Last week Harry Reid was interviewed by a radio host and he was asked if he thought Dick Cheney should be prosecuted for waterboarding. I found his answer to be very interesting, here was his response:
There are a lot of decisions that are made that are right that may not be absolutely totally within the framework of law
He is still playing to the far left by claiming that waterboarding was illegal, even though it was ruled legal, but even so he claims that the decision was the right one. He is admitting that the decision to waterboard was the correct decision to make.
The truth is that all of the members in congress felt this way in 2002 whether they want to admit it or not. Finally one of them has come out and said it. They all thought that waterboarding was the right thing to do at the time.
Harry Reid is now trying to spin his comment. He is trying to say that he wasn’t saying waterboarding was the right thing to do, he is claiming that he was trying to say that the decision to not prosecute Dick Cheney is the right decision. That explanation doesn’t wash with me when you read the whole answer. If he was talking about the decision to not prosecute Dick Cheney how would that “not be absolutely totally within the framework of law?”
I think it is pretty obvious what he said AND what he meant.
Nancy Pelosi is trying to use Patches O’Houlihan’s five “Ds” of dodgeball, Dodge, Duck, Dip, Dive and…..Dodge, on the issue of waterboarding. She is trying use use them but it isn’t working, the more we learn and the more she scrambles the tighter the noose gets.
Nancy Pelosi was briefed in 2002 about waterboarding, she knew that the CIA had approved it and that they were going to use it. She claims that she knew that the CIA could use waterboarding but not that they were using waterboarding. It seems to me that if she had all of these morals that she claims to have and that if she thought that waterboarding violated these morals, and the morals of the United States, that the time to rise up and oppose waterboarding would have been in 2002 before anybody was waterboarded. But she didn’t, she condoned waterboarding with her silence. To feign disgust now is transparent.
CIA memos that were released last week show that Nancy Pelosi was briefed and did know that waterboarding was going to be used. She can play semantics all that she wants but the truth has been learned. But now we have learned that Nancy Pelosi’s top aide was briefed on waterboarding in 2003, after waterboarding was employed.
Are we supposed to believe that Nancy Pelosi’s top aide was briefed on waterboarding and did not tell Nancy Pelosi? Are we to believe that on an issue this important her aide did not think that this was worth mentioning? Or did she tell Nancy Pelosi and Nancy Pelosi approved of waterboarding?
Nancy Pelosi can Dodge, Duck, Dip, Dive and…..Dodge all that she wants to but she knew about waterboarding in 2002, her aide was informed that waterboarding had taken place in 2003, and still she did nothing.
If, as Nancy Pelosi would have us believe, waterboarding is a crime and if those that approved waterboarding are to be tried for crimes than I would say that Nancy Pelosi is an accessory after the fact and should be tried as a war criminal also.
I look forward to the possibility that this administration will authorise investigations into the harsh interrogations that were used by the United States. I can’t wait to see all of these people who knew what was going on and who are now outraged squirm as the public learns that they approved of these methods also. The president has opened up a can of worms by releasing selected documents on the Bush administration’s interrogation techniques and now it is too late to put the lid back on.
President Bush doubled the national deficit during his eight years in office and this current president has doubled the national deficit once again. The president then announced he would cut some of his outrageous spending and we found out that the total spending cuts account for less than 1% of the spending that he has proposed.
Not surprisingly half of the spending cuts are in the Department of Defense. I don’t agree with that but it was expected, we knew that we were getting someone who wouldn’t take national defense seriously.
We also know that the president has recently stated that he wanted to pass comprehensive immigration reform by the end of the year. In other words he wants to grant amnesty to illegal aliens. So it should also come as no surprise that one of the biggest programs that is going to be cut is called State Criminal Alien Assistance Program. (He must hate the name of that program alone, it calls them both criminals and aliens and the assistance is going to the states and not the criminal aliens.) This program sends federal money to border states to help defray the costs of jailing illegal immigrants when they are caught.
This is going to meet some resistance from the border states which have been trying to get more funding for the program. Even Dianne Feinstein has been thying to get more funding for this program. President Bush also tried to end this program, also not surprising considering he and the current president hold the same position on illegal immigration, but was unsuccessful.
