The Interrogation Memos And How Obama Is Playing Politics With National Security

The Washington Post reports that "a source familiar with White House views said Obama’s advisers are further convinced that letting the public know exactly what the past administration sanctioned will undermine what they see as former vice president Richard B. Cheney’s effort to 'box Obama in' by claiming that the executive order heightened the risk of a terrorist attack." In other words, pure politics took a higher place than national security. The New York Times explained the political motives behind releasing the memos and threatening to bring the lawyers who wrote them up on criminal charges when it wrote that "Mr. Obama and his allies need to discredit the techniques he has banned. Otherwise, in the event of a future terrorist attack, critics may blame his decision to rein in C.I.A. interrogators." This is what not allowing Cheney to "box-in" the White House actually means. Obama is putting future political considerations ahead of national security.

In fact, the Washington Post reports that "five CIA directors -- including Leon E. Panetta and his four immediate predecessors -- and Obama's top counterterrorism adviser had expressed firm opposition to the release of interrogation details in four top secret memos in which Bush administration lawyers sanctioned" enhanced interrogation techniques. George Tenet, who served as CIA director under Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, told CBS's "60 Minutes" in April 2007: "I know this program alone is worth more than the FBI, the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency put together have been able to tell us." Yet Obama ignored them all so that Cheney could not "box-in" the administration.

President Obama's national intelligence director Adm. Dennis C. Blair told colleagues in a private memo last week that “high value information came from interrogations in which those methods were used and provided a deeper understanding of the al Qa’ida organization that was attacking this country." It appears that the White House tried to suppress this key part of Blair's memo. The New York Times reports that "Admiral Blair’s assessment that the interrogation methods did produce important information was deleted from a condensed version of his memo released to the media last Thursday. Also deleted was a line in which he empathized with his predecessors who originally approved some of the harsh tactics after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001." In other words, the Obama White House tried to cover up their own intelligence director's assessment that the techniques used allowed for high value information to be gathered.

Cheney has objected to Obama's only releasing legal memos. The fact that Obama only released the legal memos justifying the techniques used by CIA interrogaters and not any showing the successes of the interrogations is evidence itself of Obama's political calculating. Cheney first said on "Hannity" that the White House should declassify documents that show the success of the techinques used in thwarting terrorist attacks. Hillary Clinton then responded by saying that Cheney was not a "reliable source of information." Cheney has hit back by showing that he is indeed a reputable source. He has now formally requested the Obama administration declassify two specific documents on intelligence obtained from the enhanced interrogation program that Obama has decried as torture, according to a copy of Cheney's request obtained by POLITICO. POLITICO reports that "the form filed with the National Archives' Presidential Libraries section on March 31 of this year shows that Cheney asked for declassification review of the two items from a folder called 'detainees' within 'OVP Cheney immediate office files.' The titles of the memoranda or reports were blacked out for classification reasons, however, one memo sought was dated July 13, 2004, and totaled eight pages, and another dated June 1, 2005, totals 13 pages. Cheney filled out the request himself--it's in his handwriting... National Archives officials said earlier this week that the request has been routed to the CIA for action. POLITICO obtained Cheney's request under the Freedom of Information Act."

The CIA has openly stated that the methods used helped stave off a monumental terrorist attack in the United States. CNSNews.com reports "that the Central Intelligence Agency said that it stands by the assertion made in a May 30, 2005 Justice Department memo that the use of enhanced techniques' of interrogation on al Qaeda leader Khalid Sheik Mohammed (KSM) — including the use of waterboarding — caused KSM to reveal information that allowed the U.S. government to thwart a planned attack on Los Angeles. Before he was waterboarded, when KSM was asked about planned attacks on the United States, he ominously told his CIA interrogators, 'Soon, you will know.' According to the previously classified May 30, 2005 Justice Department memo that was released by President Barack Obama last week, the thwarted attack — which KSM called the 'Second Wave'– planned ‘to use East Asian operatives to crash a hijacked airliner into’ a building in Los Angeles."

Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI), the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, wrote a piece in the Wall Street Journal saying he has asked Adm. Blair "to provide me with a list of the dates, locations and names of all members of Congress who attended briefings on enhanced interrogation techniques. Any investigation must include this information as part of a review of those in Congress and the Bush administration who reviewed and supported this program. To get a complete picture of the enhanced interrogation program, a fair investigation will also require that the Obama administration release the memos requested by former Vice President Dick Cheney on the successes of this program. An honest and thorough review of the enhanced interrogation program must also assess the likely damage done to U.S. national security by Mr. Obama's decision to release the memos over the objections of Mr. Panetta and four of his predecessors. Such a review should assess what this decision communicated to our enemies, and also whether it will discourage intelligence professionals from offering their frank opinions in sensitive counterterrorist cases for fear that they will be prosecuted by a future administration."

