Two great friends of this blog, Bev Perlson and Debbie Lee, were on Fox and Friends this morning to talk about their protest against moving Guantanamo detainees being brought to Thomson, IL;
Category: Barack Obama/Joe Biden
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Just let ’em all go
While the Obama Administration had us distracted with the health care debate this weekend and the plan for putting Gitmo detainees in IL, the media had us fixated on snowfall and cops with guns, under the table the Justice Department was releasing some Guantanamo detainees back where we got them.
One of our readers, bdaman sent us a BBC link (since our own media doesn’t seem too interested in the war against terror these days)
“These transfers were carried out under individual arrangements between the United States and relevant foreign authorities to ensure the transfers took place under appropriate security measures,” the Department of Justice said in a statement.
“Consultations with foreign authorities regarding these individuals will continue.”
Yemenis account for almost half of the 198 detainees who remain at the US military base in Cuba. But officials fear many could re-join militant groups if sent back to Yemen.
Well, “officials fear”, but apparently none of them are in the Justice Department. Uncle Jimbo of Blackfive and In The Crosshairs fame tells us about the most disturbing of this weekend’s bunch;
This is not some poor bastard who was scarfed up in Afghanistan and sold to us by some warlord. We conducted a raid into Somalia specifically to capture this guy and now he is just back on the street? I kinda doubt it was the military changing their minds that he was a High Value Detainee, so we have the Attorney General and his friends in the terrorist fellow travelers camp to thank for this.
But this isn’t important enough for our own media to cover, so there are lots of questions that won’t be answered. At The Weekly Standard Blog, Thomas Jocelyn writes;
In other words, the DOJ and Foggy Bottom control transfer decisions, not the military officials who have been responsible for detaining, interrogating, and analyzing the intelligence collected on each Gitmo detainee. That is not surprising. Lake’s comments reinforce what we’ve known for some months. The DOJ, in particular, plays a leading role in President Obama’s interagency review board, which in turn makes transfer decisions.
So the war against terror is just another police action with the politicians and law enforcement agencies operating as the military. Naw, that doesn’t scare me.
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Witness to the fix
Yeah, we don’t have a state-controlled media. We have a media that trips over their own feet to be the mouthpiece of the White House. Ed Schultz witnessed the process last week and tells us about how it works. From The Radio Equalizer;
SCHULTZ (08:12): So Mika starts looking at her Blackberry and so does Scarborough and obviously the White House is texting them or emailing them or whatever and they didn’t like the show. Because Arianna had been on there, I’m on there, Howard Dean had been on there and they wanted some balance.
Now think about that – here’s the White House getting in contact with ‘Morning Joe’ because they’re afraid there’s too many lefties on the air! Now if that’s not sensitivity at its highest level, I don’t know what is! I told ya a few days ago they had rabbit ears! They don’t like anything that’s being said right now, they’re getting beat up!
I’m guessing we’re paying some doofus in the White House who makes more money than you make, to watch the news programs all day and all night to alert Axelrod when opinion starts sliding away from the administration.
Naw, that doesn’t scare me.
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Ahmadinejad not influenced by smart power
The Associated Press in Fox News reports that all of that smart power just hasn’t influenced Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Ahmadinejad dismissed the threat of sanctions, saying Iran wants talks “under just conditions where there is mutual respect.”
“We told you that we are not afraid of sanctions against us and we are not intimidated,” he said, addressing the West. “If Iran wanted to make a bomb, we would be brave enough to tell you.”
“This nuclear game thing is an old story, it’s history now,” the Iranian leader said, as the crowd cheered: “We love you, Ahmadinejad.” He lashed out at Washington, vowing Iran will stand up against U.S. attempts to “dominate the Middle East.”
Of course he’s not influenced. No matter what happens he’s a winner. If no one does anything, Iran gets nuclear weapons. If the US or Israel decides to strike at Iran’s nuclear development, he gets to play victim of Zionist ambitions on the world stage. George Bush understood that no matter what we do, we’ll get no respect – so we might as well do what’s best for the country.
With reams of evidence that Iran is developing nuclear weapons and supplying our opposition in Iraq and Afghanistan, the case for the Obama Administration’s “smart power” is dead now, if it wasn’t already.
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Biden in the New York Times
Joe “Mad Bomber” Biden, who has been consistently wrong on every piece of legislation for which he ever voted while he occupied his dunce seat in the Senate, tries to convince his former fellows to vote for the dubious health care bill before them this week from the pages of the New York Times. His reason? What else – it’s historic;
If I were still a United States senator, I would not only vote yes on the current health care reform bill, I would do so with the sure knowledge that I was casting one of the most historic votes of my 36 years in the Senate. I would vote yes knowing that the bill represents the culmination of a struggle begun by Theodore Roosevelt nearly a century ago to make health care reform a reality. And while it does not contain every measure President Obama and I wanted, I would vote yes for this bill certain that it includes the fundamental, essential change that opponents of reform have resisted for generations.
