General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Anyone who claims Obama called the torturers "patriots"... [View all]Autumn
(48,982 posts)chide those who was being so sanctimonious about them doing their job on 9/11? No one was. You are dishonest and a liar yourself if you think that those teams on 9/11 were the only ones being referenced by the President when he said he understood why IT happened and them went on to talk about not feeling too sanctimonious in retrospect. Who were the people on Bush's national security team? Who were the heads of Bush's FBI and CIA on 9/11? (there's the law enforcement Obama was talking about)
"With respect to the RDI report, even before I came into office I was very clear that in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 we did some things that were wrong. We did a whole lot of things that were right, but we tortured some folks. We did some things that were contrary to our values.
I understand why it happened. I think its important when we look back to recall how afraid people were after the Twin Towers fell and the Pentagon had been hit and the plane in Pennsylvania had fallen, and people did not know whether more attacks were imminent, and there was enormous pressure on our law enforcement and our national security teams to try to deal with this. And its important for us not to feel about the tough job that those folks had. And a lot of those folks were working hard under enormous pressure and are real patriots."