The New York Daily News reported last night (Thursday, 1/29/2010):

The White House ordered the Justice Department Thursday night to consider other places to try the 9/11 terror suspects after a wave of opposition to holding the trial in lower Manhattan.

The dramatic turnabout came hours after Mayor Bloomberg said he would “prefer that they did it elsewhere” and then spoke to Attorney General Eric Holder.

Well, the dam appears to be breaking on ostensibly what is the easiest of the “Jack Bauer War” issues facing the Obama Administration: that is, where to try KSM.  I say “ostensibly” because the matter of where to try KSM will not be as easy it may seem.

All this being said, there are all sorts of conflicting stories about whether or not this will happen.  See Jack Foster’s piece at NRO.

According to the Daily News’ account four options are being considered – all in New York State:  1) Governors Island (near Manhattan and Brooklyn); 2) West Point, N.Y. (U.S. Military Academy); 3) Newburgh, N.Y. (Stewart Air National Guard Base); and 4) Otisville, NY (Federal Correction Institution).

Why won’t this be so easy?  First, leaving aside Governor’s Island, these communities will go crazy in opposition.  Even Governor’s Island may not leave New Yorkers feeling warm and fuzzy.  Second, a civilian trial will still be a disaster.  Think Slobodan Milošević turning the Hague into a circus for a year.  Enormous damage will be done to the national security.  Third, the cost will still be enormous.  Fourth, what civilian will risk his or his family’s well-being to sit on the jury?  Can the jurors identity be protected?

I guess the good news is that they can always move the trial back to Guantanamo.  Didn’t KSM already plead guilty before a military commission down there and ask to be executed?  Oh, I forgot, he was given the mass-murdering-jihadist-criminal-procedure-do-over-and-mulligan.

So, how long does Eric Holder have left as Attorney General?

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A few weeks ago I had a truly edifying conversation with a Mrs. Slyvia Slifko, who helped to found Image Clear Ultrasound (ICU) in Akron, Ohio.

In 2004, after working for a number of years in a pregnancy resource center, Sylvia wanted to offer pregnant mothers considering abortion the opportunity to see their developing baby in ultrasound. Recognizing that location was critical Sylvia hoped to find an RV or van for a mobile sonogram unit. In a very short period of time and thanks to a generous donor, a number of pieces came together to make Sylvia’s hope a reality, including the purchase an RV, a sonogram machine, and the help of a retired MD and part-time Sonographer.

Since that time ICU has enabled women who don’t have access to sonograms but do have questions about the life in their womb this priceless opportunity, for free. In the process, as many as 1500 abortions have been averted.  To hear this inspiring story in her own words, listen to Sylvia’s interview on FRC’s weekly radio show.

And to learn more about Sylvia’s work or how you to do similar work in your locality, visit her website.

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My good friend Tom McClusky had the wit and the heart to remind us all of Ronald Reagan’s speech on the occasion of the Challenger disaster in 1986. Tom circulated the video clip of Reagan speaking to the nation that very night.

The morning had been clear and cold–in Washington as it was in Florida. I was working at the U.S. Department of Education then. We were all watching on TV as the rocket launched the Space Shuttle into the skies over Cape Kennedy. We were more interested in this flight than in many shuttle flights because a teacher was on board. In fact, we had seen Krista McAuliffe and her fellow astronauts in the elevators of F.O.B. 6–our department’s office building. That’s because NASA occupied the top three floors of our building.

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OK. I’ll admit it. I skipped the President’s State of the Union Address last night. It’s not the first time I’ve done that. Since I have to be up before five to get to the pool on time, I decided not to lose sleep over Barack Obama. And, with the wonders of technology, I knew I could get it all online. Which I did, over a strong cup of morning coffee.

I managed to see Justice Alito mouthing the words—simply not true when the President totally mischaracterized the Supreme Court’s latest ruling on free speech and campaign finance. Alito was so right. His silent dissent thundered through the House Chamber. If this President is going to make a charade of the State of the Union, there are obviously others skilled at the game of charades, too. How proud I am that I worked to get him confirmed.