This is the first step toward comprehensive immigration reform. First make it too cost prohibitive for states to jail the immigrants and then, because the aliens are walking our streets anyway we will need to bring them out of the shadows. What better way than to do that than to make them legal?
I am all for ending the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program but only under one condition. When the criminal aliens are caught instead of putting them in jail, we put them on a bus and send them back to where they came from. I don’t think that there is money in the budget for that idea however.
Today the regime in the White House threatened to rescind the stimulus money that is allocated to California if the state goes forward with their plan to cut the wages of some state employees.
California, like the rest of the country, is facing tough economic times, probably even more-so than most other states. These economic times require tough decisions to be made and California made the decision that some state employees would have to take a pay cut. Unfortunately for California this administration is so far in debt to labor unions that they are strong arming the state with the threat of rescinding stimulus money for political gains with the unions.
This president evidently feels that he has the right to step in and tell a state how it should be run. This is one of the problems with states accepting federal stimulus money, they have whored themselves out to the federal government.
Drastic times call for drastic measures and if some people need to take a pay cut in order to make the state more solvent than so be it, that is up to the state legislators and the governor, the president has no authority to step in and tell a state how it should be run.
This president is over-reaching and assuming powers that the president was never supposed to have. We have seen it in the private sector and now we are seeing it at the state level. It is time to stand up and say enough is enough. Hopefully California will stand up and tell the president that his thug mentality and strong arm threatening politics will not work. The governor should tell the usurper in the White House to mind his own business and tell him where he can put the stimulus money.
I don’t think that is going to happen though. Governor Schwarzenegger will roll over and play dead for the president.
As I have written about twice before, here and here, Nancy Pelosi was briefed on the harsh interrogation methods that the United States was using and she knew about them as early as 2002. She has been denying that she had knowledge about waterboarding since it was learned that she was briefed in 2002 but we now know according to documents released by the CIA that she did know that waterboarding could be used in interrogations. And we also know that she did nothing to stop it.
She claims that she was told that waterboarding could be used but that at the time of her briefing waterboarding wasn’t yet used. It turns out that this is correct, the CIA had not yet waterboarded anyone when she was briefed. That does not get her off the hook however.
The newly released CIA documents show that Nancy Pelosi was briefed on all of the techniques that were approved for use and were deemed legal, among those techniques was waterboarding.
So we now know that Nancy Pelosi knew that waterboarding was ruled a legal and acceptable means of interrogation as early as 2002 and that she didn’t have a problem with it then. If she had an issue with waterboarding the time to bring it up would have been in 2002 before anyone was waterboarded, but she did not have a problem with it then or she would have done something about it.
It wasn’t until it became clear that the Democrats could gain politically that she and other Democrats feigned disgust, surprise, and indignation at the notion that the CIA used waterboarding as a means to interrogate terrorists.
Nancy Pelosi is playing a game of semantics with this issue and she thinks that we are too stupid to see through it. Nancy Pelosi had a chance to do something about waterboarding seven years ago if she thought that this harsh interrogation method was torture yet she did and said nothing. Her silence was her approval. Now that the political tide has turned she has found the so-called morals that she must have been lacking in 2002 and she has decided that America has lost her moral compass because we have been torturing suspects by using methods that she approved of before the political climate changed.
Nancy Pelosi has been exposed for the fraud that she is, as have the Democrats on this issue. It doesn’t matter whether you believe that waterboarding is torture and it doesn’t matter if you believe that waterboarding was justified. What does matter is that the loudest voices that have recently come out against waterboarding knew about it all along and they did nothing because they thought at the time that it would hurt them politically.
Afghanistan officials are claiming that United States air strikes have killed between 100 and 200 civilians including scores of women and children. General David McKiernan is asking for American citizens and officials not to jump to conclusions because the Taliban may actually be responsible for the deaths.
The strange thing is that nobody is jumping to conclusions. The reason I find this strange is because many of our legislators have made a career of jumping to conclusions about the United States military over the last six years. But that is not the case now that Afghanistan and the troop surge there belongs to the current president and not President Bush.
John Murtha did not have a problem jumping to a conclusion when the Haditha marines were accused of murder; he called them cold blooded killers before any one of them ever had a chance in court. The marines have been cleared of any wrongdoing while John Murtha has never apologized.
