Gingrich To Americans: People Should Be Afraid

Newt Gingrich, former GOP speaker of the house, rallied to the former vice president’s side Sunday morning, making excuses for the prior administration’s torture program.

Echoing Dick Cheney during an appearance on Meet the Press, Gingrich insisted that “people should be afraid” because of President Barack Obama’s alterations to former President George W. Bush’s terror war.

“If you look at the behavior the last few months, if you look at the effort to open up past wounds,” said Gingrich. “… If you were a CIA employee today, and you understood there were people who wanted a truth commission, that people wanted to say to you, ‘I want to go back six, seven, eight years and I wanna put you on trial potentially … If you look at what Speaker Pelosi said, they lie to us all the time … This has hurt morale. The question is, is the most important thing to us today to find some sort of American Civil Liberties Union model of making sure that we never offend terrorists, or we’re gonna cover your back, we’re proud of you and we want you to defend America.”

“You will find the message we just heard from Mr. Gingrich, from Vice President Cheney and Mr. Rush Limbaugh to be the same. It’s a message of fear. Be afraid. Be very afraid. And to say that this president is not doing everything in his power to keep America safe is just about as irresponsible as anything I’ve ever heard said on [Meet the Press],” said Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) at the beginning of a lengthy retort to Gingrich.

“I think people should be afraid,” said Gingrich. “I think the lesson of 1993, the first time they bombed the World Trade Center, was, fear is probably appropriate. I think the lesson of Khobar Towers, where American servicemen were killed in Saudi Arabia, was, fear is probably appropriate. I think the lesson of the two embassy bombings in east Africa was, fear is probably appropriate. I think the lesson of the Cole being bombed in Yemen was, fear is probably appropriate. I’ll tell ya, if you aren’t a little bit afraid after 9/11, with 3,100 Americans killed inside the United States by an effort … If you weren’t worried about the second wave attack that was designed to take out the second largest building in Los Angeles … I think that you are out of touch with reality.”

The so-called second wave attack Gingrich referred to — an allegedly planned jumbo jet attack on the Library tower in Los Angeles (which Bush occasionally referred to as the “Liberty” tower) — has been called into doubt by intelligence officials. Members of the Bush administration have used the claim repeatedly to justify the torture of prisoners, even though waterboarding — which allegedly revealed the plot — had nothing to do with it.

[link to rawstory.com]