Former attorney general Michael Mukasey has a great op-ed in this morning’s WSJ about how crucial intelligence gleaned from terrorist interrogations is to our security. He also addresses the Obama administration’s rashness not only in scrapping the CIA interrogation program before understanding its nature but in taking further steps — the public revelation of techniques, the hounding of CIA agents by the Justice Department — that will make it difficult to reinstate an effective interrogation program. It’s all worth reading. Here’s a sample:
The current president ran for election on the promise to do away with them even before he became aware, if he ever did, of what they were. Days after taking office he directed that the CIA interrogation program be done away with entirely, and that interrogation be limited to the techniques set forth in the Army Field Manual, a document designed for use by even the least experienced troops. It’s available on the Internet and used by terrorists as a training manual for resisting interrogation.
In April 2009, the administration made public the previously classified Justice Department memoranda analyzing the harsh techniques, thereby disclosing them to our enemies and assuring that they could never be used effectively again. Meanwhile, the administration announced its intentions to replace the CIA interrogation program with one administered by the FBI. In December 2009, Omar Faruq Abdulmutallab was caught in an airplane over Detroit trying to detonate a bomb concealed in his underwear. He was warned after apprehension of his Miranda rights, and it was later disclosed that no one had yet gotten around to implementing the new program.
Yet the Justice Department, revealing its priorities, had gotten around to reopening investigations into the conduct of a half-dozen CIA employees alleged to have used undue force against suspected terrorists. I say “reopening” advisedly because those investigations had all been formally closed by the end of 2007, with detailed memoranda prepared by career Justice Department prosecutors explaining why no charges were warranted. Attorney General Eric Holder conceded that he had ordered the investigations reopened in September 2009 without reading those memoranda. The investigations have now dragged on for years with prosecutors chasing allegations down rabbit holes, with the CIA along with the rest of the intelligence community left demoralized.
Immediately following the killing of bin Laden, the issue of interrogation techniques became in some quarters the “dirty little secret” of the event. But as disclosed in the declassified memos in 2009, the techniques are neither dirty nor, as noted by Director Hayden and others, were their results little. As the memoranda concluded—and as I concluded reading them at the beginning of my tenure as attorney general in 2007—the techniques were entirely lawful as the law stood at the time the memos were written, and the disclosures they elicited were enormously important. That they are no longer secret is deeply regrettable.
Thank you again sir, for further identifying the Republican party as pro-torture, while the Democrats are not.
These distinctions can be helpful come election time.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseIntObs -- I hope you and your side DO cling to that bit of childishness come election time. You will get another drubbing.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseMichael Mukasey-- a brilliant mind, a scholarly legal practioner, judge and public servant. More importantly a decent and moral man who understands the moral distinction between the predator and the innocent. I get physically ill thinking about his successor; an arrogant preening fool. When is it just and right to use harsh and extraordinary means because of the just and vital ends served? Sober and difficult choices for serious leaders-- Mukasey brillantly advised those leaders in making legal and moral choices. In response, the Left hurled ignorant lie upon lie at Mukasey. He defended his legal and moral advice humbly but firmly. Now he has been vindicated by disclosure of what really happened and by events. Which brings us to a Leftist fool-- Interested Observer. He suffers from the same moral defect as Obama/Holder/Sullivan/Greewald et al. It is good and noble to bomb suspected wrongdoers on imprecise information and "collaterally damage" bystanders, but we must treat captured unlawful AQ terrorists like POWs, even though that disgraces the legal and moral basis of the Rules of War because these AQ terrorists are the opposite of a soldier. Plus now we see, that this Leftist moral defect inevitably leads to assassination rather than capture. The Left is morally debased and truly moronic.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse@interested observer: Thank you sir for providing further proof that Democrats and liberals are bereft of any legitimate arguments, always rely on laughable talking points rather than facts, and should never be trusted to hold power again, particularly in wartime.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseDid anyone read the Mukasey piece????
You can't read it without concluding, yeah, The New York Times was right when it said all KSM gave us toward OBL was a pseudonym of a courier.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseRepublicans are "pro-torture?" Let me see if I have this right . . . It is unacceptable, indeed a "trashing of the constitution" to waterboard senior leaders of a terrorist organization in order to gain what has proven to be vital information (and not just in the case of Osama bin Laden), but it is perfectly acceptable, not a trashing of the constitution, cause for celebration, etc… to put the bullet in the head of a senior leader of a terrorist organization and dump his body in the sea without gaining anything useful by interrogating him.
The Left’s entire laughable argument is devoid of logic or principle. Isn't summary execution just the ultimate form of "torture?" Frankly, I don't see anything wrong with either waterboarding or assassination under the circumstances, but just wish to point out how absolutely absurd the Left's argument is. No surprise there.
Also, while I’m on the subject, just how is what the President in approving the mission "gutsy" as it has been endlessly portrayed by the administration and the media (for obvious political purposes)? When your intelligence people are telling you that they know with a very high level of confidence where OBL is hiding out, and as has now been reported they have been tailing him for several months, what other alternative is there but to take him out or capture him. Anyone would make that decision, you, me, my mother, etc. . . It was the only acceptable course of action. Who wouldn't make that decision? If you want to give credit to the President for sending in the SEALS, fine, though it was obviously an option presented to him, likely with overwhelming support by the military and intelligence advisors. Look, I get the age–old “on his watch” exercise in taking political credit, and in that sense obviously at least some credit is due the President, but to take the assignment of credit to the lengths we have seen is neither seemly nor justified.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseMost Americans recall the NYT’s moral outrage regarding a warrantless wiretap program used by the Bush administration to track terrorist activity around the world. So dedicated is the Gray Lady to the tenets of the United States Constitution and individual privacy rights that the newspaper disclosed the details of that crucial national security program to the world - over the objection of the White House - thereby rendering it useless and providing our enemies with the opportunity to change course and return to the shadows.
