Fighting to Preserve Liberty in America
Did you ever watch a business, celebrity, or government agency find itself in the middle of a media frenzy that it thinks will soon blow over and instead it only gets worse? In a way, I feel sorry for TSA Administrator John Pistole, but after listening to him try to defend what they are doing, a head slap is the more appropriate reaction. What are these idiots thinking?
Over the past few days we have learned of a new tack by Al Qaeda on how to strike at America. It is not by commandeering planes and crashing them into buildings, it is not by putting homicide bombers into passenger seats, it is now by sending packages with bombs inside from overseas to targets in the U.S. It is very disturbing to know that Al Qaeda is not giving up, despite the piles of olive branches Barack Obama has laid at the feet of these despots.
Equally disturbing, for those of us in the First Congressional District in New York, is the scorecard just issued by national security organization Keep America Safe, which just gave Congressman Tim Bishop its lowest possible score, an “F”. It explained:
When you are waiting for someone an hour can seem like a long time, but when you really want to accomplish something an hour is really not that long. Here are some things you can’t do in an hour:
However there are some things that you can accomplish in less than an hour, such as:
That’s right #10 was completed in 50 minutes before the FBI decided to read him his Miranda rights and put him into the criminal justice system. You will probably not be surprised to find out that he soon had a lawyer who advised him to stop speaking to the FBI. So now if they want him to divulge any information they will have to go the plea bargain route up to and including setting him free. Aren’t you glad we got rid of Bush and Cheney? I mean, seriously, don’t you feel safer?
What Did He Know?
Does anyone believe what the Obama administration is telling us that they got everything they could out of this 23 year old novice in 50 minutes. The kid was definitely talking, so why stop him? He just got back from Yemen and probably had a wealth of information to give up. He belongs in Guantanamo. Are we not, as Obama finally admitted, at war? Or are we at war, but just not with this guy? (And by the way, Obama has been in office a year now so why hasn’t he captured Osama bin Laden? During the campaign he snorted that McCain wouldn’t even follow him to his cave, as if Obama had the address).
Regardless of your position on “enhanced interrogation techniques” and let’s just say you put those aside. You want to keep this guy where you can interrogate him again and again. Where you can work to gain his trust, and where you can corroborate other information you find until he has been in your custody so long his information is stale and no longer of use. Here’s a little secret for the Obama administration… it takes longer than 50 minutes.
An Embarrassment of Incompetence
Close on the heels of Janet Napolitano’s blundering at the helm of the Department of Homeland Security we have this astonishing exchange between Chris Wallace of Fox News Sunday and White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, as reported in the Washington Examiner by Byron York:
On “Fox News Sunday,” host Chris Wallace asked White House spokesman Robert Gibbs whether President Obama was informed of the decision to read Abdulmutallab his Miranda rights before or after it was done. Gibbs avoided the question, saying, “That decision was made by the Justice Department and the FBI, with experienced FBI interrogators.” Gibbs stressed that “Abdulmutallab was interrogated and valuable intelligence was gotten as a result of that interrogation.”
Wallace pressed. “But we now find out he was interrogated for 50 minutes,” he said to Gibbs. “When they came back, he was read his Miranda rights and he clammed up.”
“No,” Gibbs answered. “Again, he was interrogated. Valuable intelligence was gotten based on those interrogations. And I think the Department of Justice and the — made the right decision, as did those FBI agents.”
“Let me just press one last question,” Wallace said. “You really don’t think that if you’d interrogated him longer that you might have gotten more information, since we now know that Al Qaeda in Yemen — ”
“Well, FBI interrogators believe they got valuable intelligence and were able to get all that they could out of him,” Gibbs said.
“All they could?” Wallace asked.
“Yeah,” Gibbs said.”
Do you remember the scene in the movie “Saving Private Ryan” where after storming a machine gun nest and losing their medic, the Americans have to deal with how to handle a prisoner they captured? Some say shoot him on the spot others disagree. They know they can’t take him with them as he will slow them down. After much vigorous debate Captain Miller (Tom Hanks) decides to untie him, point him toward the American line and tell him to keep walking, with the hope that he will be captured by the advancing American forces.
Later in the movie as Miller’s unit is in a pitched battle to the last man, the released German prisoner is among those killing Miller’s men. After reinforcements arrive to turn the battle in the Americans favor and the remaining Germans surrender, the former prisoner smiles and nods to the soldier in Miller’s unit that acted as translator and argued for sparing him as if to say, “Hey, how’s it goin’ pal?” The soldier lowers his rifle and kills the German.