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A new report published online in Nature describes how Stanford scientists turned mouse skin cells directly into nerve cells, without any intermediate stem cell step. Starting with mouse skin cells in the lab dish, they added three nerve-specific genes using viruses. According to senior author Marius Wernig, the “induced neuronal cells” are fully functional.

“We actively and directly induced one cell type to become a completely different cell type. These are fully functional neurons. They can do all the principal things that neurons in the brain do. That includes making connections with and signaling to other nerve cells.”

Wernig’s group took a page from Yamanaka’s book in discovering the right mix of factors to add. They started with 19 genes expressed in neural tissue, testing various 5-gene and 3-gene sets until finally narrowing down to just three genes that worked to convert the skin fibroblasts to neurons. The change took a week with an efficiency of almost 20 percent, faster and better than the reprogramming seen with iPS cells. Wernig said:

“We were very surprised by both the timing and the efficiency. This is much more straightforward than going through iPS cells, and it’s likely to be a very viable alternative. That means reprogramming doesn’t only go backward, but can occur in any direction. If you extrapolate from this, you could probably turn any cell in your body into any other cell if you just know the right factors.”

Wernig and his colleagues are now trying to do the same direct reprogramming with human cells and Stanford has applied for a patent on the process.

In 2008, Doug Melton’s team at Harvard used a similar technique to directly reprogram adult mouse pancreas cells, turning them into insulin-secreting beta cells. That cell reprogramming was accomplished within the bodies of the mice by infecting their pancreas with viruses containing three transcription factors; the newly-formed beta cells could ameliorate hypoglycemia in the mice. In his Nature paper, Melton noted that the new direct reprogramming method

“suggests a general paradigm for directing cell reprogramming without reversion to a pluripotent stem cell state.”

Commenting on the latest Stanford results, Melton thought it was a major advance because it used cells that could be easily obtained from a person, and takes a more direct route to changing cells than Yamanaka’s iPS cell method, which creates undifferentiated embryonic-like stem cells.

“Instead of trying to turn them back into pluripotent stem cells and then make those into differentiated cells, he’s short- circuiting that process and saying let’s go right from one readily available cell to another cell of interest.”

Perhaps the most significant fact is that the cells make the change without first becoming a pluripotent type of stem cell, like an embryonic stem cell. Given that pluripotent stem cells are notoriously difficult to control, bypassing that step with direct reprogramming becomes an extremely attractive method to transform cells.

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There were times during last night’s speech when reality seemed suspended: The President’s evident sincerity and earnestness were undermined by the caustic laughter that occasionally greeted his comments.  At other times, silence met his words.  And, in media theory courses across the land, analyses will be done of the number of times he looked to the Republican side of the aisle – he seemed far more concerned with the GOP responses to his remarks than those of his own party.  Maybe the spectre of another Joe Wilson moment (“You lie!”) had him jumpy.

More seriously, I wonder if his desperation to be liked is compelling him to try to woo his skeptics.  Of course, he won’t succeed.

It is hard not to like President Obama, at least the persona he projects in such settings as the State of the Union Address.  He seems so reasonable.

Yet his policies are those of a man of the Left.  It is as though he believes empathy is a substitute for substantive compromise, or that by virtue of patiently listening he can lull his opponents into political somnolence.

The speech, like the Obama presidency, was interwoven with unintended ironies:

** Mr. Obama calls for unity and patriotic oneness but simultaneously calls for open homosexuality in the military in a time of war.  He knows this will go nowhere, but throws the political bone to the homosexual lobby anyway.  Why?  Because he can say he tried (placating a key part of his base) while bearing no real consequence (the measure lifting the ban on gays in the military won’t succeed and so, given the relative inattention of the American people to this issue in a time of economic
crisis, there will little political price to pay for Democrats in November).

** He insists on taxpayer-subsidized abortion, resists litigation limits against health care providers and persists on wanting to micro-manage Americans’ medical care but urges Republicans to share with him their ideas about health reform – as though they have not already done so myriad times!