John McCain has described Obama's actions as a "witch hunt." McCain rightly said during an interview with CBS's "Early Show" that "if you criminalize legal advice, which is basically what they’re going to do, then it has a terribly chilling effect on any kind of advice and counsel that the president might receive." He compared the potential prosecutions with the actions of “banana republics” that “prosecute people for actions they didn’t agree with under previous administrations. To go back on a witch hunt that could last for a year or so, frankly, is going to be bad for the country, bad for future presidents — precedents that may be set by this, and certainly nonproductive in trying to pursue the challenges we face.”

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NjRmZDc2YzUyOGE1N2Q1YjQ4MTk1NzI2NWU3MmVhZmQ Obama’s Interrogation Mess Andrew C. McCarthy, Contributing Editor; National Review, 24 April 2009 He made it, and now he’ll have to bear the consequences. Obamateur Hour continues. At Politico, Josh Gerstein and Amie Parnes are reporting that Pres. Barack Obama is now backing away from the idea of an inquiry into the Bush-era enhanced-interrogation tactics — at least insofar as such a probe might be conducted by a 9/11 Commission-style panel or Pat Leahy’s proposed “truth commission.” (The Politico reports are here and here http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0409/21643.html> <; Jen Rubin, who is closely monitoring developments at Contentions, has observations here .) The president, having started a fire by recklessly releasing memos describing interrogation tactics, and then having poured gasoline on the flames by reversing himself on the banana-republic notion of investigating his political rivals, cannot douse the resulting inferno simply by saying, Oh, never mind. The president is reeling because he sees his legislative agenda going up in smoke. In his inexperience, he reckoned that his base on the Left would somehow be sated by the mere disclosure of Bush-era methods, coupled with vague assurances that a day of reckoning for Bush administration officials might soon be at hand. His Republican opposition, he further figured, would be cowed by his moral preening on “torture.” This, he concluded, would mean smooth sailing ahead for the more pressing business of nationalizing the economy, starting with the health-care industry. But as George W. Bush might have warned his successor, anti-American ideologues are emboldened, not mollified, by concessions. The Left doesn’t want Bush officials exposed — they want blood, and anything less than that will be cause for revolt. Simultaneously, Obama has raised the ire of the Right. In his solipsism, the president failed to foresee that the “torture” memos — memos that, as Rich Lowry shows , in fact document an assiduous effort to avoid torture — would not support his overblown rhetoric or substantiate the allegations of misconduct raised by politicized leaks from the International Committee of the Red Cross. Critics were not cowed. That, combined with Obama’s disingenuous strategy of exposing our tactics while suppressing the trove of intelligence they produced, ensured that the Right would push back aggressively. So now the president has chaos on his hands and no one but himself to blame for it. From the Left’s perspective, he has validated their war-crimes allegations. You can’t expect to do that and then just say, “never mind.” Senator Leahy was already agitating for an accounting before Obama’s high-wire act, as was the ACLU. Obama opened the door to prosecutions only 48 hours after his chief of staff assured a national television audience that there would be no prosecutions; having proved it can push around the weak-willed president, the Left is not going away. Neither are Obama’s political opponents on the right. Many of us spent years frustrated by the Bush administration’s failure to defend its national-security policies effectively. President Bush’s determination to do what he thought necessary to protect America, regardless of media carping and the consequent sag in his popularity, was his most endearing trait. But his unshakable conviction that the rightness of his actions would be borne out by history, and that he therefore didn’t need to justify himself, was foolish. Yes, history will be detached, and perhaps more accurate, decades hence, but it starts being written right now. Bush ceded to the Left the narrative-writing for the War on Terror, which is why the public remains in the dark about the intelligence haul from the CIA’s interrogation program for high-level detainees, as well as from the detainees held in Guantanamo Bay, whom antiwar activists have effectively portrayed as hapless shepherds mistakenly plucked from the fields of Afghanistan and shamefully consigned to a “legal black hole.” However unintentionally, Obama has invited an accounting. Vice-President Dick Cheney has lent his still-powerful voice to the push for disclosure of the intelligence produced by the CIA interrogations, and that push is not going away, either. You can’t have an accounting with half the facts — the more important half — missing. Just as Gitmo was not a due-process experiment, enhanced interrogation was not a Marquis de Sade study in human endurance potential. The goal, and the motivation of those involved in the effort, was to gather intelligence. That doesn’t mean “anything goes” — and the memos elucidate that restraint was an abiding concern. It does mean, though, that the effort can’t be reasonably evaluated without factoring in the obligation of those who took part in it to protect American lives, the dire straits in which they were operating, the encouragement they received from Congress and the public (remember, for example, President Clinton’s endorsement of torture to cull information in an emergency), and, most significant, the yield from the methods that were employed. If President Obama really thinks he can dance away unscathed after making a little feel-good mayhem for his side by telling only half of the story, he is mistaken. Obama’s apparent retreat on the notion of an investigation by an independent, bipartisan panel does not retract his more explosive proposition of kicking the matter over to the Justice Department. The “truth commission” idea is bad, but the prosecution idea is — by orders of magnitude — worse. And unlike the case of a congressional commission, it’s also within Obama’s power to pull the plug on a criminal investigation. Instead, he’s entrusting the matter to Attorney General Eric Holder, who responded to his boss’s abrupt turnabout by boldly promising to “follow the evidence wherever it takes us” —because, as he and Obama mindlessly repeat, “no one is above the law.” This underscores that it is, indeed, amateur hour. While no one is above the law, the law often is not enforced. As law-enforcement professionals will tell you, we don’t always follow the evidence wherever it takes us. If a defendant commits perjury at his trial, for example, we don’t investigate his lawyer, even though the lawyer elicited, and may well have encouraged, the false testimony. The bedrock of our system is prosecutorial discretion. How we use the government’s scarce resources is not a legal judgment but a political one that the president is elected to make, with the help of an attorney general expected to have the maturity the task demands. We don’t just “follow the evidence” — we expect that we’ve put adults in charge to decide which evidence gets followed. Obama and Holder can’t pretend that this is not their decision to make, that the “rule of law” is a train on which they are mere passengers. At issue here is a matter of policy, not evidence: In the United States of America, should the victor in a presidential election use the enormous powers of his office to investigate and prosecute his political adversaries, and thereby begin a cycle of retribution in which policy disputes will henceforth be criminalized? That is exactly what the Left wants. We, on the contrary, believe it would tear the country asunder, in addition to re-establishing the ethos of risk-aversion that invited 9/11. President Obama could have let sleeping dogs lie. Instead, he stirred both sides to battle stations. Now he will have to decide, and bear the consequences. — National Review’s Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and the author of Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad (Encounter Books, 2008).

