Free Republic

Good morning everyone. A short post to get Freeper opinion. I saw former General Zinni on Fox News this morning and he came out in favor of the report released this week by Diane Feinstein. What is the word on Zinni? Was he a good commander? Was he anti Bush, pro Obama?

Democrats are always on dubious ground whenever they use the word "stain." However, that didn't deter Senator Diane Feinstein from describing the Central Intelligence AgencyÂ’s (CIA) efforts to tease valuable information out of mass murdering jihadists as "a stain on American values and history." The CIA's enhanced interrogation program was a tease in comparison to the prehistoric barbarity of Islamic jihadists and in comparison to the horrors of actual battle. Review the footage from the Twin Towers on that infamous day. American citizens, real people, with wives, husbands, and children threw themselves, in desperation, out of the inferno to be...

On this week’s open from Judge Jeanine, she takes aim at the torture report and the underlying incompetent and naive worldview that produced and released it.

Waterboarding is not designed to kill anyone. None of the other enhanced interrogation techniques that liberals are screaming about are designed to cause lasting damage or death. The reality is that the “torture” that liberals are getting upset about would be called torture only in the First World; in the rest of the world, it would be considered a mild first step. That doesn’t mean that enhanced interrogation techniques are acceptable or moral, but it does mean that they are a far cry from what most of the world thinks of when they hear the word “torture.” On the other...

The chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee released new information on Thursday that he claims is evidence that the Bush administration misled the nation in the run-up to the war in Iraq. In a speech on the Senate floor, retiring Sen. Carl Levin, a Democrat, outlined a 2003 CIA cable that warns George W. Bush administration officials against making references to claims that Mohammad Atta — the man who led the Sept. 11 hijackers — met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in the Czech Republic before the Sept. 11, 2011, attacks. Levin claims Bush officials used the unconfirmed meeting...

During a presidential primary debate in 2007, I and the other seven candidates on the stage were asked about waterboarding. The question was: As president, would I agree to waterboard a captured terrorist if three bombs had gone off in this country and we were awaiting the “big one” and we had a captive who we believed knew when and where it would happen? I replied, not only would I waterboard the guy, but I’d be looking for Jack Bauer, the superhero character from the television series “24.” That was my answer after all other candidates said no because John...

Governor Palin posted to Facebook:See more here:http://insider.foxnews.com/2014/12/13/eric-bolling-blasts-cia-torture-report-i-have-zero-sympathy-terrorists  Connect with Governor Palin on Facebook

Every now and then, news breaks in the Obama administration that is so stereotypical, it is actually depressing. You might want to sit down for this. Attorney General Eric Holder, made infamous by Operation Fast and Furious, is currently arguing before the Supreme Court that United Nations treaties trump the United States Constitution. That’s right. The sitting Attorney General, charged with upholding and defending the Constitution, is arguing before the highest court that international law is in fact the law of the land. The case in question, Bond v. United States, is actually pretty ridiculous. The defendant is charged with...

Russia has called on the United States to punish those responsible for the use of “inquisition-style” interrogation methods in the “global war on terror”, as revealed in the US Senate report on torture this week. Konstantin Dolgov, the human rights ombudsman of Russia’s foreign ministry, said the results of the “shocking” report were “the latest confirmation of gross, systemic human rights violations by the American authorities”. .... The Senate report showed that “prisoners in secret torture chambers were subjected to inhuman, humiliating treatment” including waterboarding, sleep deprivation and threats against suspects’ families in order to “beat confessions out of often...

Scalia Challenges Liberals On CIA Torture Debate: ‘You Think It’s An Easy Question?’ By Douglas Ernst December 12, 2014 Supreme CourtJustice Antonin Scalia has waded into the CIA torture debate after Democrats on the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee released a report on the interrogation techniques used after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Justice Scalia, speaking Wednesday with a Swiss broadcaster on the issue, accused American and European liberals of being unduly self-righteous on the matter given the kind of real-world scenarios that could unfold, The

WASHINGTON (AP) — Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is joining the debate over the Senate's torture report by saying it's hard to rule out the use of extreme measures to extract information if millions of lives were threatened. Scalia told a Swiss broadcast network that American and European liberals who say such tactics may never be used are being self-righteous. The 78-year-old justice said he doesn't "think it's so clear at all," especially if interrogators were trying to find a ticking nuclear bomb. Scalia has made similar comments in the past, but he renewed his remarks on Wednesday in an...

