RUSH: This is (Delaware senator Joseph) Biden on Stephanopoulos’ show yesterday.
BIDEN: I — I — I — I think that should be — I want — I want — I want — a commission to make a recommendation so everybody is saying that it’s not just me or others just uh, er, you know, espousing a point of view but there’s a rationale for it but the end, er, result is I think we should end up shutting it down, moving those prisoners. Um, those that we have reason to keep, keep and those we don’t, let go. Uh, but the bottom line is I think more Americans are in jeopardy as a consequence of the perception that exists worldwide with this existence than if that were no G’itmo.
RUSH: This is unbelievable. You know who started this? Thomas Friedman, New York Times: “Just Shut It Down, Mr. President.” Shut down G’itmo. So Biden picks up. Talk about following talking points! Here’s Biden picking up on Friedman — and the New York Times, dutifully weighed in over the weekend by agreeing with Amnesty International that G’itmo is a “gulag.” Meanwhile, Amnesty International is backtracking. “Well, we may not know that to be true.” They’re backing off, but the New York Times is hell-bent now. “Yes, G’itmo is a gulag! It’s got to be shut down.” The New York Times, Friedman the editorial board and Biden all agree with this. He says, “The bottom line is I think more Americans are in jeopardy as a consequence of this perception that exists worldwide…” Why is this? I’ll tell you why, Mr. Biden, Senator Biden, because the US military, for whatever reason, I guess… Well, I can’t explain it, other than to say they’re under such feverish assault, that the US military and the US government’s now going out of its way to try to appease a bunch of critics rather than fight a war. So here we got all these critics about G’itmo and all these critics about Abu Ghraib and all these critics about how we’re conducting our prison locations and so forth rather than going out and fighting a war. I mean, you may as well let Al-Jazeera in the country and start dictating our POW policy where it involves terrorists that are being held in these prisons. I mean, it’s clear as a bell that we’ve got political considerations going on here. Anything to embarrass the administration, anything to embarrass the president, anything to stifle the president’s ability to get anything done regardless what we’re talking about, be it domestic policy or the war on terror. Just shut down G’itmo. It’s great propaganda against the United States.
Right, and he’s helping it. He’s using it. Joe Biden is turning it into anti-American propaganda
“‘He tried to insert one finger into my eye socket, then he transitioned into a fishhook maneuver,’ the guard said. ‘He got his finger into my mouth and was trying to rip my cheek off.’ After another moment, the detainee’s hands were forced down and into the cuffs. The entire incident was videotaped, as are all cell-extraction procedures under the tight protocol with which military officials have been running the Guantanamo prison amid scrutiny and harsh criticism from human rights advocates. Senior officials here, several of whom take ongoing criticism of their performance at the prison personally, eagerly described the incident as an example of ‘the other side of the story’ about Guantanamo, which they say deserves a closer look.” Col. Michael Bumgarner, the senior officer working inside the prison camp said, “It’s an extreme slap in the face to me frankly that the American public is being led to believe that we’re abusing, or mistreating detainees,” and it is a one-sided story, it’s a one-sided story because the people doing the criticizing have an agenda — and it’s not human rights, and it’s not the welfare of prisoners. It is the criticism and the defeat of the United States. And for Americans, particularly United States senators, to come up and spread this propaganda that there is all this Koran abuse and prison abuse and detainee abuse is just unconscionable. My brother, who has the syndicated column wrote a piece on weapons of mass destruction and a number of things and he got a response to it and he sent me the e-mail response, and I want to share this with you because it dovetails with this subject. Oh, I’m sorry, not weapons of mass destruction. The column was on WorldNetDaily, and that’s where my brother’s column was published, and that’s where the reader, the e-mailer, whose note I’m going to read to you saw it.
