It’s been an interesting few months in Obamaworld. The Obama Justice Department now wishes to conduct criminal investigations into detainee treatment following 9/11. Apparently, Eric “We Are a Nation of Cowards” Holder is disturbed that CIA personnel roughed up Khalid Sheik Mohammed and some of his cronies after they murdered 3,000 of our citizens in 2001 in an effort to learn more about Al Qaeda and its plans. Evidently, burning, beheading and maiming is fair practice for the bad guys, but making the bad guys extremely uncomfortable is out of bounds for us.
Last month, Congress voiced its extreme displeasure with Dick Cheney’s authorization of hit squads of CIA operatives that were to be deployed in Pakistan to take out high level Al Qaeda figures. Apparently, it is fine to take them out with drones (thereby risking collateral damage), but taking them out face to face at close range is impermissible.
What is interesting to me is that these positions follow closely on the heels of Obama’s off the cuff remark in his press conference that the Cambridge police had acted “stupidly” by arresting Henry Louis Gates for being disruptive when police were called to his residence responding to a call regarding a potential break-in. After leaping to the conclusion that the Cambridge police acted stupidly, our “post-racial” president then went even further and initially asserted that this incident was about race. Finding himself caught in this entanglement, he tried to slither out from under the controversy by stating that he “could have calibrated his words more carefully” (how Clintonian) and then tried to whitewash it all using Rodney King (“can’t we all just get along”) diplomacy at the infamous “beer summit”.
What does the Gates incident have to do with how we deal with international terrorists? Quite a bit, actually. Taken together, they speak volumes about how Obama and his advisors view the world. In Obamaworld, the guys that are charged with protecting us are the ones that need to be restrained, collared and contained. They must abide by a strict set of rules, and in some cases, even abiding by the rules may not be enough. In the Gates incident, the police officer in question was not shown to have violated any rule or procedure. In the case of Khalid Sheik Muhammed, the alleged wrong was that he was threatened with a drill. Now, it might be different if they actually harmed KSM with it, but it’s hard for me to feel a great sense of injustice because the mastermind of the most bloody attack on U.S. soil was shown how a drill works. Obama and his crew seek to impose strict rules on the good guys. The bad guys get to do whatever they want.
The whole Gates incident gives us a peek at how Obama thinks about the world. Think about it for a moment. That press conference was extremely revealing. Obama (a Harvard educated lawyer) said, “I don’t know what the facts are, but the white cop was wrong.” That is Obama’s starting point. The guy in charge of protecting our lives and property was presumptively wrong.
Similarly, that is the mindset with international terrorism. The terrorists need to be protected from the guys that are in charge of protecting us—just to make sure they don’t get overzealous. The guys at the CIA are wrong. They need a labyrinthian set of rules to follow when interrogating the most evil guys on the planet. Eventually, the lawyers in Obamaworld will come to develop a code of permissible conduct for our CIA operatives.
It’s one thing to question a little dust-up between a Cambridge cop and a Harvard professor where no one got hurt, but Holder and his staff apparently don’t realize that his crusade will lead to an upgrade of Al Qaeda’s training manual.
Last month, Congress voiced its extreme displeasure with Dick Cheney’s authorization of hit squads of CIA operatives that were to be deployed in Pakistan to take out high level Al Qaeda figures. Apparently, it is fine to take them out with drones (thereby risking collateral damage), but taking them out face to face at close range is impermissible.
What is interesting to me is that these positions follow closely on the heels of Obama’s off the cuff remark in his press conference that the Cambridge police had acted “stupidly” by arresting Henry Louis Gates for being disruptive when police were called to his residence responding to a call regarding a potential break-in. After leaping to the conclusion that the Cambridge police acted stupidly, our “post-racial” president then went even further and initially asserted that this incident was about race. Finding himself caught in this entanglement, he tried to slither out from under the controversy by stating that he “could have calibrated his words more carefully” (how Clintonian) and then tried to whitewash it all using Rodney King (“can’t we all just get along”) diplomacy at the infamous “beer summit”.
What does the Gates incident have to do with how we deal with international terrorists? Quite a bit, actually. Taken together, they speak volumes about how Obama and his advisors view the world. In Obamaworld, the guys that are charged with protecting us are the ones that need to be restrained, collared and contained. They must abide by a strict set of rules, and in some cases, even abiding by the rules may not be enough. In the Gates incident, the police officer in question was not shown to have violated any rule or procedure. In the case of Khalid Sheik Muhammed, the alleged wrong was that he was threatened with a drill. Now, it might be different if they actually harmed KSM with it, but it’s hard for me to feel a great sense of injustice because the mastermind of the most bloody attack on U.S. soil was shown how a drill works. Obama and his crew seek to impose strict rules on the good guys. The bad guys get to do whatever they want.
The whole Gates incident gives us a peek at how Obama thinks about the world. Think about it for a moment. That press conference was extremely revealing. Obama (a Harvard educated lawyer) said, “I don’t know what the facts are, but the white cop was wrong.” That is Obama’s starting point. The guy in charge of protecting our lives and property was presumptively wrong.
Similarly, that is the mindset with international terrorism. The terrorists need to be protected from the guys that are in charge of protecting us—just to make sure they don’t get overzealous. The guys at the CIA are wrong. They need a labyrinthian set of rules to follow when interrogating the most evil guys on the planet. Eventually, the lawyers in Obamaworld will come to develop a code of permissible conduct for our CIA operatives.
It’s one thing to question a little dust-up between a Cambridge cop and a Harvard professor where no one got hurt, but Holder and his staff apparently don’t realize that his crusade will lead to an upgrade of Al Qaeda’s training manual.
