Free Republic

May 05, 2011 Debra Burlingame: Obama Says He Will Not Intervene With AG Holder Over Indictments of CIA Interrogators Just over FoxNews now. As the wife sister of one of the victims of 9/11 -- and a persistent critic of Obama's policies -- she used the meet-and-greet as a chance to ask Obama about an issue that concerns her. Holder's holding indictments over the heads of CIA interrogators -- the same ones who delivered bin Ladin to the SEALs. Burlingame asked him about that, and said "I know you can't tell him what to do" (which isn't really true), and...

You would think the identification and arrest of sleeper agents working for al Qaeda mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), and operating on U.S. soil in 2003, is a success story our intelligence and law enforcement agencies can rightly trumpet, no? Not according to Peter Bergen, who is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and a national security analyst for CNN. Writing about the inspector general's report on the CIA's detention and interrogation program and two other CIA analyses released on August 24, Bergen wrote the following on CNN.com: Of the terrorists, alleged and otherwise, cited by the CIA...

Poll: Should Federal Prosecuters investigate CIA Interrogators?

Meanwhile: Obama STILL has not released the memos Cheney claims show how waterboarding THREE terrorists saved American lives!Like other Democrats, Senator Carl Levin, Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, recently claimed that former Vice President Cheney is lying about proof that the waterboarding of the three worst terrorists, including the mastermind of the September 11th attacks, yielded information that saved American lives. Obama could the settle the matter and release those memos with a stroke of the pen. The methods and techniques have already been fully disclosed by Obama's prior release of similar classified memos. There is no valid...

For the first time in his presidency, Americans are getting a glimpse of Barack Obama on the defensive. Over the past few weeks, Obama has been back on his heels over torture and terror, issues on which he surely thought he had the upper hand. And he spent Thursday battling charges from a man he surely thought he had vanquished in November, former Vice President Dick Cheney. It took some worried calls from Capitol Hill Democrats, congressional aides said, to convince him otherwise – that he needed to give a speech defending his plan for closing the terror prison at...

I was right to torture terror suspects - it saved lives, claims unrepentant George Bush By DAVID GARDNER 29th May 2009 George Bush has defended his decision to allow the use of torture on terror suspects in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. The former president broke his silence on the scandal to insist that controversial interrogation methods like waterboarding and sleep deprivation helped save lives. Mr Bush was echoing claims made by his former Vice President Dick Cheney that the harsh interrogation techniques vilified by the Obama administration gained valuable intelligence. The ex-president was careful to avoid words...

BENTON HARBOR, Michigan (CNN) -- Former President George W. Bush on Thursday repeated Dick Cheney's assertion that the administration's enhanced interrogation program, which included controversial techniques such as waterboarding, was legal and garnered valuable information that prevented terrorist attacks. Former President George W. Bush defended his administration in speech Thursday in Michigan. Bush told a southwestern Michigan audience of nearly 2,500 -- the largest he has addressed in the United States since leaving the White House in January -- that, after the September 11 attacks, "I vowed to take whatever steps that were necessary to protect you." In his speech,...

Plus: Obama tells the big lie in Annapolis speech. Promises America will be safe if only we follow his lead!The big news story of last week was the contest of dueling speeches between President Obama and Vice President Cheney. Video and text highlights of Cheney's speech are found here.I've already pointed out how Obama hastily announced his speech at the National Archives standing in front of a copy of the U.S. Constitution at the same time as Cheney's long planned address at the American Enterprise Institute. In the wake of Democrats in Congress refusing to grant Obama a blank check...

Senior Republicans have rallied to support former Vice President Dick Cheney in the wake of his vehement attacks on Barack Obama. His fierce criticism has made him the principal voice opposing the new president and won him praise from figures. Republican leaders have cast aside doubts about Mr Cheney reminding voters of the unpopular Bush administration, and concluded that his critique is valuable. Mitt Romney, viewed by many Republicans as the front-runner for the party's 2012 presidential nomination, weighed in behind the former vice-president after he accused Mr Obama of practicing "recklessness cloaked as righteousness". The former Massachusetts governor described...

WASHINGTON – House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Friday she won't talk any more about her charge that the CIA lied in 2002 about using waterboarding on terrorism suspects. "I have made the statement that I'm going to make on this," she told reporters at a Capitol Hill news conference. "I don't have anything more to say about it. I stand by my comment." But Republicans aren't letting this one slide. Ken Spain, spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee, issued a statement after the news conference calling Pelosi a political liability to the Democratic party.