“I saw you op-ed on WND and would like to think you for writing a bit of common sense. I am an interrogator, actually WSJ did a piece on me in April of 2002, when we were peaking on being able to wrap up Taliban and AQ.” [Al-Qaeda]. “A couple thing I really find appalling about the whole GTMO/Bagram/ Abu Ghraib thing (besides the left’s continuous flogging of that dead horse) is that between 1991 through Haiti, Somalia and Kosovo our tactics, techniques and procedures were essentially the same (I’m not talking about the fratboy antics of some bored and frustrated reservist MPs at Abu Ghraib) – which leads me to think that the only reason for this uproar is because of the left’s hatred of Bush, and that they will do anything, even at the expense of soldiers’ lives over here to embarrass him.” The point is that during the Clinton administration, these same techniques, same tactics and procedures were used every day, and nobody cared and nobody criticized them at all. Nobody even brought it to anybody’s attention. He continues, “I think even worse than that though, has been the [Department of Defense]’s reaction to the whole matter. They’ve hamstrung interrogation and counterintelligence to the point now where no interrogation is done, and interrogators and CI personnel wait meekly inside the gates of forward operating bases hoping some Iraqi will trundle through the gate and give up information on local insurgents for a piddling $20…. They’ve even gone as far as rewriting the interrogation manual, citing addendums to Geneva the US never ratified, took out approaches that seemed harsh, and made the legal portions to read like the manifesto for Amnesty International. It just seems like everybody thinks that appeasing the press, the left and organizations like AI is more important than saving soldiers’ lives, taking down the bad guys and ending the war in a timely manner. I’m glad I’m retiring in a year.”
This is a guy who is interrogating prisoners, and it sounds like he’s doing it in Iraq. But nevertheless, he’s fed up. How about this? “It just seems like everybody thinks that appeasing the press, the left, and organizations like Amnesty International is more important than saving soldiers’ lives, taking down the bad guys and ending the war,” and it does seem that way. It does seem like we’re obsessed with this. I know the media is obsessed with this, and of course they’re causing some kind of reaction among government which must respond to them, or thinks they must respond to them. But when you hear stories like this from people on the front lines who are affected by this — and then when you learn, it was no different than what was going on throughout the nineties. In fact this whole business of rendition, have you heard people being criticized for rendition? Basically rendition is… Oh, and how about this? Last week the New York Times ran this story blowing the cover of a CIA charter flight operation. They wouldn’t have run that story under Bill Clinton and they wouldn’t run that story under FDR during World War II. But the CIA has a charter company that nobody knew about, and its basic intent was to fly prisoners to various countries for interrogation under the rendition program, and the rendition program was started under Bill Clinton, and yet we only hear about it within the context of, “It’s an eeevil Bush idea,” but this was a Clinton idea from the get-go, and the New York Times relished blowing the cover of this operation, and here we are in the midst of a war. People seem to have forgotten that 9/11 happened and all the previous terrorist attacks, and so all everybody seems to be focus on is how mean the Americans are in treating these prisons. It is maddeningly frustrating, and I totally understand the sentiments of the man who wrote the e-mail expressing them.
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RUSH: Yeah, the New York Times is hilarious. I’m getting to the point I can only laugh at the news these days. I mean, I don’t even get mad at it anymore, folks. I know some of you do but it’s, frankly, a waste of energy. I just laugh at it. For example, New York Times upset… On the one hand, the New York Times is outraged about the supposed mistreatment of the Koran — and, of course, not by the detainees, by supposedly a couple of our guys. They’re just
“Making good on a Republican campaign call to celebrate with Christian friends, Governor Rick Perry traveled to an evangelical school sound in Fort Worth to put his signature on measures to restrict abortion and prohibit same-sex marriage. About a hundred protesters lined the street outside the school, Calvary Christian Academy denouncing the unusual signing as breaching the constitutional separation between church and state.” It’s basically a parental notification bill for abortion, and he signed it at a school. Of course, New York Times is outraged over this. Outraged.
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RUSH: Now, the reason for all of these attacks on interrogators, and all these attacks on essentially our prisons that are holding suspects in the war on terror, “prisoners of war,” is simply — all these attacks are simply going on because the war in Iraq has and is succeeding. Liberation, free government, broad support of the people, spreading liberty everywhere. This is troublesome to the left in America. Now they seek to smear us since they lost on policy. They’re just changing the subject from their past criticisms to creating new issues and controversies. There has to always be something that they’re doing that has one purpose, and that is to gin up anti-war support among as many Americans as possible. That’s what this whole Amnesty International report is. Well, there’s some fund-raising involved in that smi mentioned to you last week. For example if you’re George Soros or any other big time lib and you’re giving a bunch of money to Amnesty International, you just can’t keep issuing reports that say, “Third World nations and North Korea and China have some of the worst human rights abuses.” You’ve got to throw America in there because some of your big contributors are the hate-America crowd. So you’ve got to throw America in there to keep your money coming in. Well, the problem is it’s backfired on them. “The head of Amnesty International’s American branch yesterday acknowledged that he ‘doesn’t know for sure’ what is going on at Guantanamo Bay prison, although Amnesty International’s secretary-general has called the terrorist prison run at a U.S. military base in Cuba a ‘gulag.’
