chief.
I would only add that I am so tired of Obama positing that those who disagree with him are operating from illegitimate, base motives. He did so today when he said that anyone who wanted the photos of bin Laden published did so out of a desire to "spike the ball in the endzone." Not only is Obama's judgment fatally flawed, the man is an intellectually dishonest ass.
Obama the Dragonslayer?
In the 1981 movie, the "Dragonslayer," a dragon terrorizes a kingdom. Three people take it upon themselves to kill the dragon and, in the end, they succeed. Yet as the dragon lays dead in the field, the King rides to the carcass, places his sword in the beast and then has himself proclaimed "Dragonslayer." Is Obama a real life "Dragonslayer?" If one very detailed, anonymous report is true, then that answer is yes. But the issue goes far beyond mere hypocrisy on a royal scale. It shows Obama as criminally indecisive as regards the decision to order the raid on bin Laden. Obama repeatedly refused to authorize the attack and, in the end, it only occurred because CIA Director Leon Panetta and General Petreaus didn't just force the issue, but actually planned and initiated the attack without the foreknowledge of Obama. In the end, they pulled him off of the golf course Sunday only after the mission was already underway. McQ at Q&O accurately opines on the ramifications of the report:
If this is true, it is a bombshell and will kill the luster on Obama’s new found Commander-in-Chief bona fides.
Read the entire, riveting report here If it is true, we all need to be holding our collective breaths over the next two years as Obama is even more incompetent and weak than we possibly feared. Here is hoping this gets thoroughly investigated and either proven or disproven.
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
Osama bin Shark Bait Part II
A few other issues have arisen in regards to the successful operation to introduce Obama to his Maker - and 72 sturgeons. One is the inexplicable lack of security at Obama's compound. Two is the decision whether to release a photo of bin Laden with his brains decorating the walls of his compound. Three is the reaction to the raid from many of the euro-lefties. Four is the reaction from the radical Muslim wing.
According to reports to date, two blackhawk helicopters were able to hover over bin Laden's compound while 24 soldiers rappelled into the compound, probably from a height of about 50 to 60 feet, perhaps higher. Once on the ground, they made their way into the building housing bin Laden and made it all the way up to the third floor before taking any fire. In the end, it appears only four men were on the compound, three of whom were bin Laden and two of his sons. In other words, there was no security presence. There were no people manning machine guns in the courtyard. There were no RPG positions on the roof. There was zip, zero, nada - not even a BEWARE OF DOG sign apparently.
For one of the most hunted men in the world, I find that complete lack of security mind boggling. From this, we can safely infer that bin Laden had no clue whatsoever as to our operational capability. Given that we have probably performed literally thousands of night air assault raids over the past decade in Iraq and Afghanistan, this suggests a level of ignorance on the part of bin Laden that is inexplicable. Obviously bin Laden felt completely secure in his compound. The only way that makes any sense at all is if bin Laden felt that that his security was guaranteed by a third party - and that can only mean that Pakistan's security services were involved at some level. We will see what the documents and computers captured from the compound show about this, if it is ever revealed.
The second issue is the hand-wringing going on in the Obama administration over whether to release photos of the recently departed bin Laden. It is ridiculous. According to the Obama administration, the concern is whether the death photos might be "inflammatory" to Muslims. Let's get this right. Bin Laden's existence on this earth was inflammatory to Americans. Americans, as well as every person who has been attacked by this most evil of men (the majority of whom are Muslims), is entitled to photographic proof of bin Laden's demise. That should be the alpha and omega of the Obama administrations consideration on that issue. But to add, I don't care if it inflames some Muslims. To the contrary, I want seared into their memory the last image of bin Laden being with half of his skull missing and his brains decorating the walls. Bin Laden claimed in the mid-90's that the massive growth of al Qaeda was because people want to back the "strong horse." Well, bin Laden today is not merely a weak horse, he is an executed one. Muslims who will be inflamed by his execution will be inflamed irrespective of graphic photos. It seems more likely that the photos may dissuade some from following bin Laden. Further, Muslims in the Middle East need proof of bin Laden's death, particularly given their propensity for utterly insane conspiracy theories. In short, whether to release bin Laden's death pictures really should be a "no brainer" for the Obama administration.
