CIA Videotapes No Different Than ISIS Videotapes, And We Are At War Over Them

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Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – “Folks, we can’t have it both ways.  If Obama is abusing his power and you want him to be held to account, then we have to go back to the wellspring and find out: Where did Obama get the authority?  Who gave him the idea?  Bush, Cheney, and their henchman lawyer John Yoo.”  Check out today’s transcript for the rest….

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

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Sen. Dianne Feinstein: . . . to the CIA inspector general during his conduct of a special review by the IG in 2004.

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Mike:  I can reset this one more time.  Article I, Section 8, this is an enumerated power of Congress, the legislative branch, “To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water.”  You just heard Senator Feinstein say the CIA was making its own rules up.  The CIA was implementing its own rules.  The CIA was defying Congress.  The CIA was defying the president.  That’s impossible because the paper trail says the president is the one — it was Bush and Cheney that told the CIA: Do whatever you gotta do, we don’t care.  It was John Yoo that drafted the now-infamous memo that authorized this and also granted to the president the authority that President Obama is currently abusing today.  These are all related.  This is a constitutional as well as a moral outrage, yet I seem to be the only one that’s outraged by it.

Folks, we can’t have it both ways.  If Obama is abusing his power and you want him to be held to account, then we have to go back to the wellspring and find out: Where did Obama get the authority?  Who gave him the idea?  Bush, Cheney, and their henchman lawyer John Yoo.  Tom Woods and Kevin Gutzman have an entire chapter in their book, Who Killed the Constitution, about the Yoo memo.  As a matter of fact, I have published on the Pile of Prep in the recent past a 78-page takedown of the Yoo memo, point by point.  Did the framers of the Constitution ever imagine a game plan that there could be a situation where a president would have to unilaterally take over rules for capture on land and sea and the declaration of war?

You see, the problem here that I’m trying to identify to you, not only the moral outrage of this — we don’t torture.  You people that want to brag about this, what is wrong with you?  We don’t torture.  We’re above and beyond that.  Well, we should be.  Unfortunately, too many people aren’t, and God help them.  Pray for them, my friends.  I just read to you Article I, Section 8.  That is a power that is vested in Congress.  What we are listening to and from Senator Feinstein today — I don’t care if she’s the biggest liberal Democrat in the history of liberal Democrats and is going into the hall of fame.  It matters not.  What we are hearing today is that Article I, Section 8 war powers have been totally forfeited by Congress.  This is more proof.  So if you’re wondering where Obama gets the authority, he got it from President Bush.  And he got it from President Bush while there was a Republican Senate and a Republican House of Representin’.

If any of you aren’t clear on this, the power to do the things that Senator Feinstein is talking about, that this report illustrates and makes clear, was accorded to Congress in Article I, Section 8.  The states, when they ratified the Constitution, agreed to cede the power and these are the powers that they conceded.  They said new union of state government, you get to do these things.  “To declare War,” have they surrendered that one?  Yes.  “Grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal,” have they surrendered that one?  Quote that in a crowded body of congressmen and all you’ll hear is either silence, because they don’t know what you’re talking about, or laughter.  “And make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water.”

Now, if you can make rules for captures, that means you can make rules for containment.  What the CIA did they did to detainees.  If Congress was being informed of this, then it was Congress’s job to stop it.  Another way to phrase this is: Does the CIA answer to anyone?  Another way to phrase this is: Do you want the CIA to answer to anyone?  Let me phrase it another way: Do you want the NSA to answer to anyone?  Do you want anyone to answer to anyone?  Or do they just get to make it up as they go along because there are terrorists?

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Senator Feinstein: When Vice President Cheney’s counsel, David Addington, asked CIA Counsel General Scott Muller, in 2003, about the CIA’s videotaping of the waterboarding of detainees, Muller deliberately told him that videotapes “were not being made,” but did not disclose that videotapes of previous waterboarding sessions had been made and still existed.  Source: Email from Scott Muller dated June 7, 2003.

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Mike:  I want to make one more point on that.  What are these videotapes that she’s talking about?  Now I’m speaking to decepticon war hawks out there, those of you that are ready to storm the ramparts and fight ISIS to the ends of the gates of hell.  What videotapes is Senator Feinstein describing, sirs, madams?  Do you know?  I do.  She’s getting ready to tell us what’s on those tapes.  Do you know what’s on those tapes?  Abu Zubaydah, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, and some others being inconceivably molested, maimed, tortured.  One of them died in a CIA detention center of hypothermia.

Now, I seem to recall being told by some of you “We have to go to war.”  I’m going to quote you back to you.  Are you ready?  “We have to go over there and fight them over there because they’re cutting our citizens’ heads off on videotape.”  Gee, what if they had videotape of the United States government performing similar atrocities?  Yeah, but Mike, we’re us.  We’re not them.  Come on.  Right, no double standard, though.  You can’t have it both ways.  We can’t have it both ways.  My friends, I plead with you, we must consider the morality of these things.  If we want a less vile, abortive culture of death, then we’ve got to start acting like it.  That’s across the board.  You can’t keep making exceptions.  For partisan reasons it’s an exception?

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By the way, before someone can ask the unbelievably redundant and imbecilic question, [mocking] “Does that mean that we have to disarm?  You want us to all get killed by terrorists?”  Yeah, that’s exactly what I want.  I want all of us to die.  I have children, too.  It just means that the train is off the tracks.  Let’s put it back on.  Let’s meekly and humbly consider our way and let’s start the process of bringing this to an end.  We don’t have to conduct our affairs like this.  We are under no compulsion to be the planet’s policeman.  We don’t have to be involved in the affairs in the Middle East.  We have our own oil.  We don’t need their oil.  The only thing that I can only remotely think of that we might need that is contained in or around some Middle Eastern countries are some heavy forms of crude oil that make certain things and uranium.

The idea here that this must continue for economic reasons is bogus.  I’ll give you the economic reasons.  $180 million was appropriated for private contractors to perform the interrogations that Senator Feinstein is describing, that apparently Congress did not write the rules for.

End Mike Church Show Transcript