Obama’s Interrogation Mess
Andrew C. McCarthy, Contributing Editor; National Review, 24 April 2009

He made it, and now he’ll have to bear the consequences.

Obamateur Hour continues.

At Politico, Josh Gerstein and Amie Parnes are reporting that Pres. Barack Obama is now backing away from the idea of an inquiry into the Bush-era enhanced-interrogation tactics — at least insofar as such a probe might be conducted by a 9/11 Commission-style panel or Pat Leahy’s proposed “truth commission.” (The Politico reports are here and here http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0409/21643.html> <; Jen Rubin, who is closely monitoring developments at Contentions, has observations here .) The president, having started a fire by recklessly releasing memos describing interrogation tactics, and then having poured gasoline on the flames by reversing himself on the banana-republic notion of investigating his political rivals, cannot douse the resulting inferno simply by saying, Oh, never mind.

The president is reeling because he sees his legislative agenda going up in smoke. In his inexperience, he reckoned that his base on the Left would somehow be sated by the mere disclosure of Bush-era methods, coupled with vague assurances that a day of reckoning for Bush administration officials might soon be at hand. His Republican opposition, he further figured, would be cowed by his moral preening on “torture.” This, he concluded, would mean smooth sailing ahead for the more pressing business of nationalizing the economy, starting with the health-care industry.

But as George W. Bush might have warned his successor, anti-American ideologues are emboldened, not mollified, by concessions. The Left doesn’t want Bush officials exposed — they want blood, and anything less than that will be cause for revolt. Simultaneously, Obama has raised the ire of the Right. In his solipsism, the president failed to foresee that the “torture” memos — memos that, as Rich Lowry shows , in fact document an assiduous effort to avoid torture — would not support his overblown rhetoric or substantiate the allegations of misconduct raised by politicized leaks from the International Committee of the Red Cross. Critics were not cowed. That, combined with Obama’s disingenuous strategy of exposing our tactics while suppressing the trove of intelligence they produced, ensured that the Right would push back aggressively.

