WASHINGTON -- Students of intelligence-gathering will tell you
that deception and outright lying are essential to the art.
Having now reviewed the controversy over who in Congress knew
what about the CIA's use of enhanced interrogation techniques, I
have concluded that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi might make a
superb intelligence officer. She claims that she was utterly
unaware of the CIA's rough treatment of terrorists detained after
9/11. She says this without betraying a hint of deception or
uncertainty. Well done, well done.
Yet a really good liar does not lie about something easily
refuted. In the case of the Hon. Pelosi's protests of ignorance,
there are no less than three public sources out there refuting
her. One is a 2007 Washington Post report that she was
included in a "bipartisan group" from the Hill that was fully
apprised of these interrogation techniques in September of 2002.
Another refutation comes from CIA Director George Tenet's memoir,
At the Center of the Storm, which is pretty open about
how rough treatment cracked Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the
mastermind of 9/11 who boasts of beheading journalist Danny
Pearl. Tenet also adds that he briefed "senior congressional
leaders," presumably among them the Hon. Pelosi, about another of
her present concerns, namely, warrantless wiretaps. Then there is
former congressman and CIA Director Porter Goss's revelation in
the Washington Post over the weekend that "Today, I am
slack-jawed to read that members [of Congress] claim to have not
understood that the techniques on which they were briefed were to
actually be employed; or that specific techniques such as
'waterboarding' were never mentioned." So maybe the Speaker of
the House would not be a very good spy.
If there is any good news to come from the Obama Administration's
release of CIA documents relating to the detention and
interrogation of post-9/11 detainees, it is that Washington's
post-9/11 fears of further terrorist attacks against America have
abated. It is official that the Obama Administration no longer
uses the term Global War on Terror. So maybe the war is over and
we can all relax.
Yet there is no question that the release of these documents and
the ongoing debate over whether to prosecute government
functionaries involved in the Bush Administration's treatment of
terrorists has hurt our intelligence community both at home and
abroad. Intelligence officers within our service have been
intimidated by our own government. Foreign intelligence officers
who have been sharing intelligence with us abroad are going to be
much less forthcoming. It is a good thing that the Administration
has determined that America is now secure from terrorist threats.
This is not the first time liberal politicians have put the
clamps on our intelligence services' ability to protect the
country. In 1975 the Church Committee investigated both the CIA
and the FBI, with the consequence that Congressional oversight
committees were set up that in the aftermath of 9/11 were accused
of inhibiting our intelligence services from pursuing al Qaeda
aggressively in the 1990s. Now apparently, with the war on terror
won, we can go back to those blissful days.
Yet frankly I am uneasy about this new climate here in
Washington. Historically intelligence documents have been kept
from public eye, not just here but throughout the Western world.
The idea is that we do not want our enemies to be informed of
what we know. In David Reynolds' stupendous book on how Winston
Churchill wrote his World War II memoir, In Command of
History, Reynolds shows over and again Churchill and his
opponents in the Labour government cooperating to keep British
secrets from the public. British intelligence techniques in
particular were not divulged. That President Obama’s
administration in the first 100 days of its existence would
expose the intelligence techniques used by his predecessor
strikes me as reckless. Yet, on the other hand, the global war on
terror is over, so maybe everything is going to be okay. I do,
however, wonder how President Barack Obama managed to win the war
so quickly. Was it just a matter of retiring the hellish Bush
from the White House, or is there more to it?
