FACT CHECK: Obama disowns deficit he helped shape

Apr 29, 5:55 PM (ET)

By CALVIN WOODWARD

WASHINGTON (AP) - "That wasn't me," President Barack Obama said on his 100th day in office, disclaiming responsibility for the huge budget deficit waiting for him on Day One.

It actually was him - and the other Democrats controlling Congress the previous two years - who shaped a budget so out of balance.

And as a presidential candidate and president-elect, he backed the twilight Bush-era stimulus plan that made the deficit deeper, all before he took over and promoted spending plans that have made it much deeper still.

Obama met citizens at an Arnold, Mo., high school Wednesday in advance of his prime-time news conference. Both forums were a platform to review his progress at the 100-day mark and look ahead.

At various times, he brought an air of certainty to ambitions that are far from cast in stone.

His assertion that his proposed budget "will cut the deficit in half by the end of my first term" is an eyeball-roller among many economists, given the uncharted terrain of trillion-dollar deficits and economic calamity that the government is negotiating.

He promised vast savings from increased spending on preventive health care in the face of doubts that such an effort, however laudable it might be for public welfare, can pay for itself, let alone yield huge savings.

A look at some of his claims Wednesday:

OBAMA: "Number one, we inherited a $1.3 trillion deficit.... That wasn't me. Number two, there is almost uniform consensus among economists that in the middle of the biggest crisis, financial crisis, since the Great Depression, we had to take extraordinary steps. So you've got a lot of Republican economists who agree that we had to do a stimulus package and we had to do something about the banks. Those are one-time charges, and they're big, and they'll make our deficits go up over the next two years." - in Missouri.

THE FACTS:

Congress controls the purse strings, not the president, and it was under Democratic control for Obama's last two years as Illinois senator. Obama supported the emergency bailout package in President George W. Bush's final months - a package Democratic leaders wanted to make bigger.

To be sure, Obama opposed the Iraq war, a drain on federal coffers for six years before he became president. But with one major exception, he voted in support of Iraq war spending.

The economy has worsened under Obama, though from forces surely in play before he became president, and he can credibly claim to have inherited a grim situation.

Still, his response to the crisis goes well beyond "one-time charges."

He's persuaded Congress to expand children's health insurance, education spending, health information technology and more. He's moving ahead on a variety of big-ticket items on health care, the environment, energy and transportation that, if achieved, will be more enduring than bank bailouts and aid for homeowners.

The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimated his policy proposals would add a net $428 billion to the deficit over four years, even accounting for his spending reduction goals. Now, the deficit is nearly quadrupling to $1.75 trillion.

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OBAMA: "I think one basic principle that we know is that the more we do on the (disease) prevention side, the more we can obtain serious savings down the road. ... If we're making those investments, we will save huge amounts of money in the long term." - in Missouri.

THE FACTS: It sounds believable that preventing illness should be cheaper than treating it, and indeed that's the case with steps like preventing smoking and improving diets and exercise. But during the 2008 campaign, when Obama and other presidential candidates were touting a focus on preventive care, the New England Journal of Medicine cautioned that "sweeping statements about the cost-saving potential of prevention, however, are overreaching." It said that "although some preventive measures do save money, the vast majority reviewed in the health economics literature do not."

And a study released in December by the Congressional Budget Office found that increasing preventive care "could improve people's health but would probably generate either modest reductions in the overall costs of health care or increases in such spending within a 10-year budgetary time frame."

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OBAMA: "You could cut (Social Security) benefits. You could raise the tax on everybody so everybody's payroll tax goes up a little bit. Or you can do what I think is probably the best solution, which is you can raise the cap on the payroll tax." - in Missouri.

THE FACTS: Obama's proposal would reduce the Social Security trust fund's deficit by less than half, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.

That means he would still have to cut benefits, raise the payroll tax rate, raise the retirement age or some combination to deal with the program's long-term imbalance.

Workers currently pay 6.2 percent and their employers pay an equal rate - for a total of 12.4 percent - on annual wages of up to $106,800, after which no more payroll tax is collected.

Obama wants workers making more than $250,000 to pay payroll tax on their income over that amount. That would still protect workers making under $250,000 from an additional burden. But it would raise much less money than removing the cap completely.

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Associated Press writers Kevin Freking and Jim Kuhnhenn contributed to this report.
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20090429/D97SCPI00.html

Mirror, Mirror on the Wall

On torture and executive power, Democrats sing a different tune when the president is … a Democrat.

By Andrew C. McCarthy

The “ticking bomb scenario” represents a narrow exception to what should otherwise be our categorical prohibition against torture. After all, “in the event we were ever confronted with having to interrogate a detainee with knowledge of an imminent threat to millions of Americans,” it might be necessary for a president to make “the decision to depart from standard international practices[.]” The president, of course, “must be held accountable” for such a decision; but the president would have to be prepared to make it in such dire circumstances.

Who says so? Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, that’s who. The Democrats’ coronee-in-waiting made the comments in an interview by the New York Daily News last October.

As is the senator’s wont (see, e.g., myriad positions on Iraq, Iran, illegal immigration, etc.), she has since flipped from this flop — just in time for a candidates’ debate before a base inherently hostile to such flashes of common sense. But she clearly made the remarks. It was thus jarring to find her announcing opposition on Monday to Judge Michael Mukasey’s nomination to become the next attorney general because, as Sen. Clinton explained, “I am deeply troubled by Judge Mukasey’s continued unwillingness to clearly state his views on torture and unchecked Executive power.”

As it happens, Judge Mukasey’s views on torture and “unchecked Executive power” are a lot clearer than Hillary Clinton’s.