We have been here before. In the past, as the moment of decision drew nearer, criticism from both the left and the right grew louder. Compromises were derided. The perfect became the enemy of the good.
The last time we, the American people, were told to cast our vote because something was merely historic, we got bumbling Obama. Sure he wasn’t perfect, but he was black and that’d be historic, wouldn’t it? Well, he’s not really black, he even lacks perfection in that regard, but he’s black enough to make it historic, isn’t he?
While it is not perfect, the bill pending in the Senate today is not just good enough — it is very good.
Just like our vote for Obama was very good at the time, and we’ve come to regret it since. Joe figures as long as he told those whoppers, he might as well shoot the moon;
President Obama and I know we have to put our fiscal house in order. This is why those who claim they oppose reform because they fear for our country’s fiscal stability should finally acknowledge what the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office makes crystal clear: not only is the Senate bill paid for, it is this country’s single largest deficit-reduction measure in a dozen years.
After all, it’s only taxpayer money – what do those schlubs know?
If the bill passes the Senate this week, there will be more chances to make changes to it before it becomes law.
And there you have it. No matter what those goobers in the Senate for this week, it won’t be the same when it finally makes it to the Federal Register.
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The Clinton strategy returns
The Obama Administration has dusted off a Clinton-era strategy of dealing with terrorists by firing off a couple of Cruise missiles into Yemen. ABC explains the objective;
One of the targeted sites was a suspected al Qaeda training camp north of the capitol, Sanaa, and the second target was a location where officials said “an imminent attack against a U.S. asset was being planned.”
Of course, none of our resident anti-war folks are calling this an “attack [on] a third world country that didn’t attack us” and it appears that the Obama Administration has found value in the Bush Doctrine of preemptive strikes in dealing with terrorists. But luckily for Obama, he doesn’t have to deal with the Left questioning his motives and accusing him of using fear mongering to accomplish political objectives.
Does anyone else thinks it’s a little strange that we’re firing off missiles into Yemen while contemplating releasing some Yemeni detainees from Guantanamo back into the wild there?
The Stars & Stripes reports that 34 terrorists were killed in raids in Yemen. The main target of the strike, a guy who escaped from prison in Yemen, reportedly avoided his ultimate demise, though.
Al-Raymi is one of 23 militants who broke out of a prison in San’a in February 2006 and is at large. Yemeni authorities have said they believe he was involved in the July 2007 suicide bombing that killed eight Spanish tourists and two Yemenis visiting a temple in central Yemen.
Christopher Boucek, a Yemen expert at the Washington-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said al-Raymi is deputy commander of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula and has managed to escape several previous attempts by authorities to get him.
The Yemeni embassy denied that the US used missiles, contrary to ABC’s report. Of course, eye witnesses in the AP report at S&S report that most of the dead were civilians.
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Who’s in Copenhagen today?
While all of the third world is in Copenhagen trying to figure a way to fleece the American taxpayers, Hillary Clinton is there to make their job easier;
“The US is prepared to work with other countries toward a goal of jointly mobilizing $100 billion a year by 2020 to address the climate change needs of developing countries,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said.
Sweet, huh? We’re dealing with unemployment, health care, tax hikes, cap-and-tax, infrastructure deterioration, foreign oil barons – then on top of all of that, we’re going to start handing money to the corrupt third world to misuse.
The President spoke this morning, insisting that this, among every other damn thing his administration is dealing with, is important enough to so anything, regardless of how destructive a catalyst it might become;
“There are those developing countries that want aid with no strings attached, and who think that the most advanced nations should pay a higher price,” Obama said. “And, there are those advanced nations who think that developing countries cannot absorb this assistance, or that the world’s fastest-growing emitters should bear a greater share of the burden.
“But here is the bottom line: we can embrace this accord, take a substantial step forward, and continue to refine it and build upon its foundation,” he said.
Republican James Sensenbrenner is there, too, according to Byron York;
Sensenbrenner’s office says he will “closely follow” several issues at the Copenhagen conference, including “the developing world’s demands for wealth transfers, the levels of commitment from developing countries [and] the feasibility of greenhouse gas reduction targets.” With him are Republican Reps. Joe Barton, Fred Upton, Shelley Moore Capito, John Sullivan, and Marsha Blackburn. Fourteen Democrats are on the trip, including the Speaker.
According to Andrew Breitbart, more nefarious forces are at work in Copenhagen, too;
Nothing like few thousand proud communists to draw support to a cause.
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Fear mongering
I’ve heard the President and Democrat Congressional leaders charge the Right with fear mongering among the citzenry. Well, I got this in an email yesterday from Organizing For America and I forgot about it until I read Gary’s comment in the preceding post.
If that’s not fear mongering, I don’t know fear mongering.