Having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have.
Rush Limbaugh.
Executing assigned host duties flawlessly.
Still documented to be almost always right.
99.7% of the time.
Happy to have you here, folks, in the fastest three hours in media.
And an added bonus for you, even though you don't know it.
I wasn't going to be here tomorrow.
And a sense of duty overtook me.
And it really upset the apple cart.
Can I tell you what happened?
I was supposed to be off tomorrow and Monday.
Take a breather from the intense times we've been going through and celebrate Catherine's birthday a little early, just a whole bunch of things.
And things have eventuated.
I may have to put this off for another weekend.
So I came in today and I saw Mr. Snerdley in the kitchen.
Most people would call it the coffee room.
Here it is the kitchen.
And I said, you know, I think I want to work tomorrow.
Would it be, remember now, I'm the boss.
It's my show.
I am the EIB network.
And I asked Mr. Snerdley, the official program observer, would it be a problem if I decided to do my show tomorrow?
I was very nice, very considerate.
I mean, most people would have come in and said, okay, look, I don't care what plans you made.
I'm working tomorrow.
Fix it.
And there would have been some cussing and muttering behind my back that I would not have known about.
But instead, I came in.
I was very considerate and I said, would it be a problem if I, who am EIB, decided to do my program tomorrow?
You know what he said?
He said it would be.
It'd be a problem.
He said, I'd made plans to go to New York.
We're going to have Mark Stein do the program on Friday.
I've got to be in New York when Stein does it, I guess.
What about Monday?
Are you going to work Monday or not?
I could mess everything up if you work Monday.
Well, no, I'll probably take Monday off.
Well, okay, then I guess I can still go to New York.
I could screen the program on Friday from New York and stay there for Stein to come in on Monday.
And I said, hey, if it's going to put everybody out, I mean, I'll go ahead and maintain a current plan.
So Snerdley gets on the phone and called Brian, called Dawn, and made sure that everybody was hunky-dory with me doing my program tomorrow.
I just want you to know what great sacrifices my staff made in order for me to do what I'm supposed to be doing anyway.
And all of it stemming from a sense of duty and commitment.
I mean, there's just simply too much going on out there.
The psychologist, one of the psychologists who developed the tactics used in the Bush era, this is the political, in the Bush era interrogation program, as though they've never been used before.
Oh, no.
Oh, no.
All this stuff that went on at Club Get Money.
Yeah, that's Bush era only.
Anyway, one of the psychologists who developed a tactics is disputing the Senate staffer.
And it's really not a Senate intelligence committee, it's a Senate staff report.
The staff wrote it, didn't interview anybody at CIA, didn't talk to any of the interrogators.
Pure political document is just low-rent chump is what this is.
And one of the psychologists who developed the tactics says it's not true.
It's just plain not true.
Some of these things are just plain not true.
It's a bunch of hooey.
His name is James Mitchell.
And he admitted all this to Reuters in an interview published yesterday.
He said, some of these things are just plain not true.
They took all kinds of things out of context.
Mitchell said he believed the Senate staff report was intended to smear people involved with the interrogation program.
He wouldn't specifically say which parts were inaccurate because he claims to have a non-disclosure agreement.
Do you remember, ladies and gentlemen, back in 2005 on the Senate floor when Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois compared interrogators at Guantanamo Bay to interrogators working for Pol Pot in Cambodia and the Soviets, their gulags, and the Nazis?
Well, Anderson Cooper did remember that.
And last night on CNN's Anderson Cooper 360, he spoke with legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin about the Senate Intelligence Committee staff torture report.
And this is how that sounded.
When you read this, if you envision Nazis doing this, and I even hate to say this, if you envision the Khmer Rouge doing this, it all, you can imagine that.
I mean, it's not that far removed from stuff they were doing.
I mean, rectally, you know, feeding somebody to the point violently beyond any medical necessity, you know, waterboarding.
It does sound like stuff that people saw in movies and thought they would try out.
It is not something that the government has ever sanctioned.
