Regime Dithers on Photo Release

RUSH: Here’s Doug in Jasper, Indiana. Great to have you up next, sir, on the EIB Network. Hi.

CALLER: Hi, Rush. Thanks for taking the call. You know, following up on your last call, I think if people want to glimpse into what people in the administration really think about the military and this kind of operation, I don’t know if you have any clips of Brennan or Brenner, the —

RUSH: Brennan, yeah, I got ’em right here. In fact, they were next up net rotation, coincidentally.

CALLER: Well, he referred to the SEAL Team 6 folks this morning on Fox News, you know, these heroes, as assaulters. That was his term multiple times, used that word, assaulters.

RUSH: I don’t have that one.

CALLER: Could not bring himself to say, you know, soldiers, you know, heroes, you know, SEAL members, Special Ops.

RUSH: Wait a minute, wait a minute. Are you saying he called them assaulters?

CALLER: Assaulters, yeah. Our soldiers. Our Special Ops folks.

RUSH: Well, look, this guy is lame-brained anyway.

CALLER: I know, he’s like Joe Biden in training or something.

RUSH: Well, no, he’s like that other guy who said the Muslim Brotherhood is basically a bunch of Mother Teresas.

CALLER: I didn’t hear that one.

RUSH: Well, he didn’t say Mother Teresa. He said the Muslim Brotherhood, oh, they’re not secular, no, they’re just guys that want peace. They’re moderates. Yeah, I forget what his name is, but he’s another one of the national security people in the regime. We’ll come back after the break. We got a couple of John Brennan sound bites, one from CNN this morning, and the other from the CBS Early Show. They’ve had to back off a couple things he said yesterday at the White House briefing. They said, “No, Osama’s wife didn’t shield him. No, Osama didn’t have a gun.” They’ve had to walk back a bunch of stuff that Brennan said yesterday afternoon.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Let me go back in time. Checking the e-mail (which I always do), in my first hour I made the claim that all of these policies that the regime is now heralding and celebrating are policies they campaigned against and opposed. The usual suspects of the left said, “You’re just making it up, Mr. Limbaugh! You can’t prove it. I don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s just typical of what the right does!” All right, let’s review some things. Here is Mark Hemingway at a blog at the Weekly Standard. Reminder — It’s been reported that bin Laden was killed by SEAL Team Six, officially known as Naval Special Warfare Development Group or DevGru.”

The bottom line is that SEAL Team Six had a different name when they were discussed by Democrats during the Bush administration. They were called “Cheney’s ‘assassination ring.'” SEAL Team Six, which Obama and the Democrats now celebrate, now herald, they were called Dick Cheney’s Assassination Ring. Here is CNN’s story from December 26th of 2003: “Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean will not pronounce Osama bin Laden guilty before a trial… ‘I’ve resisted pronouncing a sentence before guilt is found. I will have this old-fashioned notion that even with people like Osama, who is very likely to be found guilty, we should do our best not to, in positions of executive power, not to prejudge jury trials.'”

So theoretically Howard Dean ought to be angry as hell. We just assassinated somebody before they had a trial! He said Osama was innocent until proven guilty. Here’s another example. Typical. It’s the kind of story we’ve gotten for years from the media. This is via the Washington Post by Peter Finn and Joby Warrick. Headline: “Detainee’s Harsh Treatment Foiled No Plots — Waterboarding, Rough Interrogation of Abu Zubaida Produced False Leads, Officials Say.” Peter Finn and Joby Warrick. That’s the Washington Post of March 29th of 2009. March 29th, 2009, the Washington Post was quoting Democrat officials: Waterboarding doesn’t work! It produces lies; t produces false leads!

Jennifer Loven, AP, April 29th, 2009, “President Barack Obama said Wednesday night that waterboarding authorized by former President George W. Bush was torture, and the information gained from terror suspects through its use could have been obtained by other means. ‘In some cases it may be harder,’ he conceded at a White House news conference marking a whirlwind first 100 days in office.” Yeah, so remember that? Everything we were doing was torture. We had to stop it! It was destroying our values; it was destroying our reputation. We had to shut down Guantanamo Bay. George Bush should be embarrassed, all of this stuff.

It’s remarkable, folks, if you go back and remember. This is what they were saying. They owe us an apology. They are now heralding and celebrating everything they opposed which led to this successful mission on Sunday night. Meanwhile, the media… This is kind of humorous. Everybody and their brother seems to have gone out of their way to misunderstand my opening monologue yesterday. You know, I’ve always heard it said that the ability to detect sarcasm and satire is a sign of mental acutity, and the media’s reaction would seem to prove once and for all that that’s true. They didn’t get it.

