Click on WORD or PDF below for full content
Andy McCarthy Corner post on AG Mukasey’s letter to Rep Conyers refusing to appoint a special prosecutor to look into CIA interrogation practices. From Mukasey’s letter;
… Your request for a criminal investigation into the actions Executive Branch policymakers and national security lawyers undertook to defend the Nation reflects a broader trend whose institutional effects may outlast the present Administration and harm our national security well into the future. I spoke in more detail about this problematic trend in a speech at Boston College Law School on May 23, 2008, which in turn drew substantially from former Assistant Attorney General Jack Goldsmith’s recent book, The Terror Presidency. In his book, Professor Goldsmith describes what he calls “cycles of timidity and aggression” among political leaders and commentators in their attitudes towards the intelligence community. As I pointed out in my speech, the message sent to our national security policymakers and lawyers in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks was clear, it was bipartisan, and it was all but unanimous. As Professor Goldsmith explains, “The consistent refrain from the [9/11] Commission, Congress, and pundits of all stripes was that the government must be more forward-leaning against the terrorist threat: more imaginative, more aggressive, less risk-averse.”
We have gone six and one-half years without another terrorist attack within the United States, and now our intelligence professionals and national security lawyers are hearing a rather different message. Your letter, which urges me to subject those involved in developing or implementing our counterterrorism policies to criminal investigation, reflects that message. Taking such a step would not only be, in my judgment, unjust, but would also have potentially grave national security consequences. …
Yesterday, the NY Times printed an Obama op-ed on Iraq. Many of our favorites had comments. Peter Wehner is first.
… Among the most striking things about Obama’s op-ed is how intellectually dishonest it is, particularly for a man who once proudly proclaimed that he would let facts rather than preconceived views dictate his positions on Iraq.Obama’s op-ed is the effort of an arrogant and intellectually rigid man, one who disdains empirical evidence and is attempting to justify the fact that he has been consistently wrong on Iraq since the war began (for more, see my April 2008 article in Commentary, “Obama’s War“).
Senator Obama is once again practicing the “old politics” he claims to stand against, which is bad enough. But that Obama would have allowed America to lose, al Qaeda and Iran to win, and the Iraqi people to suffer mass death and possibly genocide because of his ideological opposition to the war is far worse. On those grounds alone, he ought to be disqualified from being America’s next commander-in-chief.
Max Boot is next.
Peter has already offered a trenchant response to Barack Obama’s New York Times op-ed, “My Plan For Iraq.” But the article is filled with so many misstatements and distortions that I feel compelled to weigh in as well. Herewith some thoughts on specific passages, from someone who is admittedly part of the McCain team of foreign policy advisers. Obama’s statements are in italics; my responses follow:
The call by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki for a timetable for the removal of American troops from Iraq presents an enormous opportunity. We should seize this moment to begin the phased redeployment of combat troops that I have long advocated.
The lead paragraph of Obama’s article makes it sound as if the Iraqi leader has endorsed the Democratic candidate’s call for withdrawing all U.S. brigades from Iraq within 16 months of assuming office. He has done no such thing. Iraqi leaders have kept talk of timetables vague on purpose because they know how much they still depend on American assistance.
I opposed the war in Iraq before it began, and would end it as president. I believed it was a grave mistake to allow ourselves to be distracted from the fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban by invading a country that posed no imminent threat and had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks.
The question of how much of a threat Saddam Hussein posed is certainly debatable. If their public statements are anything to judge by, Bill Clinton and senior members of his administration had a much graver view of the threat than did Obama. So did many Democratic members of the Senate, including Tom Daschle, Joe Biden, John Edwards, and Hillary Clinton, who voted to give President Bush the authority to invade Iraq. None of them connected Saddam Hussein with 9/11 (neither did George W. Bush) but they believed, as Bill Clinton put it in 1998, “The community of nations may see more and more of the very kind of threat Iraq poses now: a rogue state with weapons of mass destruction, ready to use them or provide them to terrorists. If we fail to respond today, Saddam and all those who would follow in his footsteps will be emboldened tomorrow.” …
Power Line gets in on the act.
… Finally, Afghanistan: Obama would have us believe that he urged defeat in Iraq because he was so firmly committed to victory in Afghanistan. Once again, he misrepresents the record.