I am reminded of this by the current situation with Yemen. Started under President Bush was the insane idea of releasing enemy combatants where they can find their way back to the battlefield. This stupid policy was, until recently, going to be accelerated under President Obama. Either we are at war or we are not. You can’t fight a war with half measures. Either you fight it to win or let the enemy have their way. If we are in a war and we capture the enemy they stay captured until the war is over. We don’t need a bunch of lawyers standing on the sidelines tapping their foot and their watches and saying, “how much longer are you going to hold these people without charging them?” Answer: until the war ends or hell freezes over, whichever comes first.
Is It a War Yet Mr. President?
Backed into a corner, on his fifth (?) try to explain what his administration is doing on the War on Terror (am I allowed to call it that?), he actually called it a war, at least against Al Qaida. He has spent the better part of his first year in office giving the back of his hand to the Bush administration. But after seven years of Bush keeping us safe and two terrorist attacks on our soil this year with Obama at the helm and his poll numbers sinking, he has come to the realization that he owns this now.
The tough Harry Truman talk is nice (“The Buck Stops Here”), but it is just words until you actually do something with the buck that just stopped on your desk. Why is the spectacularly incompetent Janet Napolitano still drawing a salary? In Obama’s world it seems to be that what he means when he says the buck stops here is that he is the only one subject to firing and since we can’t fire him, everyone under him keeps on keeping on. But who appointed these people? It was Obama. So he should recognize that he blundered and if the underlings don’t have enough sense to fall on their swords and resign, he should flat out fire them.
Vacations are Important. Anti-terrorism, Not So Much
After the terror attack at Fort Hood, you would think that perhaps President Obama would be a little more responsive to another attempted attack, but hey, he was on an Hawaiian vacation. Nobel Prize? Chicago trying to win a bid for the Olympics? President Obama will travel across the sea for that. But an attempted attack on America? Chill, baby, chill. How about his director of National Counterterrorism, Michael Leiter, taking a ski vacation? Just because stopping such an attack might be considered counterterrorism and just because that organization just failed miserably at stopping such an attack, and just because we didn’t know why it failed or if another attack might be on the way, why interrupt time with the family over that? Family time is important, so said his boss. Don’t worry, Mike, we’ll wait.
Behind the Curve
It seems that with each attempt the enemy is one step ahead of us. So discussions heated up about these new body scanners that can find anything, so it is claimed. Don’t get me wrong, I am a big advocate of technology, but I guess the real problem is best summed up by one pundit comparing our methods to the Israelis:
“The Israelis look for terrorists, we look for tweezers.”
Instead of reading body scanners, perhaps we should be training the TSA agents in reading body language. That’s what the Israelis do. If you are a Palestinian, sorry, but you go in a different line and you get more closely screened and questioned. You may pass, but you are going to be thoroughly checked out. We should do the same. Where is your passport from? What visa stamps do you have in your passport indicating where you have been? Why don’t you have any luggage Mr. Abdulmutallab? Why did you buy a one way ticket? Who are you staying with in Detroit? I see you paid cash for your ticket, how much cash do you have left for your trip after you land in Detroit? Do you have a credit card? No? Hmmm…maybe you should wait over there, while we check further.
No technology is foolproof. Having worked in technology for over thirty years I can say that with some degree of confidence. It only takes one failure of the technology for a disaster to strike. But if we spend less time trying to find that box cutter, shampoo bottle, tweezers, jar of honey, etc., and spend more time spotting someone who doesn’t look like they are on a nice business trip or a visit to relatives or who otherwise fit the profile of a terrorist, that’s right I said it: profile, we could probably become a lot safer without having to lock the bathrooms for the last hour of the flight. If we had pulled the young Abdulmutallab aside and questioned him, he probably would have cracked like an egg. Does anyone think for a minute that this kid would have given off no body language signals if questioned by a trained professional? The right combination of skilled human observers and questioners along with technology, is what we need to be safer. Rather than this: We”re the TSA and You Can Count on Us!
Intelligence Sprawl
We also need to collapse the intelligence arms of our government back into one and shut the others down. Roll back Homeland Security into the Department of Defense, put the myriad intelligence gathering arms back into the CIA, make people accountable and lessen the need for a coordinating center to gather intelligence from a dozen agencies correlate it and send it back out to the dozen agencies. All that does is create more fiefdoms that don’t want to talk to the dummies in that other agency who aren’t as smart as we are. As the old saying goes, “When everyone’s responsible, no one is responsible.” Government is neither nimble nor overly cooperative. The fewer handoffs between agencies necessary to connect the dots, the better off we will all be.
I am sure you all recall the video played ad nauseum starring the Reverend Wright railing against America defending itself. It now seems to accurately describe the results of the new hope and change administration. After his worldwide apology tour, and banning the term “War on Terror,” replacing it with the limp “Overseas Contingency Operation,” so that, like his presidential campaign, no one would know what he actually meant or stood for, his own chickens are coming home to roost.
