ht: SDA (more discussion in comments there)
A disturbing epidemic of amnesia seems to be plaguing my former colleagues on Capitol Hill. After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, members of the committees charged with overseeing our nation's intelligence services had no higher priority than stopping al-Qaeda. In the fall of 2002, while I was chairman of the House intelligence committee, senior members of Congress were briefed on the CIA's "High Value Terrorist Program," including the development of "enhanced interrogation techniques" and what those techniques were. This was not a one-time briefing but an ongoing subject with lots of back and forth between those members and the briefers.
Today, I am slack-jawed to read that members claim to have not understood that the techniques on which they were briefed were to actually be employed; or that specific techniques such as "waterboarding" were never mentioned. It must be hard for most Americans of common sense to imagine how a member of Congress can forget being told about the interrogations of Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed. In that case, though, perhaps it is not amnesia but political expedience.
(...)
I do not recall a single objection from my colleagues. They did not vote to stop authorizing CIA funding. And for those who now reveal filed "memorandums for the record" suggesting concern, real concern should have been expressed immediately -- to the committee chairs, the briefers, the House speaker or minority leader, the CIA director or the president's national security adviser -- and not quietly filed away in case the day came when the political winds shifted. And shifted they have.
Circuses are not new in Washington, and I can see preparations being made for tents from the Capitol straight down Pennsylvania Avenue. The CIA has been pulled into the center ring before. The result this time will be the same: a hollowed-out service of diminished capabilities. After Sept. 11, the general outcry was, "Why don't we have better overseas capabilities?" I fear that in the years to come this refrain will be heard again: once a threat -- or God forbid, another successful attack -- captures our attention and sends the pendulum swinging back. There is only one person who can shut down this dangerous show: President Obama.
This is also what I have been thinking. Politics and a radically extreme left-wing agenda getting in the way of national security.
It's likely part of Obama's hidden agenda to impose Global Socialism and Global Governance by dropping America's guard for evil regimes who want to change America to be like them so they can then easily participate in the Global Government for whatever their selfish, greedy purposes may be. The implication of this includes erosion/loss of rights and freedoms for all of humanity, weakening of the rule of democratically-originated law, the rendering useless of national constitutions and so on and so forth. But who sees this coming? It's so far-fetched that to just openly muse about its possibility will get one labelled whatever the small-minded myopics will say.
Global Socialism/Global Governance will only lead to horrendous catastrophe the likes of which will make Al Gore's "climate change" Big Lies look like a mere forecast for scattered light showers. After all, the Axis of Evil is composed of an explosively unstable mismatch of neo-Communists and Islamofascists, which ultimately cannot last and will only lead to a world-you-know-what... again, and this time both sides will have nukes. But then again, I'm just a nut, right? Imagine if I had predicted 9/11 before it happened; wouldn't you think I was nuts then, too? Of course, for that's the way you're expected to be thinking! The Axis of Evil and their Useful Idiots (The Extreme Left as a whole) are counting on your Media of Mass Deception (MMD)-programmed tendency to exercise knee-jerk disbelief at such awesome "right-wing extremist" predictions (of course, on the other hand, as for such awesome left-wing extremist predictions as we've seen the IPCC and Al Gore make... it's expected that you're going to automatically believe what the Extreme Left tells you is so).
