Homeland Insecurity

The Politico in Obama muddles torture message: ... President Barack Obama’s attempt to project legal and moral clarity on coercive CIA interrogation methods has instead done the opposite — creating confusion and political vulnerability over an issue that has inflamed both the left and right.

In the most recent instance, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair acknowledged in a memo to the intelligence community that Bush-era interrogation practices yielded had "high-value information,” then omitted that admission from a public version of his assessment.

That leaves a top Obama administration official appearing to validate claims by former Vice President Dick Cheney that waterboarding and other techniques the White House regards as torture were effective in preventing terrorist attacks. And the press release created the impression the administration was trying to suppress this conclusion.

Krauthammer: ... The administration has put out stories about how Obama agonized about the release of the documents. Well, if you were born yesterday, you'll believe that.

You look at the political expediency and the political objective of these leaks. Obama was elected by running against George Bush, even though he wasn't on the ballot. He has been running against Bush in the first 100 days. He ran against Bush when he was in Europe and in Trinidad. He's making himself the foil against Bush.

And you would expect that has to end after a few months. Well, with the torture issue, it doesn't end. It's a perfect way to keep Bush alive as the permanent nemesis and foil of Obama.

And what he's doing is by strategically releasing a memo here, a memo there, he creates a firestorm, which is all predictable, which is not going to end up in prosecutions. It will end up in a truth commission.

You will have all kinds of congressional hearings. You will have all kinds of commissions. You will have leaks. You will have televised, very dramatic testimony.

This issue, the Bush issue, will be alive for a long time.

And the reason Obama is trying to look magnanimous in saying he won't prosecute the CIA officials is because, obviously, there is no way to prosecute an official who acted in good faith. And even their lawyers, who simply offered an opinion, you're going to [prosecute a] lawyer who simply offered an opinion?

The issue, I think, of prosecutions, is a side issue here. The real issue is the hearings, the commissions, and the leaks that we will have in the future.

source: ...

FOX News has learned there were more than 30 meetings and briefings with Congress on the subject since 2002. 

The first such briefing dealt with the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, Al Qaeda's operations chief who ran the training camps in Afghanistan were the Sept. 11 hijackers were trained. Rep. Nancy Pelosi, now House speaker, attended along with then-Rep. Porter Goss, Fla., (who later became CIA director), but did not raise any objections, sources said. 

The briefings were given until 2006 to the chairmen and ranking members of the intelligence committees in the House and Senate. That could cover Sen. John Rockefeller, W.Va., and Rep. Jane Harman, Calif., both Democrats, as well as Sen. Pat Roberts, Kan., Sen. Lindsey Graham, S.C., Sen. Richard Shelby, Ala., and Rep. Pete Hoekstra, Mich., all Republicans. 

Defenders of the interrogation program note that if Congress had wanted to kill the program, all it had to do was withhold funding, which didn't happen

source: ...

Republicans currently hold a six-seat majority in the House. Democrats had a one-seat majority in the Senate, prior to the death of Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota in a plane crash last month. Political observers expect a tight race for control of Congress. They say the United States appears to be as politically divided as it was during the contested 2000 presidential race.

ibid: ...

Other Republicans have pointed out that with the exception of Blair, the Obama administration has defending the policies using political figures – like Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod – rather than top national security advisers.

“You can imagine what it would have looked like, if on a sensitive intelligence matter involving the CIA and this controversy, if we sent Karl Rove out to do this briefing. And that’s in effect what’s happened here,” says a high-ranking official from the Bush White House. “And I assume that’s because they saw it primarily as a political issue – because it’s being debated inside as a political issue –because it’s about appeasing the left, whose support they sought during the campaign. And Axelrod is more of an expert on that crowd that anybody else. It also says to me he was in all the meetings where they were debating this question – whether or not Obama had better go forward with some kind of investigation.”

source: Ali Soufan an F.B.I. supervisory special agent from 1997 to 2005

One of the most striking parts of the memos is the false premises on which they are based. The first, dated August 2002, grants authorization to use harsh interrogation techniques on a high-ranking terrorist, Abu Zubaydah, on the grounds that previous methods hadn’t been working. The next three memos cite the successes of those methods as a justification for their continued use.

It is inaccurate, however, to say that Abu Zubaydah had been uncooperative. Along with another F.B.I. agent, and with several C.I.A. officers present, I questioned him from March to June 2002, before the harsh techniques were introduced later in August. Under traditional interrogation methods, he provided us with important actionable intelligence.

We discovered, for example, that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. Abu Zubaydah also told us about Jose Padilla, the so-called dirty bomber. This experience fit what I had found throughout my counterterrorism career: traditional interrogation techniques are successful in identifying operatives, uncovering plots and saving lives.

source: ... So we know this predictable pattern of flexibility and accommodation. From 2001 to 2003, Bush officials were deemed serious and sober, and reformed the intelligence agencies to stop the incompetence that led to 9/11. By consensus, they took decisive measures to stop new enemies in a new sort of war — in which terrorists out of uniform, blending in with civilians, had devised ways of infiltrating the United States to murder thousands. And that consensus kept us safe.

Then, in the luxury of that very safety, and with the recrudescence of partisanship, from 2004 to 2009, our once-praised guardians were redefined by their Democratic critics as Gestapo-like torturers who created a Stalag in Cuba. And the terrorists, this new story went, were unfortunates bundled away for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, in the vicinity of bin Laden’s Hindu Kush compounds.

And we know in advance the dénouement of this tragicomedy. Should we lose another 3,000 in a morning, and should the attackers have appeared earlier on wire-taps, been released from Guantanamo, or escaped notice due to new “firewalls,” then once more we will go into the cycle of recrimination.

The only constant is that those who are most loudly screaming for the heads of the Bush officials will be silent should the carnage return — or perhaps they will be the most vocal in allotting blame to the Obama administration, which listened to them. No doubt they will demand postfacto hearings on topics such as “Who let him out of Guantanamo?” as they chant, “Obama slept, we wept!”