“Men sleep peacefully in their beds at night because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.” – George Orwell
Can it be that the same United States that honored Col. Paul Tibbets and put his Enola Gay, which dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, on display in its Air and Space Museum is going to prosecute a CIA agent for faking an execution and threatening, but never intending, to kill the children of Khalid Sheik Muhammad?
According to The Washington Times, which reviewed the newly declassified CIA documents, those interrogators “produced life-saving intelligence that disrupted numerous terrorist plots.”
They elicited the names of al-Qaida agents who planned anthrax attacks on Westerners and a massive bombing of Camp Lemonier, the U.S. base in East Africa. They got the names of 70 recruits al-Qaida deemed “suitable for Western attacks” and of the men who made the bomb used on the U.S. consulate in Karachi.
Iyman Faris, an al-Qaeda sleeper agent and truck driver in Ohio, is serving 20 years because of information the CIA got from KSM and associates. Other operations aborted include al-Qaida “plots to fly airliners into buildings on the West Coast, setting off bombs in U.S. cities and planning to employ a network of Pakistanis to target gas stations, railroad tracks and the Brooklyn Bridge.”
Krauthammer’s right about the trial lawyers owning the Democrats, but not so much on Dean. Dean did speak honestly about not wanting to make enemies of the trial lawyers, but not completely honestly. ObamaCare didn’t avoid tort reform out of concern of making too many enemies; it avoided tort reform because Democrats oppose tort reform altogether, and not just in the context of health-care reform. Trial lawyers indeed own the Democratic Party, which is why we’re not seeing tort reform now, and why we won’t see it in the future as long as Democrats control Congress.
Former Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean, a medical doctor who served as governor of Vermont, said at a town hall meeting on Tuesday night that Democrats in Congress did not include tort reform in the health care bill because they were fearful of “taking on†the trial lawyers.
“This is the answer from a doctor and a politician,†said Dean. “Here is why tort reform is not in the bill. When you go to pass a really enormous bill like that the more stuff you put in, the more enemies you make, right? And the reason why tort reform is not in the bill is because the people who wrote it did not want to take on the trial lawyers in addition to everybody else they were taking on, and that is the plain and simple truth. Now, that’s the truth.â€
It wouldn’t be because of all that money that is donated to the Democrats by trial lawyers, would it?
As President Obama makes perfectly clear, ” …if we’re able to get something right, like Medicare, then there should be a little more confidence …”
Then, on the other hand points out, “Medicare and Medicaid are on an unsustainable path. Medicare is slated to go into the red in about eight to ten years. I don’t know if people are aware of that. If I was a senior citizen the thing I’d be worried about right now is Medicare starts running out of money because we haven’t done anything to make sure we are getting a good bang for our buck …”
Those Facebook pages she’s tossing around like ninja throwing stars are eloquent proof that no one has the right to pat Sarah Palin on the head and send her out of the room, while the grown-ups settle down to serious talk. She isn’t just writing snarky rants. She’s providing both devastatingly effective criticism, and substantial policy alternatives. It’s fairly obvious the White House paid a great deal of attention to her infamous “death panel†column. I haven’t seen that many people turned into nervous wrecks by Facebook since the last time the “Mafia Wars†servers went down.
The death panel doesn’t have to take the form of nine robed Sith Lords, stamping your grandmothers’ termination orders with a giant red skull, then handing them to a ghoul in surgical scrubs. It will be no less deadly if it consists of thousands of faceless government drones in cubicles, processing Quality of Life spreadsheets and crossing out the unlucky Social Security numbers with pink highlighter pens. In fact, my only quibble with Palin’s prediction is that, given the style of the current Administration, it is much more likely that we’ll have a Death Czar. Using the same Noonan-swooning judgment that gave us a tax cheat for Treasury Secretary, Obama will appoint a serial killer to the position. The Death Czar’s first official act will be spending $2 billion in taxpayer dollars to hire a Brazilian company, which will extract organs from Americans after they receive their end-of-life counseling, then ship them overseas for use in foreign patients.