The MSM is not only continuing to carry water for Team Obama, they are doubling down on stupid by trying to trash the success that Bush had fighting Al Qaeda.  They follow the standard practice of a misleading headline that contradicts the article itself.

The war on terror is gone - the phrase that is, replaced by the meaningless “Overseas Contingency Operation”.  Nobody will use it, and that will make it easier to shut down.

And the rise of ‘man-caused’ disasters.  Wow.

In my speech, although I did not use the word “terrorism,” I referred to “man-caused” disasters. That is perhaps only a nuance, but it demonstrates that we want to move away from the politics of fear toward a policy of being prepared for all risks that can occur.

And then there’s this gem:

Our policies will be guided by authoritative information. We also have assets at our disposal now that we did not have prior to 9/11.

Assets you did everything you could to stop, derail or expose.

Release Gitmo detainees in the US.  Sure, why not.

Team Obama is seriously committed to a pre-9/11 mindset and they don’t care how many people have to be killed to get there.

Funnily enough, the Europeans have decided it’s not such a great idea after all.

No, not this one. The last one.

CHENEY: John, I’ve seen a report that was written based upon the intelligence that we collected then that itemizes the specific attacks that were stopped by virtue of what we learned through those programs. It’s still classified. I can’t give you the details of it without violating classification, but I can say there were a great many of them. The one that has been public was the potential attack coming out of Heathrow, when they were going to have several American planes with terrorists on board, with liquid explosives, and they were going to blow those planes up over the United States.

Now, that was intercepted and stopped, partly because of those programs that we put in place.

Now, I think part of the difficulty here as I look at what the Obama administration is doing, we made a decision after 9/11 that I think was crucial. We said this is a war. It’s not a law enforcement problem. Up until 9/11, it was treated as a law enforcement problem. You go find the bad guy, put him on trial, put him in jail. The FBI would go to Oklahoma City and find the identification tag off the truck and go find the guy that rented the truck and put him in jail.

Once you go into a wartime situation and it’s a strategic threat, then you use all of your assets to go after the enemy. You go after the state sponsors of terror, places where they’ve got sanctuary. You use your intelligence resources, your military resources, your financial resources, everything you can in order to shut down that terrorist threat against you.

When you go back to the law enforcement mode, which I sense is what they’re doing, closing Guantanamo and so forth, that they are very much giving up that center of attention and focus that’s required, and that concept of military threat that is essential if you’re going to successfully defend the nation against further attacks.

First he named long-time Israel hater Chas “Chas” Freeman to head the NIC, and here’s his followup:

Now both Republican and Democratic intel experts are raising questions about another Blair pick: John Deutch, a former CIA director once accused of major security lapses, who’s been appointed to a temporary panel reviewing troubled, top-secret spy-satellite programs.

After Deutch resigned as CIA director in 1996, agency officials discovered he had stored hundreds of pages of classified files on his home computers, despite repeated warnings that they could be intercepted via the Internet. Because of the incident, Deutch was stripped of his high-level security clearances, and a criminal probe into the matter culminated in January 2001, when the ex-spy chief agreed to plead guilty to misdemeanor charges of mishandling classified material. (The next day, Clinton, in one of his final acts as president, pardoned him.)

Given Deutch’s history, congressional officials want to know why Blair placed him on a panel so sensitive that its work should require an ultra-top-secret security clearance known as SI/TK (Special Intelligence/Talent-Keyhole). “The decision to grant [Deutch] a security clearance again is an affront,” GOP Sen. Kit Bond, the vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told NEWSWEEK, adding that it “should be reversed immediately.”

So the Lawyer-in-Chief is changing the name but not the status of enemy combatants held at Gitmo.  A meaningless sop to his base in the media who will crow about this break from the past, ignoring the fact it is a continuation of Bush’s approach in all important respects.

5 of the Gitmo detainees proudly admit responsibility for 9/11.

Team Obama takes a curiously Cheney-esque view of warrantless wiretapping on the green side of the White House fence:

The Obama Justice Department has adopted a legal stance identical to, if not more aggressive than, the Bush version. It argues that the court-forced disclosure of the surveillance programs would cause “exceptional harm to national security” by exposing intelligence sources and methods.

…

Then again, we are relearning that the “Imperial Presidency” is only imperial when the President is a Republican. Democrats who spent years denouncing George Bush for “spying on Americans” and “illegal wiretaps” are now conspicuously silent. Yet these same liberals are going ballistic about the Bush-era legal memos released this week. Cognitive dissonance is the polite explanation, and we wouldn’t be surprised if Mr. Holder released them precisely to distract liberal attention from the Al-Haramain case.

Taking time out from alienating the UK, Team Obama has decided it’s a good idea to invite Iran to a conference on how to stabilize Afghanistan.