“Jerk meet knee!” (laughter) We’re sitting here and we’re in stunned disbelief over this. We can’t believe it. I’m even asking the staff. You shoulda been here. I’m asking during the commercial break, I’m asking Dawn and Brian and Snerdley, “Have I lost it?” We were struggling here yesterday. By the way, the latest guidance is that the White House is gonna release the death photo of Bin Laden close to two o’clock, which is now. We are close to two o’clock now. That’s the latest guidance. We haven’t seen anything yet. Here’s Ahmet in Buffalo. Great to have you on the program. Welcome to the EIB Network.

CALLER: Good afternoon, sir. Rush, how are you?

RUSH: Very well, thank you.

CALLER: Thanks for taking my call.

RUSH: You bet.

CALLER: I love the show. I listen to it every day.

RUSH: I appreciate that.

CALLER: Rush, quick question, sir. I am from India, and I’m a legal immigrant, and I’m a US citizen now. And we are so close to Pakistan that we always have fights with them. Here’s my question, Rush. What kind of information and how many years does this guy know, that Pakistan knew, and what kind of allies are they to us that he’s living in their backyard, and they didn’t say a word about it?

RUSH: You know, I don’t know about the Pakistanis. They’re in a precarious situation. I think these guys have to play a double game. They’re on the… I’m not making excuses for ’em, but Al-Qaeda would just as soon wipe them out as they’d wipe us out. They have nukes, don’t forget. Pakistan has nuclear weapons, and they’ve gotta play a double game. What you want to know is, “What did Pakistan know and when did they know it?” It seems logical to conclude… I mean, he’s living in an enlarged hut that’s basically a hundred yards from military training center. How can they not know he’s there? And supposedly he’s been there for five or six years. So you have to conclude that he was there and people say, “We gotta stop giving them money. Foreign aid for Pakistan, this is nuts. We can’t do it,” and other people —

CALLER: Rush?

RUSH: Yeah?

CALLER: Sorry to interrupt you, I just want to make a quick point. Now, the other thing, even if your staff — like I said, I listen to you every day. Even to your staff on what you do, you are good, and you are very good about it, and you still say, “We here at the EIB Network” to try to give credit to each one of them. I want to know, “Did Mr. Obama, Mrs. Obama, or any Democrat from the Senate — did anyone — come out and say, ‘Hey, let’s give some credit to the Bush-Cheney administration'”?

RUSH: No, no, no. No, no. No, that’s the point. Nobody was capable other than Obama of seeing this in a proper light, trite way to do it, no, that’s an excellent point. I could not have said it better myself, even though I did.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: we’ve been told here since two hours ago that the pictures of Bin Laden are coming. When did I first see the Drudge headline: “White House to Release Bin Laden Death Photo”? At least three hours now. If this photo is not up by 2:45, base 38 minutes from now, I’m calling Donald Trump. Trump gets things done. (interruption) Well, when you ask Mark Mellman, “Name one thing Obama has done?” he can say, “He produced his birth certificate, and then he killed Osama, killed Bin Laden.” So those pictures aren’t up. That’s the ticket. Call Trump.

Great to have you back here with us, folks. Telephone number is 800-282-2882 if you want to be on the program. The e-mail address, ElRushbo@eibnet.com. (interruption) What? They can’t release the photos now? Is that right? Jay Carney, the White House secretary, said that it’s such a highly classified operation that they can’t release the photos? Wait a minute, they can’t…? (interruption) He did say can’t or he did say can’t? They can’t release the photos because it was such a highly classified…? (interruption) Oh, he’s giving a reason why it hasn’t been released yet? Carney’s doing the White House press briefing now. So I don’t know. The White House narrative of the raid of Jay Carney is now they’re calling the SEALs “assaulters.” Carney spent almost as much time describing the reverence that the rites surrounding Osama’s burial at sea than the attack itself. Wow. That was a 40-minute burial ceremony. So he’s suggesting that they may not release or won’t or haven’t yet because the operation was so highly classified. Well, let’s get to this assaulters business. Here is the bite. This is this morning on Fox News Channel’s Fox & Friends, and this is what Brennan said. He’s the White House Assistant to the President for Counterterrorism. This is what Brennan said about the raid on Osama Bin Laden.

BRENNAN: President had decided that the — the, uhh, raid that was conducted on Sunday provided maximum chances for mission success — again, getting Bin Laden, having the proof — at the same time, he had, duhhh, supreme confidence in the ability of the assaulters to carry out this operation successfully, uhh, and stealthfully, uhh, so that they were able to get out without engaging any Pakistan forces, and that’s how he decided on, uh, the raid option.

