POLITICS BEFORE JUSTICE AT OBAMA'S DOJ

The attacks on 9-11-2001 were devasting, and significant steps were taken in order to prevent other attacks on our country. The CIA took carefully researched and planned steps to successfully protect America.

Omaba has again gone back on his word, and this time puts our national security in jeopardy. The Heritage Foundation reports:


Politics Before Justice at Obama’s DOJ
August 31, 2009

On Friday of last week, following the announcement that Attorney General Eric Holder would appoint a prosecutor to re-investigate the CIA’s treatment of detainees, former Vice President Dick Cheney taped an interview with Fox News. During the interview, which aired yesterday on Fox News Sunday, Cheney describes Holder’s decision as an “outrageous political act” that will have “devastating” consequences within the CIA.

Cheney is dead on. But unfortunately Holder’s political CIA witch hunt is just the latest example of a troubling pattern of politicization of the Justice Department under Holder.

Voter Intimidation: On Election Day 2008, members of the New Black Panther Party dressed in military-style uniforms were filmed standing outside a polling place in Philadelphia. According to a complaint filed by career lawyers at the Justice Department, the New Black Panther Party violated section 11(b) of the Voting Rights Act by engaging “in coercion, threats, and intimidation” of voters, including “racial threats and racial insults” as well as brandishing “a deadly weapon.”

One of the defendants named was Jerry Jackson, a Democratic Committeeman of the 14th Ward in Philadelphia. The front-line career lawyers in the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division recommended that Justice seek sanctions against the party and three of its members after the government had already won a default judgment in federal court against the men. But then Associate Attorney General Thomas Perrelli, the politically appointed No. 3 official in the Obama Justice Department, intervened. Instead of following through and getting an injunction to prevent this behavior in future elections, the suit was dismissed against all defendants, but Jackson, who received a watered-down injunction to prevent him from carrying a weapon in a polling place. But only in Philadelphia and only until 2012!

Public Corruption: In 2008, a federal grand jury began an investigation into a possible pay-to-play scheme in which lucrative work on New Mexico bond deals went to a Gov. Bill Richardson (D) donor. But then just last week, news leaked that that no one would be charged in the investigation with sources telling the Associated Press: “It’s over. There’s nothing. It was killed in Washington.” Heritage senior legal fellow Hans von Spakovsky explains why this is so troubling: “For anyone familiar with internal Justice Department procedures, this is particularly suspicious. The DOJ has a manual called “Federal Prosecution of Election Offenses” (I helped edit the latest edition when I was at Justice) that sets out the rules and procedures for U.S. attorneys when they are investigating these types of public-corruption cases. It is the U.S. attorney in New Mexico who would normally make the final call on a local public-corruption case, not ‘top Justice Department officials’ in Washington.”

Undermining National Security: In 2004 the CIA Inspector General issued a report documenting alleged detainee abuse by CIA interrogators and contractors. The DOJ’s career, not political, prosecutors then examined that document and other incidents from Iraq and Afghanistan for legal accountability. In one case, the DOJ decided to prosecute, and has already obtained a criminal conviction of a CIA contractor. Furthermore, the CIA has also taken their own disciplinary action against others involved in the incidents. As Heritage senior fellow Peter Brookes explains, Holder’s decision to re-investigate the CIA will have a chilling effect on the morale at the agency and will leave officers in the field wondering whether they should be more concerned about getting terrorists or getting lawyers.

Anyone familiar with Holder’s history should not be surprised by the politicization of the Justice Department under his leadership. In 1999, Holder promoted clemency for 16 members of FALN and Los Macheteros, terrorist organizations linked by the FBI to more than 130 bombings and six murders. Then in 2000 Holder played a prominent role in the pardon of Marc Rich, whose ex-wife gave considerable sums to the Democratic Party ($867,000) and the Clinton Library ($450,000).

Now, as the head of DOJ, Holder’s political decisions are undermining core rule of law concerns including the integrity of elections, ethical governance, and national security. Holder reports directly to his boss, President Barack Obama. Someone needs to be held accountable.


QUICK HIT

According to Rasmussen Reports, 57% of Americans would vote to replace the entire Congress and start all over again.

THE GET-CHENEY SQUAD

It is unconscionable that the CIA is under attack while we are in the midst of 2 wars. It is unconscionable the CIA is under attack for doing their job in keeping us safe after the devastating terrorists attack on American soil nearly 8 years ago. Has it been so long ago that we have forgotten our fear, and sense of urgency to prevent future attacks?

