Obama Has Guaranteed Us Another 9/11 Attack
The Advocate
By Herb Denenberg, The Bulletin
Friday, April 24, 2009
President Barack Obama has taken more steps to guarantee another 9/11 attack on America. He did that by forbidding enhanced interrogations that have already prevented a second 9/11 in Los Angeles. But it gets worse.
He issued the interrogation memo but edited out everything that documented how enhanced interrogation works. So he not only guaranteed more terrorist attacks on America but, in a single stroke, also committed a massive fraud by censoring out the effectiveness information. If anyone ought to be investigated for actions that damage America, it is not the Bush administration, but none other than President Obama.
And to further compound the crime, he calls for an investigation of those responsible for enhanced interrogation to be conducted by Attorney General Eric Holder. He’s the chap that, along with former Attorney General Janet Reno, created the wall between the FBI and CIA, which caused our failure to detect the 9/11 plot. Bill O’Reilly was on target when he said Mr. Holder was nothing more than a partisan and an incompetent … who distinguished himself by improperly sanctioning the pardoning of terrorists and a fugitive from justice.
With that kind of activity piling up, it should be obvious to the most casual observer the Obama administration and the mainstream media have teamed up in a combination that is on an almost certain path to destroy America. The Obama administration is letting loose with every kind of radical program, and the mainstream media is providing them with perfect cover, translating the most dangerous radicalism into seemingly mainstream policy. They are selling the presidential fraud that is Mr. Obama. They were responsible for electing him, and are now using their biased journalism to sell his programs.
The Obama moves so far have set us on a course to provide financial disaster, with unsustainable debt already here and back-breaking taxes in our near future. The Obama administration has already started to destroy our security, by displaying incredible weakness, and presenting Barack “The Apologizer and Appeaser” Obama. Most recently, the release of the documents relating to enhanced interrogation informs terrorists, destroys morale at the CIA and sets off a Banana Republic scene of criminalizing political positions and criminalizing lawyers whose opinions the Obama administration disagrees with. President Obama has, in effect, called for a witch hunt and show trial. The total insanity is demonstrated by holding lawyers criminally responsible for their legal advice and legal opinions. This means all of our lawyers are going to jail, but it also means that too many of our politicians have flipped their wigs.
It means our intelligence service will be run by a bunch of lawyers instead of by spies. There will be the kind of intelligence paralysis we initiated in the 1970s that led to our being unprepared for the likes of 9/11.
There is another disconcerting aspect of the famed Obama flip-flop on prosecuting those responsible for the memos on interrogation. President Obama’s prior theme was that we have to look forward and not back. His chief of staff and press secretary both said there would be no prosecution of the CIA personnel who carried out the advice in the interrogation memos and of the lawyers and others responsible for the memos. Then President Obama suddenly changed his mind and passed the matter to Mr. Holder for his disposition. This suggests President Obama is buckling under pressure from left-wing radical pressure groups, the base of the Obama support, who want blood from the Bush administration.
The president is a total leftist and radical, and he is being nudged even further off the looney left cliff by the likes of MoveOn.org, George Soros, and the rest of the most radical elements in American politics. This has turned into criminalizing the previous presidential administration and another senseless distraction from the major issues of our time, like the war on terror and the economy.
Don’t expect Mr. Obama to stand up to his leftist supporters. This is the moral weakling who could not even stand up to the corrupt Chicago political machine when called to do so, and this is the same moral runt who sat quietly in the pews of the church of Rev. Jeremiah “God Damn America” Wright for 20 years. And I should add, this is the guy who sat quietly while dictator Daniel Ortega went on for 40 minutes with an anti-American rant. He didn’t have the courage or sense to walk out in protest. Then he said he was glad that dictator Mr. Ortega did not criticize him for things that happened when he was 2 years old. This egomaniac thinks it is about him, when he should know it is about America. He thinks he is in a popularity contest and doesn’t realize he’s the president of the U.S. and the leader of the free world.
The only thing that can stop the march of the Obama administration and the mainstream media from destroying the U.S. is a public uprising that generates irresistible public opinion demanding a change of course. And that brings us to the theme of this column — the mainstream media and its total distortion of the news. This has already led to decisions with disastrous consequences, such as electing a president who wasn’t vetted and whose radical record and associates would probably have assured his electoral defeat — if the public was given the facts, which it wasn’t due to the bias of the mainstream media.
