While busy doing Monday-morning quarterbacking on the enhanced interrogation techniques used immediately after 9/11, the Obama administration has failed to develop new intelligence and annihilated whatever intelligence remained from the Bush era, former Illinois Rep. Michael Patrick Flanagan said Monday on
Newsmax TV’s "America’s Forum."
Flanagan joined former House Intelligence Chairman Pete Hoekstra to discuss the recently released Senate Intelligence Committee report detailing techniques such as water-boarding and rectal feeding used on some high-level detainees.
"Much of the targets that the Bush administration developed over the years were developed for intelligence purposes," Flanagan said. "President Obama has taken all of those sources and
droned them into nonexistence.
"We've killed all that we know and we haven't developed any ability to find others and to root out the problems with these organizations."
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Hoekstra pointed to the hypocrisy of some of the very people protesting the loudest about the tactics employed.
"Republicans and Democrats, in 2004, were briefed in a room," Hoekstra said, "some of the same Democrats who today are so viciously attacking the former vice president, the Bush administration and the CIA.
"In 2003 and 2004, they were as enthusiastic about this program as the former vice president was. They had the opportunity to stop it and they didn't."
Former Vice President
Dick Cheney is especially furious because "it was an agonizing decision for him to move forward with this enhanced interrogation," Hoekstra added.
Flanagan recalled then-Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel coming into work each day asking "'who did we get today' as if he were part of the war effort himself."
"He was talking about droning and he was talking about killing off the context that the Bush administration had developed over the years. Horrible people who needed to die, but maybe people we weren't done mining information from them yet."
By "droning" those people for "quick victories," Flanagan said the Obama administration has allowed terror groups to grow by "leaps and bounds."
"They [the Obama administration] have a blithe attitude about the droning, where Cheney agonized over whether or not to have the enhanced interrogation with the people that we had captured," Flanagan said.
"Obama sends them out of Guantanamo, the Bush administration put them in so we could find out information from them. The Democrats have nowhere to stand on this, and this report does not help them at all.
"It is rank hypocrisy and it's sad to watch," Flanagan added.
The men also briefly discussed the
$1.1 trillion government spending bill awaiting the president’s signature.
House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell need to develop a strategy to reduce spending and to target Obamacare and Obama’s executive order on immigration, Hoekstra said.
"If Republicans are divided, they will be ineffective," he said.
Flanagan cautioned Americans not to pre-judge Boehner, whom he characterized as a "tough guy."
"He is a hard negotiator, and he will take us to a place we're very glad we'll be in April and May," Flanagan said. "We'll look back and say the strategy was good.
"Peter's right again, we need a better-announced strategy, but I know a lot of people around Boehner and I can't believe they're stumbling along.
"They're probably working a very good strategy now, and the fact that they didn't fund amnesty through the end of the year but only until March should tip your hat, it should tip your hand a little bit and say there's something coming," he added.
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