Constantly second-guessing and blaming the previous administration have been taken to un-presidential depths by Obama.
Democrats decide to spend $40 million taxpayer dollars to contrive a one-sided report questioning the tough post-9/11 decisions by George Bush and our CIA on methods of interrogating captured terrorist masterminds. True to form, the Dems release the report in one of their last acts while they still control the Senate.
Democrat Senate staffers did not even talk to the heads of the agencies who oversaw the programs. It took seven years and was a hatchet job targeted at Bush. The 6,000-page report was slightly longer than a Tom Cruise pre-nup.
His unpopularity manifested by historic Democratic losses in the mid-term election, association with Obama has topped cirrhosis of the liver as the number one cause of death for old, white, Democrat politicians.
The cumulative effect of Obama’s feckless "foreign policy" is weakness. His loathing for America and divisive second-guessing feed our enemies' resolve, betray our allies, are politically motivated – and unnecessary. And they will help ISIS recruitment. They were probably factors in the violence at Australia’s Lindt chocolate shop. If terrorists start attacking America’s strategic chocolate reserve, then we’d care.
To Democrats, everything is political; the best interests of our country seldom matter. Releasing this report on the day ObamaCare architect Jon Gruber was grilled by Congress for calling Americans "stupid" was calculated.
The fake moral outrage that is the trademark of liberals continues. Somehow it is awful to slap around a mass-murdering 9/11 mastermind, but it's OK for Obama to kill many innocent bystanders at family weddings with drone attacks. Democrats do like weddings.
The "torture" issue was well behind us, but Obama has effectively accused Bush of war crimes — once again deeming his political foes enemies of the state.
The report talked about us sending terrorists to “black sites,” which initially I thought were ILikeBigBooties.com or the ObamaCare website. But no. Black sites are places in friendly countries where a tough foreign intelligence officer interrogates the bad guys and pours water in their faces until he gets information. It sounds like a role for Liam Neeson for which Hollywood would pay him $5 million. Interestingly, our idiot government paid $80 million to two former Air Force psychologists to design our “Enhanced Interrogation Program.”
These two torture experts must have caught the eye of the CIA for their work designing the property tax appeal process for the City of Atlanta.
If there is to be an investigation, it need only be why we paid these guys $80 million for their torture expertise. If the Feds raid these guys' homes, they best be really careful when they go into their basements.
Only three of the terrorists most directly involved with Osama bin Laden were waterboarded. So we pretty much spent $80 million divided by 3, or $26.6 mil per waterboarding. That water is more expensive than Pellegrino bought at Starbucks.
We mostly water-boarded Khalid Sheik-Mohammed, the 9/11 mastermind and evil genius bomb builder. He’s been at Gitmo for ten years and has won the Guantanamo Science Fair eight times. So what if we took this terrorist somewhere and subjected him to enhanced irrigation?
The CIA was also accused of giving terrorist “rectal hydration.” Democrats call it torture, but liberals in Beverly Hills pay good money for colonics like that. Nancy Pelosi said such methods do not reflect our country's values – this from a woman whose district in San Francisco would like to see rectal hydration covered under ObamaCare.
Either way, the information extracted from KSM helped us get bin Laden, for which, hypocritically, Obama eagerly took credit.
After 9/11, Bush felt we had two choices. The first was to grab the guys who did it and interrogate them to get to the leaders, and then light up terrorist training camps with bombs from our fighter jets. That was the right choice. The other was to invade, occupy and bomb Afghanistan and Iraq back to the Stone Age. That set the two countries back about a month, and it was the wrong decision.
The only outrages in this report are that the Democrats saw fit to release it and that our government paid two ex-government employees more than $80 million to torture terrorists for information. My bookie has a guy with vast experience in the art of "persuasion" who would have done it for a hundred bucks.
Ron Hart, a libertarian syndicated op-ed humorist,award-winning author and TV/radio commentator can be reached at Ron@RonaldHart.com or visit www.RonaldHart.com
This article originally appeared on Santa Rosa Press Gazette: Political Torture