** He is all over the map on taxes, calls for yet another commission on entitlement reform (as if the several essential steps were not obvious, especially after many other such reform bills, panels, studies, commissions, select committees, etc.) and rewrites the economic history of the past decade — and does so with such seeming intensity that one wants to join him in the land of political make-believe.

The President needs to come to terms with some basic realities: People aren’t stupid.  Politicians aren’t children.  Civility doesn’t mean acquiescence.  And facts are stubborn things.

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Washington, D.C. – Family Research Council President Tony Perkins released the following statement in response to President Obama’s first State of the Union Address:

“At a time of enormous economic challenge, two on-going wars in which Americans are fighting and increased terrorist threats to Americans at home, President Obama seems untethered from that reality as he called on Congress to force the military to allow open homosexuality. As a veteran of the Marine Corps, the timing of the President’s call in the midst of two wars shows that he is willing to jeopardize our nation’s security to advance the agenda of the radical homosexual lobby.

“The military is a warrior culture for a reason: Our service members wear the uniform to fight and win wars, not serve as liberal social policy guinea pigs. The sexual environment the President is seeking to impose upon the young men and women who serve this country is the antithesis of the successful warfighting culture and as such should be rejected.

“Tonight the President also proposed expanding the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit which would only benefit families if: both parents work, a single parent works, or one parent works and the other is in school. In other words, it completely discriminates against families with stay-at-home parents, who wouldn’t see a penny from this plan. The President’s plan further drives a wedge between parents and children as it would encourage parents to place their children in government approved day-care rather than encouraging one parent to stay home and personally care for their off-spring.

“This new socialized child care proposal comes on the heels of a proposed major marriage tax penalty included within the President’s health care bills. A tax penalty on married couples only serves to discourage couples from marrying while encouraging societal instability through cohabitation and divorce.

“If this administration cared about getting families back on their feet, it would double or triple the across-the-board child tax credit and let parents decide how to spend the money. For many, it may be all the incentive they need to stay home and care for their kids.

“We applaud Governor Bob McDonnell for calling for a land in which ‘innocent human life is protected.’ There is no more innocent life than that which is carried in a mother’s womb, and the Governor’s call is not only right in itself but is also clearly in line with the convictions of the American people, who overwhelmingly oppose the President’s proposal to use our hard earned dollars to pay for abortion coverage in his health reform plan.

“Family Research Council pledges to work with our allies and the thousands of families we represent to oppose the President’s plans to socialize child care, sexualize the military, and penalize married couples through a government takeover of the U.S. health care system.”

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Here are some of the scenes from last week’s March for Life.

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This is the second video in our four part series.

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Last week I wrote a blog post on Barack Obama’s conduct in what I called “Jack Bauer’s War.”  That is the war being conducted directly against the jihadists.  In the week since then we have discovered more disturbing information about the Obama administration’s performance in this conflict.  For example, Jeffrey Kuhner of the Washington Times asserted on his weekday radio show that it is now well-known that the underwear bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, was questioned for only 50 minutes before he was read his Miranda rights.  This is true.  See the Wall Street Journal article affirming these facts.

I argued that these “Jack Bauer” war issues are a political acid that are badly damaging Barack Obama and the Democratic Party.

The national security issue has been mentioned as one that Scott Brown ran on but MSM reporting has not placed it as a first-tier issue in Massachusetts.  However, in Jamie Glazov’s interview with national security attorney and former prosecutor, Andy McCarthy, in Frontpage Magazine, we read the following (my emphasis):

McCarthy: …. The Brown campaign’s internal polling told them something very interesting.  While it’s true that healthcare is what nationalized the election and riveted everyone’s attention to it, it was the national security issues that put real distance between the two candidates in the mind of the electorate—in blue Massachusetts of all places. Sen.-elect Brown was able to speak forcefully and convincingly on issues like treating our jihadist enemies as combatants rather than mere defendants, about killing terrorists and preventing terrorism rather than contenting ourselves with prosecutions after Americans have been killed, about tough interrogation when necessary to save innocent lives.  Martha Coakley, by contrast, had to try to defend the indefensible, which is Obama-style counterterrorism.  It evidently made a huge difference to voters.

