Obama and his attorney general EricHolder are acting like enemies of the American people. They are disabling this nation's ability to defend itself against those who are fighting to destroy us.
Sooner or later, Americans will die because of what they are doing. Hamstringing the CIA is just one thing. Allowing Iran to acquire nuclear weapons is another. Instructing all U.S. agencies not to even use terms such as "war on terror" or "Islamic terrorism" is another. So is setting Islamic terrorists captured on the battlefield free in foreign countries, in some cases paying millions of dollars to bribe them to take the terrorIsts. So is cutting defense spending. So is cutting the production of the world's best airplane the F-22.
The writer of the article below is sadly resigned to these actions so damaging to the security of this country. The public will only rise up when terrorists or an Islamic nation such as Iran breaks through our weakened defenses to horrible effect.
AUGUST 26, 2009The War on Terror Is Over
Lawyers are about to smother the war on terror.By DANIEL HENNINGER Wall Street Journal Opinion
Shakespeare wrote, "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers." As we know, that didn't happen. Four hundred years later, they're killing us with the smothering pillow of hyper-proceduralism. Now the lawyers are about to smother the war on terror.
This Monday, the same day that Attorney General Eric Holder named a special prosecutor to investigate persons who conducted the CIA's interrogations in the war on terror, Scotland's Justice Minister Kenny MacAskill stood before his parliament and gave this defense for releasing convicted Lockerbie bomber Abdel Basset Ali Megrahi:
"It was not based on political, diplomatic or economic considerations. . . . My decision was made following due process, and according to the law of Scotland. I stand by the law and values of Scotland."
Faced with a similarly fastidious assertion of the law's triumphal self-regard in "Oliver Twist," Mr. Bumble replied: "If the law supposed that, the law is a ass--a idiot." Mr. Bumble added something acutely relevant to what is happening to the war on terror: "The worst I wish the law," said Mr. Bumble, "is that his eye may be opened by experience--by experience."
The experience of a world beset by terror eludes the eyes of a Kenny MacAskill, Eric Holder and others in the Obama administration. The rest of us may suffer for it.
In a May speech at the National Archives, President Obama, mirroring Kenny MacAskill's remarks, said we had to "update our institutions" to deal with terrorism but "do so with an abiding confidence in the rule of law and due process."
That "update" is upon us. The smothering pillows have arrived.
Attorney General Holder named Connecticut prosecutor John Durham to conduct an investigation into whether interrogations by CIA employees warrant a criminal inquiry. It has been shown repeatedly the past 25 years that an office of independent counsel or special prosecutor nearly always puts in motion an Inspector Javert-like hunt for an indictable defendant.
Mr. Holder's justification, that his own reading of the "available facts" gave him no choice, is close to a preordained conclusion that Mr. Durham will cite one of these CIA guys for criminal prosecution.
The day of Mr. Holder's announcement, CIA Director Leon Panetta said his agency received "multiple written assurances its methods were lawful." It's now clear that even playing by the rules cannot stop erosion by legal challenge.
That day also brought the release of CIA Inspector General John Helgerson's 2004 report on the agency's detention and interrogation of terror suspects. Both sides to this argument say the report supports their view of the CIA. No matter. What the release of the Helgerson report mainly does is open the dams on detainee lawsuits.
This litigation nightmare, together with the chilling effect of the special prosecutor's potential indictments, has as its goal making the price of aggressive interrogation too high under any circumstance, including a one-hour-bomb scenario.
To supervise future interrogations, the administration is creating something called a High Value Detainee Interrogation Group. Interrogation techniques will be limited to those in the Army Field Manual or that are "noncoercive," which suggests more constrained than a big-city police department. Authority is being moved from the CIA to the FBI.
This means that the class of person who blows up skyscrapers, American embassies or the USS Cole would spend less time under a bare light bulb than a domestic robbery suspect. The Los Angeles Times reported in May that the goal of a proposed administration "global justice initiative" would be to get all terror suspects into a U.S. or foreign court.
