The President Owes Us an Apology

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RUSH: Now, let's review. Let's review, ladies and gentlemen, and let's do this with pure and total objectivity, exactly where we are today, just shortly after noon on the 3rd of May, 2011. An American president with admittedly incomplete intelligence, intelligence provided by people, techniques, and agencies reviled, ridiculed, and opposed by this American president, invades a foreign and supposedly friendly nation without its knowledge or consent, using information extracted from Guantanamo detainees, a place that the sitting president opposes, techniques to acquire this information opposed by this president and his regime.

The information provided by waterboarding, it was said last night by Peter King, congressman, New York, waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed produced the intel that led to the successful assault on that glorified hut in which Osama Bin Laden was living. All of this produced by techniques and policies steadfastly opposed by this current president. The president gives a -- some would say illegal -- kill order. We are proscribed because of an executive order from President Ford to assassinate foreign leaders, but nevertheless this president gives a kill order for a target in a private residence in a country, a friendly country invaded by us without their knowledge where there are women and children present, by the way. In the course of this attack, upwards of 22 foreign nationals are either killed or captured, including the targeted unarmed foreign leader.

Then, it is reported that the president ordered the target's body respectfully tossed into the ocean, all of which is done without any United Nations resolution or authorization of any kind. And not only does our president not apologize for any of these actions, he brags about what he did and claims that it was all his idea from the get-go, and our media celebrates him as courageous. Now, who could have imagined such a series of events just a few days ago? If you were alive and paying attention during the 2008 presidential campaign, who could have ever believed that these events would have happened and that their reaction, the reaction of these events would be what it is?

If you were alive and paying attention to the first two years of the current president's administration: we're closing Guantanamo Bay, getting out of all of these countries. In fact, this current president court-martialed Navy SEALs in Iraq because one of the SEALs happened to give a fat lip to a targeted terrorist. You remember that, do you not? There was outrage across the country when Navy SEALs under orders to capture the number one terrorist in Iraq happen to give the guy a fat lip. They get court-martialed for it. And yet, less than a year and a half later, all of that which I just described takes place to herald and applause and celebration. It's just stunning, ladies and gentlemen. It's just a darn good thing, in retrospect, that President Obama listened to President Bush rather than Senator Obama.

But all that notwithstanding, my friends, the effort to deny the enormous importance of the Bush intelligence efforts is in full swing. Let's examine again with total objectivity and clarity the following. Clearly, a combination of enhanced interrogations at Guantanamo Bay, i.e., waterboarding, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and CIA detention locations in Europe. These are the secret prisons, rendition, if you will, clearly a combination of that, plus more CIA operatives and agents on the ground, along with the telephone and e-mail intercepts, the warrantless wiretap, virtually everything this current president and his party opposed was utilized by the current president to effect the outcome of Sunday night, the death of Osama Bin Laden.


Our current president is being called gutsy. Andrew Malcolm, who writes a blog at the Los Angeles Times, had a brilliant piece yesterday in which he contrasted Mr. Brennan, his press conference yesterday, his presser at the White House talking about the sweat and the tension and the pressure in the Situation Room, which was air-conditioned, creature comfort controlled. It was gutsy. It may have been the toughest and the gutsiest presidential decision ever, and yet there was not one word of the pressure of the challenge, of the hardship of the actual uniformed personnel on the ground in Pakistan. No, what happened in the Situation Room on Sunday was said to be gutsy, the gutsiest ever undertaken perhaps by an American president. This according to John Brennan.

Let me tell you something, folks. What was gutsy was the refusal of George W. Bush to bend to political and media pressure to drop it all. For the last four years, three years of the Bush administration the pressure was daily, and it was intense on Bush to quit, to give it all up, to pull out of Iraq, to stop the enhanced interrogation techniques, to close down Guantanamo. Harry Reid, "This war is lost." The surge had no chance, every effort was made to influence President Bush to just quit. He didn't. President Bush was gutsy. He was attacked by the left relentlessly. He was attacked by the media. He was attacked by the haughty John Kerry, who served in Vietnam one time. He was attacked relentlessly by candidates Obama and Clinton, by legal groups, by human rights groups. Cindy Sheehan was a national hero in the mainstream press. A little aside, Cindy Sheehan does not believe Osama Bin Laden is dead. You won't find her as a guest anymore on any of the mainstream media programs. But George W. Bush and his administration did not bend. They hung in.

