In an interview with CNN former Vice President Dick Cheney said that the Obama administration has made the country more vulnerable to a terrorist attack by changing America's approach to fighting terrorism. The Obama administration prefers law enforcement over a wartime approach.
'Citing "enhanced interrogation" techniques, government wiretapping and other Bush initiatives as instrumental in preventing terrorist attacks, Mr. Cheney said that rolling back those programs will undermine U.S. intelligence gathering.
"I think those programs were absolutely essential to the success we enjoyed of being able to collect the intelligence that let us defeat all further attempts to launch attacks against the United States since 9/11," he said in an interview on CNN's "State of the Union."
"President Obama campaigned against it all across the country. And now he is making some choices that, in my mind, will, in fact, raise the risk to the American people of another attack," Mr. Cheney said.
Mr. Cheney said the plan to close the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba is one of the Obama decisions that reflect a "law enforcement" as opposed to a "wartime" view of terrorism.
"We made a decision after 9/11 that I think was crucial. We said, 'This is a war - it's not a law enforcement problem,' " Mr. Cheney said. "Once you go into a wartime situation and it's a strategic threat, then you use all of your assets to go after the enemy ... you use your intelligence resources, your military resources, your financial resources, everything you can in order to shut down that terrorist threat against you.
"When you go back to the law enforcement mode, which is what I sense they're doing, closing Guantanamo and so forth, they are very much giving up that center of attention and focus that's required, and that concept of military threat that's essential if you're going to successfully defend the nation against further attacks," he said.
The White House had no immediate comment on Mr. Cheney's evaluation of President Obama's decisions.'
'But Mr. Obama has said that moves such as closing the detention facility at the U.S. Naval Base Guantanamo Bay will enhance U.S. security by strengthening the U.S. image abroad. He also has said that the Bush-era practice of holding suspected terrorists as enemy combatants has been a failure because none of them has been successfully prosecuted.'
When past presidents have spoken of the need to project an aura of American strength, they never meant that we should project a strengthened touchy, feely image.
While Obama signals his intent to back away from a wartime strategy, India has begun to move in the opposite direction. According to the Asia Times, India has begun to reassess its military capabilities with an eye toward "non-state actors".
'According to a senior defense official, the army has traditionally been manpower intensive, which is an anachronism. "It needs to shed manpower and replace it with high-end technologies. This hasn't happened due to inadequate resource allotment," said the official.
In his report "Indian Army: 2020" - a blueprint for the army of the future - General S Padmanabhan wrote that it is threats from non-state groups armed with weapons of mass destruction (WMD) that India needs to watch out for. "These elements could be acting on their own initiative or, at the behest of a sponsor nation," he said. "This dimension of WMD would warrant a war-like response from us."'
Sounds remarkably like the discussion leading up to the invasion of Iraq. The WMD dimension "would warrant a war-like response." For state sponsors the beauty of terrorism lies in the plausible deniability that it affords. Sponsors may assume a pose of innocence while their proxies go on the attack. For a brief moment the invasion of Iraq took that away. Iraq and other state sponsors were challenged to demonstrate that they did not support or harbor terrorists, or seek weapons of mass destruction. Libya renounced its nuclear weapons program, Syria pulled out of Lebanon. They were persuaded by the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.
But that was then and this is now, and with Congress safely in anti-war Democrat hands, sponsors of terrorism have much less to fear. Obama and his friends in congress extend the offer to give them back their cover. Instead holding state sponsors accountable by threat of military action, the Democrat regime signals its intent to go after the pawns who plan the attacks and try to prosecute them in court. The War on Terror is done. Now it's Law and Order, with a heavy dose of wishful thinking.