Pat Buchanan writes:


The Get-Cheney Squad
by Patrick J. Buchanan, August 28, 2009

"Men sleep peacefully in their beds at night because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf."

George Orwell's truth comes to mind as one reads that Eric Holder has named a special prosecutor to go after the "rough men" who, to keep us sleeping peacefully at night, went too far in frightening Khalid Sheik Muhammad, the engineer of the September massacres.

Yet, it seems now indisputable that those CIA interrogators, with their rough methods, got vital intelligence that saved American lives, as Dick Cheney has consistently contended.


According to The Washington Times, which reviewed the newly declassified CIA documents, those interrogators "produced life-saving intelligence that disrupted numerous terrorist plots."

They elicited the names of al-Qaida agents who planned anthrax attacks on Westerners and a massive bombing of Camp Lemonier, the U.S. base in East Africa. They got the names of 70 recruits al-Qaida deemed "suitable for Western attacks" and of the men who made the bomb used on the U.S. consulate in Karachi.

Iyman Faris, an al-Qaeda sleeper agent and truck driver in Ohio, is serving 20 years because of information the CIA got from KSM and associates. Other operations aborted include al-Qaida "plots to fly airliners into buildings on the West Coast, setting off bombs in U.S. cities and planning to employ a network of Pakistanis to target gas stations, railroad tracks and the Brooklyn Bridge."

What were the "inhumane" techniques CIA interrogators used to uncover these plans for the mass murder of Americans?

"Interrogators lifted one detainee off the floor by his arms, while they were bound behind his back with a belt," reports The Washington Post. "Another interrogator used a stiff brush to clean a detainee, scrubbing so roughly that his legs were raw with abrasions. Another squeezed a detainee's neck at his carotid artery until he began to pass out."

The CIA, we are told, used mock executions to frighten captives and threatened to kill KSM's children and rape his mother. Power drills were brandished in interrogation rooms.

Were any children killed? No. Was anyone's mother raped? No. Was the power drill used? No.

Was anyone executed in front of a witness to make him talk? No. It was faked, as Sean Connery faked it in "The Untouchables" to get an underling to blab to Eliot Ness, aka Kevin Costner, about how he could take down Al Capone's mob.

As for threatening to kill the children of our enemies, we did not do that in "The Good War." Instead, what we did was kill them in the thousands every night in air raids over Germany and Japan.

In the Tokyo firestorm of February 1945, the Dresden raid in March, and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August, we killed grandparents, mothers, fathers, wives, sisters, daughters and sons of the enemy in the scores of thousands on each of those days.

Can it be that the same United States that honored Col. Paul Tibbets and put his Enola Gay, which dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, on display in its Air and Space Museum is going to prosecute a CIA agent for faking an execution and threatening, but never intending, to kill the children of Khalid Sheik Muhammad?

Why is Barack Obama allowing these prosecutions to proceed?

In 2004, career lawyers at Justice looked over the same reports and concluded that prosecutions would not serve the national interest. Obama has himself said he wants to move on.
Now, he and Holder may not like what was done back then, but who does? And where is the criminal intent? These agents are not sadists. They were trying to get intel to abort plots and apprehend terrorists to prevent them from killing us. And they succeeded. Not a single terrorist attack on the United States in eight years.

Do we the people, some of whom may be alive because of what those CIA men did, want them disgraced, prosecuted and punished for not going strictly by the book in protecting us from terrorists?

In its lead editorial Tuesday, "Following the Torture Trail," The Washington Post declaims, "The real culprits in this sordid story are the higher-ups, starting with former President George W. Bush and former Vice President Richard Cheney who led America down the degraded path of state-sponsored torture."

But why is Obama yielding to the clamor of a left that will not be satiated until Cheney and Bush are indicted as Class A war criminals? Is that in the national interest? Is it in Obama's interest to tear his country apart to expose and punish these CIA agents?

In the 1960s, Robert Kennedy and the boys at Justice set up a "Get Hoffa Squad" to take down Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa. It was a vendetta that succeeded.

This vendetta will not. For, on the issue of national security, as Barack will painfully discover, he is not more trusted than Dick Cheney or the rough men at the CIA who did the harsh interrogations of terrorists, to keep us sleeping peacefully at night.