The third issue is the international response to the raid on bin Laden's compound. As a threshold matter, bin Laden was responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of people. If there was ever a man who deserved death at the end of a gun, it was him. Yet the euro-left, as discussed at length in Der Spiegel, is engaging in a lot of hand wringing, speculating that our assassination mission violated some provision of "international law:"
Claus Kress, an international law professor at the University of Cologne, argues that achieving retributive justice for crimes, difficult as that may be, is "not achieved through summary executions, but through a punishment that is meted out at the end of a trial." Kress says the normal way of handling a man who is sought globally for commissioning murder would be to arrest him, put him on trial and ultimately convict him. In the context of international law, military force can be used in the arrest of a suspect, and this may entail gun fire or situations of self-defense that, in the end, leave no other possibility than to kill a highly dangerous and highly suspicious person . . . .
It is unfortunate. And it is certainly no reason for the indescribable jubilation that broke out on Sunday night across America -- and especially not for applause inside the CIA's operations center.
This from the folks who gave us Hitler and the final solution. Really guys, if you want a say over our foreign policy and how we conduct our national security, or to condemn us for celebrating the execution of this most evil of men, let me just say, with all sincerity . . .
Lastly, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, the Taliban and many others of their ilk are condemning the assassination of bin Laden. On of the most bucolic of these responses came from an Imam in Jerusalem:
An imam from the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem vowed to take revenge over "the western dogs" for killing Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in Pakistan on Sunday.
In a Youtube video uploaded by the imam he said: "The western dogs are rejoicing after killing one of our Islamic lions. From Al-Aqsa Mosque, where the future caliphate will originate with the help of God, we say to them – the dogs will not rejoice too much for killing the lions. The dogs will remain dogs and the lion, even if he is dead, will remain a lion."
The imam then verbally attacked US President Barack Obama saying: "You personally instructed to kill Muslims. You should know that soon you'll hang together with Bush Junior."
"We are a nation of billions, a good nation. We'll teach you about politics and military ways very soon, with god's help," he vowed.
This is the response I would respect from radicalized Muslims. As Instapundit notes:
what’s this about how dogs should not rejoice after killing a lion? If I were a dog, and I killed a lion, I’d damn sure rejoice.
But Osama was more of a jackal, you know? And if this dumbass keeps talking, people might get the idea that we’re at war with Islam or something. And trust me, your Imam-ness, you don’t want Americans to decide that.
True enough. Indeed, most Americans believe in live and let live. That said, the reality of radical Islam is an unknown to most Americans still to this day - a fact for which I blame both Bush and Obama. Under a best case scenario, Americans become educated about the realities of radical Islam and public opinion in the free world is harnessed to bring pressure for change and moderation. Under a worst case scenario, Americans remain blissfully ignorant and the radicals in fact do pull off another 9-11, perhaps one with nuclear or biological weapons. And when that happens, live and let live will be out the window - as will be any attempt to seperate the good from the radicals in the Muslim world. God help the radical Muslims - and indeed, all Muslims - should that happen.
Friday, April 22, 2011
Boeing & Obama's War On The Free Markets In Support Of Unions
This from the NYT:
In what may be the strongest signal yet of the new pro-labor orientation of the National Labor Relations Board under President Obama, the agency filed a complaint Wednesday seeking to force Boeing to bring an airplane production line back to its unionized facilities in Washington State instead of moving the work to a nonunion plant in South Carolina.