“However, William F. Schulz defended the description made last week by Irene Khan, saying on Fox News Sunday yesterday that America’s ‘archipelago of prisons throughout the world’ are ‘similar in character, if not in size’ to the Soviet gulags, where millions of political prisoners were killed,'” and in fact we have audio sound bites of this in our roster today. Well, I thought we did. I could have sworn I saw them when I went through the roster. Hmm. Maybe I’m missing a page here or something. Nevertheless… No, I bet we don’t. I was reading something else. But the bottom line is they’re now pulling back. They are withdrawing. Schultz said, “‘We don’t know for sure what all is happening at Guantanamo and our whole point is that the United States ought to allow independent human rights organizations to investigate.'” He added “that Amnesty International was careful to use the word ‘alleged’ when accusing high-level Bush administration officials.” Schultz said, “‘We try to hold up one universal standard for all countries.’ He added that the report accusing the US of running a gulag was written by Amnesty International researchers in London. ‘It has nothing to do with John Kerry.'” Oh, it doesn’t, does it? That’s because Schultz was asked if he supported John Kerry, was asked if he contributed money to John Kerry —
This is also the week where two more judges will face their votes, and the Republicans are thinking about throwing up William James Haynes to test just where the seven Republicans on the gang of 14 stand on the filibuster deal that they cut three weeks ago. “Conservative Republican senators plan on pressing the nomination of Defense Department General Counsel William James Haynes.” Now, Haynes is one of the nominees, and if you believe the Democrats that cut the deal, Haynes is one of the nominees not officially part of that Gang of 14 agreement. “However, several Republicans in the negotiating room including Lindsey Graham claimed that Haynes was one of the nominees, that all 14 agreed would be released for a vote by the full Senate. A GOP staffer in the leadership said, ‘We want to hold Graham and Susan Collins and the rest of them to their word. One of the reasons we went along with this deal to the degree that we did was because they promised nominees like Haynes would get an up-and-down vote. They gave us their word. We assume their word to fellow Republicans is as good as their word to Democrats,'” but we’ll see. This is a
BIDEN: Is my fifth trip to Iraq. Same message privately on the ground. We didn’t have enough troops to begin with. We don’t have enough troops now and the only hope now is to train up Iraqis as quickly as possible and that’s the problem.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Senator, we must have had this conversation half a dozen times over the last year and every time you come back with exactly the same message. What can we do right now to speed up this training?
RUSH: Even Stephanopoulos is getting fed up with the talking points. Biden, this is his fifth trip to Iraq; he comes back, “It isn’t working. There is no success.” This is meant to dovetail with his criticism of G’itmo. We just ought to shut it down, it’s a propaganda tool being used against us, thanks to people like Senator Biden who joined with the criticism, unfounded and unknown, only alleged by Amnesty International. Does it not strike you as humorous, frustrating, whatever you want to say that whenever enemies of America launch criticisms of this country, the American left is right in there to echo them? And even amplify them, and that’s what Senator Biden is doing. Yet he comes back from five trips to Iraq, and he says, “We need training up; it’s going to hell in a hand basket over there,” and Stephanopoulos says: That’s all you ever say when you come back! That’s all you ever say — because the point is, folks, there will be no success stories told by leftists after they visit Iraq. They have to continue to be critical because their whole point is to drum up anti-war support among as many Americans as possible. That’s an electoral strategy for 2006 and 2008.
