Former military man and former Secretary of State Colin Powell has again put himself at odds with official Cheney-branch Republican talking points by asserting that the United States is in fact not less under President Barack Obama:
Claims that the United States is less safe under President Obama are not credible, former Secretary of State Colin Powell said on “Face the Nation” Sunday.
He also challenged criticism by some (including former Vice President Dick Cheney, who say that by not using extreme interrogation techniques such as waterboarding on terror suspects the United States is more vulnerable.
“The point is made, ‘We don’t waterboard anymore or use extreme interrogation techniques.’ Most of those extreme interrogation techniques and waterboarding were done away with in the Bush administration,” Powell said. “They’ve been made officially done away with in this current administration.”
“The Transportation Security Administration created by George Bush is still in action working in our airports; they take care of me every day that I go to an airport,” Powell told moderator Bob Schieffer.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence was also created under President Bush, “and it is still under President Obama working hard,” he said. “Our counterterrorism authorities and forces are hard at work. Our law enforcement officials are hard at work. We have gone after the enemy in Afghanistan with 50,000 more troops, more predators are striking al Qaeda and Taliban leaders in Pakistan. We have continued the policies that President Bush put in place with respect to Iraq.
“The bottom line answer is the nation is still at risk. Terrorists are out there. They’re trying to get through. But to suggest that somehow we have become much less safer because of the actions of the administration, I don’t think that’s borne out by the facts,” Powell said.
One different between Powell and some others is that he doesn’t talk in what I call the “talk radio political culture” language. Rather than hit someone who disagrees with him over the head with a verbal shovel and trying to discredit the other person, he just lays out the facts as he sees them.
There used to be a time when that was how the bulk of politicians and/or commentators did it, even if their aim was political gamesmanship. But we’re in a new era.
Which is one reason why our government and politics seems so broken..
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Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.