RUSH: So Dianne Feinstein, who I think poses a great risk, finally let the cat out of the bag. Dianne Feinstein, whatever it is that is motivating her, or did motivate her, to just unleash the dogs here, is now out there saying that none of these interrogations produced any worthwhile intelligence. That is just absurd. It’s irresponsible, and it’s wrong. And it is doing a great disservice to people that put their lives on the line trying to capture these people and interview them, interrogate them, and try to figure out what it is they know.
Have we been hit since 9/11? We’ve not been. Has there been a major terrorist plot that succeeded in this country since 9/11? No, there has not, and yet Dianne Feinstein’s out there running around saying that none of this worked. In fact, she’s out saying it was counterproductive, that none of this intel had any value whatsoever. None of the interrogations produced any intel of any value whatsoever. That’s just irresponsible.
Now, whatever happened here, she has taken it personally and has decided to use her committee chairmanship to use this Intelligence Committee — there were no Republicans involved in this report. There were no Republicans involved in any of the machinery that resulted in this report. There was nothing bipartisan, since that seems to be the magic word today. Boehner’s out there, by the way, talking about how (paraphrasing), “Well, we only did what the American people wanted us to do. We worked together and came up with a budget.”
That’s not what you’re elected to do. And Dianne Feinstein was not elected to single-handedly undermine the intelligence gathering apparatus of this country, but she’s taken something very personal here, I guess some Democrats were being investigated. Why wouldn’t they? They leak all over the place. Pat Leahy’s middle name is Leaky. These people have leaked. Ted Kennedy, back in the days when Reagan was president, actually called the Soviet Union and warned them about him.
Anyway, last night on the Fox News Channel, our old buddy Jose Rodriguez, who ran the interrogation program of the CIA — we’ve played sound bites of him from 60 Minutes before — he was on the Hannity TV show last night. The first question he was asked — well, the first of the three that we have: “Did I just hear Dianne Feinstein acknowledge this report may cause more violence that we can’t prevent? Did she just admit that?” And she did, by the way. And she added to it by now claiming that they learned nothing of any value in any of these interrogations at Guantanamo Bay. Absolutely nothing.
Now, part and parcel of that, by the way, is that Obama is still looking to come up with ways to shut the place down. What better way to do it than to have a leading Senator of the Intelligence Committee, the chairwoman, in fact, come out and say that whatever went on down there produced nothing.
So Hannity says, “Did I just hear Dianne Feinstein acknowledge that this report may cause more violence, that we can’t prevent that?” He says, “That would tell me that if they didn’t release the report, it could prevent more violence.” Anyway, here’s what Rodriguez said.
RODRIGUEZ: I think it’s a very dark day for the CIA. I think the CIA’s been thrown under the bus, and, you know, the CIA is the country’s paramount intelligence service, and it has a very important mission, and the mission is to protect American interests, to protect the homeland, to safeguard American lives, and it needs to be held accountable when it screws up. And, you know, there’s a lot of moving parts and a lot of risk taken when we do very complex terrorism covert action. In this case, I believe that, you know, we’ve been thrown under the bus, and the politicians are playing political football with the CIA.
RUSH: The Democrat Party politicians are playing political football with the CIA. I was at a Steelers game one day. Obviously it would have been a Sunday, ’cause I don’t go to the Monday night, Thursday night, Tuesday night, Wednesday night games. And I ran into the CIA director at the time, General Hayden. He’s from Pittsburgh, a Steelers fan. And I asked him a question, I also asked Rumsfeld this question when he was secretary of defense. I said, “Mr. Hayden, is there any one person — you’re the director — is there any one person –” he might have retired at the time I met him; I’m not sure. He might have been the former CIA director by the time, I’m not sure, doesn’t matter. He was either there or recently departed. I said, “Is there any one person at the CIA who knows everything going on, under the auspices of the CIA?”
He laughed at me. “No way.” And I said, “Is that right? Is there one person who, if he wants to find out everything going on, he can?” He laughed and said, “No.” And you know one of the reasons why? Above and beyond the obvious, one of the reasons why not a single person knows everything going on, there are some units that are operating without orders. They have leeway and they are deployed. They’ve got a mission, they’ve got an assignment. But how they do it, where they go to do it, totally up to them.
Many are off the grid working amongst themselves, and they may be in places that a few support people in the agency might know for obvious reasons, but it’s part of the strategy behind the use of elite Special Forces and elite units, is that they’re so good and they are so accomplished, they are so achieved that they give themselves their orders. They’ve got a general umbrella under which they’re operating, but they go wherever it takes ’em.
I had never even stopped to think of that. I think of the military, the intelligence apparatus, as a strict top-down hierarchy, that nobody does a thing unless they’re ordered to do it, and that parameters are very narrowly defined. It’s just the way I’ve always assumed it. I mean, nobody told me that. It’s just the way I’ve grown up assuming things by observing how people in that business work. And I asked Rumsfeld, I said (paraphrasing), “You’re the secretary of defense, is there anybody at the Pentagon who knows everything going on in that building?”
He said, “That’s not possible.”
I said, “Well, how do we police it, control it?”
He said, “It’s just too massive. Everything’s under orders and so forth, but there are projects that are eyes only, ears only, that are classified to one degree or another.”
I said, “But there’s not one person that you can go to who knows everything going on? What if I’m the president, something happens in the world and I want to know what’s going on? There’s not a single person I can call at the Pentagon or state that knows?”
“Well, there is a person that knows what you want to know, Mr. President, but that person may not know everything going on. That’s how massive and big it is.”
So here’s Jose Rodriguez, who led the interrogation efforts against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. We know that everything we got from him was valuable. We found additional people have been involved in 9/11. If it weren’t for these techniques, we wouldn’t have known where Osama Bin Laden was, and we wouldn’t have been able to kill him so that Obama could take cowboy credit for it.