RUSH: Okay, there you have it. The president had decided the raid was conducted on Sunday provided maximum chances for mission success, getting Bin Laden, having that proof, had supreme confidence in the ability of the assaulters. The assaulters? This is SEAL Team Six. Seymour Hersh, New Yorker magazine. This is from a Weekly Standard reminder. According to the New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh, “It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on. Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us.”

So this is, again, here you have this regime celebrating SEAL Team Six. “What a great operation! Only Obama knew the proper way to use ’em,” and that’s why these people owe us an apology, because they did everything they could to impugn, denigrate, destroy, smear. Every person, every organization, every institution that was working to keep this country safe, they were trying to destroy, impugn, smear, and now they embrace it. Now they embrace all of these things. So that’s Brennan from this morning. Also on CNN’s American Morning, the Co-Host Kiran Chetry said, “Will the public ever see any of that video or the photo of a dead Bin Laden?”

BRENNAN: We have been releasing a lot of information over the last 36 or 48 hours about this operation. Uh, we want to be able to be sure that we’re able to do it in a, uh, thoughtful manner, he we also want to anticipate what the reaction might be on the part of Al-Qaeda and others when we release the information so that we can take the appropriate steps beforehand. So any other material, whether it be photos or videos, whatever else, uhhh, we are looking at it, and we’ll make the, uhh, appropriate, uhhhh, decisions.

RUSH: You know about that, is it just me, or is it odd that they’re talking about what a treasure trove of intel they have gathered from the hard drives and the hard disks, the computers, whatever; all the stuff that they collected from that so-called mansion — and you’ve seen it. The first reports of this thing Sunday night and Monday were Osama was living in a “mansion.” Come on, folks! It’s a glorified hut. It’s a hut, for crying out loud! Mansion? At any rate, why advertise that you’ve got this stuff? Flush who out? (interruption) I’m sorry.

I’m sorry, Snerdley, announcing that you’ve got the stuff does not flush ’em out. You have the stuff. You study it. You look at it. Maybe some of the intel that they got will disclose the location of the #2, Ayman al-Zawahiri. Well, now Ayman al-Zawahiri doesn’t have to worry about whether or not we know. He already knows we know so he can decamp, we can move, whatever. You keep that stuff close to the vest. You know, this is the one thing about intel. Really, ideally, you never learn how good it is because they never say. We’ve just blabbered all over the world what we’ve got.

I don’t know. Again, I think in their quest here to claim credit — to create this impression of utter, uber-competence, and, “Look how good we are!” — they’re making a tactical mistake by announcing they got all this stuff rather than holding it tight, holding it close and being able to act on it. Just don’t say anything about it. After all, the rest of the network, whatever, how do they know what’s in that house? How does some terrorist gang somewhere know that Osama’s got anything on them? Now they’ve all on the alert. I don’t know. I just think it’s a tactical error. One more Brennan sound bite, and it is from this morning’s CBS Early Show. The co-host Erica Hill asked him this question: “Did you have any sense at this point of how active Osama Bin Laden was leading up to his death?”

BRENNAN: I think the latest information is that he was in his compound for the past five or six years, uhhh, and, he had, uh, virtually no, uhh, interaction, uhhh, with others outside of that compound. Uh, but yet he seemed to be very active inside the compound, and we know that he had released videos and audios. We know that he was in contact with some senior Al-Qaeda officials.

RUSH: Yeah. So he “seemed to be very active inside.” What does that mean? He “released videos and audios using contact with some senior Al-Qaeda officials but he had had virtually no interaction with others.” That’s in the same sound bite. “Yeah, he had virtually no interaction with others … we know he was in contact with some senior Al-Qaeda officials … but he had no interaction with others.” These people, they don’t have the slightest clue what they say. It was Clapper. That was the guy who described the Muslim Brotherhood as basically just a Meals-on-Wheels bunch.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Los Angeles, Eric, glad you called, sir. Great to have you. I appreciate your patience here on the EIB.

CALLER: Great to talk to you, Rush.

RUSH: Hi.

CALLER: The release of these photos could be one of the biggest mistakes the Obama administration makes. Just like the Bolivian military did in 1967 when they shot and killed a filthy, dirty, sickly, highly depressed Che Guevara but they made the mistake of cleaning him up and taking a really benign looking photograph of him, they propped his eyes slightly open, they created a modern icon by releasing that photograph. So the Obama administration has to be very careful about anything they release. You can imagine anything halfway benevolent looking is gonna end up on the iPhones of every anti-American person in the world as a rallying cry, and also, we’re not sure we can trust some of the Obama administration’s apparatchiks who may have Che Guevara T-shirts hanging in their own closets.