In its complaint, the labor board said that Boeing’s decision to transfer a second production line for its new 787 Dreamliner passenger plane to South Carolina was motivated by an unlawful desire to retaliate against union workers for their past strikes in Washington and to discourage future strikes. The agency’s acting general counsel, Lafe Solomon, said it was illegal for companies to take actions in retaliation against workers for exercising the right to strike.
Although manufacturers have long moved plants to nonunion states, the board noted that Boeing officials had, in internal documents and news interviews, specifically cited the strikes and potential future strikes as a reason for their 2009 decision to expand in South Carolina.
Boeing said it would “vigorously contest” the labor board’s complaint. “This claim is legally frivolous and represents a radical departure from both N.L.R.B. and Supreme Court precedent,” said J. Michael Luttig, a Boeing executive vice president and its general counsel. “Boeing has every right under both federal law and its collective bargaining agreement to build additional U.S. production capacity outside of the Puget Sound region.”
It is highly unusual for the federal government to seek to reverse a corporate decision as important as the location of plant.
But ever since a Democratic majority took control of the five-member board after Mr. Obama’s election, the board has signaled that it would seek to adopt a more liberal, pro-union tilt after years of pro-employer decisions under President Bush. . . .
This is such a vast overreach by Labor and its cronies in the Obama administration - it is such a fundamental attack on capitalism - it is difficult to know where to begin. As a threshold matter, the anti-retaliation provisions of the NLRA protect individuals from being fired or demoted for their union activities. The Obama radicals on the NLRB now seek to vastly expand the scope of those provisions to a point that corporations would become captives of unionized, closed shop states.
Unions are an anachronism of the communist movement near two centuries old - which itself was a response to inequities that arose early in the Industrial Age, something that has long been consigned to the history books. There is a reason unions are drastically declining in the private sector in the U.S.. They do not make economic sense in an age of vast national wealth where competition for labor and the mobility of labor insures that laborers will be able to receive fair market value.
It is beyond any form of contention that, where unions exist, the end product is at best, substantially more expensive than that produced by non-union labor, such as with automakers, or in the worst case, substantially lessens the quality of the service being delivered, as is the case with teachers unions and public education. Further, the reality is that in "closed shop" states, unions create a form of indentured servitude, where to even work in a desired field, a laborer must pay a union for the privilege. The laborer then has no say in how the union uses those dues. Whatever justification for unions existed in 1848, when Marx, in the Communist Manifesto, described unions as the building blocks of his Communist utopia, those justifications do not exist in America today.
The only thing that can possibly save private sector unions in the U.S. is the point of the gun by the government. And indeed, that is what we are seeing today with Obama's NLRB outrageously trying to use the police power of our government to force Boeing to keep all production in Washington.
The only reason unions still exist in America, both public sector and private sector, is that they are economic base of the Democratic party. It is hard to think of a more corrupt or malign situation. When the administrations change in 2012, it is time to go to war on unions - outlawing public sector unions and changing the rules for private sector unions. No place in America should be subject to a "closed shop," the U.S. government should never favor unions in its contracting, and the NLRB should be disbanded.
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
Obama, The Economy & An Absence Of Leadership
Obama is finally figuring out that the November 2010 elections meant something. Americans can see the direction of our country - and its running fast and furious towards an economic cliff. Obama tried ignoring it with his 2011 Budget and insane SOTU speech. In stark contrast, Rep. Paul Ryan recently released a budget proposal to deal honestly with our problems. Obama tried to respond today - with a speech of course, not a serious budget proposal. Here is the summary of that speech:
The debt and deficit is Bush's fault. Republican's budget plan is "E"-vil. It will destroy our nation's infrastructure, toss grandmothers into the street, take away their health care, and take candy from babies. WE (the royal "we") will bring fiscal sanity to America by gutting our military and raising taxes on the rich and corporations. WE will also increase spending and leave untouched all benefits for social security and medicare. All of this will magically reduce the deficit by trillions.
Add a ton of intellectually dishonest demagoguery and announce a new panel with Joe the Clown in charge and that is it a nutshell. Obama is more dangerously incompetent than Homer Simpson working at a nuke plant.