For Dianne Feinstein to be running around today saying, two things, A, none of the intel was worth it, there was no value in it, and, yeah, yeah, this report being released may cause more violence that we can’t prevent, but this is the price that we must pay for these egregious errors that we have made by engaging in values beneath us as Americans, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
It’s the same old poisonous liberal thinking. We’re the problem. We’ve behaved badly. We’ve overstepped our bounds. We’re reprobates here or there, and we have to pay the price. We have to find out what it’s like for the people that we have harmed and damaged and impugned. And I don’t understand this psychologically, if they’re overrun with guilt. I don’t know what the hell it is. I can’t possibly relate to being one of these people. I can’t imagine what life being a liberal is like every day. You gotta be mad about something all the time. You can never be happy, never be satisfied. You gotta be walking around with constant levels of guilt that are so deep you need medication for it.
I can’t relate to these people. I know them like the back of my hand, but I can’t imagine being one of them. The anger, the guilt, the belief that your own country is the bad guys. The belief that your own country’s the problem in the world and it’s about time we pay the price for it. It just boggles the mind.
Hannity then said to Jose Rodriguez, “These senators, these lawmakers, do you remember any specific meetings with them? Was Dianne Feinstein told specifically what the CIA was doing in terms of enhanced interrogation?”
RODRIGUEZ: There are about 40 instances where we briefed the Senate and the House intelligence committees over the life of the program, from 2002 to 2009, briefed Dianne Feinstein and Nancy Pelosi and Rockefeller and many others all the time. I remember very clearly them telling me, ‘You know, the problem that you guys have is that you are risk-averse. You need to use the authorities that we have given you to go out there and destroy this organization and to kill bin Laden.’ So we feel that we briefed them and we briefed them thoroughly, and they are, you know, hypocritical.
RUSH: Obviously, if they’ve been briefed all these times and they’re out there saying nobody told them anything today. Dianne Feinstein’s out there saying that this information was held back, the CIA didn’t tell her what all was going. This is like the same scenario that happened with the first vote authorizing the use of force in Iraq in 2003. The Democrats voted against it until they saw public opinion. When they saw public opinion was profoundly in favor, overwhelming in favor, they asked for a second vote.
So Mrs. Clinton and all these guys, Rockefeller, Reid, all these guys, the only person that didn’t really — well, Obama wasn’t there yet, but he publicly said he would never have voted for the use of force, i.e., authorizing the war in Iraq. Most of these Democrats did, but how long did it take ’em? It was less than a year, a year and a half, and they were all out running around acting like they never voted for it, and they were lied to about it, and the Bush administration had never told them what the plans were, and had that happened they would have never supported it, after they had all voted for it.
And of course the media’s backing ’em up a hundred percent. And now here Jose Rodriguez says (imitating Rodriguez), “Yeah, we told them what we were doing, 40 different times, 40 different times I went up there, I testified, Rockefeller, Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein, they knew what we were doing, but now conveniently they run around and act like nobody told them, and that they would sandbagged and they only recently learned how outrageous our actions were and so now they’re trying to act all offended.”
He said they’re a bunch of hypocrites.
And then the last question from Hannity, “You’re saying that the accusation that these enhanced interrogation techniques were used beyond what we had already been disclosed you’re saying is false, number one, and that in spite of their suggestion that they were not successful, you’re saying that, in fact, that’s not true. Well, you were there, Mr. Rodriguez. Were these techniques successful?”
RODRIGUEZ: It was very successful, and for those of us who were there, it’s just amazing that they could have come to this conclusion. Those of us who read the intelligence coming out of our black sites every morning and who acted on that intelligence know the value and basically it led to the destruction of the organization. You know, this administration actually does not take any prisoners. They prefer to kill them from afar using drones. And somehow they feel that because they kill from a distance somehow it’s more ethical, more ethical than the difficult and messy and unpleasant task and mission of actually interrogating prisoners. I think it’s a distortion of what our values are.
RUSH: Amen. A-frigging-men. That’s exactly frigging right. These people are running around talking about, “This is not who we are. This is not our values.” What he’s pointing out, oh, yeah? Our values are to kill from 10,000 feet with a drone that none of these people — including Americans that have been killed with drones? He’s pointing out this administration has been more deadly than anything we happened to do at Guantanamo Bay, and he’s exactly right about it.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: By the way, let me reiterate something. The Democrat staffers on the Senate Intelligence Committee did not talk to a single person from the CIA. You know who they talked to? They talked to the lawyers for the terrorists in Club Gitmo. Now, the lawyers for the terrorists at Club Gitmo are people like Eric Holder and people from the firm Eric Holder worked at before he became attorney general. A bunch of typical left-wing lawyers who are also of the belief the United States is the problem, eagerly signing up for clients like those at Club Gitmo, eagerly wanting to represent them because of the soapbox opportunity it provides to rip into America.
So here you have these wonderful little Senate Democrat staffers — and I will tell you something. I would venture to say that these staffers are probably much more informed than Dianne Feinstein is. You know, the discussion of term limits that we’ve had since the early nineties, one of the legitimate reasons people object to term limits is, “Hey, you can get rid of the elected official all you want; if the staff doesn’t change, nothing’s gonna change.”
The staff, be they staff or members of House or Senate or whatever, they are these nameless, faceless people behind the scenes doing all the position paper writing, all the policy position writing, all of this, and a number of these senators, particularly elderly ones, are just pointed to the door, “You go out there and you sit in the chair with your name on it and try not to fall asleep and we’ll handle the rest of it.” And if you don’t term limit the staff, well, then you’re really not having that great an impact.