Similarly, the brilliant American-Israeli columnist for the Jerusalem Post, Caroline Glick, picked up on this as well.  She made note of Robert Costa’s National Review interview (1/19/2010) with Eric Fehrnstrom, the Brown campaign’s senior strategist.  Fehrnstrom made the following points about the national security issue:

On the issues, “people talk about the potency of the health-care issue, but from our own internal polling, the more potent issue here in Massachusetts was terrorism and the treatment of enemy combatants,” says Fehrnstrom. Health care, he says, was helpful in fundraising, but it was the campaign’s focus on national security in the final week that he believes helped to give voters another issue to associate with Brown…. (2^nd paragraph from bottom)

Wow.  KSM’s trial in NYC; the undie bomber trial’s in Detroit; moving / releasing Gitmo prisoners.  These are wounds that won’t stop bleeding.

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In the latest Mapping America, always-intact married adults are less likely than married, previously divorced adults and unmarried adults to report that they sometimes drink too much alcohol.

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That day—22 January 1973–was a day very much like today, cold, gray, threatening. I was walking around the House Office Buildings, hunting for a job. The previous November, I had been defeated for the State Assembly in New York. I hadn’t wanted to campaign on abortion one way or the other, but I couldn’t avoid it. After anguishing over my decision for weeks, I came out strongly anti-abortion. Immediately, the $25,000 promised to my struggling campaign—a huge sum in those days—was withheld by the New York State Democratic Party. Although I never met him, I was told that Harold Ickes, Jr. had made the decision. “We’re not going to have anyone in the Democratic Party who is anti-abortion,” he was quoted as saying. With that, I lost the race that was said to be a sure thing.

Job-hunting for an anti-abortion Democrat wasn’t easy then. It’s not easy now. Then, in the midst of my search came the thunderous news—the U.S. Supreme Court had struck down the abortion laws of all fifty states.

Broke, unemployed, I could not have been more dejected. With the Court’s radical ruling, I thought it would be this way forever. In my experience, no one—at least no one who was not a segregationist—had spoken out against a ruling of the Supreme Court. We had been schooled to believe that the Supreme Court had the final word.

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For those who enjoy going to the movies but want a film that digs deeper into the soul than the pocketbook, the inspiring Christian film To Save a Life opens in theatres today.

High schooler Jake Taylor has it all—basketball stardom, perfect girlfriend, college scholarship, but an old friend’s suicide forces him to discover what he truly values and believes. The film also deals with abortion in a dramatic and touching way, a fitting reminder of what we are fighting for on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade.

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Is the unborn child a human life? President Reagan used to say if you were in doubt whether a body you found on the sidewalk was dead or alive, you would never just assume it was dead.

President Obama, by contrast, famously answered Rev. Rick Warren’s question about when the unborn child begins to have human and civil rights by saying “that question is above my pay grade.” But Mr. Obama’s policies all assume the body on the sidewalk is dead.

There’s yet another thing you will never learn reading the papers about Roe. Just where were those abortion laws of the fifty states that were struck down by the Supreme Court that dread day? They were not in the family law codes. Nor in the child custody codes. Not in the medical licensing statutes.

The abortion laws of the fifty states were typically found in the “Homicide” sections.

No state made abortion a homicide in the first degree (“pre-meditated murder,” to most of

us lay people.) This may have been due to wise 19^th century state lawmakers who did not want to prosecute women. And it may have taken account of the difficulty of obtaining convictions where the evidence of the unborn child’s body was hard to find.

Still, that these laws were homicide laws tells you volumes. Some of our younger pro-life friends believe that the Court could not have known about the humanity of the unborn child in 1973. Not so. Yes, we know so very much more now. Yes, we have 4D ultra-sound that we did not have then.

But they knew in 1973. Everyone knew. I recall sitting in the Catholic hospital where my mother worked in the late 1960s. Across from me in the waiting room was an expectant  Filipino woman. She could hardly speak English, but she wore a tee shirt with an arrow pointing down at her tummy. The tee shirt said: “Baby.” Everyone knew what that meant.

