Crimes Against Liberty (54 page)

Unsurprisingly, Obama’s popularity among U.S. Jews overall has plummeted. He garnered 78 percent of Jewish voters in the presidential election, but
Arutz Sheva
reported that a poll by the McLaughlin Group found that today only 42 percent said they would vote to re-elect him.
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Caroline Glick reported that American and European Jews are “belatedly awakening to the threat of divestment from Israel.” They are now seeing that Israel’s constant compromising of its rights in exchange for promises of support and peace have made matters worse—where Israel’s peace is in greater jeopardy and its “very legitimacy is being called into question throughout the world.” As Glick correctly observes, “It is impossible to reconcile the rights of the Jewish people and the demands of the Obama administration and the alliance of the international Left and the Islamic world it leads in their common campaign to undermine Israeli control over Jerusalem.”
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The Obama administration’s heavy-handed treatment of Israel, especially its wildly exaggerated reaction to Israel’s housing policies and its demands for a complete freeze in settlement construction, bespeaks a pre-planned policy. Obama’s approach to the Israeli- Palestinian issue has been completely one-sided and strikingly unfair—as if he has inflexible, preconceived notions about the conflict and is impervious to the facts and history.

How can an objective witness to Obama’s behavior fail to conclude that he has bought into Palestinian propaganda and its skewed view of history? What else would account for his meting out harsher treatment to one of our best allies and the world’s finest and most honorable democratic societies than to the world’s dictatorial regimes that are not only enemies of freedom, but hostile to the United States? What is it that Obama resents so much about Israel?

In light of his constant apologies for American history and his endless flattery of third world grievances, it’s clear that for Obama, a distant outpost of Western, democratic values like Israel is not something worthy of admiration. Instead, he seems to believe the Jewish state is just another Western imposition on noble, innocent Muslim societies for which we must apologize and make amends.

Chapter Fifteen

SEE NO EVIL

CRIMES AGAINST NATIONAL SECURITY

I
n keeping with his view that America, not Islamic extremism, is the world’s agitator, President Obama is deeply ambivalent about the war he now leads. From his perspective, if we hadn’t historically behaved so badly toward the Muslim world by supporting Israel, invading Iraq in a “war of choice,” and “abusing,” torturing,” and “illegally detaining” enemy prisoners, al Qaeda might not be attacking us. But our excessive, misguided response to the 9/11 attack, in his view, alienated the entire Muslim world and swelled the terrorist ranks. Only he, with his unique background and proper understanding of the real America, can rectify our missteps and restore our relationship with Muslims, repair our damaged world image, and ultimately redeem this nation.

As columnist and military expert Ralph Peters, wrote, “The Obama administration has ducked all unwelcome evidence that such appeasement doesn’t work. Instead, it goes to absurd lengths to convince Muslim radicals that we respect their views. Our counterfactual assumption is that, if we’re really, really nice, the fanatics will stop being grumpy and blowing us up. But Islamic extremists haven’t read our actions (or inactions) as an admirable exercise in tolerance. They view our bowing and scraping and apologizing as weakness.”
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Victor Davis Hanson had a similar take:

To paraphrase the president himself, “words matter.”... Our enemies are simultaneously also waging a symbolic war in which imagery, vocabulary, and perceptions matter as much as battlefield realities. So when Obama and his team were dreaming up euphemisms like “overseas contingency operations”... and magnifying our own past misdemeanors while downplaying the felonies of Islam ... perhaps a subtle message was delivered to radical Islamists that we either would not or could not any longer wage war against them.... Words matter.... Our enemies may look far more to words than deeds—and see in them a radical loss of our deterrence ability. So the Hasans, Abdulmutallabs, and Shahzads of the world interpret our new philological magnanimity as weakness, regardless of whether it is or not. And that seems to me very dangerous indeed.
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With these instincts for appeasing our enemies, it’s a small step to trivializing the horror of terrorist attacks—even the 9/11 attacks. Incredibly, Obama’s nominee for the number two man at the Justice Department, James Cole, takes exactly this approach, writing in a 2002 op-ed, “Our country has faced many forms of devastating crime, including the scourge of the drug trade, the reign of organized crime, and countless acts of rape, child abuse, and murder. The acts of Sept. 11 were horrible, but so are these other things.”
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In other words,
terrorism is bad, but so is crime and many other things, so let’s not get caught up in spending too much time and energy fighting terrorists.

PAPER TIGER

Obama’s worldview blinds him to the facts and to human nature. Osama bin Laden himself said our feckless reaction to the massacre of U.S. soldiers in Somalia by al Qaeda terrorists emboldened him to attack us. In 1996 he declared, “You have been disgraced by Allah and you withdrew. The extent of your impotence and weaknesses became very clear. When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse.” He repeated this argument in 1998: “Muslim fighters ... were surprised at the low morale of the American soldiers and realized, more than before, that the American soldier was a paper tiger and after a few blows ... would run in defeat.”
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In April 2010, we heard from a former bin Laden associate that bin Laden was stunned that the United States—the “paper tiger”—reacted with such force following the 9/11 attacks. Norman Benotman, head of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, said, “I’m 100 percent sure they had no idea about what was going to happen. What happened after the 11
^th
of September was beyond their imagination.” Benotman reported that al Qaeda leader Ayman Al-Zawahiri laughed when Benotman told him the United States would react ferociously to the attack. Since we responded to the bombings of their embassies in East Africa with seventy-five cruise missiles, Zawahiri predicted we would simply respond with 200 after 9/11.
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Obama has pursued an ostentatious policy of retreat from the War on Terror. Despite all we’ve learned about our vulnerabilities prior to the September 11 attacks, Obama made a conscious decision to revert to our pre-9/11 mindset and approach the war as a criminal law enforcement matter. Henceforth, we would no longer treat terrorists as the enemy. We wouldn’t even treat them as criminals, but more like criminal
suspects
.

