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Junkie
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Obama again shows a lack of courage by not defending one of his people, Van Jones. Van Jones' past/present political views and actions were no secret. I think if Obama said to Jones, 'you have my support', Jones would have went toe to toe with his critics. It is unbelievable to me that the Obama administration let people like Beck dictate the people who stay or leave within his administration. It is unbelievable to me that liberals walk away from this blaming conservatives rather than blaming Obama for being passive. Obama needed to either fire Jones or stand behind him, publicly in my view. That is what leadership is about - sending clear messages to those who you lead.
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WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The resignation of Obama administration figure Van Jones, following controversies over a petition he had signed and his comments about Republicans, did not come at the request of the president, the White House senior adviser said Sunday.
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Obama did not order Van Jones' resignation, adviser says - CNN.com
So what do we take from this? I bet Glenn Beck celebrated.
And another tidbit illustrating Obama's double speak. Remember when he ran for President scolding Bush's policy of extending deployments for troops? Now we have:
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The Marines from Twentynine Palms, assigned to train the Afghan National Police, have had their seven-month deployment extended by 30 days.
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AFGHANISTAN: More Marines ordered to stay longer | Babylon & Beyond | Los Angeles Times
I guess it is not a big deal, is it? I guess it is Bush's fault, isn't it? What's next? Well we do have this:
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Sept. 3 (Bloomberg) -- Let’s take a walk on the dark side.
Who better to go into the shadows with, hand in hand, than former Vice President Dick Cheney. He knows that the way to keep America safe is through everything the prior administration engaged in, from waterboarding to the use of power equipment.
However much we cringe at the reality of it, torture works, says the vice president. Proof? He has it. We haven’t had another 9/11.
And who is that masked man walking a few steps behind and slightly to the left? Why, that’s President Barack Obama. He campaigned against torture and for restoring America’s good name in the world by abiding by the Geneva Conventions. But now in office, he’s decided to continue rendition and has come out -- at least publicly -- against any criminal investigation of Central Intelligence Agency interrogations of terror suspects.
What gives? Obama’s current position lets him have it both ways: Attorney General Eric Holder is proceeding with an investigation of enhanced interrogations under the Bush-Cheney administration, with or without Obama’s blessing. But Obama doesn’t give up extracting crucial information by using enhanced interrogation techniques, though only in other countries.
There is only one reason to ship detainees to another country, and it’s not prison overcrowding. We have room. It’s that other countries -- say Syria -- will do what it takes to crack an operative without U.S. fingerprints on the electrodes strapped to vulnerable body parts.
Obama’s Reading
The president got to read the unredacted version of the recently released 2004 report from the CIA’s inspector general. With that, Obama may have an answer to the question that confounds the rest of is. Does torture work? Does it work some of the time, all the time, or never? Only the most morally pure person could say the answer doesn’t matter.
Even the redacted version suggested that the umpteenth waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who planned the Sept. 11 attacks, yielded crucial information that prevented another attack. Can harm to one life be morally wrong if it saves many lives? And what if those lives, as the TV program “24” often posits, are the lives of your family?
Senator John McCain, who knows firsthand about the subject, says torture doesn’t work, and anyway torture is wrong. Cheney says it always works, so it has to be right.
More than half the public favors torture on the chance that it does work sometimes. In a June poll by the Associated Press, 52 percent of Americans said torture was sometimes or often justified to obtain information from terror suspects. An April CNN poll found that even though 60 percent of Americans thought harsh techniques including waterboarding constituted torture, 50 percent approved of them.
Calming the Base
It’s curious that Obama allowed Holder -- if that’s what he did -- to pursue an investigation the president insisted would be “looking backward” when what he wanted to do was go forward. But there’s an advantage to being against an investigation of the CIA before he was for it: he mollifies his base, which expects Obama to pull the country back from the abyss of the Cheney years and punish more than the “few bad apples” down the chain of command.
There is always a chance Holder went rogue, though. “My Cabinet can do what they feel is right” is a formulation not much heard in any recent White House. Power is so concentrated in the West Wing that any kid with an office can tell a Cabinet member what to do.
Keep Guessing
To keep everyone guessing, an unnamed high administration official gave an off-air interview to CNN recently, saying that Holder, not the president, is the country’s “chief law enforcement officer,” so he can do what he wants in such matters.
More likely an e-mail may one day come to light going something like:
Dear Eric,
This is a one-time-only pass to have your own way. Do not think it represents a change in policy.
Your friend,
Rahm
Cheney may be right that there is a cost to opening an investigation. The specter of a special prosecutor poring over videotaped interrogation sessions a few months hence might chill a CIA employee. No interrogator of high-value detainees wants to open himself up to being interrogated later as a criminal himself.
Idle Threat
Then there are the terrorists. For those operatives with access to the Internet, which seems to be most of them, how likely are they to take threats seriously knowing that waterboarding is out of the question? That power drill looks menacing but it isn’t plugged in. Severe sleep deprivation is unlikely.
With rendition, Obama can afford to appease his critics on the left. Our CIA won’t waterboard, but someone else’s will.
Until an unredacted report is made public, I still believe situations where the bomb is ticking don’t occur other than on a back lot at Warner studios, that torture is ineffective against people who are willing to die for their cause and be united with 72 vestal virgins in heaven, and that innocents who know nothing will be mistreated as well.
And I don’t trust the former vice president’s protestations that he was right about everything, when he was wrong about weapons of mass destruction, the number of troops needed in Iraq, and so much else.
But on the question of torture, Obama is closer to Cheney than to those who elected him. He’s proving the old saw that when you get to be president, you learn things no one else knows that justify things no one thought you would do, even yourself.
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Obama Moves Closer to Darth Cheney on Torture: Margaret Carlson - Bloomberg.com
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"Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on lunch."
"It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions on vegetarianism while the wolf is of a different opinion."
"If you live among wolves you have to act like one."
"A lady screams at the mouse but smiles at the wolf. A gentleman is a wolf who sends flowers."
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