The public has to stop relying on the mainstream media, and get a full picture of the world by getting news and information from other sources as well. The mainstream media gives only one sliver of the news that conforms to its radical leftist bias.
The public has to be aware of that looney-left bias of the mainstream media and act accordingly. For example, when we discuss media bias, we often think of electoral news and a small group of other issues. But the bias is pervasive. The radical left has an agenda, which is adopted and sold by the mainstream media.
Here’s one area of bias you may not have thought of — the Second Amendment and the right of the citizen to bear arms. I’ve never found that matter the subject of extended treatment, even in the alternative media. About the only places you find it discussed are in the publications of the National Rifle Association (NRA). That came home to me when I was reading a copy of the NRA’s magazine Freedom (May 2009).
The NRA’s executive vice president, Wayne LaPierre, in a piece called “Standing Guard: A National Threat,” discussed media bias when it comes to the Second Amendment. He showed how the media has placed blame for what’s going on in Mexico on the Second Amendment. For example, he cites an ABC News story that was headlined, “U.S. Guns Arming Mexican Drug Gangs: Second Amendment to Blame!” The story was rigged to blame what’s going on in Mexico on the Second Amendment and presumably guns bought in America. But the pictures that accompanied the ABC story showed pictures of such weapons as M-60 machine guns and other strictly military weapons, which are irrelevant to Second Amendment issues. And it quoted a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms official as saying, “It’s virtually impossible to buy a firearm in Mexico as a private citizen, so this country is where they come [from].”
This story was based on a series of lies as was a cited New York Times article, which claimed “American gun dealers along the border were busily arming the cartels’ murderous gangs…A vast arms bazaar is rampant along the four border states, enabled by porous to non-existent American gun laws…”
Mr. LaPierre shows how the drug cartel routinely pays corrupt Mexican officials as much as $400,000 a month in bribes. With a virtually unlimited supply of money in the hands of the drug cartel, Mr. LaPierre thinks it is strange that they have to rely on American gun dealers to buy their weapons one at a time. He writes: “You would think that some responsible individual in the media would report that with such market power in dollars, the Mexican cartels buy massive quantities of illegal arms on the open, illegal international market. Or that organized crime kingpins with unlimited drug funding obtain military arms through bribes and payoffs internationally.
“No way. The in-the-tank American media is sticking to the spoon-fed notion that some of the richest, most ruthless criminals in the world, who will stop at no act of barbarism or violation of international law, are obtaining firearms from licensed dealers in the U.S. — one weapon background check at a time.”
The mainstream media wants to sell its gun control agenda and the facts and the truth be damned.
Mr. LaPierre makes a convincing case that blaming the Second Amendment for what goes on in Mexico is just one more attempt of the Obama administration to take advantage of a crisis to achieve objectives not otherwise attainable. The objectives here are more restrictions on gun ownership and more impairment of the Second Amendment.
You will recall White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel’s now famous statement, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. What I mean by that is it’s an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.”
So the bottom line, writes Mr. LaPierre, is, “Mexico is the crisis and banning our guns is their craven opportunity. We must have a single message to Congress and the media.”
“Seal the borders. Punish the guilty. Use existing federal gun and drug laws to the fullest against violent drug syndicates here and in Mexico.
“Bottom line: At issue is not the absence of law, but the political will to enforce the laws both nations already possess. In the search for solutions to Mexico’s ruthless criminal enterprise, American gun owners will stand resolute for enforcement of the rule of law against drug and gun traffickers.
“But when it comes to our Second Amendment rights, we will yield nothing, nor should we.”
You may or may not agree with Mr. LaPierre, but you should agree that something is wrong with the mainstream media when you have to read National Rifle Association publications to get some discussion of the point of view of gun owners and a point of view other than that of The New York Times and the other leftist, biased mainstream media outlets.
I found reading the NRA publication valuable and informative because it gave me important information and persuasive arguments on matters, which the mainstream media automatically censors out of its publications. On the Second Amendment — as on the war on terror and on solutions to the financial crisis — I think the mainstream media is giving us one-sided information that is bringing us to many dangerous and mistaken conclusions and policies.
Herb Denenberg is a former Pennsylvania Insurance Commissioner, Pennsylvania Public Utility Commissioner, and professor at the Wharton School. He is a longtime Philadelphia journalist and consumer advocate. He is also a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of the Sciences. His column appears daily in The Bulletin. You can reach him at advocate@thebulletin.us.
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