Trickle Down Tyranny (29 page)

So much for Obama’s insistence that the transition “must be peaceful.”

So much for a pro-Israel, anti–Muslim Brotherhood Egypt as an ally of the United States.

Egypt is under military rule with the ouster of Mubarak. Although there remain deep divisions between Islamists and those who favor a secular government, the overwhelming likelihood is that the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood will prevail. With Mubarak gone, the transition to either a military government or one founded on Islamic law is guaranteed.

Libya

When the popular revolt against Libyan dictator Moammar Ghadafi began, Obama didn’t know what to do.

Many of strongest supporters—like Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan and race hustler the Reverend Al Sharpton—were actually in favor of the dictator.

And Obama had made nice to the dictator from his first days in office.

It is time for a Savage history lesson, which includes the important points that the mainstream media leave out.

Abdel Basit al-Megrahi was a colonel in Libya’s intelligence service when he approved the bombing of a packed passenger jet, Pan Am 103. It exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988—killing all 270 people on board. Mothers, babies, tourists, students, and two retirees coming back from a trip that they had dreamed about for a lifetime.

Ultimately, Libya turned over the bomber. He was tried in a British court and jailed for life.

The military intervention in Libya had everything to do with Europe’s need to keep Libyan oil flowing and nothing to do with defending Libyan citizens or promoting democracy.

Have you forgotten Britain’s and Scotland’s deal with Libya?

The one that led to Megrahi’s release?

British intelligence had been in bed with the Libyan dictator throughout Prime Minister Tony Blair’s tenure in office. The Blair government had offered British special forces to assist in training Ghadafi’s Khamis Brigade, the brutal and vicious Libyan security force. They’d also disclosed to Ghadafi how one of their secret forces operated. When it came to Megrahi, though, Britain caved. Ghadafi threatened “dire consequences”—including harassing British nationals and canceling lucrative oil contracts with British companies BP and Shell, and suspending cooperation with British intelligence—if Megrahi was not freed and returned to his homeland.
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The Obama administration played a role in that, too.

It secretly approved the release of supposedly terminally ill Megrahi. They said Megrahi was dying and asked if he could spend his last few moments of life with his family. A Scottish doctor played along. Of course, the families of the Lockerbie victims would have liked a few more moments with their loved ones before they died in a plane crash at Megrahi’s hands.

The real reason Megrahi was released was so that oil giant BP could negotiate a contract with Libya.

With Obama’s approval secretly delivered through the U.S. ambassador in London, Megrahi was flown home.
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Cheering crowds in Libya greeted his plane like he had just returned from landing on the moon or winning the World Series.

As for the terminally ill Megrahi, he was still alive almost two years later. The Libyans had tricked Obama. Maybe he wanted to be tricked.

Still, Obama treated Ghadafi as a friend.

In Libya, the Transnational National Council (TNC) has gained some control as the governing body of Libya and has been recognized by the U.S. and other European countries. The Muslim Brotherhood, banned by Ghadafi, would be eligible to participate in a government formed by the TNC. The U.S. went along, recognizing the “legitimacy” of the Brotherhood in Egypt in July 2011.
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Pakistan

Osama bin Laden was hiding out in a concrete castle some 800 yards from Pakistan’s equivalent of West Point. The Pakistanis said they had no idea the arch-terrorist was there.

Barack Obama believed them. After all, the Pakistanis were our friends.

The question Obama failed to ask was this: Why wouldn’t bin Laden be in Pakistan?

Nearly every senior al Qaeda leader that we’ve taken out has been captured or killed in that country. More than two-thirds of all al Qaeda “high-value targets” in the world have been killed or captured in Pakistan. That’s more than were killed or captured in Iraq and Afghanistan combined.

Where was Ramzi Yousef, who bombed the World Trade Center in February 1993, captured? Pakistan.

Where was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the planner of the September 11 attacks, captured? Pakistan.