So now the president has chaos on his hands and no one but himself to blame for it. From the Left’s perspective, he has validated their war-crimes allegations. You can’t expect to do that and then just say, “never mind.” Senator Leahy was already agitating for an accounting before Obama’s high-wire act, as was the ACLU. Obama opened the door to prosecutions only 48 hours after his chief of staff assured a national television audience that there would be no prosecutions; having proved it can push around the weak-willed president, the Left is not going away.

Neither are Obama’s political opponents on the right. Many of us spent years frustrated by the Bush administration’s failure to defend its national-security policies effectively. President Bush’s determination to do what he thought necessary to protect America, regardless of media carping and the consequent sag in his popularity, was his most endearing trait. But his unshakable conviction that the rightness of his actions would be borne out by history, and that he therefore didn’t need to justify himself, was foolish. Yes, history will be detached, and perhaps more accurate, decades hence, but it starts being written right now. Bush ceded to the Left the narrative-writing for the War on Terror, which is why the public remains in the dark about the intelligence haul from the CIA’s interrogation program for high-level detainees, as well as from the detainees held in Guantanamo Bay, whom antiwar activists have effectively portrayed as hapless shepherds mistakenly plucked from the fields of Afghanistan and shamefully consigned to a “legal black hole.”

However unintentionally, Obama has invited an accounting. Vice-President Dick Cheney has lent his still-powerful voice to the push for disclosure of the intelligence produced by the CIA interrogations, and that push is not going away, either. You can’t have an accounting with half the facts — the more important half — missing.

Just as Gitmo was not a due-process experiment, enhanced interrogation was not a Marquis de Sade study in human endurance potential. The goal, and the motivation of those involved in the effort, was to gather intelligence. That doesn’t mean “anything goes” — and the memos elucidate that restraint was an abiding concern. It does mean, though, that the effort can’t be reasonably evaluated without factoring in the obligation of those who took part in it to protect American lives, the dire straits in which they were operating, the encouragement they received from Congress and the public (remember, for example, President Clinton’s endorsement of torture to cull information in an emergency), and, most significant, the yield from the methods that were employed. If President Obama really thinks he can dance away unscathed after making a little feel-good mayhem for his side by telling only half of the story, he is mistaken.

Obama’s apparent retreat on the notion of an investigation by an independent, bipartisan panel does not retract his more explosive proposition of kicking the matter over to the Justice Department. The “truth commission” idea is bad, but the prosecution idea is — by orders of magnitude — worse. And unlike the case of a congressional commission, it’s also within Obama’s power to pull the plug on a criminal investigation. Instead, he’s entrusting the matter to Attorney General Eric Holder, who responded to his boss’s abrupt turnabout by boldly promising to “follow the evidence wherever it takes us” —because, as he and Obama mindlessly repeat, “no one is above the law.”

This underscores that it is, indeed, amateur hour. While no one is above the law, the law often is not enforced. As law-enforcement professionals will tell you, we don’t always follow the evidence wherever it takes us. If a defendant commits perjury at his trial, for example, we don’t investigate his lawyer, even though the lawyer elicited, and may well have encouraged, the false testimony. The bedrock of our system is prosecutorial discretion. How we use the government’s scarce resources is not a legal judgment but a political one that the president is elected to make, with the help of an attorney general expected to have the maturity the task demands. We don’t just “follow the evidence” — we expect that we’ve put adults in charge to decide which evidence gets followed.

Obama and Holder can’t pretend that this is not their decision to make, that the “rule of law” is a train on which they are mere passengers. At issue here is a matter of policy, not evidence: In the United States of America, should the victor in a presidential election use the enormous powers of his office to investigate and prosecute his political adversaries, and thereby begin a cycle of retribution in which policy disputes will henceforth be criminalized?

That is exactly what the Left wants. We, on the contrary, believe it would tear the country asunder, in addition to re-establishing the ethos of risk-aversion that invited 9/11. President Obama could have let sleeping dogs lie. Instead, he stirred both sides to battle stations. Now he will have to decide, and bear the consequences.

— National Review’s Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and the author of Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad (Encounter Books, 2008).

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