Continuing the theme of President Pantywaist, former CIA Director Porter Goss shows his displeasure at what the Obama admin and the Congressional Democrats Defeatocrats are attempting to pull: Security Before Politics
Since leaving my post as CIA director almost three years ago, I have remained largely silent on the public stage. I am speaking out now because I feel our government has crossed the red line between properly protecting our national security and trying to gain partisan political advantage. We can’t have a secret intelligence service if we keep giving away all the secrets. Americans have to decide now.
A disturbing epidemic of amnesia seems to be plaguing my former colleagues on Capitol Hill. After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, members of the committees charged with overseeing our nation’s intelligence services had no higher priority than stopping al-Qaeda. In the fall of 2002, while I was chairman of the House intelligence committee, senior members of Congress were briefed on the CIA’s “High Value Terrorist Program,” including the development of “enhanced interrogation techniques” and what those techniques were. This was not a one-time briefing but an ongoing subject with lots of back and forth between those members and the briefers.
Today, I am slack-jawed to read that members claim to have not understood that the techniques on which they were briefed were to actually be employed; or that specific techniques such as “waterboarding” were never mentioned. It must be hard for most Americans of common sense to imagine how a member of Congress can forget being told about the interrogations of Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed. In that case, though, perhaps it is not amnesia but political expedience.
For Democrats, political power comes before all else. If they needed to throw abortion on demand under the bus for power, they would do it in a heartbeat. I’m sure that Goss understands that this is simply business as usual for the Democrats, and, while he may be slack-jawed, he is surely not surprised in the least. Or, perhaps he is an idealist, and expects better out of people elected to Congress.
The days of fortress America are gone. We are the world’s superpower. We can sit on our hands or we can become engaged to improve global human conditions. The bottom line is that we cannot succeed unless we have good intelligence. Trading security for partisan political popularity will ensure that our secrets are not secret and that our intelligence is destined to fail us.
With Obama and the Donkeys running things, including their mouths, expect our intelligence to fail us, much like it did on 9/11. Interestingly, Conservative dissent, which is now considered un-patriotic, is meant to increase American power and security. Democrat dissent, supposedly patriotic, according to them, is meant to reduce American power and security.
Others, via Memeorandum: The Hill’s Blog Briefing Room, Firedoglake, JustOneMinute, TalkLeft, Emptywheel, Hot Air, Weekly Standard, Power Line, NO QUARTER, TigerHawk, Commentary, The New Ledger, Newshoggers.com, And So it Goes in Shreveport, Betsy’s Page, protein wisdom, Macsmind, PrairiePundit, Neptunus Lex and The Huffington Post
Teach is it possible that Goss’s remarks might be a bit self serving ? Might in fact he be at some point a target of a criminal investigation ? Are you aware that the CIA’s own Inspector General says that torture was used ? That the waterboarding technique that was used was not as originally described to the “Gang of Four” ? That it bore so little little resemblance to what was done in SERE as to make its usage almost irrelevant ? http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/story/66895.html
also Teach Goss is a bit vague on exactly WHO was briefed. Was it the Gang of Four or the Gang of Eight ? http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2009/04/25/porter-goss-attacks-on-pelosi-and-harman-but-admits-cia-broke-the-law/#more-4024
unless the Republicans decide to come clean on this torture issue it will be as long and as costly to the party as Abu Ghrib. Remember how much support for the war in Iraq that fiasco cost them ?
In Also please note that the briefing that Goss speaks about happened in the fall of 2002 this was well AFTER the waterboarding had occurred. They were saying that they had the legal justification to do things that they had already performed months before
also wasn’t Goss in charge of the CIA when the tapes of the waterboarding were destroyed and the law broken by doing so ?
Ahhh. Torture Memos. This is truly sad for the Democrats. Torture? Like Krauthammer says, if what is described in those memos now constitutes torture, the word has no meaning. As a member of the U.S. military, I experienced everything those scum-sucking terrorists did, albeit my stay in Club Pleasant was shorter than theirs and I wasn’t waterboarded (though our Navy SEALS and other special forces get that treatment), perhaps because I’m not a scum-sucking terrorist bent on mass-murder. My point being is that you won’t find any sympathy for this so-called torture from those who know the difference between being slammed into the WWF wall or opened hand slaps to the stomach and being hung with your arms behind until they’re ripped out of their sockets…
In fact, if I were captured by today’s enemy, I would only WISH that they would waterboard me and make me sleep in a small box. No, I would expect to be tortured and beat, then have my head sawed off in front of a camera with dull knife.
