Time Magazine: Obama Didn’t Negotiate with Terrorists, but Other Presidents Did
Posted By Philip Hodges on Jun 6, 2014 | 1 Comment
lies
Time had an article defending the Obama administration’s decision to swap five Gitmo detainees for alleged deserter Bergdahl. So far, the conservative narrative has been to blast Obama for negotiating with terrorists, something that Time claims didn’t happen. And not only that, but Time also claimed that other presidents, namely Carter, Reagan, and Clinton, actually did negotiate with terrorists.
Warner Todd Huston with Breitbart pointed out some distinctions between what Obama did and what these other presidents did:
Time notes that during the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis Jimmy Carter negotiated with the Iranian Mullahs who took over Iran after deposing the Shah. Reagan also negotiated with the Mullahs, Time notes.
Of course, in both cases the Mullahs were then the official government in Iran, whereas today the Taliban are not an officially recognized government in Afghanistan.
The magazine also reminds readers that Bill Clinton met with Irish Republican Army leader Gerry Adams in the mid-1990s. Still, in that case Clinton was not “negotiating” for the release of American soldiers. Clinton’s was a political move, not a traditional “negotiation.”
Oddly, Time treats the Taliban as a single organization, calling it a “savage and deplorable organization” that the magazine yet notes “is not on the State Department’s official list of terrorist organizations.”
In truth, though, the Taliban is not really a “the,” but a “they.” The Taliban is a catch-all phrase used to describe a loosely knit movement of many different groups, some of which don’t work well with the others. Often these groups are based on local tribes as opposed to members of a centrally controlled group.
There are essentially two separate “Talibans,” one in Pakistan and one in Afghanistan.
Regardless, Time magazine insists that whatever was going on, “the real debate isn’t whether Obama negotiated with terrorists – he didn’t.”
Listening to talk radio over the past few days, it’s been nonstop. People calling in, outraged that Obama “negotiated with terrorists” in giving up five high-ranking terrorist Taliban officials for dirt bag traitor Bergdahl. And then you have radio hosts claiming that the Obama administration is using this new scandal in order to knock the VA scandal off the front pages. That’s always a possible scenario, but I don’t see how this new scandal benefits the Obama administration in any way. So far, his actions have been indefensible, even by his own party.
Frankly, I don’t see why what Obama did is any worse than what the U.S. has been doing for decades with regards to terrorists. Forget negotiating with them. How about creating them? Al-Qaeda and its myriad related terrorist organizations would be nothing today if it weren’t for the U.S.’s covert funding, arming, training and recruiting of them. Why is it that that gets no outrage from conservatives, but this prisoner swap does?
Look at Benghazi. What was the narrative put forth by the media? Basically, that the Obama administration told security forces to stand down and not go to the aid of the Americans who were trying to defend the Benghazi facility and Ambassador Stevens from attack. That was the media-defined scandal. The liberal media retorted that the “attack” was just a demonstration inspired by some stupid YouTube video that no had ever seen up to that point. Then they denied blaming it on the video and said that there were no security forces to send that were close enough to Benghazi. That entire back-and-forth was a giant distraction and completely and deliberately ignored the bigger picture.
No one wants to talk about what this facility was, what its purpose was, who Chris Stevens was, and what he was doing. This facility was not the embassy; that’s located in Tripoli. It was a CIA annex, and Stevens’ diplomatic cover was ambassador. That was his cover ID. He was essentially an arms broker. His job was to collect the left over weapons from Gaddafi’s fallen regime and ship them over Syria, where terrorist organizations there could use them (with CIA training) to continue to destabilize the country with the U.S.’s hopes of bringing down Assad. In short, the U.S. was negotiating with terrorists, as they’ve been doing for years.
But what we’re supposed to be outraged over is the fact security forces weren’t ordered to help fend off the attack. While that is an outrage in and of itself, because Americans died, the bigger scandal is that it has been a matter of policy for the U.S. to aid and abet terrorist organizations to accomplish its own wicked geopolitical ends.
This is what happens when we let the media do our thinking for us. We end up with a filtered bunch of half-truths and lies by omission, all meant to stir up strife to keep this “Republicans vs. Democrats” game going ad infinitum. And this Bergdahl story is no exception.
Read more at
http://lastresistance.com/6018/time-magazine-obama-didnt-negotiate-terrorists-presidents/#0XVhPxubvLTKbgxB.99