That's just not true.
The point is that the Democrats on this committee had all been told.
That's what Jose Rodriguez has been trying to get people to understand.
The Democrats from Dianne Feinstein to you name it were all told, and they all signed off on it on closed-door sessions and public sessions.
They were told.
And they signed off.
They had no problem with it.
They just decided to politicize it.
This is like the second or third time.
But does this not ring familiar?
I mean, here's Anderson Cooper.
Why, if you read this, you're going to envision the Nazis doing this.
I mean, I even hate to say it.
No, he loves saying it.
The truth.
Comparing waterboarding to regimes that killed millions of people like Pol Pot?
Waterboarding?
Compared to Pol Pot to Khmer Rouge?
Well, where did he get this?
Anderson Cooper just didn't drag this stuff out of thin air.
Let's go back to June 14th of 2005 on the Senate floor and Senator Dick Turbin.
If I read this to you and didn't tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have happened by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime, Paul Potter others, that had no concern for human beings.
Sadly, that's not the case.
This was the action of Americans in treatment of their own prisoners.
This was the action of Americans.
Isn't it amazing how similar this sounds?
Back in 2005, nine years ago, ladies and gentlemen, almost nine and a half years ago now, Dick Durbin says, if I read this to you and didn't tell you that it was an FBI agent, Tuesday night on CNN, Anderson Cooper says, when you read this, you envision Nazis, the Khmer Rouge, Pol Pot.
I mean, it's not that far removed from stuff they were rectally feeding somebody.
These people were on a hunger strike.
That's what they leave out on a hunger strike.
And we are acting humanely to try to keep them alive.
Rectally feeding is one of the ways you can do that.
I mean, you could have done it other ways, but I mean, after all, who are these people?
What the hell did they do?
They killed 3,000 Americans for crying out loud.
Do these people forget this?
Remember what I said yesterday about what real torture is?
Putting your head on the pillow every night, trying to go to sleep with the mental image of family members leaping to their deaths from the top floors of the World Trade Center to avoid burning to death.
That's torture.
And then waking up to the same thought.
That's torture, and it never ends.
So, Dick Cheney was on special report with Brett Baer on the Fox News Channel last night.
Brett Baer said, What's your overall impression, Mr. Vice President, of this report?
What's in it and its release?
It's a terrible piece of work, basically.
It seems to me it's deeply flawed.
They didn't bother to interview kepel involved in the program.
And I think that it's a sort of a classic example, which you see too often in Washington, where a group of politicians get together and sort of throw the professionals under the bus.
We've seen it happen before.
I can remember year-round contra.
What happened here was that we asked the agency to go take steps and put in place programs that were designed to catch the bastards who killed 3,000 of us on 9-11.
Right.
But see, the bastards that killed us on 9-11, we've got to be empathetic with them.
We can't mistreat them.
We have got to understand their rage.
We've got to do seminars like the State Department did and try to understand why they hate us.
Why is their grievance legitimate?
Because you see, everybody that has a grievance with the United States is legitimate.
It could be an Hispanic, could be an African-American, could be somebody from the Muslim community, could be anybody from anywhere.
If they've got a grievance, then it must be warranted.
Anybody with a grievance, it must be justified.
That's the attitude of the American left, because we are the problem in the world.
We are never the solution, and we are always guilty.
But yeah, Cheney says, we got to bastards that killed 3,000 of us on 9-11.
We're going to find out as much as we can about who did it, why, who planned it, and who's planning to do it again, and we're going to stop it.
And that's considered extreme by people like Dick Durbin and Anderson Cooper.
That's considered a little bit too much.
That attitude is dangerous.
That attitude is too risky.
It's too extreme.
It's fraught with danger.
It's beneath our values to speak of them as bastards who killed us.
No, that's not who we are.
That's sacrificing our values.
So next, Brett Baer said, Well, the New York Times writes it this way about the report when told about one detainee being chained to the ceiling of his cell, clothed in a diaper, and forced to urinate and defecate on himself.
