Freedom Line Blog

In this week’s Freedom Minute, CFIF’s Renee Giachino discusses the current dysfunction at the CIA, Congress’ political showboating and the need for everyone in Washington to get a lot more serious.

What makes conservatives so sure that the Obama administration will bailout insurance companies losing money under ObamaCare?

“According to a recent investigation conducted by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee chaired by Darrell Issa, insurers widely expect to receive funds from the bailout program,” writes U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL). “One large insurer recently filed financial statements claiming they expect part of their revenue to come from American taxpayers via the ObamaCare bailout ‘fund.’”

Thwarted by the GOP majority in the U.S. House of Representatives who refuse to appropriate money for this part of ObamaCare, the Department of Health and Human Services “figured out a way to use general funds available through the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to pay off health insurers,” says Rubio. “The effect is to circumvent Congress’ power of the purse for the purpose of bailing out health insurers with taxpayer funds.”

Whether it’s the CIA lying about spying on congressional investigators or IRS officials conveniently losing potentially damaging emails, executive branch officials in the Obama administration are destroying the ability of anybody outside their clique from being able to trust anything they say.

Obama’s CIA Director was caught lying to Congress about spying on a Senate investigative committee, and so far it looks like his only punishment will be an apology tour.

In March, CIA Director John Brennan took issue with a line of questioning by U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) alleging that the agency had hacked into a computer system used by Senate investigators. “Nothing could be further from the truth. I mean, we wouldn’t do that,” he said.

His cover blown, Brennan is facing bipartisan calls for his resignation. Despite his earlier claim, the embattled director is hoping his apology will quiet the critics and spare him the same fate as David Petraeus, his predecessor who was hounded from office by revelations of an extra-marital affair.

I’m no fan of firing people to make a point, but one does wonder what Congress could and should do now that the CIA – an executive branch agency – has been shown to be spying on a portion of the legislative branch.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds provides some answers.

“Congress can, of course, charge Brennan with contempt of Congress, or refer him for prosecution under the False Statements Act. But in both cases, the decision to prosecute would be made by Attorney General Eric Holder, who seems to see his role not as administering justice, but as running interference for the Obama administration and protecting its officials from consequences.”

Perhaps better, then, to make the agency as a whole feel the brunt of punishment for acting badly. “Probably the best that Congress can do is to punish the entire CIA by using its budgetary power to make employees’ lives worse: Cutting back on bonuses, raises, conferences, and other perks.”

None of these answers are completely satisfying. Punishing everyone for the misdeeds of a few can be precisely as unjust as the initial bad act. The truth is we want and need competent, honest public servants whose tenure in office won’t trigger massive expenditures of time and money cleaning up their messes. Until the man in the Oval Office sets a better example for following the rule of law, we’ll likely continue to see his subordinates faithlessly executing their duties.

The reason given is that the married general-turned-Director of the CIA had an affair.  That’s horrible.  But if this is a smokescreen to dodge responsibility for the Benghazi fiasco, the story – and David Petraeus’ reputation – will get worse.

Robert Costa at National Review reports that certain members of the Senate GOP sent a letter to President Barack Obama demanding an immediate end to the Justice Department’s politically motivated investigation of CIA interrogators.  I published a column this week concluding that the only reason this nearly two-year travesty is still being funded is because it plays to the president’s liberal base.

The most troubling aspect of the president’s threatened but unlikely prosecutions is that they target interrogators who were acting under authorization from the Justice Department.  The fact that current U.S. Attorney Eric Holder takes a different view than his predecessors John Ashcroft, Alberto Gonzales, and Michael Mukasey is irrelevant.  Prosecuting people for activity that is only determined to be a crime after the fact is a violation of the Constitution’s ex post facto prohibition.

If President Obama really wanted to thread the needle between following the law and pleasing his fellow liberals, he would shut down Holder’s after-the-fact prosecutions and  issue an executive order directing all federal personnel not to use whatever interrogation techniques – enhanced or otherwise – that he deems unacceptable.  That he’s instead choosing to make career civil servants sweat out indictments for doing their job is shameful.

Former Department of Justice official John Yoo is helping set the record straight on how much credit the Obama Administration should be sharing with its predecessor.

Writing in today’s Wall Street Journal, Yoo makes the case that the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound would have been impossible without Bush era policies such as warrantless wiretapping and enhanced interrogation techniques – both critically important to finding the terrorist mastermind.

And the credit-shifting doesn’t stop there.  When asked by NBC News’ Brian Williams whether waterboarding was used to extract information from detainees, CIA chief Leon Panetta evaded answering.

Here’s the relevant excerpt, courtesy of RealClearPolitics:

BRIAN WILLIAMS: I’d like to ask you about the sourcing on the intel that ultimately led to this successful attack. Can you confirm that it was as a result of waterboarding that we learned what we needed to learn to go after bin Laden?

LEON PANETTA: You know Brian, in the intelligence business you work from a lot of sources of information, and that was true here. We had a multiple source — a multiple series of sources — that provided information with regards to this situation. Clearly, some of it came from detainees and the interrogation of detainees. But we also had information from other sources as well. So, it’s a little difficult to say it was due just to one source of information that we got.

