Eyes off the prize

The Democrats have lost the political initiative – they’ve been proven wrong on Iraq. Even their own ranks have conceded that the US troops have begun an effective pacification program and the Iraqis are taking control of their own security. So with an election on the horizon, they needed more ammunition.

Democrats got their boost this week from the anti-Bush and China-loving elements at the State Department and the CIA. The weinies a the State Department decided to abruptly release a National Intelligence Estimate that doesn’t jibe with common sense (Jon Ward, Washington Times);

Several current and former high-level government officials familiar with the authors of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran described the report as a politically motivated document written by anti-Bush former State Department officials, who opposed sanctioning foreign governments and businesses.

A Republican senator plans to introduce a bill next week that would create a commission of policy experts to examine whether the new report on Iran is accurate, a spokesman said today.

John Bolton finds the major flaws of the NIE report (h/t Atlas Shrugs)

First, the headline finding — that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 — is written in a way that guarantees the totality of the conclusions will be misread. In fact, there is little substantive difference between the conclusions of the 2005 NIE on Iran’s nuclear capabilities and the 2007 NIE. Moreover, the distinction between “military” and “civilian” programs is highly artificial, since the enrichment of uranium, which all agree Iran is continuing, is critical to civilian and military uses. Indeed, it has always been Iran’s “civilian” program that posed the main risk of a nuclear “breakout.”

Obviously, a weak attempt to dissuade Americans that Iran is a threat to world peace. Now, this morning, we read that the CIA destroyed video tapes of interrogations in 2002 – instantly sending Democrats off on a false tangent of outrage (Wall Street Journal, Siobhan Gorman)

The CIA’s acknowledgment that it destroyed videotapes of interrogations of detainees made in 2002 set off a fierce debate on Capitol Hill today, as it re-opened a contentious issue that the CIA director has worked for a year and a half to put to rest.
 
It also raised new questions about the government’s handling of evidence in the trial of al Qaeda suspect Zacarias Moussaoui, who is now serving a life sentence after his conviction last year.

But, Michele Malkin says Democrats in Congress were informed of the tapes’ impending destruction more than four years ago;

Rep. Jane Harman of California, then the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, was one of only four members of Congress in 2003 informed of the tapes’ existence and the CIA’s intention to ultimately destroy them.

“I told the CIA that destroying videotapes of interrogations was a bad idea and urged them in writing not to do it,” Harman said. While key lawmakers were briefed on the CIA’s intention to destroy the tapes, they were not notified two years later when the spy agency actually carried out the plan. Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., said the committee only learned of the tapes’ destruction in November 2006.

Yet the propaganda wing of the Democrat Party (otherwise known as the Washington Post) calls it a “startling disclosure”;

The startling disclosures came on the same day that House and Senate negotiators reached an agreement on legislation that would prohibit the use of waterboarding and other harsh interrogation tactics by the CIA and bring intelligence agencies in line with rules followed by the U.S. military.

Hardly startling when even Rockefeller admits he knew about it a year ago. Yet, WaPo perpetuates the myth of “startling”;

Hayden said he decided to discuss the tapes publicly because of news media interest and the possibility that “we may see misinterpretations of the facts in the days ahead.” The New York Times said on its Web site that it had informed the CIA on Wednesday night that it was preparing a story about the destroyed tapes.

So how did the New York Times find out? Either leaky-ass Congress or the anti-Bush wing of the CIA – my money’s on both.

WSJ writes on “our troops are SS concentration camp guards” Little Dick Durbin’s drama play;

Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois fired off a letter to Attorney General Michael Mukasey asking for a Justice Department investigation of “whether CIA officials who destroyed these videotapes and withheld information about their existence from official proceedings violated the law.” On the Senate floor, Mr. Durbin rejected the CIA’s explanation that it was trying to protect the identity of its agents.

Of course, the Washington Post thinks that the ACLU has a dog in the fight for our National Security;

Civil liberties advocates denounced the CIA’s decision to destroy the tapes, saying the agency should have known by 2005 that the actions depicted on them were potentially the subject of litigation and congressional investigations.

Jameel Jaffer, a national security lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union, said the tapes were destroyed at a time when a federal court had ordered the CIA to comply with a Freedom of Information Act request by the ACLU seeking records related to interrogations.

“The CIA appears to have deliberately destroyed evidence that would have allowed its agents to be held accountable for the torture of prisoners,” Jaffer said. “They are tapes that should have been released to the courts and Congress, but the CIA apparently believes that its agents are above the law.”

The Leftists in this country can’t get it through their fat heads that this isn’t an exercise in law enforcement, it’s dealing with people who would kill us all if they had the chance – which is why we need to stop Iran’s nuclear ambitions whether they’re advanced or not.

But they’d rather play silly political games and russian roulette with our security.

Category: Foreign Policy, Media, Politics, Terror War