Watch Pelosi LIVE news conference Click Here

The spectacle of two duelling speeches with a mile of each other in downtown Washington was extraordinary. I was at the Cheney event and watched Obama's address on a big screen beside the empty lectern that the former veep stepped behind barely two minutes after his adversary had finished. So who won the fight? (it's hard to use anothing other than a martial or pugilistic metaphor). Well, most people are on either one side or the other of this issue and I doubt today will have prompted many to switch sides. But the very fact that Obama chose to schedule...

Honestly, you’ve gotta love the man’s political huevos! He stood right there, right in front of America’s most sacred documents, and lied to the American people. Now, over the last several weeks, we have seen a return of the politicization of these issues that have characterized the last several years. I understand that these problems arouse passions and concerns. They should. We are confronting some of the most complicated questions that a democracy can face. But I have no interest in spending our time re-litigating the policies of the last eight years. I want to solve these problems, and I...

Hotline has the transcript, but be warned that it’s a long slog through many swamps — Gitmo, interrogation, the torture memos, the unreleased Abu Ghraib photos, and on and on. You’re better off with Maguire’s witty recap. In a nutshell: We must look forward while also remembering that everything is Bush’s fault, and we must not abandon our core ideals unless doing so would make things too difficult for The One. My favorite part:************************** We are going to exhaust every avenue that we have to prosecute those at Guantanamo who pose a danger to our country. But even when this...

President Obama on Thursday defended some of his most controversial national security decisions since assuming the Oval Office while legitimizing former Vice President Dick Cheney, who has emerged as one of his harshest critics. Obama, speaking at the National Archives and surrounded by the nation's most prized documents, slammed the Bush administration for an "anything goes" policy on legal terrorism matters and reminded his critics that it is he, as commander in chief, who bears the responsibility of keeping the country safe. "As commander in chief, I see the intelligence. I bear responsibility for keeping this country safe, and I...

Let's face it, this is shaping up as George W. Bush's best month in years. The last time the 43rd president enjoyed this kind of vindication was when a bedraggled Saddam Hussein was pulled from a hole in the ground by American soldiers in 2003. All of Barack Obama's efforts to cast the Bush administration as an immoral stain on American history have not merely collapsed, but collapsed on the heads of Bush's most public and vocal critics. Here's a non-stammering Nancy Pelosi talking about Bush last July: "God bless him, bless his heart, president of the United States --...

Will the last activist who hopes the antiwar cause will re-emerge as a central tenet of the Democratic Party please turn out the lights on the way out the door? Little evidence exists that any antiwar movement is alive, well and influencing policy in this country. Certainly no voice for it is coming from Barack Obama's White House. In fact, Obama has been pretty consistent in

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi argued at a news conference Thursday that Republicans are focusing on how much she knew about CIA enhanced interrogation techniques in 2002 and 2003 as a "diversionary tactic to take the spotlight off those who conceived, developed and implemented these policies, which all of us long opposed." Yet Pelosi's failure to protest what she alternately calls "enhanced interrogation methods" and "torture" - depending on whether the controversy threatens to make her look bad or the Bush administration - goes to the very heart of whether or not the "truth commission" she supports is anything more than...

A CNN news clip from May 22, 2002, shows Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi was not as out-of-the-loop as she now claims on interrogations. William Jacobson provided a little more evidence that Pelosi was not the clueless babe in the woods in 2002 that she now says she was. Pelsoi, after all, was the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. No one in Congress would know more than she. Jacobson dug out this from an old CNN clip: CNN.com, May 22, 2002: Last Monday night, the New York Joint Terrorism Task Force–a round-the-clock operation at the New...

Sen. Patrick Leahy wants an independent commission to investigate them. Rep. John Conyers wants the Obama Justice Department to prosecute them. Liberal lawyers want to disbar them, and the media maligns them. What did the Justice Department attorneys at George W. Bush's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) -- John Yoo and Jay Bybee -- do to garner such scorn? They analyzed a 1994 criminal statute prohibiting torture when the CIA asked for legal guidance on interrogation techniques for a high-level al Qaeda detainee (Abu Zubaydah). In the mid-1980s, when I supervised the legality of apprehending terrorists to stand trial, I...