Even a president known for his dead or alive swagger expressed discomfort.
Is that true?
I don't have any idea.
I've never heard of such a thing.
What really bugs me as I watch all this process unfold is the men and women of the CIA did exactly what we wanted to have them do in terms of taking on this program.
We've got Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who's the mastermind of 9-11, who has killed 3,000 Americans, taken down the World Trade Center, hit the Pentagon.
He is in our possession.
We know he's the architect.
And what are we supposed to do?
Kiss him on both cheeks and say, please, please, tell us what you know.
Of course not.
We did exactly what needed to be done in order to catch those who were guilty on 9-11 and to prevent a further attack.
And we were successful on both parts.
This report says it was not successful.
The report's full of crap.
This report says it wasn't successful.
And Dianne Feinstein read from it on the Senate floor, and she said, we didn't learn anything.
Nothing that we did in terms of interrogating these prisoners helped us do anything.
We didn't find any more about where bin Laden was.
It didn't help us get bin Laden, didn't help us kill bin Laden.
I guess Obama knew all that on his own.
Yeah, not one worthwhile bit of information was gleaned from any of these interrogations.
Cheney says appropriately, the report's full of crap.
And about this business, a detainee being chained to the ceiling of his cell, clothed in a diaper, and forced to urinate and defecate on himself.
Hmm.
Cheney says, no such thing.
I've never heard of it.
But even if you picture that against the two planes hitting the World Trade Center, but that's not who we are, Mr. Limbaugh.
It's so sober to just make a mockery of our values.
Okay, then we could have just put him up there nude so that he would have pooped on the floor, right?
Not on himself.
Is that a way to solve this?
Is it the diaper that's the offensive thing here chaining to the ceiling?
By the way, this doesn't jibe.
We had a call yesterday from, I don't know if an interrogator, but a security person down there that they've got the Quran, they've got flat-screen TVs in their cells, and they're not allowed to be referred to as prisoners.
They have to be called detainees.
They get exercise time.
Why do you think you go to rushlimbaugh.com?
We have a thriving licensed merchandise business there with all of our Club Gitmo gear.
Club Gitmo hats, Club Gitmo t-shirts, Club Gitmo everything.
Bright orange.
It's good stuff.
It's been selling well ever since we opened.
Why would we open something called Club Gitmo?
Because we originally heard that it was certainly not being treated and the people there were not being treated the way they are described in this report.
It was quite the opposite from the get-go, we've been told.
Remember the hell that broke loose when Michael Issakoff ran this BS story that a Koran was flushed down the toilet?
And we found out that wasn't true?
And Obama has always said that the existence of Club Gitmo is nothing more than a recruitment tool for more terrorists.
So what are we supposed to do?
Shut down prisons because it just makes the family members mad and shut down prisons because that just infuriates our enemies even more and causes more to sign up?
Well, if that's the case, why do we have anybody in jail?
These people are lunatics.
Brett Baer said to Dick Cheney, you had one detainee, Rachman, who died in captivity, November 2002.
3,000 Americans died on 9-11 because of what these guys did.
And I have no sympathy for them.
I don't know the specific details.
I'm sure there were instances cited in the report.
I haven't read the report, but I know for a fact.
No, wait, you haven't read it?
6,000 pages?
I've seen parts of it.
I've read summaries of it.
I keep coming back again to the basic fundamental proposition.
How nice do you want to be to the murders of 3,000 Americans?
I think that what needed to be done was done.
I think we were perfectly justified in doing it, and I'd do it again in a minute.
And we've got more from Cheney, but I have to take an obscene profit break.
Do that and be right back.
Well, isn't this interesting?
John Brennan, who is the CIA director, used to be over at the White House in Obama's national security apparatus.
He is appearing at CIA headquarters right now.
He's been doing a press conference for the past half hour or so.
And he just threw Dianne Feinstein under the bus, and he just threw the Senate committee staffers under the bus.
He just said that all of these techniques were used and they produced results.