Update: Krauthammer offers his take on the scurrilous performance by Obama:
Jake Tapper at Political Punch notes this contrast in intellectual honesty from one of Obama's prior speeches to today's:
President Obama at the GOP House retreat, January 2010:
“We're not going to be able to do anything about any of these entitlements if what we do is characterize whatever proposals are put out there as, ‘Well, you know, that's -- the other party's being irresponsible. The other party is trying to hurt our senior citizens. That the other party is doing X, Y, Z.”
President Obama today:
“One vision has been championed by Republicans in the House of Representatives and embraced by several of their party’s presidential candidates…This is a vision that says up to 50 million Americans have to lose their health insurance in order for us to reduce the deficit. And who are those 50 million Americans? Many are someone’s grandparents who wouldn’t be able afford nursing home care without Medicaid. Many are poor children. Some are middle-class families who have children with autism or Down’s syndrome. Some are kids with disabilities so severe that they require 24-hour care. These are the Americans we’d be telling to fend for themselves.”
One word that will never be appended to Obama when history is written is "leadership." My only question is whether we will still be able to fix our country post 2012, or whether Obama and the left have set us on a permanent progressive course to ruin.
Update from Rep. Paul Ryan, via the Weekly Standard:
“When the President reached out to ask us to attend his speech, we were expecting an olive branch. Instead, his speech was excessively partisan, dramatically inaccurate, and hopelessly inadequate to address our fiscal crisis. What we heard today was not fiscal leadership from our commander-in-chief; we heard a political broadside from our campaigner-in-chief.
“Last year, in the absence of a serious budget, the President created a Fiscal Commission. He then ignored its recommendations and omitted any of its major proposals from his budget, and now he wants to delegate leadership to yet another commission to solve a problem he refuses to confront.
“We need leadership, not a doubling down on the politics of the past. By failing to seriously confront the most predictable economic crisis in our history, this President’s policies are committing our children to a diminished future. We are looking for bipartisan solutions, not partisan rhetoric. When the President is ready to get serious about confronting this challenge, we'll be here.”Update: Ryan's office highlights "key facts" from Obama's speech:
· Counts unspecified savings over 12 years, not the 10-year window by which serious budget proposals are evaluated.
· Postpones all savings until 2013 – after his reelection campaign.
· Runs away from the Fiscal Commission’s recommendations on Social Security – puts forward no specific ideas or even a process to force action.
Update: The full comments from Paul Ryan on video -
(H/T Hot Air)
Monday, March 14, 2011
The Slaughter Of The Fogel Family
On Friday night, two Palestinians entered the house of the Fogel family in Itmar and, using knives, slaughtered them:
According to YNET News, the al-Aqsa Martyr's Brigade has claimed credit for this act. Moreover:
Gaza residents from the southern city of Rafah hit the streets Saturday to celebrate the terror attack in the West Bank settlement of Itamar where five family members were murdered in their sleep, including three children.
Residents handed out candy and sweets, one resident saying the joy "is a natural response to the harm settlers inflict on the Palestinian residents in the West Bank."
Palestinian media has condemned the murder on one hand, yet justified it on the other as a response Israel's "hostile policies" towards the Palestinians.
These people are animals. They need to be treated as such. Peace with these animals is not possible. They should not be receiving one penny in Western aid. And we should be giving full support to Israel to conduct whatever military operations they deem necessary to insure the protection of their nation.
Thursday, March 10, 2011
OUTRAGEOUS Crony Capitalism: How A Drug Goes From $10 To $1,500 A Shot
Free market capitalism is defined by open competition. Competition increases quality and lowers cost. The polar opposite is crony capitalism, where the government picks winners and losers, competition is stifled if not banned, and monopolies are created. The public suffers significantly from the absence of competition.
