Friday

March 29th, 2024

Insight

Obama takes us back to torture talk

Ron Hart

By Ron Hart

Published August 7, 2014

Obama takes us back to torture talk

It’s difficult to overstate the petulance of our president. In his latest press conference, Obama took credit for every perceived good and blamed Republicans for every perceived bad. He blasted Congress for going on vacation, as he was leaving for his, on Martha’s Vineyard. Between golf and fundraising, I’m surprised he has time for vacation.

Currently, ISIS is on the march in Iraq; border wars rage; Mexico holds a U.S. Marine; and Syria, Gaza/Israel, Afghanistan, Libya and Ukraine are theaters of war with escalating violence. They are not really “theaters” of war, anymore, they are more like a multiplex of war.

The cumulative effect of Obama’s feckless foreign policy is weakness.

So what diversion does Obama dangle as bait before his media at his final press conference before they vacation together? With his CIA caught snooping on senators, he changes the topic to his favorite “Blame Bush” theme by leaking a CIA document on torture.

Now the discussions go from CIA spying on senators, Benghazi, IRS targeting of political opponents, deficits, a jobless recovery, burdensome regulations, Obamacare lies and NSA spying on U.S. citizens to an old game of semantics: Did the Bush administration’s CIA “torture” terrorists?

The “torture” issue was well behind us. But Obama has effectively accused Bush of war crimes, thus again deeming his political foes enemies of the state.

In my view, we need to find out who leaked this memo and hire a friendly, but tough, foreigner to strap the leakers to a board and pour water on their faces until they say they are sorry. It sounds like a job for Liam Neeson.

We mostly waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the 9/11 mastermind and evil-genius bomb builder. He’s been in the Camp Gitmo prison 10 years and has won the Guantanamo Science Fair eight times. So what if we took this terrorist somewhere and waterboarded or subjected him to “enhanced interrogation”? (I like to call it “enhanced irrigation.”) Either way, the information helped us get Osama bin Laden, for which Obama, hypocritically, was eager to take credit.

Constantly second-guessing and blaming the previous administration have been taken to unpresidential depths. Those were tough post-9/11 decisions. I am not sure how Obama makes decisions, but he appears to use the “rock, paper, scissors” method.

Never have unrepentant incompetence and epic narcissism melded so seamlessly in one president.

After 9/11, George W. Bush felt that we had two choices. The first was to grab the guys who knew about it and interrogate them to get to the leaders. That was the right choice. The other was to invade and bomb Afghanistan and Iraq back to the Stone Age. That set those places back about a month, and it was the wrong decision.

Obama’s unnecessary and blunt statement that we engaged in “torture” will just further inflame the Arab world and give its extremists more reason to fight. To Obama, blame and politics come before what is best for America.