Krauthammer: 'Cheney is winning' on terrorist torture issue

Dr. Charles Krauthammer takes a look at the Cheney vs. Obama scrum and concludes "Cheney is winning" on the issue of torture on terrorists, citing the dramatic turnaround of the 9-11 terrorist leader who is now leading CIA seminars on the inner workings of Al-Qaeda terrorism plans.

Lest we forget: A WWII Bataan survivor's sketches

The current generation has vaguely heard there was something called World War II and most of them probably can't tell you what decade it was fought in, much less anything about it, like the Bataan Death March in the Philippines, where thousands of U.S. and Allied soldiers died. One of the survivors was an Army private named Ben Steele, whose story is told today in The New York Times.

IN the fall of 1940, Ben Steele, a 22-year-old Montana ranch hand, enlisted in the Army Air Corps at the prodding of his mother. A year later, his unit, the 19th Bombardment Group, was shipped to Clark Field in the Philippines, part of an unsuccessful American effort to deter Japanese aggression in the Pacific. (Soon after Private Steele arrived, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and then the Philippines.)

Private Steele then took part in the first major land battle for America in World War II, the battle for the peninsula of Bataan in the Philippine Islands — a 99-day fight that ended on April 9, 1942, in the surrender of more than 76,000 men under American command, the worst defeat in United States military history.

Afterward, the Japanese set their sick and starving American and Filipino captives on a 66-mile walk under a broiling sun to prison camp, an infamous trek now known as the Bataan Death March.

Early in his three years of captivity, Private Steele, crippled by malaria, jaundice, blood poisoning and beriberi, became an invalid in a prisoner-of-war hospital in Manila. One day during his slow recovery, he pulled a burned stick from a cooking fire and started making scratches on the concrete floor. With some tutoring from a fellow prisoner who was an engineer, those scratches turned into sketches, and soon cellmates were scrounging paper and stubs of pencil for him.

When Navy P.O.W. doctors noticed Private Steele’s talent, they suggested that he secretly begin to document their experience. He made 50 such sketches, which an Army chaplain hid in the false bottom of a Mass kit. The chaplain was then shipped to a prison camp in Japan, and en route his vessel was sunk by American aircraft. Though the chaplain survived, Private Steele’s sketches ended up at the bottom of the South China Sea.

When he returned home to Montana after the war, Mr. Steele began to recreate and refine his early work, filling scores of sketchbooks. His aim, he says, has always been “to remember” — to remember the more than 10,000 American prisoners from the Philippines who died in Japanese captivity from April 1942 to August 1945.

God help us, here we are today making a big deal politically out of three, count 'em, only three terrorists who were directly involved in the terrorists attacks on America on 9/11, who had water poured on them until they thought they were drowning. Waterboarding my hindquarters! What the Japanese did in WWII to our troops makes waterboarding sound like a picnic.

The Revenge of Cheney is aided by Obama's power grab

Take a wild guess what the most-read post on my blog is during its short history?

It's Let's Go Fly Fishing with Mr. Nice Guy, quoting a Weekly Standard report on a fishing trip on the Snake River with Vice-President Dick Cheney shortly before he left office.

The most under-appreciated vice president ever, Cheney didn't care a fig about his popularity while in office, he just quietly did his utmost to protect our country, earning his Darth Vader nickname from the leftwingnuts. Hey, anybody that bunch hates has got to be doing something right.

And Cheney has proven himself to be a valuable public servant out of office by speaking out in defense of our nation once again, blasting the Obama administration for releasing the CIA torture memos that document the terrible waterboarding torture of guess how many terrorists? A grand total of three, all three of which were directly involved in the 9/11 attacks on our nation.

But a funny thing happened to Darth Vader and the left's vilification of this good man. While he was speaking out, he blasted those leftwingnuts in office, like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who knew all about the CIA waterboarding and applauded it shortly after 9/11, only to turncoat in the present political climate and accuse the CIA of lying to them about it. And guess who gets hoisted by her own petard? None other than fancy Nancy from San Fran. Couldn't happen to a nicer gal, could it? There's something delicious about libtards being hung by their own words.

And Bill Kristol points out in a current article in the Weekly Standard how Cheney's courageous stand in the face of withering criticism from the Obamessiah's defenders is defending America.

Dick Cheney is reminding Republicans that they need to defend themselves when attacked.

When President Obama released the Justice Department interrogation memos a month ago, Cheney denounced him for doing so. He explained why it was inappropriate and unwise to release such documents. But he did more. He didn't just defend himself and the administration in which he served. He fought back, and encouraged others to do so.

He challenged the president to release CIA memos evaluating the effectiveness of the enhanced interrogation techniques. He raised the question of whether congressional Democrats--Nancy Pelosi, for one--had known of, and at least tacitly approved of, the allegedly horrifying abuses of the allegedly lawless Bush administration.

Now, a month later, Pelosi is attacking career CIA officials for lying to Congress, and other Democrats are scrambling to distance themselves from her. Meanwhile, the Obama administration has pulled back on threats to prosecute Bush-era lawyers, reversed itself on releasing photos of alleged military abuse of prisoners, and embraced the use of military commissions to try captured terrorists. The administration now looks irresponsible when it lives up to candidate Obama's rhetoric, and hypocritical when it vindicates Bush policies the candidate attacked.

Thank God for Dick Cheney. Along with Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich, these three are taking a stand against the lunatic left and finally the Republicans in office are joining the fight.

House Minority Leader John Boehner steps up to the plate and joins the battle at long last.

And it also appears the lynch mob clamoring for Pelosi's head has been joined by Obama's chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, who Bill Kristol sees as the guiding hand behind CIA Chief Leon Panetta's blast at Pelosi, rebutting her charge that she was lied to about torture by the CIA.