Actions Have Consequences
The left used to attack the Bush administration’s approach because being tough on terrorists only served to aid them in their recruiting. Maybe so, but I am less concerned about lines of recruits in Afghanistan than crazed terrorists in New York. Obama’s apology tour shows his weakness and as the terrorist mindset abhors weakness, it encourages attacks. So what would you prefer, attacks on American soil, or an uptick in recruiting on the other side of the world?
War vs. Law and Order
Bush recognized the War on Terror for what it was, a direct attack on the United States and our way of life. In a war, you go after the enemy, you don’t wait for him to come to you. You take prisoners and hold them, until the conflict is over. You dismantle their ability to wage war. It is aggressive and proactive. It is the way America has prevailed in wartime.
The Obama approach is Law an Order. Each act is seen as separate an isolated and as a crime to be investigated and prosecuted after the fact. First responders are more important than the first wave of Marines. To quote today’s Wall Street Journal:
Brian Jenkins, who studies terrorism for the Rand Corporation, says there were more terror incidents (12), including thwarted plots, on U.S. soil in 2009 than in any year since 2001. The jihadists don’t seem to like Americans any better because we’re closing down Guantanamo.
But the Obama Administration is currently considering releasing prisoners held in Guantanamo to Yemen. How long do you think it will be before they are back on the front lines trying to kill us?
Add to the mix the Obama administration’s, or should I say Eric Holder’s, decision to try the 9/11 terrorists in a civilian court. Holder’s testimony before Congress justifying his decision was painful to watch how he had no credible justification. Don’t forget to give Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, his Miranda rights and get him a good lawyer. Let’s pretend his claims to be associated with al Qaeda is just tough talk and braggadocio.
The reality is that whenever America fought a war and politicians pulled punches (e.g., Viet Nam) we lost.
Things are Working Swell
Janet Napolitano, Obama’s head of Homeland Security had this to say, according to the New York Times
“The system has worked really very, very smoothly over the course of the past several days,” Janet Napolitano, the Homeland Security secretary said, in an interview on “This Week” on ABC. Robert Gibbs, the White House spokesman, used nearly the same language on “Face the Nation” on CBS, saying that “in many ways, this system has worked.”
How chilling is that? What exactly does she mean by the system worked? She refers to the number of organizations that were alerted after the fact. How about notifications before the fact? How about listening to the terrorist’s own father who reported him to the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria. How about denying him a visa? Or is Napolitano too busy adding funeral homes to her list of organizations to notify after the fact?
Where’s Obama?
If there’s a chance Chicago might get the Olympics, don’t worry, Obama’s on a plane to give it the old presidential push! If there’s a Nobel Prize to pick up, Obama is your man! If there is a terrorist attack on our country, hey, don’t bother me I’m on vacation in Hawaii.
Some pundits on the news pointed out that President Bush didn’t speak out against the shoe bomber, Richard Reid, for several days, so cut Obama some slack. The problem is that no one doubted for a minute that Bush was engaged in the War on Terror, some even saying he was obsessed. Well that obsession kept us safe for seven years. In less than one year we have had Fort Hood and now this airline bombing.
Furthermore, why is Eric Holder making such a monumental decision regarding trying the 9/11 terrorists in New York? Why isn’t this Obama’s decision? Just like so much in this administration, Obama campaigns and gives speeches, and Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Eric Holder make policy decisions on their own.
Here’s to the Heroes
The heroes in this case were a Dutch citizen and the flight attendants, who subdued the terrorist and extinguished the fire. To quote again from the Wall Street Journal:
The lesson here is the same as Flight 93 on 9/11 and shoe-bomber Richard Reid, which is that civilians willing to act in their own self-defense are a crucial part of “homeland security.”
May I suggest that the statists drop their efforts to weaken the 2ndAmendment? As part of “homeland security” we may need to bear arms like at no time since the Civil War.
How much time do we have left before Joe Biden’s prophesy comes true that within six months of taking office Obama, and by extension we, will face an international crisis? Well, unless you haven’t been paying attention, I think he will hit his mark before his 100 days are up.
Obama and Biden and the rest of their supporters have confused the difference between being liked and being respected. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, while ambassador to the UN called the world, “A Dangerous Place.” When trying to be a leader in a world that is dangerous, it is far better to be respected than liked.
The Obama Feel Good Tour
As President Obama tours the world and grovels at the feet of the Europeans, the Saudis, and Latin American dictators, trying to “repair the damage,” done by President Bush, our enemies are licking their chops. The Europeans flocked to see him, touch him, kiss him, but when he asked for a commitment of more troops for Afghanistan, how did they respond? Awkward silence and an offer of 5,000 troops to train police while at the same time an insistence that the “world” should have some say in the regulation of the U.S. economy.
