RSSSafe and Sunny April 2009?
Tom Bowler | April 17, 2009
Bill Kristol of the Weekly Standard speculates on the implications one might draw from the White House release of the Bush administration “torture memos” .
‘It wasn’t really a surprise that President Obama sided with leftist
lawyers in his Justice Department and released, over the objections of
the intelligence community, four Office of Legal Counsel memos that
concluded certain interrogation techniques used in the last several
years by CIA officers on certain al Qaeda terrorists were legal. Nor
was it a surprise that the presidential statement put out by the White
House was a medley of preening self-righteousness and defensive
disingenuousness.
What was more interesting was the accompanying statement by the
Director of National Intelligence, Dennis Blair, trying to justify
Obama’s decision–or at least put it “into perspective.” The
perspective, the context, is that in the months after 9/11, “we did not
have a clear understanding of the enemy we were dealing with, and our
every effort was focused on preventing further attacks that would kill
more Americans. It was during these months that the CIA was struggling
to obtain critical information from captured al Qaida leaders, and
requested permission to use harsher interrogation methods. The OLC
memos make clear that senior legal officials judged the harsher methods
to be legal.”
Blair continues: “Those methods, read on a bright, sunny, safe day
in April 2009, appear graphic and disturbing. As the President has made
clear, and as both CIA Director Panetta and I have stated, we will not
use those techniques in the future. But we will absolutely defend those
who relied on these memos and those guidelines.”
So: We were once in danger. Now we live in
“a bright, sunny, safe day in April 2009.” Now, in April 2009, Obama’s
Director of National Intelligence seems to be saying, we’re safe.
Good news, if true. And it would be an amazing tribute to the
preceding administration’s efforts in the war on terror–efforts that
Democrats have been saying for years were making us less safe.
Apparently, the old policies worked. The threat from al Qaeda has gone.’
The release of those memos provides a good indicator for gauging whether the Obama administration will ever succeed in gathering intelligence on potential terrorist attacks against the U.S. I think we can expect his administration will be just as successful there as Obama himself was when he asked for cooperation from our European allies. Zero. Besides, according to his Department of Homeland Security the real threat is posed by veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, not al Qaeda.
It’s interesting to note that certain Democrats who have been outspoken in their condemnation of the Bush administration, at one time approved of what they would later call “torture”. Here is a Washington Post article from December 2007.
‘In September 2002, four members of Congress met in secret for a first
look at a unique CIA program designed to wring vital information from
reticent terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. For more than an hour, the
bipartisan group, which included current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA’s overseas detention
sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make
their prisoners talk.
Among the techniques described, said two officials present, was
waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as
torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill. But on that
day, no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in the
room asked the CIA to push harder, two U.S. officials said.
“The briefer was specifically asked if the methods were tough enough,” said a U.S. official who witnessed the exchange.
Individual lawmakers’ recollections of the early briefings varied
dramatically, but officials present during the meetings described the
reaction as mostly quiet acquiescence, if not outright support. “Among
those being briefed, there was a pretty full understanding of what the
CIA was doing,” said Goss, who chaired the House intelligence committee
from 1997 to 2004 and then served as CIA director from 2004 to 2006.
“And the reaction in the room was not just approval, but
encouragement.”‘
That may be one reason neither the Obama administration nor the Spanish courts will pursue any charges against Bush administration officials. It could be embarrassing for certain high ranking Democrats. There is another one, according to William A. Jacobson, Associate Clinical Professor of Law, Cornell Law School. No law was broken. It’s all about he moral preening.
The Democrats by their actions admit that Bush administration policies really did protect the U.S. made us safer than we otherwise would have been. Now that the Democrats are firmly in power the plan is to continue those policies.
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