Attempting to definitively reject Bush-era policies and reclaim the “moral high ground” in the War on Terror, Obama issued three executive orders on January 22, 2009, his second day in office. He said the United States does not have “to continue with a false choice between our safety and our ideals,” as he issued an order to close the prison in Guantanamo Bay.

“Guantanamo became a symbol,” said Obama, “that helped al Qaeda recruit terrorists to its cause.” Closing the facility would “restore the standards of due process and the core constitutional values that have made this country great even in the midst of war, even in dealing with terrorism.” His second order formally banned “torture” by requiring the Army field manual to guide terrorism interrogations, which would preclude controversial enhanced interrogation techniques such as waterboarding. Obama declared, “We can abide by a rule that says we don’t torture, but ... still effectively obtain the intelligence that we need.” His third order established an interagency task force to systematically review detention policies and individual detainees’ cases.
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Obama also undertook other actions, symbolic as well as concrete, that further signaled our retreat in the war. By April 2009, the administration had ordered an end to the use of the phrase “Global War on Terror”—another infernal reminder of the Bush administration—and replaced it, per Defense Department memo, with “Overseas Contingency Operation.” Perhaps the administration was responding to pressure from the International Commission of Jurists, which argued the phrase “war on terror” had given the Bush administration “spurious justification to a range of human rights and humanitarian law violations,” such as controversial detention practices and enhanced interrogation techniques.
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Another casualty of Obama’s vernacular purge was the Bush-era phrase “enemy combatants.” But there was more to this move than mere symbolism. As if acting as advocate for the constitutional rights of our nation’s enemies, Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder said the term was too broad and allowed the government to detain almost any terrorism suspect indefinitely. Holder said we would only seek to hold suspects who “substantially supported” the groups against us and not those who “provide unwitting or insignificant support” to al Qaeda and the Taliban.
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Next, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano told the German newspaper
Der Spiegel
that she was abandoning use of the word “terrorism” because it “perpetuates the politics of fear”—as if fearing jihadists is an irrational thing. She would replace it with the meaningless, widely ridiculed locution “man-caused disasters.”
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Finally, Obama made the mind-numbing decision to Mirandize terrorists on the battlefield, claiming this unprecedented, woefully impractical legalism would help “to preserve the quality of the evidence obtained.”
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A THWARTED ATTACK

For all his posturing, Obama didn’t have a plan to close our expensive, state-of-the-art detention facility at Gitmo, nor for relocating its terrorist detainees or funding the relocation. He also failed to substantiate his claim that we could obtain the same information without enhanced interrogation and be just as safe. Though Obama dismisses the reliability of information obtained through such means because the victims will allegedly say anything to stop the procedures, our experience teaches differently. In fact, we indisputably extracted life-saving information from 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed via waterboarding, the most “controversial” technique of all.

Before he was waterboarded, KSM defiantly told CIA interrogators that “soon you will know” about planned attacks on the United States. But the CIA has repeatedly confirmed that after undergoing enhanced interrogation techniques, KSM sang a different tune, producing information that helped prevent a planned attack that would use “East Asian operatives to crash a hijacked airliner into a building in Los Angeles.”
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The
Chicago Tribune
reported that KSM offered so much information it took 100 footnotes to reference it all in the final report of the 9/11 investigative commission. Much of the information was corroborated through other captured al Qaeda prisoners.
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For all the Left’s sanctimonious sermonizing on waterboarding, the United States reportedly only administered the technique against three al Qaeda terrorists: KSM, Abu Zubaydah, and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. According to a May 30, 2005 Justice Department memo, the CIA applied very restrictive rules on waterboarding and did not operate like the lawless cabal the Left has depicted. It only used the technique against “high value” detainees if it had “credible intelligence that a terrorist attack is imminent.” This is the ticking time bomb scenario, when there are “substantial and credible indicators that the subject has actionable intelligence that can prevent, disrupt or deny this attack, and [o]ther interrogation methods have failed to elicit this information within the perceived time limit for preventing the attack.” In the memo, a Justice Department official named Bradbury told a CIA official, “Your office has informed us that the CIA believes that ‘the intelligence acquired from these interrogations has been a key reason why al Qa’ida has failed to launch a spectacular attack in the West since 11 September 2001.’”
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Obama continued to bend over backward to accommodate terrorists, this time in his decision to declassify and release the opinions of the Bush Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) on the legality of the CIA’s interrogation techniques. There was no legal requirement that they be released, and there were considerable damaging national security consequences in doing so, including the revelation of the precise techniques themselves. Even Obama’s CIA chief, Leon Panetta, objected to the release, as did former Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff. In an op-ed, former CIA director Michael Hayden and former Attorney General Michael Mukasey noted that the disclosure compromised the techniques by assuring that “terrorists are now aware of the absolute limit of what the U.S. government could do to extract information from them, and can supplement their training accordingly.” Well aware of the partisan nature of this exercise, former vice president Dick Cheney argued the memos didn’t tell the whole story and urged the administration to release other classified documents that detailed the success of the enhanced interrogation techniques.