John Brennan, Obama's CIA guy, is validating the use of these dire techniques.
He's admitting that they were used and he was admitting that they were useful.
He was admitting that they're productive.
And he says that we did glean information.
Now, what does that tell you?
The very same people, these are Obama's people, the very same people have been running around trying to destroy George W. Bush and Cheney and everybody in that regime, Rumsfeld, you name it.
And all the CIA interrogators, they've been running around saying this doesn't work.
Torture doesn't work.
Waterboarding doesn't work.
Even McCain's been running around.
It doesn't work.
It doesn't produce any information.
It doesn't do this.
And Obama's been running around six years promising to close Club Gitboard.
It's still open, isn't it?
And now when this report comes out, which attempts to tie the Americans' hands, tie our hands in dealing with these people, the Obama administration stands right up and says, hold on, these techniques work.
The Obama administration stands, wait a second, this information and these techniques led to the tracking down and killing of Osama bin Laden.
He just said this.
He just threw Diane Fein.
He just called Dianne Feinstein a liar in so many words and threw her under the bus and everybody having to do with this report.
She pointedly said that no information was gathered that led to us getting bin Laden or anybody else.
And Obama's CIA director, one of Obama's guys, has now gone public to defend these dire techniques.
What does that tell you, folks?
To me, it speaks volumes about how really serious this threat is.
If even these people have now been forced into disagreeing with the Democrat narrative of the day, if Obama's CIA now, one thing, no, no, no, I'm not fooled.
I know that Obama loves using these techniques as much as anybody else ever has.
Don't misunderstand.
I know full well.
I know full well Obama loves drone killing.
I know full well.
He wants people to think that he's every bit the softy that his lunatic base is.
But in the real world, Obama loves having this power.
I'll tell you one other thing, too.
Mr. Snertley has made a valid point.
Anderson Cooper obviously cannot possibly know the kind of things the Khmer Rouge did or the Nazis.
Because if he did, he wouldn't even think about comparing what happened at Guantanamo Bay to what the Khmer Rouge did.
So he obviously, I'm not surprised either, that a journalist doesn't know something.
It's perfectly obvious that Anderson Cooper doesn't have any idea what the Khmer Rouge did if he thinks we engaged in similar stuff.
Story from the Daily Caller.
On Monday night, the Politico Magazine national editor, a guy by the name of Michael Hirsch, referred to Dick Cheney, the former vice president, as a war criminal.
This is a mainstream media editor, national editor at Politico.
Monday night, Politic Magazine national editor Michael Hirsch had something quite pointed to say about Dick Cheney.
He tweeted, quote, another item in the already long bill of particulars on Dick Cheney, war criminal.
I'm telling you, this is who these people are.
One more Cheney soundbite, and it is from Brett Baird's last night special report on Fox News Channel.
So, Mr. Vice President, did the ends justify the means?
Absolutely.
No doubt in your mind.
No doubt in my mind, I'm totally comfortable with it.
We had reporting that al-Qaeda was trying to get their hands on nuclear weapons, that they'd been dealing with Pakistanis, who, after all, have nuclear weapons.
We had the anthrax attacks who went on here at home.
There was every reason to expect there was going to be a follow-on attack.
And from our perspective, if you were sitting in my chair, the president's chair, our job is to keep the country safe and secure and go get those guys who hit us on 9-11.
And that's exactly what we did.
We did what we felt was necessary.
The professionals in the intelligence community, especially at the CIA, did one hell of a job.
They did.
And even Obama's CIA director was forced to come out publicly just moments ago and say the same thing.
Now, Brennan just finished, and he said what every other director and deputy director of the CIA has said about this report.
Now, there are more seven of those people.
There are more than seven former directors and deputy directors.
More than seven people have all said the same thing about this report, that it's crazy, it's full of crap, and none of it is true.
Now, either these seven people are liars or the Democrat staffers are liars.
My money is on the Senate Democrat staffers.
And I just wonder what Obama's lunatic base, they don't know yet.
And here Die Fi puts out a report.