No better example of how this works can be seen than with production of the drug Makena, a progesterone mix that has, for the past decade, successfully treated pregnant women at significant risk of spontaneous premature labor. It is a condition that effects black women at far higher rates than either whites or hispanics. The drug is given to such women once a week between the 16th and 36th week of their pregnancy. For years, the drug has been mixed at numerous pharmacies and has been sold at $10 to $20 per shot, with an entire regimen of the drug costing between $200 and $400. It is estimated that the drug could benefit up to 130,000 women in the U.S. annually. It is also the only known effective treatment for women suffering from high risk of spontaneous premature labor.
The FDA recently gave sole approval for production of Makena to KV Pharmaceutical of St.Louis. KV did not pioneer the use or production of the drug. And indeed, the drug was first developed over 50 years ago. Patent rights, which were never KV's to begin with, ended decades ago. Nonetheless, KV petitioned the FDA to give them approval to produce the drug under the "orphan drug" law, which would give KV, among other things, a seven year monopoly on the market to produce Makena. The FDA complied.
Yesterday, KV announced that physicians could purchase Makena from them at a cost of $1,500 per shot. An entire 20 week regimen of Makena will now cost $30,000. KV also sent out cease and desist letters to all other pharmacies producing the drug.
The costs for this will be born by the public through Medicaid and higher insurance premiums. The only winner in this gross distortion of the market is KV pharmaceutical and those who championed their cause - such as the March of Dimes who receives hundreds of thousands in support from KV annually.
This is an outrageous travesty that cries out for congressional investigation. Why did the FDA approve the monopoly under these facts? Is it as it appears, that the orphan drug law was wholly misused in this case? And if the government is going to grant a monopoly over lifesaving drugs, what responsibility does or should it have to oversee pricing? The bottom line, in a just society, we would hang the people at KV and FDA for this grand larceny taking place at the expense of women in need and the public purse.
(H/T The Anchoress)
Monday, February 28, 2011
The Wages Of Green
Britain is about 5 to 10 years further on than the U.S. in the insane push for green energy. Besides putting their economy on the path to destruction with outrageous prices for inefficient, highly subsidized energy, the push is, according to British economists, costing 3.7 jobs for every one job it creates. This from the BBC:
Government support for the renewable sector in Scotland is costing more jobs than it creates, a report has claimed.
A study by consultants Verso Economics found there was a negative impact from the policy to promote the industry.
It said 3.7 jobs were lost for every one created in the UK as a whole and that political leaders needed to engage in "honest debate" about the issue. . . .
The report, called Worth the Candle? The economic impact of renewable energy policy in Scotland and the UK, said the industry in Scotland benefited from an annual transfer of about £330m from taxpayers and consumers elsewhere in the UK.
It said politicians needed to recognise the economic and environmental costs of support for the sector and focus more on the scientific and technical issues that arose.
Richard Marsh, research director of Verso Economics and co-author of the report, said: "There's a big emphasis in Scotland on the economic opportunity of investing in renewable energy.
"Whatever the environmental merits, we have shown that the case for green jobs just doesn't stack up."
Co-author Tom Miers added: "The Scottish renewables sector is very reliant on subsidies from the rest of the UK.
"Without this UK-wide framework, it would be very difficult to sustain the main policy tools used to promote this industry. . . ."
The Executive Summary of the report is here. The BBC, which has made an industry of global warming alarmism, actually reports this story in order to attack it, as noted at Biased BBC. Be that as it may, this report comports with reports from both Spain and Germany, showing that this insane push into green energy negatively impacts both jobs and the economy. Germany has recognized this and has resumed building coal fired power plants. Spain, upon whom Obama modeled his push into green energy, touting its employment benefits, is an economic basket case teetering on national bankruptcy. Nonetheless, Obama is pushing us down this same path at break-neck speed, between massive subsidies for green energy and his extra-constitutional assault on our energy infrastructure and domestic production of coal and oil. If he wins reelection in 2012, our nation will likely never recover, at least during our lifetime.
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