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RUSH: There’s also another objective of those who are constantly criticizing our interrogators. It’s not just to dredge up a bunch of anti-war sentiment among the American people. Make no mistake about this, folks: There is an effort on to impede our intelligence gathering. There are people who are attempting to stop our ability to gather the intelligence necessary to prosecute the war on terror, and I’m not accusing the US media of it per se. They’re more like useful idiots in this because they are so enamored with any critic of the Bush administration, that they just, without thinking… Well, I won’t give them that much, but they just reflexively echo it and simplify it. Make no mistake, Amnesty International has no cause for the America and our brief, and anything these leftist groups around the world can do to harm our intelligence gathering is also part of this agenda. Brian in Charleston, Missouri — just south of where I grew up — welcome to the program, sir.
CALLER: Mega dittos from the heartland, Rush.
RUSH: Thank you, sir.
CALLER: Honor to speak to you. I’ve seen you once even though you don’t know who I am. So I will get straight to my point. I’ve been listening to you, and what I have gathered from what you said, the left is trying so hard to pin something, a terrorist attack on Bush just to erase what Clinton didn’t do in the nineties.
RUSH: Ummm, I —
CALLER: Do you agree with that? Basically they want to let — seems like they want to let detainees go, shut down the terror camps, everything bad, bad, bad, and let go all these people so there will be another attack and they can pin it on Bush.
RUSH: Well, I’m hesitant to make that claim. I can understand how people would think it. But I don’t think that I would necessarily say that that’s the purpose here. I think the strategy is more forward-thinking. I think the strategy is an electoral strategy for 2006 and 2008. I think that’s why they’re trying to drum up as much anti-American support as possible to defeat Republicans in ’06 and in ’08. Remember what the Democrats are all about here, folks, is to do everything they can to delegitimize these whole eight years. The Democrats’ objective here is that when these whole eight years are over that they never happened, that not enough happened policy-wise to have mattered with George Bush in office. They’re trying to limit what they think is the damage to the country done by conservatism. Now, there may be some sickos out there who will do anything they can to build up Bill Clinton’s legacy and to establish, you know, something like another attack to show that Bush isn’t doing anything about it, but we’ve talked about that before on this program. I actually think that would backfire. I think if there’s another attack on this country, you take a look out there at the political landscape, who is it that seems to be taking this war on terror seriously and who is it that doesn’t seem to be, and it’s clear that Bush is. It’s clear that Bush and Rumsfeld and the Republicans are continually warning this about this. The director of the CIA said in public testimony three or four weeks ago that his biggest fear is a nuclear weapon being brought into the US via our southern border which is too wide open.
It got hardly any mention whatsoever. Here you have a 9/11 Commission. The 9/11 Commission was all about these warnings, all about what we missed, all about who didn’t connect the dots. So here’s the CIA director. He said, “I’m not going to let this happen again. This is what I’m afraid of; this is what we’ve got going. That’s what’s cooking. This is what I’m going to mention,” and nobody says a word about it! Nobody reacted in any way, shape, manner or form particularly as it might relate to shutting down or getting even tougher on the borders. Meanwhile, the 9/11 Commission in another story today is all upset that not enough of their recommendations are being followed. The 9/11 Commission wants to be empowered to make sure that their recommendations are enacted into law. I mean, it’s incredible what’s going on! They’re feeling ignored. Nobody is paying attention to them anymore. It’s because their big mouthpieces, Richard Clarke and the others, were discredited along the way. But I think that to the extent… Now, let me modify. If you ask me the question this way:
I know damn well that that’s what the left would do. Now, the question is: “Are the American people going to go for this?” Remember, we don’t live in a media monopoly anymore, and the mainstream press can echo the sentiments of the left should this hypothetical happen. But the bottom line is the case can be made from sunup to sundown that one of the reasons why this attack happened is because not all Americans on the political spectrum have decided to take the threat seriously, and the president doing his best to protect the country has been stopped at this turn and that turn from trying to do what he thought best. We can clearly make the case that the Democrats in this country wanted to turn over our defense to the UN and our sovereignty to the UN, the French and the Germans and so forth. I think they’d be skating on thin ice. But would they be eager for the political opportunity that they think another attack would present them? No question about it. Do they want the release of these prisoners so that that attack will happen? No. There’s no guarantee. The only way you can guarantee that is if the left mounts the attack
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