The state lawmakers knew as early as 1857, when science discovered that human life begins at conception. And every accurate scientific and medical textbook since has acknowledged this inescapable but, to politicians like Al Gore, inconvenient truth:
“The chromosomes of the oocyte and sperm are…respectively enclosed within female and male pronuclei. These pronuclei fuse with each other to produce the single, diploid, 2N nucleus of the fertilized zygote. This moment of zygote formation may be taken as the beginning or zero time point of embryonic development.”
[Larsen, William J. Human Embryology. 2nd edition. New York: Churchill Livingstone, 1997, p. 17]

President Obama: I have the honor to present to you the human oocyte and sperm. And they didn’t even have to crash your White House dinner. I was introduced to them in high school biology. Sir, I wanted you to meet them.

Since the public has been deliberately misled about Roe v. Wade, it will be necessary to educate people about it. That’s why, when confronted with insistent media questions on “overturning” Roe v. Wade, I hope the pro-life community will resolutely respond:

Roe overturned all fifty state laws that protected unborn children and their mothers. Roe needs to be corrected.

“Overturn” is what happens to SUVs in a ditch. “Overturn” is radical and dangerous. The American people are inherently conservative and reflexively reject that which is radical and dangerous. Liberal activists and journalists know this. That’s why they always frame every question about abortion—or at least the ones they lob at pro-life candidates—in terms of “overturning” Roe.

They know what they are doing. Shouldn’t we?

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Spanish scientists report use of adult stem cells to treat corneal blindness. The University Institute of Applied Oftal-molecular Biology in Valladolid, and the Institute of Genetic and Molecular Biology, report a positive result in 90% of patients who have undergone the new treatment. Patients receive transplants of adult stem cells to regenerate the cornea. The doctors note that as many as 88,000 people in Spain could benefit from this adult stem cell treatment. They also say that applying this technique for various types of blindness could reduce health care costs.

This news from Spain follows a similar report of restoring sight to patients in the U.K. with adult stem cells.

¡Células madre adultas son un gran avance de la medicina!
[Adult stem cells are a great advance for medicine!]

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Here’s the live feed (from 8:30-11:30 a.m.):

For more info, go here.

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The Gallup Company created quite a stir last spring when they announced that, for the first time, a majority (51%) of Americans consider themselves pro-life. We would think, therefore, that a majority would also favor “overturning” Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court ruling that gave us abortion-on-demand. Not necessarily.

First, we must remember that the American people have been misled by the major news media about Roe v. Wade since that dark and dreary day 36 years ago.

The media regularly call Roe a “landmark decision.” Landmark is a good thing. It connotes something historic and of great weight. You never hear the infamous 1857  Dred Scott ruling that upheld slavery in the territories called “landmark.”

Almost never will a story about Roe include the critique of Yale Law School Dean, John Hart Ely. Prof. Ely, although he favored liberalizing our abortion laws, was unimpressed by the legal reasoning behind Justice Harry Blackmun’s Roe v. Wade ruling: “It is not constitutional law and it gives no impression of an obligation to be constitutional law.” According to Bob Woodruff’s behind-the-scenes book on the Supreme Court, the Justices’ clerks were even more dismissive, calling the opinion “Harry’s abortion.”

Harvard Law Professor Archibald Cox was a friend of the Kennedy family. He, too, was not impressed with the land that Roe was marking:

[Blackmun’s opinion] fails even to consider what I would suppose to be the most important compelling interest of the State in prohibiting abortion: the interest in maintaining that respect for the paramount sanctity of human life which has always been at the centre of Western civilization, not merely by guarding life itself, however defined, but by safeguarding the penumbra, whether at the beginning, through some overwhelming disability of mind or body, or at death.

Continuing to blast Roe, Cox wrote:

The failure to confront the issue in principled terms leaves the opinion to read like a set of hospital rules and regulations, whose validity is good enough this week but will be destroyed with new statistics upon the medical risks of child-birth and abortion or new advances in providing for the separate existence of a fetus. . . . Neither historian, nor layman, nor lawyer will be persuaded that all the prescriptions of Justice Blackmun are part of the Constitution.

