al Qaeda

9/11, al Qaeda, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Guantanamo, Osama bin Laden, Richard Cheney, terror, Terrorist Surveillance Program, terrorists, waterboarding

Cheney: Obama has made America less safe

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CNN’s John King interviewed former Vice President Richard Cheney yesterday:

Power Line posted a nearly complete transcript of the video, as well as what VP Cheney said about the economy and hunt for Osama bin Laden. As you read Cheney’s answer, remember the context of the question, the Obama administration’s retreat from some of the Bush administration’s security policies:

KING: I’d like to just simply ask you, yes or no, by taking those steps, do you believe the president of the United States has made Americans less safe?

CHENEY: I do. I think those programs were absolutely essential to the success we enjoyed of being able to collect the intelligence that let us defeat all further attempts to launch attacks against the United States since 9/11. I think that’s a great success story. It was done legally. It was done in accordance with our constitutional practices and principles.

President Obama campaigned against it all across the country. And now he is making some choices that, in my mind, will, in fact, raise the risk to the American people of another attack.

KING: That’s a pretty serious thing to say about the president of the United States…

CHENEY: Well…

KING: … and commander in chief of the military. So I want to give you a chance, because many people will say, Vice President Cheney just said Barack Obama, President Obama is making us less safe, more at risk, which you just said. I want to give you a chance — and take as much time as you want — to prove it. Because you put that list up there, and I know you say there have been three cases, I believe, of waterboarding in the past, and you say that specific things have been prevented. I know some of this is classified intelligence, but now that you’re out of government, to the degree that you can, tell the American people, because of those tactics, because of those, yes, sometimes extreme tactics, we stopped this.

CHENEY: Well, I would say that the key to what we did was to collect intelligence against the enemy. That’s what the terrorist surveillance program was all about, that’s what the enhanced interrogation program was all about.

KING: But another 9/11, because of a tactic like waterboarding or a black site, can you say with certainty you stopped another attempt to do something on that level?

CHENEY: John, I’ve seen a report that was written based upon the intelligence that we collected then that itemizes the specific attacks that were stopped by virtue of what we learned through those programs. It’s still classified. I can’t give you the details of it without violating classification, but I can say there were a great many of them. The one that has been public was the potential attack coming out of Heathrow, when they were going to have several American planes with terrorists on board, with liquid explosives, and they were going to blow those planes up over the United States.

Now, that was intercepted and stopped, partly because of those programs that we put in place.

Now, I think part of the difficulty here as I look at what the Obama administration is doing, we made a decision after 9/11 that I think was crucial. We said this is a war. It’s not a law enforcement problem. Up until 9/11, it was treated as a law enforcement problem. You go find the bad guy, put him on trial, put him in jail. The FBI would go to Oklahoma City and find the identification tag off the truck and go find the guy that rented the truck and put him in jail.

Once you go into a wartime situation and it’s a strategic threat, then you use all of your assets to go after the enemy. You go after the state sponsors of terror, places where they’ve got sanctuary. You use your intelligence resources, your military resources, your financial resources, everything you can in order to shut down that terrorist threat against you.

When you go back to the law enforcement mode, which I sense is what they’re doing, closing Guantanamo and so forth, that they are very much giving up that center of attention and focus that’s required, and that concept of military threat that is essential if you’re going to successfully defend the nation against further attacks.

There was a time, you might vaguely recall, when the Bush administration was blamed for “not connecting the dots.”

If we get hit again, we will remember all President Obama did to stop collecting the dots.

9/11, al Qaeda, Barack Obama, detainees, Gitmo, Guantanamo, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Military Commissions, New York Times, September 11, World Trade Center

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed plus 4 al Qaeda killers at Gitmo admit they planned September 11

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Anyone remember 9/11?

Anyone remember the World Trade Center?

Anyone remember the Pentagon?

Anyone remember the innocent aboard those four planes?

Someone will have to explain to my family and me what President Barack Obama meant when he said those at Guantanamo will receive, “Swift and certain justice,” why five barbarians were not allowed to plead guilty last year, and why this latest admission of guilt is not reason enough to let them plead guilty immediately at a Military Commission.

The New York Times reports:

The five detainees at Guantánamo Bay charged with planning the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks have filed a document with the military commission at the United States naval base there expressing pride at their accomplishment and accepting full responsibility for the killing of nearly 3,000 people.

The document, which may be released publicly on Tuesday, uses the Arabic term for a consultative assembly in describing the five men as the “9/11 Shura Council,” and it says their actions were an offering to God, according to excerpts of the document that were read to a reporter by a government official who was not authorized to discuss it publicly.

The document is titled “The Islamic Response to the Government’s Nine Accusations,” the military judge at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp said in a separate filing, obtained by The New York Times, that describes the detainees’ document.

The document was filed on behalf of the five men, including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who has described himself as the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks.

President Obama halted the military proceedings at Guantánamo in the first days after his inauguration, and the five men’s case is on hiatus until the government decides how it will proceed.

Several of the men have earlier said in military commission proceedings at Guantánamo that they planned the 2001 attacks and that they sought martyrdom. The strategic goal of the five men in making the new filing, which reached the military court on March 5, was not clear.

In their filing, the men describe the planning of the Sept. 11 attacks and the killing of Americans as a model of Islamic action, and say the American government’s accusations cause them no shame, according to the excerpts read by the government official.

“To us,” the official continued reading, “they are not accusations. To us they are a badge of honor, which we carry with honor.”

Remember the 2,975 that were killed and bring “swift and certain justice” now to their murderers.