INTERROGATION MEMOS ARE POLITICAL DIVERSION
I suppose next they’ll have an inquisition for Truman.
Probably the Obama Administration will want to indict him for war crimes having to do with the unpleasantness at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Repeat the new administration’s motto: America wrong, America wrong, America wrong.
Especially when it defends itself.
That’s what I think about these interrogation memos. By revealing their contents and vilifying their authors, the new Caesar can not only prosecute and destroy his political opponents, he can also further the emasculation of America’s will and capacity to defend itself.
You’ve heard about the memos, right? They were written in the first months after September 11 by Justice Department officials who had been tasked to define the border between acceptable and unacceptable.
New and different kinds of enemies had been captured – terrorist masterminds – and, our face still bloody from the collapse of the Towers, we needed to know what they knew. We needed to know who was coming at us and how.
In those days, the president said that no matter what, he would defend the United States. In these days, the president went against the recommendation of the intelligence community and selectively declassified secret memos that outline what we allowed then and what we will do now.
Why did the new president do that?
Repeat after me: America wrong, America wrong, America wrong.
In the first months after 9-11, we were dealing with people who handled prisoners by cutting off their heads. We dealt with prisoners by making them stay awake for a long time, and by subjecting them to the same waterboarding that our Special Forces troops go through as part of their training.
Their prisoners get cut up into pieces and dumped by the side of the road. Our prisoners live to go to trial.
To keep things straight, and to draw a dividing line in a shades-of-gray world, government lawyers wrote memos that said interrogators could go this far, but no further. They defined as best they could the right and wrong of a war that was forced upon us.
And they were successful.
We waterboarded just two prisoners. Both of them were at the very center of Al Qaeda attacks against the United States. One was waterboarded more than 50 times, the other more than 150 times.
What does that tell you?
That waterboarding isn’t dangerous.
It may well be unpleasant, but if you can do it to a guy 163 times in a month, it must not be too bad for his health.
But it was good for our intelligence.
Just last week, the Obama Administration’s intelligence chief -- Admiral Dennis C. Blair – wrote in a memo for his staff, “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.”
That is the exact opposite of what Barack Obama has said. Of course, since the admiral wrote that last Thursday, he has been forced by the White House to repudiate it.
Which means that the government’s top advisor on intelligence has been ordered to change his assessment of a situation in order to support the political decisions of the administration.
Which is exactly what the Obama Administration accuses the Bush Administration of doing.
Former Vice President Dick Cheney has challenged the Obama Administration to declassify all the memos related to the interrogations. He accused the White House of selectively releasing information that could be damaging without releasing other information that showed the success of the interrogations.
Last week, the White House declassified secret documents that embarrassed the country and angered its enemies.
This week, the White House says that it won’t block investigations and prosecutions of former government lawyers who wrote memos.
Next week, who knows what the White House will do.
But thus far it has used the sensitive and important subject of how we interrogate the worst of terrorists as a political whip to stir up the Democrat base. As attention focused on Barack Obama’s own policies, and support cooled, he has fallen back on what he does best – bashing George W. Bush.
These memos are nothing but a political diversion, a sideshow meant to help the administration steamroll its version of the new America. They are all a political game.
Sadly, they weaken American security and endanger Americans captured on the field of battle.
And Barack Obama seems to care nothing at all about that.
- by Bob Lonsberry © 2009