I wonder how the dedicated advocates of human rights and the rule of law at the NYT feel about their favorite President authorizing Navy SEALS to force their way into OBL’s home, shoot him in the head and take his personal property, all without a warrant? Where is the outrage for an administration that obviously had the option to capture OBL and provide him with the Constitutional rights and access to our justice system it prefers for terrorists captured by the Bush administration? Michael Moore and lots of folks around the world are outraged, why not the global citizens at the NYT?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseYou can tell the weakness of the torture advocates' positions by the weakness of their arguments. Mukasey is a smart guy - he was the Attorney General, you know. And this is an important subject - something that is deeply important to his legacy.
So here is intelligent, hard-working, motivated Mukasey on KSM: "He loosed a torrent of information—including eventually the nickname of a trusted courier of bin Laden." That's it?!? A nickname!?! And Mukasey left out the good part - KSM denied that the courier was anyone important. Conclusion: we torture the guy over and over and over and over again, and all we got out of it is that he once accidentally let slip someone's nickname.
Torture must not have worked.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseMikeB: I guess you haven't been given the latest talking points yet.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseNobody ever claimed that KSM gave us more than a pseudonym. Fortunately, the pseudonym was all we needed.
Gosh. Why would someone who just let loose a valuable piece of intel then deny that it was anything important? Whysoever would that happen? I'm having trouble coming up with a reason. Hmmmm. It's an insurmountable point, no question about it.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThere's a lot more to the information provided by KSM and the two other terrorists who were waterboarded than some folks here seem to grasp. It wasn't just the courier's nickname that opened the door to valuable intelligence information, but KSM's denial that the courier was anyone of importance. Interrogators knew from information obtained from other terrorists - information they knew to be accurate - that KSM was lying to protect the courier, which confirmed for them that he was someone of great importance. Once they knew who to follow and eventually followed him to OBL's door.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThat's correct, Jenna, and it exposes the silliness of the some of the posts here twofold.
First, the obvious -- there are those who are so invested in the idea that the enhanced interrogation was EEEEEVILLLL, so they will deny tooth and nail, making up whatever inane things they have to, that any useful information did or could possibly have come from it. Not only does it have to be wrong, it MUST be useless.
But that doesn't follow, and that brings us to the second point. The question isn't being "pro-torture" or even "pro-enhanced interrogation" without calling it torture. It's of the fact that if these people throwing out the silly "pro-toture" label had their way, and Obama is one of them, bin Laden will still be alive and in hiding.
You don't have to approve of any technique to admit that it worked. But they don't seem to be able to grasp that particular nuance.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseIs embrace of torture actually republican doctrine now? I respectfully dissent.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseYou can tell the weakness of the liberals defense of Obama, when they have to refer to something that clearly isn't torture, as torture.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse@ Ostap
Where have you been the past 8 years?
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Waterboarding isn't torture? I guess it depends on what the meaning of "is" is.
This is an evil little rathole to be stuck in (justifying malum in se).
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseBy every standard that existed prior to the left deciding that anything that could be used to bash Bush was good, water boarding isn't torture.
I've had people tell me with a stright face, that forcing the prisoners to listen to rock music qualified as torture. That forcing them to stand in a corner for several hours straight was torture. Not letting them go to the bathroom whenever they want is tortuer.
Not everything that is unpleasant or even a bit painfull is torture.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseMarkW: if you want to make an argument that our national interest is best served by the limited and selective use of waterboarding, that is intellectually defensible, but playing games with the meaning of words isn't. Waterboarding is torture and has long been acknowledged as such. The United States prosecuted Japanese interrogators for waterboarding our troops during WWII. You can stand up and say the nature of the conflict with jihad requires us to torture, but playing Clintonian semantic games is dishonest.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseIrish John, you're playing word games yourself. Prosecuting the Japanese for waterboarding does not in and of itself make waterboarding "torture." Never mind that there's a stark, real difference between their version of it and our version of it (and these things do indeed turn on the details), that something can be "inhumane" without being torture, that no Japanese were ever actually charged with "waterboarding," and that no one who was prosecuted wasn't also prosecuted for a long, long list of indisputable horrors. Don't rewrite history to favor your point, and don't compare what we did and have done with the savagery of how the Japanese treated its prisoners. That's a whole different kind of outrageous.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseSo it is just flatly unacceptable now to call waterboarding torture? Our waterboarding is... less torturous then Japan's version? Where is that line? I'll be honest - I don't know for sure, and my inclination is to err on the side of saying all waterboarding is torture. Frankly, I find it a rather silly semantic argument, and I don't understand it. The real argument is whether a)it works (questionable) and b)should we be doing (I say not, as I question the effectiveness of "harsh techniques", based on the opinions of some professional interrogators). But I think that is a fair argument to have. An absolutist prohibition of the use of the word "torture" doesn't make sense to me, and is a distraction from what should be the real debate.
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