Where was Ramzi bin al-Shib, the so-called 20th hijacker, captured? Pakistan.

Where was Abu Zubaydah, a key al Qaeda supervisor linked to the 9/11 attacks, captured? Pakistan.

Where was Amar al-Baluchi, who carried money for the September 11 attacks, captured? Pakistan.

Where was Abu Faraj al-Libi, the head of al Qaeda’s military wing, captured? Pakistan.

The last two heads of al Qaeda’s military wing were also killed in Pakistan. The head of Al Qaeda’s computer network was captured in Pakistan. So was bin Laden’s doctor. So was the courier for Mullah Omar, the founder of the Taliban. So was Mir Aimal Kansi, who shot several CIA officers at the spy agency’s front gate in 1993.

I could go on, but you get the point.

The Pakistanis are up to their eyeballs in senior al Qaeda figures—but they never seem to be able to spot them.

And virtually all of these terrorists were captured in Pakistan’s major cities—not hiding in some distant mountain cave. Often they were found in Pakistan’s capital city, Islamabad. So we’re not talking about some terrorist who disappeared into the folds of the Hindu Kush Mountains. No. They were all found in large homes or pricey hotels in the wealthiest neighborhoods in Pakistan’s largest cities. It would be like the Unabomber hiding out in Beverly Hills.

And it seems anyone in Pakistan who wanted to find bin Laden or a senior al Qaeda figure could do so. Hamid Mir, a reporter at
Dawn
, one of Pakistan’s largest English-language newspapers, interviewed bin Laden more than any other journalist did. Each of those interviews was conducted in Pakistan. When Al Jazeera wanted to interview the mastermind of the September 11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, they found him in Pakistan. When
Newsweek
wanted to interview Taliban leaders who escaped from an Afghan prison, they did it in Pakistan.
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The only people who couldn’t find bin Laden or his top henchmen were our allies, the Pakistanis.

When European intelligence services monitored phone calls from suspects in Europe in 2001, they found that more than 60 percent of all calls went to a single city in Pakistan, Karachi. The following year, more than half of all suspect phone calls went to another Pakistani city, near Pakistan’s Jalozai refugee camp.

Meanwhile, President Obama asked Congress to send Pakistan another $3.4 billion in military and foreign aid in 2012. That was on top of the $4.46 billion we sent them in 2010. And the estimated $3 billion we sent them in 2009.
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That’s the equivalent of sending everyone in Pakistan a check for almost $3,000 every year.

So after bin Laden was shot dead in his Pakistani hideout, what did our friends in Pakistan do? Did they apologize for missing the world’s most wanted man in their midst? Did they promise to try harder?

What do you think?

Pakistan’s President Asif Zardari took to the pages of the
Washington Post
to complain. How can the United States complain, he wondered, when Pakistan was doing the best it can?
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You can’t say he doesn’t have chutzpah.

Then our friends the Pakistanis warned us never to kill another terrorist in their country without telling them first.

Should we tell them?

Let’s not forget what happened the last time we tipped off the Pakistanis that we were going to kill bin Laden. It was August 20, 1998. A few weeks earlier, bin Laden’s men had driven truck bombs to the gates of two U.S. embassies in East Africa, killing 224 people (including 12 American diplomats). So, after many meetings with his cabinet and his national security team, President Clinton decided to launch dozens of Tomahawk missiles against bin Laden’s mud-walled compound in Afghanistan. When the missiles were just about to cross over Pakistan’s airspace to landlocked Afghanistan, a visiting U.S. general told the head of Pakistan’s military that the missiles were flying through his country to hit bin Laden in Afghanistan. The Pakistan general asked if he could be excused for a minute to confer with his chain of command. Minutes later, U.S. satellites observed panic in bin Laden’s compound and trucks full of people darting off in all directions. The missiles landed ten minutes later.
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Bin Laden got away clean. And soon he was planning the September 11, 2001, attacks.

Still, Obama talks about our good friends the Pakistanis.