Now, however, we are to forget all of that. No, no, that was irrelevant. We are to believe now that none of that was helpful. None of the policies of the Bush administration were even relevant. No, the genius and the acumen of Barack Obama, his unmatched guts, his unparalleled intellect, his profound seriousness, are to be credited. By the way, have you seen the picture of these clowns in the Situation Room from Sunday? Have you seen that picture? My gosh, what a letdown. CTU on "24" was more impressive. What a tiny Situation Room. I'll tell you something else. This is just an observation from looking at the picture. The smallest guy in the room is Obama. He looks small in that picture. He's hunched over, he's still got his golf shirt on. They gave him a windbreaker before they took the picture. Right, but it was his seriousness, it was his acumen, his unmatched guts that are to be credited here.

At the same time, they lecture all of us to get behind him, to unite behind his administration, et cetera, et cetera. But don't worry. At the same time none of this is political. No, no, no, because Obama's never political. There's nothing political about this. How dare you accuse us of making this political. How dare you accuse us of positioning this and framing this so all it's about is our reelection. That's silly. And the speech that he gave on Sunday night, oh, wow, what a work of selflessness and humility. I, me, my. The fact of the matter is, ladies and gentlemen, the liberals, the American left and the Democrat Party owe us and the country an apology. I will explain when we get back.


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RUSH: The left, the American left, the Democrat Party of this country, the liberals, owe us and the United States an apology. They owe us an apology for taking every opportunity to undermine our efforts to track down Bin Laden and other terrorists. They have been the primary obstacles to getting Bin Laden. Since 2003, 2005, whenever. Whatever period of time after the 9/11 attacks or the invasion of Iraq that you want to go back to, the primary obstacle to achieving Sunday's result has been the Democrat Party.

And they owe us an apology for their speeches, for their protests, for their lawsuits, their overall campaign to deny our military and our intelligence services the tools and techniques needed to defeat the enemy. They have sought to undermine the US military, not only in Iraq, but around the world. They have impugned our intelligence services -- they have sought to undermine them for at least the last eight years -- and among those who owe us this apology is Barack Obama. Barack Obama campaigned against the very enhanced interrogations that have made him a hero. He campaigned against Guantanamo Bay. He campaigned against renditions overseas.

One of the first things he did was to sign an executive order closing Guantanamo Bay. It was Barack Obama who wanted to parade Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to New York for a multiyear, multimillion-dollar trial in which Khalid Sheikh Mohammed would be given a forum to impugn and criticize and rip this country to shreds with the full endorsement of Barack Obama and Eric Holder. Barack Obama won the Democrat primary in big part due to his radical anti-war positions -- positions that he shared with the most extreme elements in our society. Eric Holder, the aforementioned attorney general, owes this nation an apology for his efforts to criminalize this war.

And by that, I mean to make us (the good guys) the criminals. His efforts to confer constitutional rights on terrorists, including Miranda rights, his efforts to eliminate military commissions... Ladies and gentlemen, virtually every tool, every apparatus, every technique, every policy used to effect a successful mission to kill Osama Bin Laden was employed by this current administration and they campaigned on undermining and destroying and ending all of it -- and now they claim credit for being gutsy and courageous, when none of this would have been available to them had they had their druthers?

Eric Holder's law firm represented a dozen or so of terrorist combatants, our enemy. Eric Holder's law firm, his lawyers, went to court trying to undo the systems put in place to protect this nation. Systems that resulted in the successful kill of Osama Bin Laden on Sunday. And let me be clear about something else. For all the talk that Obama has now embraced the Bush and Cheney policies, he has not. They've utilized them; they took advantage of them. They recoil at any mention that any of this or all of this was put in place by their predecessor. Remember, the purpose of the previous administration is "blame."

Obama continually citing the mess he "inherited," be it the economy, be it Guantanamo Bay, be it intelligence, whatever -- and now people are mistakenly saying that Obama has embraced the Bush and Cheney policies. They have not reinstituted the Bush and Cheney human gathering methods. They have not reinstituted enhanced interrogations. They've wiped that stuff out. They have done away with much that they utilized or that was utilized to permit the successful operation on Sunday. That means that going forward, we may well not be able to gather the same kind of intel that was collected to kill Bin Laden.

The next president will not have the benefit of the same kind of information Obama received due to Obama's own policies. The liberals are who they are, and they have not changed. The president's speech Sunday night showed that he has not changed. Not a word about Bush or Cheney's superb efforts, their stick-to-itiveness under a withering assault. Not a word about the supreme efforts of General Petraeus or the military. Nothing. The staff is still out there trying to frame this as a win for Obama -- not the troops, not for intel, not for America, but a win for Obama.