The MSNBC crowd, the Democrat base, applaud and cheer.
Cheney is a war criminal.
We mistreated.
We tortured.
We sacrificed our values.
We were hated.
We engaged in reprehensible behavior.
And Obama's guy stands up and says, no, no, no, no.
I have to defend these dire techniques.
I have to defend them because they work.
They produced valuable intel.
If it weren't for these interrogations and these techniques, we would have never found bin Laden.
What do you think Obama's lunatic base is going to do with this?
The very last person they thought would stand up and defend this would be Obama's former NSA guy and now CIA director Brennan.
This is going to be interesting to follow.
Now, they may stand mute.
I don't know, but this is fascinating to me because I am sure they expected every Democrat to fall in line with this report because this report creamed America.
This report creamed the CIA.
This report destroys the American military.
It destroys the entire effort in the war on terror.
And here comes Obama's CIA director contradicting it, throwing it under the bus, throwing Feinstein under the bus.
One more bite here, Jose Rodriguez.
Back on Fox last night, he was the lead interrogator.
He was one of the guys that interrogated Khalik Sheikh Mohammed.
We've played his soundbites with Leslie Stahl in 60 Minutes.
In fact, I'll play it again here in just a second.
But first, Megan Kelly said, these people, Senate staffers, they're so critical of you and your program.
And yet, when asked to justify the drone program, where does the White House go?
Right to the terrorist behavior to try to justify what we're doing is in response to what they're doing.
So the White House is perfectly fine to drone these guys to death.
The White House is perfectly fine because these guys are engaging in activity to kill us.
So we're going to kill them or we're going to drone them.
And they defend that.
But when it comes to what you did, Mr. Rodriguez, you don't get that same benefit of the doubt.
I am so tired of hearing from the president and others in this administration that this program was against our values.
It's an excuse, an excuse not to capture and interrogate terrorists because this administration does not have the fortitude and the courage to do what it takes to do the mission of capturing and detaining terrorists.
They rather kill, and somehow, because they kill from a distance, is more ethical than actually capturing and interrogating terrorists, which is actually a little messier and unpleasant.
Now, this is what you call hitting back.
This is something that Republicans on Capitol Hill can learn from.
This is called hitting back.
This is called hitting back hard.
This is Jose Rodriguez.
Oh, yeah, it's really brave and it's really gutsy for these guys to drone these enemies to death from afar.
Just drone them and kill them, but they don't have the fortitude or the courage to actually capture, detain, and interrogate.
Just so you remember who this man is, Leslie Stahl interviewed him.
She was in a total state of bewilderment the whole time.
He wrote a book about what happened at the CIA, what happened at Club Getmo, detailing some of the techniques, detailing some of the experience he had with Khalid Sheikh Mohamed and others.
She just could not believe.
She could not believe that we gave them insure.
To her, that was dire.
Insure, but let's give cancer based in a hospital.
That, oh, God, that's horrible.
See, Leslie Stahl wouldn't drink it, so it's got to be bad.
Leslie Stahl wouldn't take that stuff.
It's just heartless what we do to people, give them insure.
So it's funny.
She's going on and on about how rotten we are, and these techniques are just so abominable.
And she's asking him about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, how he reacted to all of this mistreatment.
She said, So what happens, Senor Rodriguez?
Does Khalid Sheikh Mohammed break down?
Does he cry?
Does he fall apart over the meanness of the United States?
No, he gets a good night's sleep.
He gets his insure.
By the way, he was very heavy when he came to us and he lost 50 pounds.
What, his insure?
You mean like people in the hospital who drink that stuff?
Yes, dietary manipulation was part of these techniques.
So sleep deprivation, dietary manipulation.
I mean, this is Orwellian stuff.
The United States doesn't do that.
Well, we do.
That is, to me, priceless.
Every word of that.
Both people is priceless.
He is openly mocking her.
She has no idea.
Yes, insure.
Dietary manipulation was part of these dire techniques.
She really does think giving somebody insure is dire.
