Posted on 08/30/2009 5:31:04 AM PDT by KeyLargo
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
* AUGUST 29, 2009, 5:04 A.M. ET
Interrogating the CIA
By REUEL MARC GERECHT
A clever, streetwise classmate of mine at the Central Intelligence Agency's junior officer training program—a former Delta Force officer—quickly and rudely discovered that counterterrorism in the much-vaunted Reagan years wasn't a serious endeavor at Langley. He had original and provocative ideas on using physical force to scare the bejesus out of terrorist suspects who had American blood on their hands. Although the CIA was then filling up with operatives pretending to be engaged against a growing terrorist menace, Langley's counterterrorist data bank and real operational planning were near zero. My friend's ideas were too unsettling. He resigned. By the time I resigned in 1994, CIA counterterrorism had become an inflexible, lumbering creature, incapable of countering the wicked anti-American forces gaining strength in the Middle East.
Fast forward to eight years after 9/11: Has Attorney General Eric Holder damaged the CIA's improved counterterrorist capacity by his decision to employ a special prosecutor to investigate whether crimes were committed by the agency's interrogators? From the moment Barack Obama won the presidency, Langley's use of "enhanced interrogation" was obviously over. The appointment of a prosecutor guarantees that unless the United States is again devastated by a terrorist attack—on a scale greater than 9/11—CIA operatives will certainly decline any future order by a Republican president to interrogate roughly a jihadist. Langley's junior officers may still receive survival and escape training, which is the baptismal font for the agency's enhanced interrogation techniques. But members of al Qaeda will not similarly get to enjoy the experience.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
if you read some of the comments there you can see Bush derangement syndrome is alive and well.
One day we’ll need people skilled in interrogation and they won’t be there.
One day we’ll information from a captured suspect and we’ll get it too late.
We’ll know exactly where to place the blame.
Obama and the administration he's surrounded himself with actions are so MORONIC I have to keep asking myself is there a brilliant unlying plan to all this I'm missing somewhere because nobody could be this inherently evil and stupid, but they keep making these outrageous moves so they just might be!
“Regardless of whether one believes CIA-inflicted waterboarding, sleep deprivation or severe psychological coercion (suggesting that harm could come to a family member of a taciturn al Qaeda detainee) constitute torture, such actions may have produced an intelligence bonanza and saved thousands of lives.
The released and heavily redacted 2004 CIA Inspector General’s report on interrogations doesn’t make a crystal clear case in favor of enhanced interrogation, but it certainly does suggest—and one has the distinct impression that the Inspector General was personally inclined against the rough treatment—that senior officers in the Directorate of Operations consistently found the interrogations to be valuable in collecting critical information against some members of al Qaeda, especially Mr. Mohammed.”
“It’s a very good guess that the organization right now has no volunteers coming forward for this work, and those who are currently indentured will free themselves from this profession as soon as possible. This may not be a pressing problem if the CIA doesn’t have anyone to interrogate, which was the case throughout most of the 1990s. That changed after 9/11, but even then it’s very unlikely that the best and the brightest at the agency involved themselves with the nuts and bolts and unpleasantness of interrogating “high-value” al Qaeda detainees. Complex debriefings—let alone more aggressive interrogations—in foreign languages have rarely been an agency forte. Such things are very hard work and don’t guarantee promotions.”
they are outing the entire cia
Good article about a horrifying development in our protective services.
1: Obama is most certainly a moron without question.
2: Obama is our enemy and is trying to destroy this country's foundation. That makes him an enemy in itself! He basically stated the constitution gives "negetive rights."
3: Both
Actually many have said that this is part of Obama's plan to gain total control, by enacting his police state using the next terrorist attack on the U.S. as his excuse. 
Actually many have said that this is part of Obama’s plan to gain total control, by enacting his police state using the next terrorist attack on the U.S. as his excuse.
So basically he will take advantage of a terrorist attack on this country, the same concept the left accused Bush of for 8 years. This time however, we have a president who will not let a crisis go to waste.
You can believe that this article by a former CIA officer has the backing of both currently serving personnel and the association of former officers.
This isn’t some off the wall individual effort IMO. Mr. Geracht is speaking FOR the CIA officers who cannot go public. The nation and the Obama administration should listen.
"Reuel Marc Gerecht is the Director of the Middle East Initiative at the Project for the New American Century and a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He is recently a contributor to Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign Policy (Editors Robert Kagan & William Kristol; Encounter Books, 2000) and is the author under the pseudonym of Edward Shirley of Know Thine Enemy: A Spy's Journey into Revolutionary Iran (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997). A former Middle Eastern specialist in the CIA, Mr. Gerecht writes frequently on the Middle East, Central Asia, terrorism, and intelligence, in such publications as the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The International Herald Tribune, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, The Weekly Standard, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The Middle East Quarterly, Playboy, and Talk." 
It should be pretty clear that we have already returned the CIA to it’s pre-911 status. The walls are already being rebuilt and a Special Prosecutor is now the defacto head of the CIA, not Leon Panetta.
Panetta ought to resign as loudly as he can over these prosecutions. The agency is toast right now and we can’t even begin to try and fix it unless and until we survive long enough for a new Congress to be seated in 2011. The dismantling of our National Security apparatus leaves that issue very much in doubt.
For those who are preparing to run for your Freehold, be sure you don’t wait too long or you may very well never make it.
God help us.
This move by Obama has several purposes:
1) Demoralize CIA officers who aren’t loyal to him and get them to quit. This consolidates his power in the agency.
2) Take his domestic policy failures off the front page.
3) Give some red meat to the far left wing of his party.
If it looks like the prosecutions are not working out he will drop them like rock, but the political benefits will already have been achieved.
there’s no question this is a Serbia moment,and hes using that card seven months into his administration.(your point 2)
Not at all positive as to number one since they will need recruits loyal to him to complete the process. Maybe if we say the upper ranks?
100% with you point 3.
Your final point is his final point,but not mine. I can understand this from a political sense. From a national security sense,they’ve screwed the pooch. Just as you say the political benefits have already been achieved so to has the damage to our national security. As i said,we’ll know where the blame lay should the events of 9/11 be repeated.
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