AMERICA-HATING OBAMA GOES AFTER CIA

As Obama goes back on his word to not prosecute the brave Americans who kept this country safe, another veil is removed. His attempts to erase the meaning of the 9-11 terrorists attack by re-naming it a National Day of Service is also very telling.

Atlas Shrugs' Pamela Geller reports in Newsmax:


AMERICA-HATING OBAMA GOES AFTER CIA
By Pamela Geller, August 26, 2009

Barack Hussein Obma lied to us.

The morally bankrupt Obama administration is yet again going after those who put protecting Americans first. “After months of consideration,” Fox News reported Monday, “Attorney General Eric Holder plans to appoint a special prosecutor to examine allegations that terror suspects were abused at the hands of their CIA interrogators.”

This is another vile chapter in the still-young Obama presidency. Obama said he would not prosecute the great Americans who kept the country safe during the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Those heroic Americans kept this country so safe, in fact, that we felt free to elect a post-American, pro-jihad president.

Obama won’t let this go. Uighurs in Bermuda, CIA agents on the rack.

The hypocrisy of this administration is breathtaking, but the implications of such action are very revealing.

The bottom line is that if one only has limited energies to devote to a wide range of enormous problems, why would anyone work to make American defense efforts the enemy? Jihad is the enemy. What was done was all done in defense of this dear country. Saner men would have lined up the enemy in front of a firing squad.

Obama is angry about the treatment of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, one of the masterminds of the Sept. 11 attacks, while he is setting up our boys and girls in Afghanistan. Month after month, we are experiencing the highest number ever of deaths over there because, in Obama’s words, “victory is not the goal.”

Meanwhile, Obama has designated Sept. 11 a “National Day of Service.” Matthew Vadum reported in The American Spectator: “The Obama White House is behind a cynical, coldly calculated political effort to erase the meaning of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks from the American psyche and convert Sept. 11 into a day of leftist celebration and statist idolatry. . . .The president signed into law a measure in April that designated Sept. 11 as a National Day of Service, but it’s not likely many lawmakers thought this meant that day was going to be turned into a celebration of ethanol, carbon emission controls, and radical community organizing.”

Also on Sept. 11, Obama plans to proclaim the creation of his mandatory “civilian community service corps” — an organization that looks ominous at best: why do we need a stateside army? And is it even constitutional to have one — if anyone even cares about the Constitution anymore?

Sept. 11, what should be a somber day of mourning and reflection (on how the hell we got here), will be the day when Obama — in a celebratory mode — makes his big announcement. The whole thing is depraved.

One has to ask: why did this man run for president? The knee jerk reaction to such a question is that a man (or woman) runs for president because he loves America. It is becoming increasingly clear that Obama ran for president because he hates America and wants very much to indict it.

“There is also no question,” Obama said, “that Guantanamo set back the moral authority that is America’s strongest currency in the world.” I disagree. America going on a witch hunt and prosecuting those that kept this country safe sets back our moral authority. America turning her back on the jihad against women, Christian, Jews, and non-believers has set back America’s moral authority. America electing a radical for a president has set back America’s moral authority.

America electing an America-hater for president vanquished our moral authority.

Want proof? You can find it in the release of Islamic terrorist Abdel Basset al-Megrahi. Evil is unleashed in a world where good has decided to sit out the Islam’s war on the West. Remember, Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi was so intimidated by President George W. Bush, he voluntarily turned over his WMD. I had my issues with Bush when he lost his mojo and caved to the left in his second term, but one thing is for certain: Abdel Basset al-Megrahi would never have been released with a patriot in the White House. Abdel Basset al-Megrahi would never have been released on the first day of Ramadan without a pro-jihad president in the White House. The chaos from the anti-American presidency has not even begun.

Fasten your seat belts.

The man will never stop punishing America for electing him. We will pay with everything good and decent.

Obama is punishing America.


Pamela Geller is the editor and publisher of the Atlas Shrugs Web site and former associate publisher of the New York Observer. Her Op-Eds have appeared in the Washington Times, Newsmax, Human Events, WorldNetDaily, the American Thinker, Israel National News, and other publications.

THE LEFT'S WAR ON THE CIA

Promises, promises. Another example of the man and his word. This time it's going back on his word to 'move forward' and a reckless attack on preserving the safety of American citizens after the most horrendous terrorist attack in American history.