He is so courageous! He is so gutsy! Only Obama could have done this! The military's a bunch of boobs. The military didn't have the foresight to understand that dropping bombs would destroy the DNA, perhaps. Eh, the military, the generals, the hawks, they just wanted to go in with scorched earth and bomb everything! Only Obama -- of everybody in the Situation Room, only Obama -- understood the precision required. The idea that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and others have had their names and reputations smeared, dragged through the mud?

Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld were targeted for imprisonment by members of this administration and its party! They literally sought to put members of the Bush administration in jail. So their names, their reputations have been smeared, dragged through the mud, attacked for building the very foundation of security and defense that exists in this country today which protected us and used by Obama to make his decision, and we are going to ignore it? We're going to pretend it never happened and we are going to all unite behind the left?

Sorry. It doesn't work that way.


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RUSH: The idea that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Scooter Libby, Karl Rove, practically everybody in the upper echelons of the Bush administration have had their names and reputations smeared, their careers and lives attacked, dragged through the mud for building the foundation of security and defense that exists in this country today, a foundation that has protected us, a foundation, a system used by Obama to make his decision and now we're just gonna ignore all that, that never happened. And we're gonna all unite behind the left, which despises, if we are to believe them, they despise virtually every aspect of this operation that was utilized to make it a success. They opposed it at every turn, and they have for decades.

Now, going forward, folks, these liberals, the American left are still dangerous because they're still misguided. We are still at war with these mass murderers. I have a friend who lost a son in the Twin Towers and he sent me a note. And I was, frankly, somewhat perplexed by the note. You notice the perspective of the 9/11 families, you've seen them on TV, is quite different than all of us, the rest of us. It's shockingly, surprisingly different. There's no rah-rah there. None of them are talking about some great sense of closure. It's interesting to see. And this friend of mine sends a note asking me if I honestly think that the death of Bin Laden will finally slow down these terrorists. He asked me with a sense of hope. How do you answer that when you know the answer is "no way"?

In fact, if you believe our current leadership, all this is gonna do is recruit more terrorists. If Guantanamo Bay was gonna be a magnet for more terrorists, if having a prison where we detainee these prisoners and terrorists, if that was gonna lead to more terrorist recruitment, then what's this going to do? Using their own philosophy, now, their own logical progression. Yet this man sends me a note, he's desperately hoping the death of Osama means that the militant Islamists will just sit down, that they'll just give up now. They won't. We are still at war with these mass murderers and Obama and his administration, his party, the Democrat Party, his media sycophants, have all worked overtime to reduce the level of security that existed before the arrival of his administration. Gitmo is open, but what kind of interrogations take place there now? We know that they don't like it being open. They want to shut it down. They just can't find a way.

Are the CIA detention locations still operative overseas? Obama says he's gonna close those. We're not gonna use rendition. What's with that? The enemy is still there. They're still targeting us. They are still ratcheting up. Is Obama still planning on slashing the defense department's budget while he massively expands domestic spending? You see, ladies and gentlemen, the left, and I don't care where you go to find the left, the White House, Congress, the media, they're doing all they can do to deny the obvious. They reject the methods and means that have been used to bring Bin Laden to his death, so they attack those of us who point it out. In rare moments of honesty, they have to be conflicted. Every aspect, everything they're standing up and applauding, everything they want a standing ovation for, they've sought to destroy. They intellectually and emotionally oppose all of it and yet here they are having to applaud it and claim credit for it as their own.

They want to have it both ways. That includes the media. They want political props for military operations on their watch, but at the same time their support for the military and intel services has been awful, openly hostile. The military and intel have been the focus of evil, as far as they are concerned. In all honesty, Obama and the Democrats campaigned against the military and against our intelligence services in the last presidential election. That's who they are. Look at the liberals today. What have they become? They are thrilled that a secret mission was used to successfully kill Bin Laden, but they don't like these secret forces. They don't like the means of getting the information, and they want to slash the budget for it.

So, again, to review, an American president, with admittedly incomplete intelligence, invades a foreign and supposedly friendly nation without that nation's knowledge or consent. Using information extracted from Guantanamo detainees subjected to allegedly illegal enhanced interrogation methods, i.e., waterboarding, the president gives a kill order for a target in a private residence where there are women and children present. And in the course of this attack, upwards of 22 foreign nationals are either killed or captured, including the illegally targeted unarmed foreign leader. And then it's reported that the president ordered the target's body tossed into the sea after a 40-minute ceremony. And all of this was done without any United Nations resolution or authorization of any kind, and no knowledge on the part of the country we invaded that we were coming.

Not only does the president not apologize for this, he brags about it. (imitating Obama) "Look what I did. I alone, under my direction, I made the decision." And our media is celebrating him as gutsy and courageous. Who could have imagined such a turn of events just a few days ago.


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