During the 2004 presidential campaign John Kerry accused US troops of TERRORIZING Iraqi families in the dead of night.
When rumors of abuses at GITMO first came to light Dick Durbin jumped to conclusions and compared United States soldiers and their treatment of detainees to Pol Pot, Nazis, and gulags.
Those are just three of the most despicable examples of people who jumped to conclusions for political reasons. These people were perfectly willing to throw American troops under the bus, they were perfectly willing to slander American troops to discredit the Bush administration and undermine the war effort.
But now these same people are strangely silent. There is nobody jumping to conclusions, and there shouldn’t be, but there can only be one explanation why these people, who were so adamant and vocal about the abuses and horrors that they claimed American troops were perpetrating just a few years ago, are so silent now when there is a claim that American air strikes killed women and children. It all has to do with who is in the White House. These same people wouldn’t dare to slander our troops now that a Democrat is calling the shots.
These people have shown us their true character, and it isn’t pretty. To put politics above our troops was disgraceful, now that they are saying nothing they have been exposed for the hypocrites and political whores that they are.
Their silence is deafening.
Several Democrats and at least one Republican think that it is time start looking at closing the “gun show loophole.” This is an attempt to criminalize the sale of weapons between two individual law abiding citizens. Currently a background check is required before a gun dealer can sell a gun but two individuals can buy and sell guns with no background check.
Legislation is going to be introduced that would prohibit ANY gun sales without a background check.
Reps. Michael Castle (R-Del.) and Carolyn McCarthy, (D-N.Y.) held a press conference at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday with survivors and families of those killed at Virginia Tech to announce the introduction of a bill that would require a criminal background check in every weapons purchase.
This is not going to solve the problem of criminals who purchase and use guns, they will still find a way to buy guns they don’t obey the law anyway, all that this legislation will do is prevent two law abiding citizens from buying and selling guns.
This legislation was introduced in front of families of people who were killed in the Virginia Tech shooting. Correct me if I am wrong, but the Virginia Tech killer legally purchased his guns through a dealer after being subjected to a background check. How well did that background check work?
Virginia Tech is a gun free zone, so while the killer was legally able to purchase a gun, the victims were not allowed to carry guns to protect themselves. If just one law abiding citizen was allowed to carry a gun perhaps the results at Virginia Tech would have been different.
Criminals are going to find weapons if they want to, they aren’t going to gun shows to purchase their weapons. It is law abiding citizens who attend the gun shows and we are the ones being targeted here. It will start with the “gun show loophole” but it won’t end there. This is just the beginning. This is just an excuse to implement more gun laws, evidently 14,000 gun laws aren’t enough, and to begin the assault on the second amendment that we know is coming. They start off with an issue that they feel most people won’t have a problem with but then the regulations keep on coming slowly but surely until one day we look around and wonder what the hell happened.
The latest lawsuit that has been filed against ACORN is in Nevada. This lawsuit claims that ACORN was paying their employees based on how many voters they registered as well as firing employees who did not meet a quota while paying bonuses to those employees who exceeded the quota. This is a violation of Nevada law because it entices employees to commit voter registration fraud if they would not otherwise be able to meet the quota or if by doing so they would be able to collect a bonus. Not that ACORN cares about such trivial matters as legality, this is not the only lawsuit pending against ACORN as they have committed voter registration fraud all across the country. (It goes without saying, but I will say it any way, that ACORN is fraudulently registering Democrat voters. This is not a secret.)
But this latest lawsuit has many worried because ACORN is now a partner in the upcoming census. This administration plans on using a method of conducting the census called sampling that is in direct violation of Article 1 Section2 of the constitution which calls for an actual enumeration of the people, not a sample enumeration. Sampling has previously been ruled unconstitutional and it should be again.
If this administration is allowed to conduct the census using sampling and ACORN is a partner in the census, considering their background, the potential for census fraud in order to further ACORN’s goals of creating a permanent Democrat block of voters, which they have so far successfully done through voter registration fraud, is unlimited.
I am not alone in my concern:
The Bureau needs to reconsider ACORN’s involvement as a partner in light of these new charges in Nevada,” Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.), a member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, told CNSNews.com.
