For the time being, Obama has decided against further release of CIA “torture” photos:
President Obama met with White House counsel Greg Craig and other members of the White House counsel team last week and told them that he had second thoughts about the decision to hand over photographs of detainee abuse to the ACLU, per a judge’s order, and had changed his mind.
The president “believes their release would endanger our troops,” a White House official says, adding that the president “believes that the national security implications of such a release have not been fully presented to the court.”
At the end of that meeting, the president directed Craig to object to the immediate release of the photos on those grounds. In an Oval Office meeting with Iraq Commander General Ray Odierno, the president told him of his decision to argue against the release of the photographs.
The move is a complete 180. In a letter from the Justice Department to a federal judge on April 23, the Obama administration announced that the Pentagon would turn over 44 photographs showing detainee abuse of prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq during the Bush administration.
The photographs are part of a 2003 Freedom of Information Act request by the ACLU for all information relating to the treatment of detainees — the same battle that led to President Obama’s decision to release memos from the Bush Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel providing legal justifications for brutal interrogation methods, many of which the International Committee of the Red Cross calls torture.
http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2009/05/president-oba-5.html
Below is a compilation of comments I’ve made on this subject.
About all the leftwing hand wringing over “torture”:
You want torture? Try being trapped in burning skyscrapers 90 stories high thanks to a crash caused by Islamic thugs who used planes like human-filled missiles. You’re calling your loved ones on a cell phone to tell them that you’re probably not going to make it. There’s no escape except the choice of being incinerated to death or jumping out of a window.
That is torture.
Liberal pansies are so wrapped around the axle over the poor, hapless muslim terrorists. There’s a few things they overlooked: What got them a trip to GITMO and the knowledge of terrorist plots endangering thousands of people.
I get their mindset, though: Leaving them to commit acts of terrorism is okay, using methods to extract that information, is “immoral”. That’s a good example of “moral relativism”.
Those methods proved to be very successful. Just a few examples of who got what they deserved:
Al-Qaeda scumbag Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. They dunked his smelly ass after his capture. They got lots of information out of him. Some of his accomplishments include: planning the 9-11 attacks that killed 3,000 in New York, Washington DC and Pennsylvania, the first World Trade Center attack in 1993, the Operation Bojinka plot, an aborted 2002 attack on Los Angeles’ U.S. Bank Tower, the Bali nightclub bombings, the failed bombing of American Airlines Flight 63, the Millennium Plot, and the murder of Daniel Pearl.
Link: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/first100days/2009/04/19/obama-punish-bush-officials-responsible-interrogation-tactics/
Interrogations of Khalid Sheik Mohammad resulted in confessions pertaining to the 9/11 attacks, the capture of other terrorists, and actionable intelligence used to thwart ‘following up’ plans for weapons of mass destruction to be used on America, including anthrax and dirty bomb operations.
Links: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,436061,00.html
http://www.canadafreepress.com/2006/cover050206.htm
Specifically, interrogation with enhanced techniques “led to the discovery of a KSM plot, the ‘Second Wave,’ ‘to use East Asian operatives to crash a hijacked airliner into’ a building in Los Angeles.” KSM later acknowledged before a military commission at Guantanamo Bay that the target was the Library Tower, the tallest building on the West Coast. The memo explains that “information obtained from KSM also led to the capture of Riduan bin Isomuddin, better known as Hambali, and the discovery of the Guraba Cell, a 17-member Jemmah Islamiyah cell tasked with executing the ‘Second Wave.’ ” In other words, without enhanced interrogations, there could be a hole in the ground in Los Angeles to match the one in New York.
Link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/20/AR2009042002818.html
Zayn Abidin Muhammed Hussein abu Zubaida, the first high-ranking al-Qaeda member captured after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, broke in less than a minute after he was subjected to the technique and began providing interrogators with information that led to the disruption of several planned attacks, said John Kiriakou, who served as a CIA interrogator in Pakistan.
The water boarding of Abu Zubaydah got him to talk in less than 35 seconds. The technique, which critics say is torture, probably disrupted “dozens” of planned al-Qaida attacks, said John Kiriakou, a leader of the team that captured Zubaydah, a major al-Qaida figure.
Link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/10/AR2007121002091.html
Until they were caught, they were in the process of killing as many infidels as possible for “Allah”.
I don’t give a damn if they have to force feed a terrorist a fucking ocean full of water to get information. The tactic works. It saves American lives.
I can hardly wait to witness the meltdown of the leftwing moonbat brigade, when they finally realize that Obama won’t prosecute anyone in the CIA, because he can’t.
Aside from the fact that several members of the Democratic Party knew about the interrogation methods,
Obama knows that if he allows prosecution he will have to release the classified information gleaned from the interrogations, which will prove they were successful. Instead, he’ll try to politicize the intelligence because the truth is inconvenient. The whole attempt to blame Bush and denounce the productive interrogations, will blow up in his face.
We used the right torture on some of the worst Islamic terrorist scum on the planet. They weren’t run-of-the-mill peons; they were al Qaeda leaders. As a result, we got information that revealed the specific names, locations, and plans of future attacks.
If you are unwilling to support coercive interrogations that could result in saving hundreds, if not thousands, of innocent Americans from being killed in a terrorist attack, then you are worthless. I have absolutely no problem water boarding cold-blooded, unremorseful, murdering muslim bastards. I hope that we do a lot worse.
Hand wringers need to divest themselves from the fantasy that we are fighting an enemy that plays by the Marquis of Queensbury Rules, or can find Geneva on a map. They don’t, and they can’t. They understand our way of thinking better than we do ourselves. They don’t hesitate to use children as suicide bombers or human shields. They’ve got good occupational experience at torture, mutilation, and gratuitous executions. Feeling sorry for these shitbags is tantamount to weeping over a little humiliation meted out to former Nazis. Whoever decides to release any of them to pick up where they left off; planting IEDs that kill American troops, targeting the West, and slaughtering innocent civilians, has a crap factory for a brain. (Read: B. Hussein Obama). He wants to ‘negotiate without preconditions’. The Islamofascists and the rest of the world’s malefactors are salivating for a ‘change they can believe in’.
If connecting a terrorist’s testicles to a 12 volt battery will save American lives, I’ve two things to say: The RED is POSITIVE. The BLACK is NEGATIVE.
I won’t lose a minute’s sleep, either.