OK, this isn’t Sean Hannity‘s byline in the Post today, but it might as well be. The headline should stop you:
In bin Laden Victory, Echoes of the Bush Years
The piece–actually written by Scott Wilson and Anne Kornblut–lays out the argument:
As President Obama celebrates the signature national-security success of his tenure, he has a long list of people to thank. On the list: George W. Bush.
After the September 11, 2001, attacks, Bush waged wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that have forged a military so skilled that it carried out a complicated covert raid with only a minor complication. Public tolerance for military operations over the past decade has shifted to the degree that a mission carried out deep inside a sovereign country has raised little domestic protest.
And a detention and interrogation system that Obama once condemned as contrary to American values produced one early lead that, years later, brought U.S. forces to the high-walled compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, and a fatal encounter with an unarmed Osama bin Laden.
So not only did torture work, but the illegal, baselesswar against Iraq “forged a military so skilled that it carried out a complicated covert raid with only a minor complication.” In other words, theIraq Warled to catching bin Laden. This could give Fox News a new theme to pound for the next couple of days.
Will Ferrell did a one-man show at the end of the Bush years, in his W. character, called “You’re Welcome, America.” It was pretty funny. This is not.
So this is a “news story”, and not an “opinion piece”, or has that distinction been pretty much obliterated at the Post – and every other corpress outlet?
And forget “the past decade”. When has the vast majority of Americans, propagandized from potty training on, ever given a rodent’s rear about “a sovereign country”, other than their own?
Didn’t Rumsfeld say: Waterboarding did not net intelligence that led to bin Laden.
“It is true that some information that came from normal interrogation approaches at Guantanamo did lead to information that was beneficial in this instance. But it was not harsh treatment and it was not waterboarding.”
So even the statement that “enhanced interrogation” lead to the death of OBL may not be that accurate…
I think it’s always worth reminding people that Bush repeatedly rejected offers to have bin Laden turned over to a third party. The fact that supposedly all these wars and all this death and torture were required and could have been avoided, assuming the actual goal was capturing bin Laden, makes this absolutely outrageous.
The Washington Post, or uh, American Pravda, sucks.
Good God, that’s truly awful–pure propaganda. Hell, that’s probably beyond propaganda, or boot-licking even. You know, Emo110, I’ll bet that Rumsfeld, the old bureaucratic hand, is just covering his ass with anything he says. He knows that Code Pink is right, and that he’s just an old war criminal. Rummy would even throw his old pal “Big” Dick Cheney off the train platform. It’s repulsive in the extreme that all the old sociopaths and their admirers (John Yoo, Ann Coulter, the entire Fox network, etc.) are crawling out of the ooze to justify criminality once again.
Haven’t social commentators and analysts been saying that the propaganda is wide, deep and ingrained into the USA for many years? It seems that these “reporters” and Shaun Hannity come from the same place on this. Still it is a long process that has taken over so much of what use to be news outlets. Makes it harder to dig though it for real news. Most people don’t want to spend the time and either ignore news all together or pick it up from the most easily accessible sources like Fox PAC and CNN or the radio.
Problem with the what “used to be news”is that it was simply a liberal media outlet. Now we have a balance.To libs that is the last thing they want. Imagine…. give people a different side of the coin to ponder. How dare those rascally conservatives
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