Liberal Hypocrisy Spoils the Call for Unity

When President Obama announced the successful mission by an elite team of Navy SEALs to raid the compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan in which Osama bin Laden had been in hiding for about five years, he said:

"Tonight, we give thanks to the countless intelligence and counterterrorism professionals who’ve worked tirelessly to achieve this outcome. The American people do not see their work, nor know their names. But tonight, they feel the satisfaction of their work and the result of their pursuit of justice.

We give thanks for the men who carried out this operation, for they exemplify the professionalism, patriotism, and unparalleled courage of those who serve our country. And they are part of a generation that has borne the heaviest share of the burden since that September day....

And tonight, let us think back to the sense of unity that prevailed on 9/11. I know that it has, at times, frayed. Yet today’s achievement is a testament to the greatness of our country and the determination of the American people...."

It is too bad that these words of praise for our intelligence and military professionals and the call for a return to the post-9/11 sense of national unity is not recognized and acted on by the liberal media or even the Obama Administration as the week of the post-bin Laden world proceeds.

It has been recognized by many in and out of the Administration that the intelligence gathered to compile the information that led to pinpointing bin Laden's hideaway included information obtained during the Bush Administration through enhanced interrogation that the current President and others of his party have called "torture".

In an interview with Brian Williams on NBC News early this week Obama's CIA Director Leon Panetta, who was put in charge of the mission to get bin Laden by Obama, said of the information used to locate bin Laden:

".... in the intelligence business you work from a lot of sources of information and that was true here… It's a little difficult to say it was due just to one source of information that we got… I think some of the detainees clearly were, you know, they used these enhanced interrogation techniques against some of these detainees..."

Yet even though the President praised the intelligence work that helped the successful outcome of the mission that eliminated the most wanted terrorist on Earth and the CIA Director admitted that enhanced interrogation helped identify the al Qaeda leader's location, the Attorney General of the United States, Eric Holder, continues an investigation of the CIA operatives (who carried out the helpful interrogation techniques) to determine whether there were any violations of law in the use of enhanced interrogation techniques. When Obama visited Ground Zero yesterday to meet with the families of the 9/11 victims, the sister of one of the airline pilots whose hijacked airliner was flown into the Twin Towers, asked the President if he would give Holder any new views on the appropriateness of the CIA interrogation investigation. Obama answered "No" and walked away.

One of the detainees who gave information that helped identify the al Qaeda courier who lived at the walled compound where bin Laden had been hiding for years was Hassan Ghul, who was captured in Iraq in 2004. Obama has criticized the war in Iraq as being unnecessary in the war against al Qaeda; yet without that war, this critical piece of information from Hassan Ghul may not have been obtained. As many in the White House team involved in planning the mission to terminate bin Laden's life have stated, the intelligence obtained and used to locate the terrorist mastermind was a "mosaic" of data gathered through a variety of sources and means.

The "mosaic" of data was obtained through a range of intelligence and military operations that allowed the capture of many operatives in terrorist networks who could contribute information to the intelligence "mosaic" that led to bin Laden. The war in Iraq was part of that range of actions. Just as the enhanced interrogations of detainees in undisclosed locations, the war in Iraq was started by President Bush and criticized by Democrats, including Candidate Obama, for years.

The team that carried out the bold mission in Pakistan on Sunday night was the elite counterterrorism unit, known as the Joint Special Operations Team headed by Vice Admiral William McRaven, a Navy SEAL himself. President Obama went to Fort Campbell, Kentucky today to congratulate the members of this outstanding team and Admiral McRaven for their brave mission in the war on global terrorism.

However, when George W. Bush was President, this same outstanding team of military professionals was seen by the liberal media as a threat to the US rather than a critical part of the apparatus to protect Americans and US national security. Two years ago, shortly after Barack Obama was inaugurated, New York Times investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, who has written many books about government scandals, said at a forum at the University of Minnesota, at which former Vice President Walter Mondale also appeared:

"Right now, today, there was a story in the New York Times that if you read it carefully mentioned something known as the Joint Special Operations Command -- JSOC it’s called. It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently. They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. They did not report to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff or to Mr. [Robert] Gates, the secretary of defense...."

Of course, we now know that the JSOC reports directly to President Obama in the current Administration, and no one has been heard to criticize this special operations team this week; not even in the New York Times!

It is clear that in the liberal media and Eric Holder's Justice Department anything that took place in the Executive branch of the federal government before January 20, 2009 for the purpose of national security was of questionable legality, but, when the same actions are taken now in the age of Obama, they are perfectly acceptable and even praiseworthy. Obama has even gone further in the pursuit of the war on terror by authorizing a mission that resulted in the execution of an unarmed man without trial in the presence of women and children. Now I don't disagree with that action at all. But if it had taken place during the Bush Presidency, liberals throughout the land (along with those Muslims and European liberals now making this argument about Obama) would be calling it a war crime (in the extreme) and an impeachable offense (in the least).

What happened to the call for national unity? I'm in favor of judging actions to successfully defend our country by the same standards regardless of who is in office. Sphere: Related Content