TWO AMERICA'S ???

nobody@vox.com(joezsgopamerica) — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 13:40:48 -0700

Two Americas
By Cliff May
Thursday, March 13, 2008

Read Article & Comments (44) Trackbacks Post Your Comments

Al-Qaeda and other militant Islamist groups live in a shadow world where they plot to kill you and me. If we expect our intelligence professionals to prevent them from succeeding, we must give them the tools required to get the job done.

But in recent days, Democratic leaders in the House of Representatives have not been providing those tools. They’ve been taking them away. There are rank-and-file Democrats who think this is wrong – but in an election year few have been bold enough to dissent loudly or clearly.

CIA Director Lt. Gen. Michael Hayden testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, Feb. 5, 2008, before a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on world threats. (AP Photo/Kevin Wolf)

VIDEO: Criminal Probe Opened Over CIA Tapes

It doesn’t take Jack Bauer to understand: One way to gather useful intelligence on terrorism is by interrogating captured terrorists. Torture is illegal – in all cases without exception. But short of torture are a variety of interrogation techniques that seek to elicit information by inflicting stress and duress; by rewarding cooperation and punishing defiance. Such techniques are aggressive and coercive, to be sure, but they do not necessarily “shock the conscience” -- the commonly agreed definition of torture.

Last week, President Bush was presented with a bill that would have prohibited the CIA from utilizing such methods even in cases involving unlawful combatants believed to have knowledge of imminent terrorist attacks. Instead, the bill would have restricted the CIA to the mild interrogation methods authorized for soldiers in the U.S. Army Field Manual – a document terrorists can access, read and utilize for training purposes.

Bush promptly vetoed the bill, saying it would outlaw techniques that have been used in the past to “prevent a number of attacks.” Among them: assaults against a Marine camp in Djibouti and a U.S. consulate in Pakistan, and plots to fly passenger airplanes into buildings in Los Angeles and London.

The President emphasized that his objection to the bill was “not over any particular interrogation technique; for instance, it is not over waterboarding, which is not part of the current CIA program,” and which the CIA itself banned in 2006 -- having acknowledged that it had used the technique rarely, but successfully; for example on Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the architect of the 9/11 attacks.

An attempt this week by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to overturn the President’s veto failed. But Pelosi has continued to block House members from voting on an additional measure – a compromise bill, passed by a bipartisan 68 to 29 majority in the Senate -- to restore to American intelligence agencies the authority they formerly had to monitor foreign terrorist suspects abroad without first demonstrating “probable cause” to a judge -- a difficult standard to meet since many of those planning terrorism have not yet committed any crime.

The bill also would protect telecommunications companies from being sued for billions of dollars by plaintiffs’ lawyers for the “crime” of having cooperated with American intelligence agencies in the aftermath of 9/11/01. The telecoms provided data that could be “mined” for clues of coming attacks.

Although quite a few Democrats in the House apparently would support this commonsense legislation, only a few have been willing to let Speaker Pelosi know, in no uncertain terms, that they want to be allowed to cast their votes.

It’s hard to avoid this conclusion: We are living in what John Edward might call two Americas. In one, are those who think we are fighting a war and better fight hard and well because our enemy is dangerous. In the other, are those who think the “war” against militant Islamism is a figment of the neo-conservative imagination -- hardly worth mentioning.

That’s no exaggeration. Check out the presidential candidates’ websites. On John McCain’s, under “Issues,” you’ll see “National Security,” with a subheading on “Fighting Against Violent Islamic Extremists and Terrorist Tactics,” and prominent mention of “the global war on terrorism” and “threats from rogue states like Iran and North Korea.”

Hillary Clinton’s web site, by contrast, lists 14 issues. Terrorism, national security, the war against Islamist terrorists and even foreign policy are conspicuously absent. Instead there is “Restoring America’s Standing in the World.”

Barack Obama’s web site shows 25 issues – but, again, national security and militant Islamism do not make the cut. Instead, in a section on “Foreign Policy,” he promises to close the terrorist detention facility in Guantanamo (he does not say where the terrorists now housed there would go), and “lead the world to combat the common threats of the 21st century: nuclear weapons and terrorism; climate change and poverty; genocide and disease.”

Obama does assert that he will “finish the fight against al-Qaeda.” He does not specify what weapons he will use to get that job done. Apparently, however, he doesn’t believe a robust intelligence gathering capability need be among them.

>>>>> The only people in the world who do not want us to be able to spy on the MUSLIM TERRORIST and all other evil scumbags,, are the LIBERAL DEMOCRATS in congress and all the communist countries who support the muslim terrorist and to see AMERICA destroyed<<<<<<<<<<

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Al "Scum Bag" Gore

nobody@vox.com(joezsgopamerica) — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 18:34:52 -0800





Date:	Fri 03/07/08 04:12 PM

Attachments

Name	Type	Save	View
Message	text/html	Save

Breaking from Newsmax.com

Gore to Rake in IPO Millions

Former Vice President and global warming crusader Al Gore stands to make close to $50 million when the TV channel he co-founded goes public with an Initial Public Offering.

Current TV, which debuted in August 2005, has been billed as “television for the Internet generation" of tech-savvy 18-to-34-year-olds, and allows viewers to contribute much of its content.

Story continues below . . .

But it currently is available in only about 19 million U.S. homes, and has lost $31.5 million over the last three years, Ron Grover discloses in BusinessWeek.

Current Media, Current TV’s parent company, hopes to raise $100 million in a public offering it filed on Jan. 28. Some of the money raised will go to lenders, who include a few major Democratic Party fundraisers.

“Something about this deal just doesn’t sit right with me,” Grover observes.

He notes that Gore and co-founder Joel Hyatt not only will take “piles of cash,” but they also collect “hefty salaries for a company that hasn’t shown a profit in three years — taking down $491,677 apiece last year in cash.”

Gore and Hyatt also collected $550,000 bonuses for, in Gore’s case, helping get the company new affiliate agreements and putting together a management team. The two currently receive $600,000 a year in salary and can collect additional bonuses.

“What really sticks out to me,” Grover writes, is that Gore and Hyatt, “who jumpstarted the company with a broken-down Newsworld International channel they bought for $70.9 million, will have the kind of hammer-lock control over the company decried by shareholder rights activists and many of the same unions that supported Gore for years.”

Gore and Hyatt will control all of the company’s B shares, which give them 10 votes for every vote of a common shareholder with a Class A share, according to the filing.

The company hasn’t yet set a price per share for its IPO, but Grover cites one estimate of between $13 and $15 per share, making Gore’s 3.7 million shares worth more than $48 million.

Al Gore = Pure Scum liberal dirt bagssssssssssssssss

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

joezsgopamerica’s blog

TWO AMERICA'S ???

Al "Scum Bag" Gore