Friday, December 12, 2014 Leftist Lynch Mobs from Ferguson to Rolling Stone Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog Did you bury a teenage girl alive after shooting her? Are you on death row after a string of crimes too gruesome to describe? Or you just a member of Al Qaeda dedicated to destroying America?  If so progressives will fight for you. Just dial 1-800-IAM-VICTIM and the left waiting to take your call will insist on your presumption of innocence. Its activists, reporters and lawyers will exploit every pretext to get you off the hook and they will...

One of the Islamic State’s senior commanders reveals exclusive details of the terror group’s origins inside an Iraqi prison – right under the noses of their American jailers. In the summer of 2004, a young jihadist in shackles and chains was walked by his captors slowly into the Camp Bucca prison in southern Iraq [snip] “I knew some of them straight away,” he told me last month. “I had feared Bucca all the way down on the plane. But when I got there, it was much better than I thought. In every way.”

The Democratic Party is well on the way to restoring its reputation as weak on national security, not to be trusted with the nation’s safety.  Senator Dianne Feinstein and the Democrat majority on the Senate Intelligence Committee who insisted on releasing their partisan report on CIA enhanced interrogation techniques (sometimes known as “torture”) have opened a Pandora’s Box. Writing at Ricochet, Herbert Meyer, recipient of the nation’s highest intelligence medal for civilians, outlines in stark terms the sort of dilemma Feinstein’s report sets up for Democrats:  Let’s use what’s called the Ticking-Time-Bomb scenario to illustrate this point: A terrorist group...

And here we go: Right off the deep end. It’s as predictable as the sunrise. As those who are genuinely and honestly outraged over the revelations contained within the Senate Intelligence Committee’s “torture” report strain themselves in the effort to adopt a posture of unparalleled indignation, they inevitably overreach. So far, the best example of this kind of indulgence in regrettable hyperbole in the pursuit of moral preening is Rep. Jackie Speier (D-CA). In an appearance on MSNBC on Wednesday, Speier reacted to the release of the SSCI’s report on the CIA’s Bush-era enhanced interrogation program by saying America’s clandestine...

As CIA chief John Brennan defended the spy agency's interrogation program for terror suspects Thursday, a senior senator whose committee published a damning report on the practice contested his claims. Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein's staff repeatedly used the hashtag #ReadTheReport on the senator's Twitter feed during Brennan's rare press conference broadcast live from CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Brennan said it was "unknowable" whether key information from suspects subjected to so-called enhanced interrogation techniques (EITs), which critics have equated to torture, could have been obtained through other methods. But Feinstein's staff responded: "Study shows it IS knowable: CIA...

CIA Director John Brennan threaded a rhetorical needle in an unprecedented televised news conference at CIA headquarters Thursday, acknowledging that agency officers did “abhorrent” things to detainees but defending the overall post-9/11 interrogation program for stopping attacks and saving lives. At the heart of Brennan’s case is a finely tuned argument: that while today’s CIA takes no position on whether the brutal interrogation tactics themselves led detainees to cooperate, there is no doubt that detainees subjected to the treatment offered “useful and valuable” information afterward. …

Just thought if anyone wants a good skewering of the recent senate report heres the CIA's 135 page response released a few days ago. 1. I appreciate the opportunity for the Central Intelligence Agency to comment on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Study of the Agency's long-terminated Rendition, Detention, and Interrogation Program (hereafter referred to as the "Study"). As I noted during my confirmation hearing and in subsequent discussions with you and with Committee members, the lengthy Study deserved careful review by the Agency in light of the significance and sensitivity of the subject matter and; of particular concern;...

...The striking fact about the Agency’s alleged misrepresentations, as catalogued by the Senate committee, is that they relate almost entirely to collateral matters. As to the basics, it appears that what the Agency and the Bush and Obama administrations have been telling us for years was true. In particular, it has been said that only three men, all vicious, high-ranking terrorists, were waterboarded. As best I can glean from the report, that is correct. But the report displays an extraordinary solicitude for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah, the two principal terrorists who were waterboarded. It goes on at almost...

The United States on Wednesday faced criticism from the United Nations as well as governments that Washington often reprimands for human rights violations over a Senate report on CIA torture techniques in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks. Some U.S. allies, who could face embarrassment or legal liability for any role in the CIA's "enhanced interrogations" during the George W. Bush administration, either condemned the CIA's methods or played down any involvement their governments might have had in them. "The CIA's practice of torture is gruesome," German Justice Minister Heiko Maas told German newspaper Bild. "Nothing justifies such methods....