“I previously spoke about ACORN’s involvement in the Census,” said McHenry. “But in light of these charges, I think it makes clear that they should not be part of the partnership program with the Census
And:
They have a record riddled with improprieties,” Blackwell told CNSNews.com. “There is no bipartisan oversight and management of the census. It could lead folks to seriously question the integrity and objectivity of the census
The integrity of the census is something that cannot be in question. The census is used to apportion representation to the house of representatives and it is not something that we can allow to be at least partially administered by a rogue and blatantly corrupt political organization such as ACORN.
We need to draw the line in the sand and demand that ACORN be removed from the census partners list. There is no way in hell that any organization with any scandal, never mind an organization that has as many scandals as does ACORN, should ever be allowed to participate in anything as important as the census, which could be used to further their agenda. That same agenda that has them in hot water in the first place.
My concern is that an organization that made up people through false voter registration — a reasonable person would suspect they would do the same in the Census count
That is the real problem with letting ACORN have ANY role in the upcoming census. They make people up out of thin air and register them to vote (Democrat) and now they are going to be able to pull off the same scandal because the government is going to guess how many people live in this country instead of following the constitution and counting how many people actually live in the United States.
ACORN cannot be allowed to have any position of authority in the census.
Republicans, who feel emboldened on the issue of GITMO now that Democrats have refused to fund the president’s plan to relocate the detainees, are preparing to introduce legislation that would prohibit taxpayer dollars being used to relocate GITMO terrorists inside the United States. It is hard to believe that this type of legislation is needed but such is life in the United States nowadays.
While Democrats did the right thing last week by refusing to fund the president’s GITMO relocation plan they did leave the door open by saying that if the president actually comes up with a real plan instead of just rhetoric that they would fund it. In other words WE would fund it.
Knowing that the American people are not in favor of releasing terrorists on our soil (just writing that I still can’t believe that I have to do a post on something like this) Republicans have seized the moment and are introducing legislation to insure that WE do not have to pay to have terrorists released into our neighborhoods.
On Wednesday, Rep. Todd Tiahrt (R-Kan.) announced that he would be pitching an Appropriations amendment that would prohibit taxpayer dollars from being used to transport the prisoners to U.S. soil.
“My first plan is to have an up-or-down vote in the Appropriations Committee tomorrow,” Tiahrt told reporters. “They are known, dangerous criminals who have vowed to destroy our way of life.”
We will now be able to get everyone on record and find out who, if anyone, is willing to spend our money on relocating GITMO detainees in this country. The president may think that this is an acceptable idea but the American people do not. Hopefully this bill will pass but if it doesn’t we will know which politicians are with us and which ones need to be replaced.
100 GITMO Detainees Headed to Terrorist Rehab?
I never would have believed this is I hadn’t read it. As a matter of fact I read it and I still don’t believe it. Our brilliant president is considering sending 100 terrorists to the Prince Mohammed bin Nayef Centre for Care and Counseling; a rehabilitation center for terrorists.
Before I get into this topic I do have one question; if these people are being sent to a terrorist rehab center than are we not admitting that these 100 detainees are terrorists? If so shouldn’t they be tried as terrorists and either convicted or released? I thought the reason we were closing GITMO is because we were holding people who were neither terrorists nor enemy combatants, this kind of throws a wet blanket on that argument, doesn’t it?
Anyway, President Bush also tried this ridiculous idea and guess what? For the most part it does not work. Who woulda thunk it?
roughly 3,000 prisoners have participated in portions of the counseling program, and about 1,400 of them have renounced their former beliefs and been released
Less than half of them have been released while most of them remain behind bars. They are just behind bars in a place other than GITMO so I guess that is supposed to make it okay.
But that is not all. Out of the 85 people on the terrorist most wanted list 11 of them had been rehabbed through the ludicrous 12 point plan that this center utilizes to break the terrorists of their Jihad addiction. Who knows how many others have also relapsed but are taking a less prominent roll to avoid detection.
This president clearly hasn’t learned from the last president and now 100 terrorists may be released into a program designed to re-educate them and show them the error of their ways. Does anyone (besides the president) really think that it is a wise idea to take known terrorists and try to rehabilitate them and then release them back into society?
What’s the worst that could happen? Do you really want to find out?
