When President Obama said he would release some of the CIA
transcripts covering incidents of “enhanced interrogation
techniques” he told his chief of staff and press secretary to put
out the word that this was the end of the matter; that it was
time to look forward and, no, there would be no prosecutions.
Obama thought this was just the right sop to throw to Cerberus,
Cerberus being the far-left wing of the Democratic Party.
Instead, he was unleashing the dogs of war. These, the
MoveOn.org/Daily Kos people, nurse resentments full time. They
resent George W. Bush for becoming president. They resent their
own country because it is rich and powerful. They resented
interrogation of terrorists because they seemed to think
terrorism was not a continuing threat. They are a minority within
their party, but they are very noisy and have plenty of money
(supplied by George Soros and other rich sympathizers).
They were in full roar after the transcript release. Here was the
opportunity to get what they wanted: putting George Bush and Dick
Cheney in the dock, if not directly, then just a step or two
removed. They clamored for a Special Prosecutor. Prosecution is,
after all, what Special Prosecutors do. For proof we have only to
look to Patrick Fitzgerald’s prosecution of Scooter Libby and
Lawrence Walsh’s prosecution of Reagan Administration officials
over the Iran-Contra affair.
Highly partisan Congressional Democrats chimed in. What they
wanted were show trials, a.k.a. hearings, to shame and humiliate
whomever they could from the Bush Administration. Sen. Patrick
Leahy and Rep. John Conyers, chairmen of their respective
judiciary committees, led this call.
Caught off guard by the left’s ferocity, Obama turned his
no-prosecution message into “maybe.” He left it all in the hands
of Attorney General Eric Holder, who ruled out prosecuting the
interrogators, but said he would investigate the Department of
Justice lawyers who wrote the memos giving legal justification
for the “enhanced interrogation techniques.”
Late the other week, Holder, in a Congressional hearing, gave a
clue to the outcome. He said he would not engage in an effort to
criminalize policy differences. He knows what harm would come
form attempting to prosecute government lawyers for rendering
legal opinions.
Indeed, for what crime could they prosecuted? Failure to advise
the interrogators they had to serve tea and watercress sandwiches
to the detainees every afternoon? That, at least, might have
appeased the ACLU, with its obsession with terrorists’
rights.
There will be no prosecution, for if there were it would surely
come out under oath that most of the members of the two
Congressional intelligence committeess were fully briefed in 2002
and 2003 on these techniques and gave either active or tacit
approval. There was not a word of dissent at that time, making
them potential accessories after the fact. Not even amnesiac
Speaker Nancy Pelosi could escape the spotlight’s glare.
This whole exercise is, indeed, an attempt to criminalize policy
differences. In that respect it bears some resemblance to the
Iran-Contra issue of two decades ago and the campaign by the late
Senator Frank Church (D-ID) in the 1970s that left the CIA
demoralized. The latter was augmented, perhaps unintentionally,
by former Admiral Stansfield Turner, President Carter’s CIA
director, who disbanded human intelligence assets, thinking the
entire job could be done by satellites. It took two decades to
rebuild that intelligence network.
Leon Panetta, President Obama’s CIA director, urged him not to
release the transcripts, understanding what a Pandora’s Box it
would open. Both Obama’s directof of national intelligence,
Dennis C. Blair, and former CIA Director Michael Hayden have said
the interrogation of Khalil Sheik Mohammed and two other al Qaeda
detainees provided important information some of which, it is
said, prevented a 9/11-type attack in Los Angeles.
Whether scaring Khlaid Sheik Mohammed with waterboarding for 30
seconds at a time was “torture” or not depends on whether one
believes that such a technique was worth it because it saved
thousand of lives.
Like a dog with a juicy bone, the far left does not want to let
go of this issue. Only Mr. Obama can keep it from careering out
of control and threatening to deeply divide the country. He must
stop Congress from beginning a circus that could last for months
on end. The answer may be a 9/11-type commission composed of
people beyond politics. Whether the 9/11 group’s conclusions were
all correct, its work was careful, measured and considered, not
raucous. Unless he does this, President Obama will never get the
dogs of war back in their kennels.