President Kennedy’s appointee to the Supreme Court, Justice Byron R. “Whizzer” White was one of two votes against Roe on January 22, 1973, and faithfully ever after. Justice White condemned the ruling as an example of “raw judicial power.”

But the media, in their worshipful treatment of Roe, rarely include such comments. Nor do they remind Americans that Roe was so radical it overturned the abortion laws of all fifty states. Even the most liberal state laws on abortion—like those of New York, Washington, California, and Colorado—were overturned by Roe’s yet more radical rule.

Further, the media regularly report that the Supreme Court “legalized abortion in the first trimester of pregnancy.” That’s true, but misleading.

Yes, the Court made abortion legal in the first trimester (three months), but it also so strictly limited the protections a state might afford to unborn children after the first trimester as to effectively give us abortion-on-demand until birth. (And, in some horrific cases, even after birth.)

Describing Roe this way is like describing Hitler’s blitzkrieg in Western Europe like this:

“German forces today overran Belgium and Luxemburg.” Surely they did. But they also simultaneously invaded France!

In practice, Roe legalized abortion in all three trimesters. This makes U.S. abortion law more radical than any other advanced democracy.

So the public has been consistently misinformed about the radical nature of Roe v. Wade.

But it is also misinformed about the reasons given for most abortions. Well over 90% of abortions are done today–and have been done since 1973 for reasons that the American people do not support–reasons of financial hardship or emotional distress.

Liberal Boston Globe columnist Ellen Goodman, who retired earlier this year, famously wrote that the three reasons for abortion are “rape, incest, and me.” She was candidly admitting that pro-abortion groups use the horrors of rape and incest to conceal their true agenda: abortion-on-demand.

The numbers of abortions are typically reported in decimal form—1.2 million. Cynical Communist dictator Joe Stalin said it: “A single death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic.” He should know. By not reporting the annual deaths from abortion as 1,200,000, or the total since Roe was issued as 49,000,000, the press collaborates in minimizing the impact.

By way of comparison, America’s Civil War claimed the lives of 630,000 young men, World War II cost us 424,000. Is there any other way to assess the gravity of a war? The worst riots? The worst flood? The worst earthquake? They’re judged by the numbers of human lives they take.

(continued in Part II)

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Tomorrow from 8:30-11:30 a.m., Blogs for Life will be taking place at the Family Research Council. This year’s lineup provides some amazing speakers, who will be talking about advancing the pro-life message through new media, in addition to hearing about some emerging technologies.

Here’s the schedule and you can still register by going here.

Schedule

8:30 – 8:35a Jill Stanek, emcee introduction

8:35 – 8:45a Kristen Day, Democrats for Life

9:05 – 9:20a PANEL: “Hosting a winning pro-life blog,” American Life League’s Katie Walker and ALL’s Pro-life Blog Contest winners

9:20 – 9:33a Carol Clews, Executive Director, Center for Pregnancy Concerns, Baltimore, Md.

9:33 – 9:35a Kristin Hansen, VP of Communications, Care Net

9:35 – 9:45a Marjorie Dannenfelser, President, Susan B. Anthony List

9:45 – 10:05a Rep. Todd Akin, R-Mo.

10:05 – 10:15a Break

10:15 – 10:25a Charmaine Yoest, Ph.D, President and CEO, Americans United for Life

10:25 – 10:45a Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio

10:45 – 11:05a PANEL: Emerging Online Technologies, Molotov Mitchell,Illuminati Pictures; Peter Shinn, President, Pro-Life Unity; Founder, Blogs for Life; Krystle Weeks, Web Editor, Family Research Council

11:05 – 11:15a David Prentice, Ph.D, Senior Fellow for Life Sciences, FRC, StemCellResearchFacts.org

11:15 – 11:30a Tony Perkins, President, Family Research Council

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I follow national security news stories pretty closely, but I have to admit to being shocked by Human Events magazine’s publication of an excerpt from a new book.  It is Courting Disaster: How the CIA Kept America Safe and How Barack Obama Is Inviting the Next Attack, by Marc Thiessen.  Thiessen was a top speechwriter for President George W. Bush.  For that reason he had access to very highly classified national security documents and information.