She even missed the fact that we treated him so well, he lost 50 pounds.
Who knows how long we extended his life?
He lost 50 pounds.
He became healthier as a result of our torture, quote unquote.
Totally misses that.
Equates insurer with absolute horror.
And we dietary manipulate.
Insure we don't do this.
Oh, but we do.
I don't know.
I've never met this guy, but I can tell you I instinctively like him.
And back we are.
Rushlin Baugh saying more in five minutes than most hosts say in an entire week.
Here's John Brennan, the CIA director.
He said, interesting.
Why are they doing this?
There's got to be a reason why, in less than two days, the CIA, Obama's CIA director is going on TV and basically calling Diane Feinstein Senate staffers liars.
Why is this happening?
Why?
No, no, no, no, no, no.
Why are they, and he's not the other, there's a bunch of other Democrats who are starting to speak up against this report.
Why?
As you ponder that, here is the CIA Director Brennan.
This is during a QA.
Henri Mitchell, NBC News, Washington, said, do you think the bin Laden case can be attributed in some part to enhanced interrogation techniques or torture?
It is our considered view that the detainees who were subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques provided information that was useful and was used in the ultimate operation to go against bin Laden.
Wow.
Again, intelligence information from the individuals who were subjected to EITs provided information that was used in that.
I am not going to attribute that to the use of the EITs.
Just going to state, as a matter of fact, the information that they provided was used.
Okay, what's going on here, folks?
You want to take a stab at it, Mr. Snerdley?
What do you think is going on here?
No guess.
I'll tell you what's going on.
They are trying to put the genie back in the bottle.
They are trying to wipe out every vestige of evidence in this report.
And I'll tell you why.
Because they know the CIA knows where the bodies are buried.
If they want to war with the CIA, I can read between the lines what Jose Rodriguez and these people are saying and Dick Cheney.
And if the CIA, if these people are telling the CIA this and that, I'm just, if the CIA wants to go to war with these people, they know a whole lot of things about these Democrats.
I'm telling you, they're trying to put the genie back in the bottle here because the CIA knows where Democrat bodies are buried.
And there are some, quote, call them adult Democrats who are trying to keep the CIA quiet.
Individuals in the CIA.
I guarantee you, this is about making peace with the CIA.
Mark my words.
Now, interesting story here from Roll Call.
Let me give you the headline.
Lacking sufficient support, House Republican leaders have delayed the vote on the omnimus budget bill.
Last updated 22 minutes ago.
Unsure now whether they have the votes to pass the trillion-dollar federal spending package.
House Republican leaders this afternoon delayed the final vote.
They did so with mere hours to go until the government is set to run out of funding.
And just before the House was scheduled to vote, Republican leaders called a recess to floor proceedings with GOP leadership aid confirming no conference meeting is planned at this time.
The aide said leadership teams are still talking to the respective members and noted, we still plan to vote this afternoon, but it's not clear what they're going to be voting on.
And if the Republicans can't surmount this impasse, they could decide to proceed with swiftly moving a short-term resolution through the chamber, which the Senate could also pass before midnight tonight.
And if they do, they'll be throwing away months of hard-fought negotiations between appropriators.
The point is, House Republican leadership doesn't have very many options.
After barely winning the procedural vote on a rule to bring the spending bill to the floor for full debate, consideration of vote, they realized they may not, despite the vote on the rule, they may not have enough votes for passage.
Because a lot of Republicans voted no.
Those 212 votes no were not all democrats.
I mean, there were some Republicans.
All the Democrats voted no.
It was like 196 of them.
So it's not a slam dunk.
It's not going the way the leadership wants, folks.
Don't know what's going to happen the rest of the day.
But even though the vote on the rule happened, it doesn't appear that what would be an automatic vote up and down on the whole thing after some debate is now going to happen.
It's trouble in paradise is the bottom line.
Just further justification for my throwing away a day off and coming in tomorrow.
So the Democrats, the Democrats are still on the verge of shutting down the government, folks, is what that means.