Obama Won’t Release Full CIA Reports and Leaves Door Open to Prosecuting Bush Officials
Much has been made in the last couple of days, of the CIA memos/reports that were released on Obama’s orders regarding the “torture” of Gitmo detainees.
I already posted on the release of the documents that provides details of the techniques and specific instances of forceful interrogations used on some of the leaders on the terror plots here in the United States.
What was not released from those memos was the other side of the story and the comprehensive report that shows that the interrogation methods used helped us stop other terrorist attacks on the nation and glean necessary information to keep Americans safe.
Dick Cheney has now asked the CIA to release those memos to show the people of the United States that terror attacks were planned outside of the 9/11 attack and the U.S. was able to stop further attempts to harm innocent lives.
Cheney said the following Tuesday night during his interview with Sean Hannity of Fox News:
“One of the things that I find a little bit disturbing about this recent disclosure is they put out the legal memos, the memos that the CIA got from the Office of Legal Counsel, but they didn’t put out the memos that showed the success of the effort. And there are reports that show specifically what we gained as a result of this activity. They have not been declassified.”
“I formally asked that they be declassified now. I haven’t announced this up until now, I haven’t talked about it, but I know specifically of reports that I read, that I saw that lay out what we learned through the interrogation process and what the consequences were for the country.”
“And I’ve now formally asked the CIA to take steps to declassify those memos so we can lay them out there and the American people have a chance to see what we obtained and what we learned and how good the intelligence was, as well as to see this debate over the legal opinions.”
I agree with Dick Cheney on this, if you are going to declassify some of the reports, you should declassify the entire thing so we can better grasp the entire story – that is at least owed to the public. This is once again another attempt for Obama to please his fringe base, who want Cheney, Bush and their administration tried for “war crimes.” It’s also just another indication of how partisan and ideological Obama truly is. Actions like these have consequences and the pendulum can and will probably swing the other way in 2010, 2012 or both and what happens if we start playing these partisan games? Who’s to say that the same thing won’t be done to Obama after he leaves office?
What should scare people even more is Obama’s willingness to leave the doors open to prosecution for Bush administration officials, especially the lawyers who helped draft and research the “torture” techniques to make sure they complied with the specific treaties in place and other laws surrounding these situations. Again, the Geneva Convention does not apply in the case of rogue terrorists who are acting on behalf of a radical faction and are not uniformed military.
Many liberals don’t just want to defeat conservatives at the polls, they want to send them to jail. Toward that end, they have sometimes tried to criminalize what are essentially policy differences. President Obama hinted at another step in that direction when he said todaythat he is open to the idea of bringing criminal charges against the Justice Department lawyers who wrote opinions to the effect that waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods could legally be used on al Qaedadetainees. Obama said the question was a complicated one, and the decision will ultimately be made by Attorney General Eric Holder.
So who in their right mind, as a Republican, would ever want to run for office? Who wouldn’t be fearful that a Democratic Congress or a Democratic successor would attempt to find fault or illegalities in your previous actions and try you? This is insane! Did anyone try FDR for his “war crimes?” It’s not like he acted in an appropriate way when he put Japanese-Americans in concentration camps as well as those of Germanic decent that he found could be a threat during WWII.
The question of whether to bring charges against those who devised justification for the methods “is going to be more of a decision for the attorney generalwithin the parameters of various laws and I don’t want to prejudge that,” Obama said. The president discussed the continuing issue of terrorism-era interrogation tactics with reporters as he finished an Oval Office meeting with visiting King Abdullah II of Jordan.
Obama also said he could support a congressional investigation into the Bush-era terrorist detainee program, but only under certain conditions, such as if it were done on a bipartisan basis. He said he worries about the impact that high-intensity, politicized hearings in Congress could have on the government’s efforts to cope with terrorism.
The president had said earlier that he didn’t want to see prosecutions of the CIA agents and interrogators who took part in waterboarding and other harsh interrogation tactics, so long as they acted within parameters spelled out by government superiors who held that such practices were legal at the time.
So let me get this straight, if Eric Holder doesn’t agree with the way in which things were conducted by the previous administration he can prosecute individuals because of his political differences?