Since the 9/11 attacks, America has been free of al Qaeda attacks because of the CIA involvement. As reckless as this is, it's also obvious diversions from failing economic numbers; diversions from falling poll numbers; diversions from TWO TRILLION more dollars of debt -- TWO TRILLION before government run healthcare and Cap and Trade.


The Heritage Foundation
The Left's War on the CIA
August 25, 2009

In June of 2008, while campaigning for the election of President Barack Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder promised the leftist American Constitutional Society: “We owe the American people a reckoning.” Yesterday, Holder escalated his “reckoning” campaign by appointing a prosecutor to re-investigate nearly a dozen CIA interrogators and contractors alleged to have abused detainees in 2002 and 2003. This is nothing more than an all out war on the CIA by the left at a time when the President desperately needs to shore up trust with his base in the face of his declining poll numbers.

Already the White House is at pains to create the perception of distance between Holder’s announcement and President Obama’s wishes. Deputy press secretary Bill Burton told reporters from Martha’s Vineyard yesterday: “ultimately, the decisions on who is investigated and who is prosecuted are up to the attorney general. . . . The president thinks that Eric Holder, who he appointed as a very independent attorney general, should make those decisions.” But make no mistake. Holder works for Obama. Holder’s priorities are by definition Obama’s priorities. And the facts make it clear that this “new” investigation is nothing more than a political witch hunt:

No New Information: Depending on where you get your news you may hear today that Holder’s decision is based on “new details” about the CIA interrogation program. This is false. While the release of the 2004 CIA inspector general report has exposed some new information to the public, Holder read the report months ago. Both the Department of Justice and the leadership of the Congressional intelligence committees have had the full report since 2004, and the full committees have had the report since 2006. The only thing that has changed since both DOJ and Congress received the full report is the 2008 presidential election.

Career Justice Lawyers Already Investigated: Not only has the Department of Justice been in possession of CIA IG report since 2004, but the DOJ’s career, not political, prosecutors have already examined that document and other incidents from Iraq and Afghanistan for legal accountability. CIA Director, and former President Clinton Chief of Staff, Leon Panetta assured CIA employees yesterday that the DOJ’s career prosecutors “worked carefully and thoroughly, sometimes taking years to decide if prosecution was warranted or not. In one case, the Department obtained a criminal conviction of a CIA contractor. In other instances, after Justice chose not to pursue action in court, the Agency took disciplinary steps of its own.”

Program Worked: From the 2004 CIA IG report: “The detention of terrorists has prevented them from engaging in further terrorist activity, and their interrogation has provided intelligence that has enabled the identification and apprehension of other terrorists, warned of terrorists plots planned for the United States and around the world, and supported articles frequently used in the finished intelligence publications for senior policymakers and war fighters. In this regard, there is no doubt that the Program has been effective.”

A Politically Motivated Re-Investigation Can Only Harm National Security: In yesterday’s Washington Post, CIA General Counsel under the Clinton administration Jeffrey Smith explains how Holder’s reopened investigation harms our national security: “Prosecutions would set the dangerous precedent that criminal law can be used to settle policy differences at the expense of career officers. … Prosecuting CIA officers risks chilling current intelligence operations. … their colleagues will become reluctant to take risks. What confidence will they have when their senior officers say not to worry, “this has been authorized by the president and approved by Justice”? … Prosecutions could deter cooperation with other nations. It is critical that we have the close cooperation of intelligence services around the world. … The key to this cooperation is the ability of the United States to be a reliable partner and keep secrets. Prosecuting CIA officers undermines that essential element of successful intelligence liaison.”

New Interrogation Guidelines Inadequate To Protect Nation: Yesterday the Obama administration also announced that their own new program for future interrogations would be controlled by the Army Field Manual. A senior administration official tells Politico, “The practices and techniques within the Army Field Manual are currently used by law enforcement and provide adequate and effective means of conducting such interrogations.” This is just not true. Across the country law enforcement official are allowed to lie to witnesses all the time in order to extract a confession. Under the Obama administration’s new guidelines we could only tell al Qaeda the truth.

It is no accident that the United States has been free of al Qaeda attack since 9/11. The CIA played a vital role in that accomplishment. President Obama has repeatedly assured the American people he wants to “look forward, not back” on CIA interrogations. It is time he lived up to this promise.