RUSH: Okay. Let me see if I understand this. We make an icon out of Che Guevara, the Bolivians do, by releasing death photos of him looking gentle and harmless in repose?

CALLER: Yes.

RUSH: And if we did the same thing here with Bin Laden, a benign, harmless looking guy with a bullet hole in his head —

CALLER: An icon like Che Guevara.

RUSH: — you fear we run the risk of creating a what?

CALLER: An iconic figure. People are still wearing Che Guevara T-shirts. They are waving Che Guevara flags at our labor union —

RUSH: But why do you think that really is? And who, by the way, is wearing the Che Guevara T-shirts? Are they not a bunch of teenagers and college students and aged hippies from the sixties?

CALLER: No. Union members in downtown Los Angeles at union rallies, at illegal immigrant rallies, Che Guevara flags, Che Guevara T-shirts, Rush.

RUSH: Why? Why are they doing it?

CALLER: Because it’s the Revolucion, as described by Jorge Castaneda. I highly recommend his biography of Che Guevara, Companero, and also pick up Mr. Castaneda’s Utopia Unarmed, and it’s all about the Latin-American threat.

RUSH: Wait. I’m being told here that the Che Guevara iconic picture on T-shirts is not his death picture that you have described.

CALLER: No, it’s not, but what it did was it redeemed an ultradepressed, filthy, dirty, about to quit Che Guevara, after he had orchestrated the kidnapping, assassination, and murder of hundreds if not thousands of people over a period of time, that image of this filthy, dirty, really depressed man was completely washed away in that death photo. And now he’s an icon among the left and among organized labor.

RUSH: What are you’re thoughts on this. Would you be surprised if Obama used whatever photo is forthcoming in his campaign posters?

CALLER: Well, if he goes PC on us, they’ll try to make Obama look good. He doesn’t want —

RUSH: No, Osama.

CALLER: Osama. Obama doesn’t want to look like a cruel man as president of the United States. So if they give any deference to some redeeming human quality of Osama Bin Laden, it will end up on T-shirts, it will end up on every anti-American’s iPhone. I guarantee it. And that was the biggest mistake that the Bolivian military made in 1967. They happened to clean him up, make him look, you know, really benevolent and —

RUSH: Okay, here’s the thing about this. I understand what you’re saying, but in my view, I think for this enemy that we face everything’s a rallying cry, and a picture of benign Bin Laden on T-shirts wouldn’t add anything to it because they’re already ratcheted up to maximum hatred. Anything we do to defend ourselves, anything that we do when detaining and interrogating them, anything we do with disposing of the bodies, anything we do with photos and videos, anything we do with cartoons, Korans, anything and everything we do provokes ’em. We provoke them by virtue of our very existence. This is what people have a hard time grasping. Our very existence provokes these people. We are infidels in our existence. Whatever additional actions we take can’t add much to the hate. They already want to kill us. There’s nothing that can change that. It’s why we seek to get them first.

I understand the concern here but I think to the extent that you worry about him becoming an icon, he already is. Nothing more can be done to add to that. You talk about union people, illegal immigrants and stuff wearing the Che Guevara T-shirt, I would contend to you that easily 95% of the people wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt haven’t the slightest clue who he was. He’s just a good-looking Latino guy, just a good-looking guy. Well, they know he’s a leftist something and so forth and so on, but he’s the kind of guy you’d hope to run into at a pool party after you assassinated some eastern European leader and he was the hit man. He’s one of these perfect James Bond kind of quasi-villain. I just think there’s a romantic attachment to Che Guevara that has nothing to do with any substance.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: This is almost as much as I can take. MSNBC right now is doing a feature honoring the secret SEALs team that did the dirty work here on the assassination of Osama Bin Laden, honoring the secret SEALs team. All right, Seymour Hersh, a credited leftist journalist, writes for the New Yorker, referred to SEAL Team 6 as “Cheney’s executive assassination ring.” November 25th, 2009, FoxNews.com: “Navy SEALs have secretly captured one of the most wanted terrorists in Iraq — the alleged mastermind of the murder and mutilation of four Blackwater USA security guards in Fallujah in 2004. And three of the SEALs who captured him are now facing criminal charges, sources told FoxNews.com.

“The three, all members of the Navy’s elite commando unit, have refused non-judicial punishment — called a captain’s mast — and have requested a trial by court-martial. Ahmed Hashim Abed, whom the military code-named ‘Objective Amber,’ told investigators he was punched by his captors — and he had the bloody lip to prove it.”