Posted on 03/24/2007 9:23:01 AM PDT by Sub-Driver
Rockefeller mulls secret prison shutdown
By KATHERINE SHRADER, Associated Press Writer 8 minutes ago
The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee is questioning whether the CIA's secret prison program — which he fears has become a black eye to the United States — should continue.
The review led by Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., comes as the Bush administration deliberates an executive order, called for by Congress, that will establish new guidelines for the CIA's system for detaining and interrogating suspected terrorists. It is the agency's most publicly controversial intelligence collection program.
Rockefeller says there is no doubt that intelligence from detainees has been valuable. Yet he says he wonders whether the CIA needed to create a system outside of long-standing FBI and military interrogation programs.
Rockefeller's spokeswoman, Wendy Morigi, said he has not been convinced that the CIA prisons produce better intelligence than the FBI and military systems.
"The real question is whether the administration's decision to pursue an alternate system (at the CIA) was the right approach," Rockefeller said in a statement Friday.
President Bush said he emptied the CIA's secret prisons in September and sent its last 14 high-value detainees to the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. But he left open the possibility that the program could be used again.
As chairman, Rockefeller has promised to conduct more vigorous oversight of the spy agencies than did his Republican predecessor. He is asking whether having a separate CIA detention and interrogation system is necessary and worth the toll on the U.S. image abroad.
"The widespread reports about secret prisons and torture, whether accurate or not, have damaged the United States' reputation around the world and hindered counterterrorism efforts with our allies," he said.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
I think not.
"President Bush said he emptied the CIA's secret prisons in September and sent its last 14 high-value detainees to the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. But he left open the possibility that the program could be used again."
Blatant political move right before the Nov election. Either these prisons were essential to American security or they weren't. Such a crass action points to the latter.
You know, it is almost funny...leftists hate America so much, despise everything it stands for, denigrate it at every opportunity, BUT THEN claim to care about its "reputation", of all things. They defecate and urinate on the US flag and the US Constitution, but then bend over backwards to afford (unwarranted!) Constitutional protections to America's foreign enemies, claiming it to be patriotic...it seems inconsistent, but it is not. The reason is not reassuring.
There is at least ONE politician at the highest level of office who understands this - Stephen Harper, Canada's Conservative Party Prime Minister. In a treatise on modern Conservatism written in 2003, Harper noted:
Conservatives need to reassess our understanding of the modern Left. It has moved beyond old socialistic morality or even moral relativism to something much darker. It has become a moral nihilism - the rejection of any tradition or convention of morality, a post-Marxism with deep resentments, even hatreds of the norms of free and democratic western civilization...it is actually disturbingly consistent. It is a rebellion against all forms of social norm and moral tradition in every aspect of life. The logical end of this thinking is the actual banning of conservative views, which some legislators and "rights" commissions openly contemplate....This is particularly striking given the nature of the [foreign] enemy here, the bin Ladens and the Husseins, individuals who embody in the extreme everything the Left purports to oppose - fundamentalism, fascistic nationalism, misogyny, bigotry.
What Rocky didn't mention was that a lot of those "reports of torture"...were coming from people in his own party.
I think that Dick Durbin's speech on the Senate floor...accusing the troops stationed at Gitmo of being worse than nazis..and the prison worse than gulags in the Soviet Union....
THOSE weren't accurate...but, they are what the DEMS have advertised...and Rocky is one of the worst.
I simply am amazed at the idiocy of politicians. Results be damned, we don't want anybody to not like us.
We are fighting a group of animals that want to kill us by the bushel. Use any means necessary against these animals to prevent that. We are in a war for our survival for God sake.
Empty Gittmo, put a fence around Rockefeller's house and dump 'em there!
That is amazingly insightful. Stephan Harper is an exceedingly intelligent man.
This is ot, sleuthie, but they have got to let Catherine Herridge do things other than host the 2 hour segments on Fox on the weekends.
She is a very nice person, but she is not good at this.
Rockefeller is such an ass...... Of course if successful in stopping this program, he will then move to limit what the FBI and the military can do too.
So Rockefeller has nothing better to do than worry about 14 prisoners who are no longer in the secret prisons anyway? It is apparent the dems have no plan for leading and can only play politics - its all they know how to do.
He did that when he appeared on MTP and blurted out that he had gone to three ME countries, including Baathist controlled Syria, and warned them way ahead of the war that we would absolutely be invading Iraq...
A couple minutes later he apparently (from his deer/headlights look) realized that he had just confessed on national TV to treason and aiding and abetting the enemy. You can't be much more of a traitor and domestic enemy than that.
It should have damaged his image, but the equally complicit media just ignored it and let it fade into oblivion.
Accurate or not, I doubt it has hindered ct efforts by our true allies.
"Whether accurate or not" is the money phrase. Whether accurate or not, the reports have done their job. The supposed existence of supposed secret prisons was reported by the New York Times. Is anyone investigating the leak of classified information? No? Maybe because it isn't true? It wouldn't be a prosecutable offense if the information leaked wasn't classified because it was made up out of whole cloth, maybe?
If it was true, then someone in CIA or perhaps in Rockefeller's committee has committed a grave breach of security, revealing classified operations in time of war. Just like someone blew the black transport flights, the monitoring of Bin Ladin's sat phone, the monitoring of Al Qaeda cell phones, the monitoring of electronic transmission of Al Qaeda funds. Someone blew these operations in the press, and there have been no Fitzecutions of these people.
Of course, if I were running things, there wouldn't be any prosecutions, because what is the point of having supposed secret prisons if you aren't going to use them? The fact that these people are still walking around free is proof-positive that while Al Qaeda is at war with us, we are not yet at war ourselves.
Didn't Commie Rockefeller take it upon himself to fly over to Syria and Saudi Arabia to personally warn Assad and Abdullah that Bush was going to invade Afghanistan or Iraq?
Secret prisons - different from "rendition" to other countries?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.