In fact, Obama has never supported our troops in Afghanistan. On the contrary, he said on August 14, 2007–less than a year ago–that our forces there are mostly committing war crimes:
We’ve got to get the job done there and that requires us to have enough troops so that we’re not just air-raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous pressure over there.
Obama has been so uninterested in Afghanistan that when he went to Iraq and other countries in the Middle East with a Congressional delegation in January 2006, he skipped the opportunity to continue on to Afghanistan, which was taken by others who made the trip with him, including Kit Bond and Harold Ford. And, in an embarrassing gaffe, Obama claimed on May 13, 2008, that we don’t have enough “Arabic interpreters, Arab language speakers” in Afghanistan because they are all being used in Iraq. Obama thereby demonstrated the intellectual laziness and incuriosity that characterizes his campaign: they don’t speak Arabic in Afghanistan, and, anyway, interpreters are drawn from local populations, not shipped around the world.
Worst of all, far from being committed to victory in Afghanistan, Obama voted to cut off all funding for all of our military efforts in Afghanistan on May 24, 2007 (H.R. 2206, CQ Vote #181), thereby seeking to bring about defeat there as well as in Iraq. His current effort to portray himself as a wolf in sheep’s clothing on Afghanistan is a complete fraud.
It is possible that at some point in American history there may have been a major politician as dishonest as Barack Obama, but I can’t offhand think of such a miscreant.
Peter Hegseth of Vets for Freedom in National Review.
As someone who monitors the Iraq-war-policy debate closely, I was puzzled to open the New York Times and see an oped authored by Sen. Barack Obama entitled “My Plan for Iraq.” Besides the seemingly moderate tone — and calling for an Afghanistan “surge” (an idea I agree, and one proposed by Sen Joe Lieberman in March) — not much in the piece is new or newsworthy. In the final analysis, the oped is another dogmatic addendum to Obama’s “withdrawal at any cost” position.
In fact, just one question entered my head when I finished reading: Why now? Why would Sen. Obama — or any legislator, for that matter — write such a piece before visiting the country for himself, seeing the situation with his own eyes, and speaking with commanders and troops who actually know what’s going on?
It strikes me that only someone who is signaling no interest in consulting with commanders on the ground would spell out his “plan” for Iraq just one week before he visits the country for the first time in 918 days. Only someone who is arrogant enough to believe he always knows best would outline his Iraq policy before once meeting one-on-one with General David Petraeus. …
It’s reassuring to hear Sen. Barack Obama, a man who based his presidential bid on the supposed inevitability of defeat in Iraq, recognize the success of the surge, which he also predicted was bound to fail. But his New York Times op-ed today betrays a strategic understanding that is more deeply disturbing; it’s not just his “Plan for Iraq” that’s worrisome, but his plan for America in the world.
In Obama’s view of international politics and power, Iraq is not simply “the greatest strategic blunder in the recent history of American foreign policy,” but a diversion, a strategic sideshow. He claims “Iraq is not the central front in the war on terrorism, and never has been,” and offers “broader strategic goals, starting in Afghanistan and Pakistan.”
Obama needs to look at a map and a history book. Iraq long has been and today remains one of the two naturally dominant powers in the Persian Gulf region, home to the second-largest proven oil reserves on the planet and a front-line bulwark against revolutionary Iran. ..
Minneapolis Star Tribune columnist defends Wal-Mart.
Wal-Mart hammered by judge,” shouted a front-page Star Tribune headline earlier this month. The Dakota County judge — responding to a class-action assault on the giant retailer — labeled Wal-Mart “dehumanizing” and set it up for a possible $2 billion penalty.
Many Minnesotans probably shrugged. What else is new? The story seemed consistent with charges we’ve heard for years: Wal-Mart exploits its workers by paying skinflint wages and skimping on health insurance. Not to mention driving legions of mom-and-pop stores out of business.
With such a reputation for ruthlessness, Wal-Mart must be struggling to find workers, right?
Yet when the company opened a new store in St. Paul’s Midway area in May 2004, about 6,000 applicants vied for 325 job openings, according to Joyce Niska, the store’s acting manager in 2005. That, too, was nothing new. For years, people have beaten down the doors to work at Wal-Mart. …