One excerpt about information gathered from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (“KSM”) is astounding, mind-boggling:

[KSM’s] resistance is described by one senior American official as “superhuman.”  Eventually, however, the techniques work….

He begins telling his CIA de-briefers about active al Qaeda plots to launch attacks against the United States and other Western targets  He holds classes for CIA officials, using a chalkboard to draw a picture of al Qaeda’s operating structure, financing, communications, and logistics.  He identifies al Qaeda travel routes and safe havens, and helps intelligence officers make sense of documents and computer records seized in terrorist raids.   He identifies voices in intercepted telephone calls, and helps officials understand the meaning of coded terrorist communications.  He provides information that helps our intelligence community capture other high-ranking terrorists,

KSM’s questioning, and that of other captured terrorists, produces more than 6,000 intelligence reports, which are shared across the intelligence community, as well as with our allies across the world.

Perhaps I’ve been under a rock, but I never heard these details before.  I assume they are correct.

Some of the KSM information appears to have foiled an August 2006 plot to destroy seven airliners flying across the Atlantic from London-Heathrow in a revised version of KSM’s failed 1994-1995 Bojinka operation.

Top CIA officials are clear that the enhanced interrogation methods in the Bush counter-terrorism program were essential to obtaining extremely valuable, life-saving information. According to Thiessen, Obama shut the program down within 48 hours of assuming office when he signed Executive Order 13491.  That order allowed only interrogation techniques permitted in the U.S. Army Field Manual 2 22.3.  The manual does not permit water boarding, for example.

The Left and President Obama have completely misread the desires of the American people on this matter.  I put it this way:  Jack Bauer – Yes; Nation Building – No.  That is, the American people want to fight the jihadists in any manner necessary to kill and defeat them anywhere in the world.  They have never waivered on this principle, and that includes keeping Guantanamo prison open in Cuba.  It also means keeping it filled.  That said, the American people have never been keen on protracted wars of attrition, counter-insurgency, and/or nation-building – see, Iraq and Afghanistan.

To be fair, President Obama may have been fooled by John McCain’s idiosyncratic positions on interrogations and Gitmo.  I mean idiosyncratic for a Republican.  Inside the GOP there are very few people who agree with McCain on either position.

That said, the Obama Administration clearly does not understand how Americans feel about Jack Bauer’s War.  Consequently, its behavior after capturing the underwear bomber left bare a policy which American’s deem to be ill-advised and dangerous.  Instead of treating Flight 253’s Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab as an enemy combatant, Obama/Holder have decided to try him in federal courts.  After singing for a mere six hours, Abdulmutallab was given a lawyer and has stopped talking.  Now he’s negotiating with prosecutors.

Look above at Thiessen’s quote and think about the information that would have been lost had KSM only talked to us for six hours.  Seven planes lost over the Atlantic?  That’s a pretty high price to pay for adherence to glib liberalism.

This is a public opinion cancer that will not go away for the administration.  The KSM trial in New York City may decimate the Democrat Party in that State, and it will go on for months and years.  Now there will be a trial in Detroit for Abdulmutallab.  And, heaven forbid, that an actual attack on the United States or Americans overseas succeeds.  Obama would be finished instantaneously.  Every Gitmo prisoner brought to the United States will constitute a new crisis.

Therefore, it is completely unsurprising that Scott Brown, the senator-elect from Massachusetts, was able to pound Martha Coakley on this point.  Brown is a USAF reserve JAG officer who was able to hammer away at the Dem’s soft position on terrorism.  This he succeeded in doing even in ultra-liberal Massachusetts.

In sum, while we are correct in focusing on the health care legislation as the core political issue at present.  I would argue that the Obama Administration’s foreign policy and national security strategy are hurting it and doing so at an increasing rate of damage with the passage of time.

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