Ronald Kessler
If Barack Obama wins the presidency, he will endanger the country by making us more vulnerable to terrorist attacks, the vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence tells Newsmax.
Obama “would so weaken our security forces that I personally believe that we would be in much greater danger of terrorist attacks in the United States and abroad,” says Sen. Kit Bond, R-Mo. “I’m very much concerned, because he’s shown weak judgment throughout his career. Throughout his campaign he has taken one position after another that just doesn’t make sense in fighting the war on terror.” Obama voted twice in favor of requiring warrants to intercept communications of foreign terrorists situated overseas, including Osama bin Laden, Bond says.
“He voted for all of the amendments to weaken the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act bill and fought to strip it of its power,” Bond says. “Only at the 11th hour when he saw the tide was turning, did he vote for” the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
Obama’s comment that the way to fight the war on terror is with prosecutions, the way the first World Trade Center bombing was addressed, shows how out of touch Obama is, Bond says.
“That’s really great,” Bond says. “Prosecuting somebody who’s blown themselves to pieces. You’re lucky to find enough of them to identify them by DNA. They’re really going to fear prosecution.”
Because of President Bush’s policies, “We are much safer than before 9/11 and have avoided another terrorist attack,” Bond says. “That strategy has carried the war to the terrorists where they are. We’ve rolled back al-Qaida a long way. But Obama’s initial position a couple of years ago that the war is lost, let’s get out, would have turned the country over to al-Qaida.”
Obama’s recent claims that, if he knew where bin Laden was, he would strike him in Pakistan without permission of that country shows how little understanding he has of the war on terror, Bond says.
“That’s the policy now,” Bond says. “We do continually kill terrorists in Pakistan with the Predator, and we advise Pakistan. We don’t seek their permission. At one point, he said we’ll just go bomb Pakistan. Apparently he doesn’t realize that Pakistan, while certainly a mixed bag, is a nuclear-equipped Muslim territory which could, with any precipitous action, turn into an enemy. They control our most important supply routes into Afghanistan, and he would ignore that. He doesn’t realize how dangerous it would be to destabilize Pakistan and allow their radical fringes to take over.”
Obama showed the same lack of understanding about Russia’s invasion of Georgia, Bond says.
“He called on Georgia to show restraint, and it took him about three times to get around to John McCain’s general position condemning Russia,” Bond says. “Then his solution was to call on the U.N. Security Council. Do we want the commander in chief to pass the mantle of U.S. leadership to the U.N.? And do we want one who apparently does not know that Russia has a veto power in the Security Council?”
Obama’s statement that he would sit down with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to negotiate without preconditions demonstrates naiveté, Bond says.
In sum, “He dismisses the threat, rewards enemies with summit meetings, abandons allies, and then refuses to support trade agreements with vital allies like Colombia, who are fighting off the narco-terrorists,” Bond says.
Ronald Kessler is chief Washington correspondent of Newsmax.com. View his previous reports and get his dispatches sent to you free via
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