Over at the Washington Post's Post Partisan blog, Kristol writes:

Commentators have been struck -- though not perhaps as much as they should have been -- by the extraordinary character of CIA Director Leon Panetta’s blunt and stark rebuke of Nancy Pelosi. Responding to political debates that “reached a new decibel level [Thursday] when the CIA was accused [by Pelosi] of misleading Congress,” Panetta wrote Friday that “our contemporaneous records from September 2002 indicate that CIA officers briefed truthfully on the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah.”

But did Panetta simply decide on his own to send this letter? It’s almost inconceivable. Panetta is a former member of Congress and a former White House chief of staff. President Obama made him CIA director only four months ago. Even if his motivation for the letter was in part driven by an institutional imperative to defend his agency, Panetta would have understood the political implications of humiliating a House speaker of his own party. He surely at least ran the letter by White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel to get clearance. It’s also possible that Panetta was encouraged to send the letter by Emanuel.

As Emanual has already been quoted as saying about the power grab during the economic crisis, never let a good crisis go to waste. It sure looks like he's using the Pelosi torture crisis to get rid of the Speaker of the House and orchestrate the elevation of someone of his own choosing.

Probably so, but I agree. Off with Pelosi's head and we'll deal with whoever replaces her. In this case, the enemy of my enemy is my friend and getting rid of Pelosi is in the nation's best interest.

And before I leave the topic of our most under-appreciated vice president, guess what the current idiot holding that office shot off his big mouth about? Blogger Stephen F. Hayes at the Weekly Standard comments that Joe Biden has revealed the secret "undisclosed location" where Cheney so famously went when national security issues threatened the Bush administration.

According to an account in Newsweek, Biden did give up one of the country's secrets at another dinner where journalists and politicians make fun of Republicans (and occasionally laugh at each other). Biden told his dinnermates about the existence of a secret bunker under the Vice President's Residence at the U.S. Naval Observatory.
Eleanor Clift writes:

Ever wonder about that secure, undisclosed location where Dick Cheney secreted himself after the 9/11 attacks? Joe Biden reveals the bunker-like room is at the Naval Observatory in Washington, where Cheney lived for eight years and which is now home to Biden. The veep related the story to his head-table dinner mates when he filled in for President Obama at the Gridiron Club earlier this year. He said the young naval officer giving him a tour of the residence showed him the hideaway, which is behind a massive steel door secured by an elaborate lock with a narrow connecting hallway lined with shelves filled with communications equipment. The officer explained that when Cheney was in lock down, this was where his most trusted aides were stationed, an image that Biden conveyed in a way that suggested we shouldn’t be surprised that the policies that emerged were off the wall.

Despite more than fifteen trips to the VPR over the past five years, and despite having conducted dozens of interviews about security precautions taken for Cheney and his staff after 9/11, I was never told such a bunker existed.

I was able to learn and write about Cheney's getaways at Camp David, extra measures taken for him when he traveled on Air Force Two, and even the use of a "dummy" plane sometimes used in combat zones. But no one ever mentioned this secure facility at the Naval Observatory.

The obvious conclusion: Its existence was highly classified.

So what was Joe Biden doing talking about it at the Gridiron Dinner? And, if it was indeed classified, will this disclosure be referred to the Justice Department?

Joe Biden ought to rode out of town on the same rail with Nancy Pelosi. God help our nation.

Lightweight Nancy takes on Heavyweight CIA: TKO at 11

As usual, Sir Charles Krauthammer cuts through all the BS concerning Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi's stammering, stuttering half-truths, lies and damn lies about the CIA and torture.

Krauthammer also provides some overwhelming factoids regarding Pelosi's charge that the CIA lied to her:

"Her charge of the CIA lying to her is utterly implausible. Why would it lie to her and tell all the others the truth? It makes no sense at all; and it was refuted by the black and white Obama CIA memo –– not a memo out of the Prince of Darkness: Bush and Cheney; but Obama CIA –– would show that in the briefing in which she says none of this simulated drowning occurred, they had specifically told her about the Enhanced Interrogation Techniques that had been used on a prisoner, obviously, a month earlier."

Watch and enjoy Pelosi getting utterly Krauthammered on Fox News last night:

Keep Gitmo open -- and send the leftwingnut lunatics there

Coming to a street near you, those poor, misunderstood, abused souls who will soon be released from Club Med East, otherwise known as Gitmo by the leftwingnut lunatic fringe now in power.



And speaking of the wailing from the left about the horrors of torture on those poor souls vacationing at Gitmo that "absolutely must be released onto the streets of America, right now!" let me quote Ann Coulter, who blows up the latest absurdity of "reporting" on torture history.

To claim that the Japanese -- architects of the Bataan Death March -- were prosecuted for "waterboarding" would be like saying Ted Bundy was executed for engaging in sexual harassment.

What the Japanese did to their POWs made even the Nazis blanch. The Japanese routinely beheaded and bayoneted prisoners; forced prisoners to dig their own graves and then buried them alive; amputated prisoners' healthy arms and legs, one by one, for sport; force-fed prisoners dry rice and then filled their stomachs with water until their bowels exploded; and injected them with chemical weapons in order to observe, time and record their death throes before dumping them in mass graves.

While only 4 percent of British and American troops captured by German or Italian forces died in captivity, 27 percent of British and American POWs captured by the Japanese died in captivity. Japanese war crimes were so atrocious that even rape was treated as only a secondary war crime in the Tokyo trial, similar to what happens during an R. Kelly trial.

Blow 'em away Ann. Get your gun out. We're gonna need ours soon. Keep your powder dry.