Eric Holder cited the Justice Department's Office of Legal Responsibility as influencing his decision to proceed with a CIA special prosecutor. This is the legal office that is expected to release its long-awaited report on whether former Bush Justice lawyers John Yoo, Jay Bybee and Steven Bradbury should be cited for misconduct for providing the CIA with legal opinions about these interrogations. If, as expected, the OPR cites the lawyers, legal groups will try to disbar them. After that, no lawyer will go near the war on terror.
Individually, some of this may be arguable. In toto, it's a death sentence for an effective war on terror. It makes what's left of the war--telephone wiretaps or monitoring money transfers--vulnerable to a steady stream of congressional and legal objection. That lets the Obama administration evade political responsibility by letting others wind down the war on terror.
The message of Scotland's release and the Holder decision is that the will born in the wake of 9/11 is waning. The war on terror is being downgraded to not much more than tough talk. Al Qaeda, the Taliban and the Iranians, not yet converts to the West's caricature of its own legal traditions, will take note. In time, they will be back. The second war on terror is in the future.
Daniel Henniger was not alone today in his fears for the safety of fellow Americans.
President Obama's terror strategy puts America at risk
Wednesday, August 26th 2009, 4:00 AM
Michael Goodwin New York Daily NewsPull together the loose threads of recent events and President Obama's vision for fighting the war on terror becomes one very scary picture. Scary, that is, for innocent Americans.
From interrogation to adjudication, the White House plan offers more legal protections to terror suspects and less to our nation. It's a kinder, gentler tilt that favors bad guys and raises the risk of attack at home because it compromises national security to promote other concerns and values.
One thread is Attorney General Eric Holder's misguided decision to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate whether CIA agents broke the law in aggressive questioning of suspects captured in Iraq and Afghanistan. Holder, who shamelessly gave Bill Clinton the legal okay to pardon megacriminal Marc Rich, has little mercy for the agents who risked their lives to protect America.
Knowing Holder stands ready to second-guess its every move is reportedly sending chills through the spook agency.
Another scary thread is the plan to take the job of terror questioning away from the CIA and move it to a new group in the FBI. The move is part of an effort to treat terror as just another law enforcement problem, a downgrade that led the White House to drop the words "war on terror."
As the new unit's rules show, the downgrade is more than just semantics. The unit will be limited to noncoercive techniques, meaning even sleep deprivation is out.
More aggressive techniques are controversial, but former CIA leaders and ex-Vice President Dick Cheney, among others, insist they yielded valuable information that allowed authorities to disrupt terror plots and save lives.
A just-released 2004 report by the CIA inspector general also seems to reach the same conclusion, saying several top terror suspects became more useful and compliant after aggressive techniques were used.
Scary thread No. 3 is the plan to close the Guantanamo Bay prison and move some of the worst terrorists to American prisons and give some detainees trials in civilian courts. Playing by the legal rule book raises the chance mad killers will walk free because of the vast defendant protections built into our criminal justice system.
All those threads come together with the insane decision of Scotland to release the Libyan agent convicted in the attack that blew up Pan Am Flight 103, killing 270 people, most of them Americans. Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill defended his decision on humanitarian grounds because the agent, who served only eight years of a 27-year minimum sentence, is dying of prostate cancer.
Completely lacking, of course, was any compassion for the victims and their families. The outrage was compounded when Libya gave the agent a hero's welcome on his return home, a sickening scene that can serve only to inspire future terrorists.
Amid strong evidence the release was part of a deal to get British companies oil and gas contracts, Prime Minister Gordon Brown finally broke his silence yesterday to say he was "repulsed" by the Libyan welcome. But he has failed to give a convincing denial to a comment by Seif al-Islam el-Khadafy, a son of Libya's leader, that the agent's release was "always on the negotiating table" when oil and gas deals were discussed.
The case raises the specter of American judges and politicians one day releasing terrorists for similarly loopy reasons. Indeed, once national security is compromised by raising other issues to equal stature, like compassion for killers and lucrative business deals, appeasement of terror inevitably results.
Obama often insists that keeping Americans safe is his most important duty, yet his actions and those of Holder say otherwise. By tying our nation's hands against an enemy that knows no rules or boundaries, the President is adding to the already considerable chance we will suffer a national catastrophe.