The Congress may possibly put a committee together to investigate these lawyers and officials. Does anybody think this sounds incredibly similar to McCarthy? We are having a witch hunt for partisan reasons because liberals have lost their minds and have become so consumed by hate for the past 8 years that they have turned into exactly what they hated! Next thing we know, we will all be dragged in and put on trial for being conservatives or libertarians due to that DHS report that came out.
I also find it incredibly interesting that many of these congress-critters were brought to Gitmo in 2002 and were also shown these classified techniques, such as Waterboarding, during their visit. One of these members of Congress was none other than Nancy Pelosi. The Senators that were shown the interrogation techniques agreed with them and some even asked if they were harsh enough. Will these Senators also be investigated and prosecuted?
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.
Congressional leaders from both parties would later seize on waterboarding as a symbol of the worst excesses of the Bush administration’s counterterrorism effort. The CIA last week admitted that videotape of an interrogation of one of the waterboardeddetainees was destroyed in 2005 against the advice of Justice Department and White House officials, provoking allegations that its actions were illegal and the destruction was a coverup.
Yet long before “waterboarding” entered the public discourse, the CIA gave key legislative overseers about 30 private briefings, some of which included descriptions of that technique and other harsh interrogation methods, according to interviews with multiple U.S. officials with firsthand knowledge.
With one known exception, no formal objections were raised by the lawmakers briefed about the harsh methods during the two years in which waterboarding was employed, from 2002 to 2003, said Democrats and Republicans with direct knowledge of the matter. The lawmakers who held oversight roles during the period included Pelosi and Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) and Sens. Bob Graham (D-Fla.) and John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), as well as Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.) and Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan).
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.”
There was evidence, prior to 2009 and this CIA memo debacle, of the success of the interrogation methods used on terrorists. One of those successes was the obstruction of an attack on Los Angeles in 2005.
In releasing highly classified documents on the CIA interrogation program last week, President Obama declared that the techniques used to question captured terrorists “did not make us safer.” This is patently false. The proof is in the memos Obama made public — in sections that have gone virtually unreported in the media.
Consider the Justice Department memo of May 30, 2005. It notes that “the CIA believes ‘the intelligence acquired from these interrogations has been a key reason why al Qaeda has failed to launch a spectacular attack in the West since 11 September 2001.’ . . . In particular, the CIA believes that it would have been unable to obtain critical information from numerous detainees, including [Khalid Sheik Mohammed] and Abu Zubaydah, without these enhanced techniques.” The memo continues: “Before the CIA used enhanced techniques . . . KSM resisted giving any answers to questions about future attacks, simply noting, ‘Soon you will find out.’ ” Once the techniques were applied, “interrogations have led to specific, actionable intelligence, as well as a general increase in the amount of intelligence regarding al Qaeda and its affiliates.”
Specifically, interrogation with enhanced techniques “led to the discovery of a KSM plot, the ‘Second Wave,’ ‘to use East Asian operatives to crash a hijacked airliner into’ a building in Los Angeles.” KSM later acknowledged before a military commission at Guantanamo Bay that the target was the Library Tower, the tallest building on the West Coast. The memo explains that “information obtained from KSM also led to the capture of Riduan bin Isomuddin, better known as Hambali, and the discovery of the Guraba Cell, a 17-member Jemmah Islamiyah cell tasked with executing the ‘Second Wave.’ ” In other words, without enhanced interrogations, there could be a hole in the ground in Los Angeles to match the one in New York.
Even the most liberal rag in the world, New York Times, states that Obama, himself has admitted that the interrogation techniques used at Gitmo produced a lot of necessary and significant information that helped the United States and instilled safety for our citizens.
President Obama’s national intelligence director told colleagues in a private memo last week that the harsh interrogation techniques banned by the White House did produce significant information that helped the nation in its struggle with terrorists.
“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,” Adm. Dennis C. Blair, the intelligence director, wrote in a memo to his staff last Thursday.
Admiral Blair sent his memo on the same day the administration publicly released secret Bush administration legalmemos authorizing the use of interrogation methods that the Obama White House has deemed to be illegal torture. Among other things, the Bush administration memos revealed that two captured Qaeda operatives were subjected to a form of near-drowning known as waterboarding a total of 266 times.
Admiral Blair’s assessment that the interrogation methods did produce important information was deleted from a condensed version of his memo released to the media last Thursday. Also deleted was a line in which he empathized with his predecessors who originally approved some of the harsh tactics after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
It’s time to make some additional signs for the Tea Party protests! Free The Memos!