WILLIAMS: Turned around the other way, are you denying that waterboarding was in part among the tactics used to extract the intelligence that led to this successful mission?

PANETTA: No, I think some of the detainees clearly were, you know, they used these enhanced interrogation techniques against some of these detainees. But I’m also saying that, you know, the debate about whether we would have gotten the same information through other approaches I think is always going to be an open question.

WILLIAMS: So, finer point, one final time, enhanced interrogation techniques — which has always been kind of a handy euphemism in these post-9/11 years — that includes waterboarding?

PANETTA: That’s correct.

President Barack Obama may not have to defend the chasm between his campaign rhetoric denouncing the Bush Administration’s policies and his use of those same tactics to find and kill bin Laden.  Don’t expect Panetta, his nominee to be the next Secretary of Defense, to be so lucky in his Senate confirmation hearings.

Britain’s Telegraph says General David Petraeus may be nominated to replace CIA Director Leon Panetta, after the latter is tapped to become Secretary of Defense when Robert Gates retires.

If that happens, President Barack Obama will have kept not only former President George W. Bush’s people, but also his rationale for staffing key national security posts.  Gates’ last government job before Defense Secretary was as CIA Director.  Air Force General Michael Hayden led the CIA under Bush before Panetta took over.

Despite his campaign rhetoric, President Obama has continued the war in Afghanistan, and reversed himself on civilian trials for Guantanamo Bay detainees.  Now, it looks like the current president is adopting the staffing rationale of his predecessor too.

Somewhere in Texas, I’m sure former President Bush is flattered.

A parallel alliance between the world’s governing thugs continues to follow a James Bond movie scenario: buffoonish villains pursuing absurdly dramatic evil.  Other than a shared penchant for casual clothing and over-the-top rhetoric, however, there’s nothing funny about the increasingly close alliance between Venezuela, Iran and Russia.

This week, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez is traveling to Russia and Iran to secure cooperation agreements on nuclear enrichment, oil production and other stick-in-the-eye measures to America and its allies.

At some point, Americans will wake up to a clutch of hostile nations that have nuclear weapons in volatile regions.  Hopefully, the Obama Administration is doing much more strategic planning than waiting for a Felix Leiter-type CIA operative to save the day.

With all the attention focused on the aftermath of the Turkish flotilla incident, former CIA Director Jim Woolsey enlarges the picture to encompass Israel’s most lethal foe: Iran.  He pens a sobering essay outlining the similarities between the rise of the Nazis in Germany to the increasing power of Iran’s mullahs.  Both faced restrained opposition from the West due to domestic economic concerns, and elite opinion that a civilized culture cannot produce a totalitarian, neighbor-terrorizing regime.  They’re too smart for that.

Maybe not.  Or rather, perhaps elite opinion shouldn’t run the risk of assuming that all governments represent the will of the people they govern.

So, what’s America to do?  According to Woolsey, there isn’t much time left.

But now, as was the case in the mid-1930s, we may have very little time left. There still may be a chance for the U.S. and at least a few of its allies to do something effective: to impose on Iran crippling economic sanctions orders of magnitude more severe than the modest ones used to date, to provide substantial and effective aid to the Iranian reformers, or otherwise to help bring about a tectonic shift in the nature of the Iranian regime. We may still have an opportunity to keep “engagement” from becoming the “appeasement” of our time, a synonym for “weakness leading to war.” The key determinant is whether our leaders decide to use Chamberlain or Churchill as their model of statesmanship.

Much will hinge on their choice.

Hopefully, President Obama won’t need a Bay of Pigs disaster to serve as a rehearsal for his own Cuban Missile Crisis.

H/T: National Review

Today’s revelation that the Obama Administration is pulling missile defense out of Poland and the Czech Republic reflects a complete ignorance of (or apathy towards) the point that I made in yesterday’s post — that the Western commitment to collective security in Eastern Europe has made the continent (and the world) a safer and freer place.

It also reflects a total strategic miscalculation. The oldest con in international diplomacy is to get an adversary to give up something tangible today for an abstract promise tomorrow (see “Land for Peace”). The notion that Russia will be of more assistance in sanctioning the Iranians (and the broader idea that sanctions will have any serious effect) ignores a question that the self-proclaimed realists in the Obama Administration have somehow overlooked. Why is it in Russia’s interest to play ball when they’re currently getting major concessions from the U.S. at no cost?

Though it’s been overshadowed by the healthcare debate, the last month or so of the Obama Administration has been its absolute worst for foreign policy. We’ve agreed to one-on-one talks with North Korea (with the laughable goal of getting back to the six party talks — you know, the ones we had before we agreed to one-on-one talks?), decided to pursue prosecutions of CIA interrogators, announced that Iran likely already has the ability to build nuclear weapons, seen the White House put political pressure on General McChrystal to keep from requesting more troops in Afghanistan, and imposed a foolish tire tariff that’s threatening a trade war with China.

The President can get away with Jimmy Carteresque policies for a lot longer than Jimmy Carter ever could because Obama has considerably more political gifts. But in the end, politics (particularly the presidency) is always about performance. This will not end well for Obama or the country.