While President Obama achieved his goal of improving the U.S.’s likability quotient, pirates were taking ships on the high seas, North Korea sent an ICBM over Japan, Iran celebrated Nuclear Technology Day, and the Taliban made inroads in Pakistan. How did the popular leader respond? To North Korea, he scolded that actions have consequences and words have meaning and proposed more words from the UN to be piled on top of the words the North Koreans are already ignoring.
Disarmament
To continue with the feel good groove, we have stopped calling terrorists terrorists. Their acts are now to be called Man Caused Disasters and I guess the terrorists themselves are to be called Man Caused Disaster Causing Men (or Women). After all, we don’t want them to be offended by being called terrorists. Isn’t that was caused 9/11? It was merely a response to our bad behavior, no? Our lack of likability?
There is no longer a War on Terror. It’s an Overseas Contingency Operation. We don’t want to raise Osama bin Laden’s sensibilities thinking we might be at war with him, but we do need contingency planning in case something happens. As a further show of good faith, let’s start re-writing the Al Qaeda training manual for them by telling them exactly what kind of interrogation techniques we use so that they can best prepare the training of their members to resist them. Of course, we already swore we would never use them again anyway, but we have to make sure they are prepared for the infidel’s trickery. Repeat after me: “I am not going to drown. I am not going to drown. I am not going to drown.” There, it’s simple, now they can resist even our most diabolical torture. But we shouldn’t forget to tell them that if an interrogator so much as raises his voice they should do the following:
If that doesn’t get them to lay down their arms, what will?
Respect Not Likability
The only time the United States is both respected and liked is when the bullets are flying and the United States is saving the hides of our new friends. When the shooting stops or it is confined to a theater far away from the talkers, the United States will be disliked but, however begrudgingly, respected.
Ronald W. Reagan may have been liked personally in private but when the klieg lights were on, he was “an amiable dunce,” and “a cowboy.” But Reagan stood firm and put Pershing II missiles in Europe against all protests. Such steadfastness led to the eventual arms negotiations and winning the cold war. At the moment President Reagan took the oath of office, the Ayatollahs in Iran released the American hostages they held for 444 days. They respected that Reagan would act, not just talk.
George W. Bush was not liked. He was another cowboy, one who was inarticulate to boot. But he was respected. After 9/11 the world respected that he would hunt down and kill America’s enemies. After the Iraq invasion, Libya publicly shut down their nuclear program. Quadaffi didn’t want to be next. President Bush kept America safe for seven years after 9/11. Now, this Congress and this President want set aside over 200 years of precedent and to put them on trial for doing that.
Preparing for Our Enemies
President Obama plans to keep America secure by cutting our defense budget by 25%. He plans on a staggering increase in our national debt and selling it to the Chinese. Picture the Chinese doing to the USA what Obama did to General Motors. Can you just see the head of the Chinese Communist Party saying to Obama, “Well, we own you now. You’re fired.”
Can this Juggernaut be Stopped?
On April 15th over 1 million people gathered at Tea Parties around the country to protest the growth of government, the taking of our liberty and out of control taxes. The Obama main stream media largely ignored the event, or willfully disparaged it.
A recent Rasmussen poll, “85% of mainstream Americans say the government has too much money and power, just 2% of the political class agree.” If they have no bread, let them eat cake! The poll went on to say, “51% of Americans have a favorable view of the Tea Parties but the political class strongly disagrees.” {emphasis added} How more out of touch with the people can they be? How more arrogant in their shameless grab for power can they be?
I will end this post, my friends, with a quotation from the Declaration of Independence.
“WE hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness — That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”
July 4, 1776
I hope to see you at the Tea Party on July 4, 2009
Goodbye Liberty
The cat is finally out of the bag. President Obama, after passing a huge spending increase, proposed cutting the budget deficit in half by the end of his current term primarily by raising taxes and cutting defense spending. This is the same old tired liberal policies that brought us the economic morass of Jimmy Carter, the unpreparedness to deal with al Qaeda under Clinton, and now in the midst of a deep recession, President Obama wants to spend more and tax more.
Just when we need to move more money into the private economy, President Obama wants to take out his Hoover vacuum cleaner and suck up whatever cash he can find and hoard it in Washington.
The real problem is government has gotten too big, too wasteful, too profligate, and too out of touch with the American people. Instead of the original vision of the founding fathers of limited federal government, pretty soon your lives will be directed by four people: your Congressman/Congresswoman, your two US Senators, and the President. All local government will become irrelevant. You can see the beginnings of it now. We have the federal government paying for local roads, local schools, local police, local unemployment. And you can also see the power plays: you do the will of the federal government or you get no money. The federal government takes your money in the form of taxes and will refuse to give it back unless you follow their liberal agenda.
Goodbye Liberty.
