GOP Candidate Allen West Claims He Has Higher Security Clearance Than President Obama
Posted in Main Blog (All Posts) on September 29th, 2010 4:37 am by HL
GOP Candidate Allen West Claims He Has Higher Security Clearance Than President Obama
Allen West, the Tea-Party backed GOP candidate for Congress in Florida’s 22nd district, is a retired lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army. He apparently believes this entitles him to a security clearance higher than any clearance held by President Obama. He told an audience in Pompano, FL last week that: “I still retain a secret security clearance. And I tell you, if you look at the application for a security clearance, I have a clearance that even the president of the United States cannot obtain because of my background.” Watch it:
PolitiFact Florida performed a rather unnecessary fact-check, and categorized the claim as a “pants on fire” falsehood. PolitiFact called Steven Aftergood, a national security and intelligence specialist with the Federation of American Scientists, who explained: “The president is the one who established the security clearance system by executive order. Therefore it is nonsensical to speak of clearances higher than what the president has. As head of the executive branch and commander in chief of the armed forces, there is no information in government that could be denied to the president for security reasons if he determined he needed access to that information.”
West’s campaign doubled down on the outrageous claim when contacted by PolitiFact, however, and added several smears against President Obama. Josh Grodin, the campaign manager, explained that West meant that he obtained his clearance through a rigorous screening and security process, while Obama simply claimed his by winning the popular vote — and that Obama would not have obtained any clearance otherwise. “The fact that (Obama) admitted to cocaine use, travel to unauthorized countries years before, and his associations with Louis Farrakhan and Rev. Jeremiah Wright, he probably would not have been granted a security clearance,” he said.
As ThinkProgress has noted, West has a record of actual transgressions that could harm whatever security clearance he may or may not hold. (PolitiFact could not confirm that West still retained one). He resigned from the military while facing a court martial over the brutal interrogation of an Iraqi man: according to his own testimony, during a military hearing, West watched four of his men beat the suspect, and West said he personally threatened to kill the man. According to military prosecutors, West followed up on his threat by taking the man outside and firing a 9mm pistol near his head, in order to make the man believe he would be shot.
TenMillionVoters.Com: Newt Launches Tea Party Campaign To Stop ?Radical, Secular Socialist Machine?
With the incendiary claim that the Obama presidency is the greatest threat the American people have ever faced, Newt Gingrich has launched a massively funded effort to mobilize ten million conservative voters this November. In an online video promoting the “Power of 10” campaign by his American Solutions for Winning the Future (ASWF) 527 group, Gingrich rails against the “genuinely radical, secular socialist machine” of the “Obama-Pelosi-Reid team” who “simply run over the beliefs and values of the American people.” Images of Tea Party rallies and the right-wing enemies list — Michael Moore, Sean Penn, and Katie Couric — scroll by as Gingrich pleads for “we the American people” to “go all out”:
You know, I don’t remember any time in American history where we had such a threat to our basic way of life: A genuinely radical, secular socialist machine ramming things through with no regard for American values or the beliefs of the American people.
Watch it:
American Solutions for Winning the Future is bankrolled by a cadre of the right-wing billionaires and oil and coal companies who put George W. Bush into office and destroyed the national economy.
Read more about Newt Gingrich’s ASWF at the Wonk Room.
Transcript:
You know, I don’t remember any time in American history where we had such a threat to our basic way of life: A genuinely radical, secular socialist machine ramming things through with no regard for American values or the beliefs of the American people.
When you look at case after case, the Obama-Pelosi-Reid team are determined that they’re going to drive home change in America no matter what you and I think, no matter what every American thinks. Polls say people oppose them. They oppose issue after issue: They don’t want big tax increases, they don’t want the labor unions to eliminate the secret ballot in organizing, they don’t want to see government control of health care, they don’t want to see the Arizona law challenged on immigration.
And yet, again and again this administration and its allies simply run over the beliefs and values of the American people.
And that’s why these 45 days are so important. Now, I look at what’s going on, and I’m frankly worried. Oh yeah, the polls look pretty good. There’s a lot of happy talk, but I’ve been here before. We haven’t yet seen the full power of the presidency. All of the elite news media biased against us, the labor unions pouring out every penny. Trial lawyers writing their big checks. The left-wing celebrities out there raising money.
October’s gonna be tough, and for us to win after their counterattack, we have to have laid out careful plans, we have to have trained our candidates, and we have to have mobilized our voters. Because we’re up against a machine that’s gonna be desperate. They know the country’s angry. They look at every poll that tells them that on issue on issue we the American people are rejecting them. They know we’re determined to defeat them. So they’re going to go all out. The question is: Are we willing to go all out too?
So I’m asking you one more time, in this 45-day period, help us before the end of September to get the resources to stop the Left and get America back on the right track. I’m confident we will win, and our children and grandchildren will have a dramatically better future.