And then Obama began acting like we were the problem.

Instead of calling on the Pakistanis to hand over al Qaeda operatives hiding in their country, Obama announced a multimillion-dollar “Muslim outreach” program. Our friends the Pakistanis just don’t seem to understand us. Professor Obama is going to fix everything with a speech and a pile of money.

Our new exchange of friends for enemies doesn’t stop at Middle Eastern countries. Caribbean and South American communists are also our new allies.

Cuba

Remember the Graham Greene novel
Our Man in Havana
? It’s a funny story about a vacuum cleaner salesman who sells blueprints of his Hoover vacuums to British intelligence, who are convinced he has stumbled onto some secret weapons being developed by Cuban communist leaders. Pretty funny, in a dry British way.

Well, Americans now have a real man in Havana. His name is Alan Gross. Let me tell you his story.

Gross lived in suburban Maryland, near Washington, D.C. He devoted his life to doing humanitarian work around the world. He helped farmers in Azerbaijan and Bulgaria boost the yields of their crop fields—saving many from poverty and hunger. He worked in the poorest and most remote section of Pakistan to help the people there attract investors to a local mine. Now ore is coming out of the ground and producing jobs. For more than 25 years, he worked in Africa and the Caribbean, helping the poor. He had never been in trouble with the law.
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When the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, an organization that has provided economic and humanitarian aid to people around the world, approached Gross, he was open to their request to help them distribute computer equipment to the small and isolated Jewish community in Castro’s Cuba.

Gross understood that many of the island’s few remaining Jews were old, sick, and poor. Many of their relatives had fled to Florida. They were unable to visit their relatives—Castro doesn’t let people leave his island prison—and their families were unable to visit them. Letters and phone calls were often intercepted. Many Cuban Jews had not seen their children in decades and had never seen their grandchildren.

Having computers and Internet access would enable them to e-mail their relatives, even see them on their computer screens. It would change their lives.

Gross couldn’t refuse.

In the fall of 2009, Gross made several visits to Cuba on a tourist visa, bringing computer equipment with him and helping to set up an intranet so the Jews scattered across Cuba could talk to each other without the communist authorities listening.

In December 2009 before he was able to make the next step—linking the Cuban Jews to the outside world—he was arrested. The Cuban authorities phoned his hotel room and asked him to come down to the lobby to pick up a message. Instead, the secret police picked him up.

For the next 14 months, he was held in a maximum-security prison. He kept asking what crime he had committed or what the charges were against him. There were none. They were simply holding him.

The little food he got in prison was tainted, and Gross became very ill. When Judy, his wife of 40 years, was finally allowed to see him, in July 2010, she was shocked. In seven months, he had lost 90 pounds. He wasn’t heavy to begin with. Only when the Cuban authorities believed that he would die soon was he moved to a military prison hospital, where he received some help.

In February 2011, Gross’s Cuban attorney came to visit him. He was surprised and grateful that the American was still alive. He said he had good news.

You will never guess what that “good news” was.

The Cuban communists had decided to put him on trial. He was charged with being a spy and committing “crimes against the state of Cuba.”

Why was that good news?

There was a slim possibility that he might be found innocent and released. Could that happen? His Cuban attorney, perhaps wanting to be kind, said, “It could.”

But it didn’t. In a trial closed to the American press, the prosecutor said Gross was a “mercenary” sent to Cuba to wage a “cyberwar” against the Cuban revolution. Ordinary Cubans are not allowed access to the Internet and giving it to them was a “counterrevolutionary” act.

The judge sentenced Gross to 15 years in prison. Gross is now 61 and will likely die before he is released. After his arrest, his 26-year-old daughter was diagnosed with cancer. He may never see her again.
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Where was Barack Obama when all this was going on?

Playing golf, going on vacations, and ignoring what was going on in Cuba.

Throughout Gross’s long ordeal and travesty of justice, Obama didn’t utter a single word in his support.