Your faux outrage at this “torture” doesn’t impress me, and in fact, makes me quite ill as it seems the left, once again, is siding with Americas enemies (surprise) for political leverage… 8-}
After re-reading the article, it seems to me that the author tries to separate the SERE training from what the terrorists faced. Once comment was that the SERE students knew it was part of the program. SO? I guess it made it more pleasant because we knew it was going to end as opposed to carrying on for an unknown time? Big frickin’ wah…
And it seems that the author wants to focus on the volume/intensity of the “torture” endured by our service men and the apparent line that was crossed somewhere in the left’s fevered-collective-minds with the terrorists. Our service people didn’t face EXACTLY the same amount of the advanced interrogation techniques, so its irrelevant in the discussion.
How convenient for you guys to have it declared such. Once again the level of
bull$h!tnuance the progressives show blows the mind…And I am referencing the article in John Ryans first comment…
Oh, here is a link to include what I would consider torture…
And the war in Chechnya was brutal, with the Islamic fanatics taking captured Russian soldiers and butchering them on video. I’m not sure if these Spetznaz guys are being for real or if they’re the Russian version of Scott Beauchamp. But given the brutality on the both sides, I’m more inclined to believe it.
As far as how this affects America, remember when our soldiers bodies were brutalized and butchered. Remember when we made detainees at Abu Ghraib get naked and make a man-pyramid and used dogs to scare them? Remember when we pretended to electrocute them? Remember? And the advanced interrogation techniques the left continuously props up as crimes against humanity and torture? Where were their cries of torture as our servicemen and women went through similar “torture” as part of their training? (Note: The left then dismisses SERE training because the trainees know it will end and it isn’t to the same “level” as to cross the magical “torture line”. How very convenient for them to draw that line in the nuanced sand.)
While I don’t necessarily believe in the actions of Abu Ghraib, they didn’t make our enemies want to chop our heads off any more or less. They just used it as an excuse for their perpetual outrage. And the left is joining America’s enemies in spreading the propaganda while ignoring, or paying lip service to and then dismissing as our fault as well, the atrocities of the other side.
H/T Six Meat Buffet.
Duncan the training that you like 10,000 of thousands of other Americans went through at SERE was according to the Inspector General of the CIAs report so dissimilar to the waterboarding that the detainees went through as to be irrelevant in any comparison.
_ The Bush administration erred by depending on a military training program, Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape, (SERE) to assess the risks that a suspected terrorist might face when being waterboarded.
“Individuals undergoing SERE training are obviously in a very different situation from detainees undergoing interrogation; SERE trainees know it is part of a training program,” Bradbury wrote, borrowing from the IG
report’s conclusion.
All 4 branches of the military had strong reservations about this and said so but were over ruled by the DOD civilians.
_ Waterboarding terrorist suspects also differed substantially from its limited use in the SERE program.
Quoting from the IG report, Bradbury wrote, “The waterboard technique . . . was different from the technique described in the DOJ opinion and used in the SERE training . . . At the SERE school . . . the subject’s airflow is disrupted by the firm application of a damp cloth over the air passages; the interrogator applies a small amount of water to the cloth in a controlled manner. By contrast, the Agency interrogator . . . applied large volumes of water to a cloth that covered the detainee’s mouth and nose.”
And when the policies of detainee abuse became public knowledege here in the USA (of course in Iraq and elsewhere it was already known) the officail line was a few bad apples and the enlisted men took the fall and did the time for following the policies given to them from above.
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/story/66895.html Duncan this is the link to where that article came from.
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Keep raging against the inevitable.
We will win this because we are willing to fight harder and longer to end torture and punish those responsible than you are to continue using it or to defend the scumbags who ordered it.
We’re willing to wait a decade or two, at which point you will have moved-on to the latest faux liberal conspiracy du jour and will not have the energy to fight old battles.