In a letter submitted Tuesday, Mukasey responded to additional questions about waterboarding raised by Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Though not informed of the classified details of any enhanced interrogation practice, the judge said the tactic of waterboarding, as portrayed by the senators, seemed to him to be over the legal line, as well as “repugnant.” He held out the possibility that, once apprised of the concrete details of any actual waterboarding practiced by American interrogators, he might very well conclude the tactic violated the federal anti-torture statute (Section 2340 of Title 18, U.S. Code). Such an analysis would make it unlawful, without exception, in all circumstances.

Moreover, even if waterboarding were found not to meet the statutory definition of torture, Judge Mukasey indicated that the tactic would still be illegal except in the rare instance when its use did not “shock the conscience” — the Supreme Court’s due-process test which Congress incorporated in banning “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatments” that fall short of torture.

So Judge Mukasey has essentially said that waterboarding might be torture and would, in any event, be illegal in all but the most dire emergencies. Senator Clinton, to the contrary, has said a president could order not just waterboarding but torture, despite a congressional statute and treaty obligations that brook no exceptions. Yet, Democrats are questioning Mukasey’s fitness even as they trip over themselves to hop aboard Clinton’s bandwagon.

Naturally, at the front of that bandwagon they will find former President Bill Clinton. He, too, weighed in last October, contending that a president has the power to order torture or waterboarding in a dire emergency. As Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz recounted in a New York Sun op-ed, upon being asked whether the president needs “the option of authorizing torture in an extreme case,” President Clinton responded (italics are mine):

Look, if the president needed an option, there’s all sorts of things they can do. Let’s take the best case, OK. You picked up someone you know is the No. 2 aide to Osama bin Laden. And you know they have an operation planned for the United States or some European capital in the next three days. And you know this guy knows it. Right, that’s the clearest example. And you think you can only get it out of this guy by shooting him full of some drugs or water-boarding him or otherwise working him over. If they really believed that that scenario is likely to occur, let them come forward with an alternate proposal. We have a system of laws here where nobody should be above the law, and you don’t need blanket advance approval for blanket torture. They can draw a statute much more narrowly, which would permit the president to make a finding in a case like I just outlined, and then that finding could be submitted even if after the fact to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

This, apparently, is the Democratic standard for clear, unequivocal opposition to torture … as long as you’re a Democrat.

Even for jaded veterans of Washington hypocrisy, the disingenuousness of the Democrats’ Mukasey critique is nothing sort of astounding. Senator Clinton and others are worried about the judge’s embrace of unchecked executive power? Are we supposed to pretend that the 1990s never happened?

Let’s not relive the myriad scandals, the countless claims of newfangled executive privileges to stonewall investigations, the claims that the President was above the law for purposes of civil suit, the lying, the obstruction of justice, and so on. Let’s stipulate for argument’s sake that they’re irrelevant. Let’s just stick with the executive-power issue the Democrats are homing in on: the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance program which Democrats contend was unlawful because it was conducted in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

FISA is a 1978 statute that attempted to limit the president’s power to order monitoring of foreign agents, including terrorists, who might pose a threat to the American people. The president’s authority in this area, however, comes from the Constitution. The Constitution cannot be changed, and its enumerated powers cannot be diminished, by a statute.

Who says so? Prominent Democrats say so. And the Clinton administration expressly said so.

Just this morning, the Wall Street Journal features an oped about FISA reform signed by, among others, Benjamin Civiletti, who served as attorney general under President Jimmy Carter. Civiletti writes:

Prior to FISA’s 1978 enactment, numerous federal courts took it for granted that the president has constitutional power to conduct warrantless surveillance to protect the nation’s security. In 2002, the FISA Court of Review, while not dealing directly with the NSA program, stated that FISA could not limit the president’s constitutional powers.

Civiletti is correct. The very court created by Congress in FISA has indicated that the president, despite FISA, maintains the authority to order surveillance against foreign threats to national security without seeking permission from a federal judge.

In this, Civiletti and the FISA Court of Review simply echo the analysis of another Carter attorney general, Griffin Bell. At the time of FISA’s enactment, Bell explained in congressional testimony: “The current [FISA] bill recognizes no inherent power of the President to conduct electronic surveillance, and I want to interpolate here to say that this does not take away the power [of] the President under the Constitution” (emphasis added).

FISA was amended in 1994 to give the FISA-court jurisdiction over not only eavesdropping but physical searches. The amendment was prompted by the Clinton administration’s execution of physical searches without warrants — in reliance on what, in President Clinton’s view, was the inherent power of the president to protect national security.

Confronted by the amendment, then-Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick was dutifully dispatched to explain the Clinton administration’s views to Congress. As National Review’s Byron York recounted, Gorelick testified (italics mine):

“The Department of Justice believes, and the case law supports, that the president has inherent authority to conduct warrantless physical searches for foreign intelligence purposes … and that the President may, as has been done, delegate this authority to the Attorney General.”

“It is important to understand,” Gorelick continued, “that the rules and methodology for criminal searches are inconsistent with the collection of foreign intelligence and would unduly frustrate the president in carrying out his foreign intelligence responsibilities.”

In connection with the tension between FISA and presidential power, Judge Mukasey has filed still another post-hearing letter, responding to questions from Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy. The submission thoroughly and ably assesses the applicable law — in which the only significant development since Gorelick’s testimony is the FISA Court of Review’s reaffirmation of presidential authority. Mukasey concludes that presidents maintain their Article II powers despite FISA. Still, he qualifies that the president does not stand above the law — in this case, the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, which requires all searches to be reasonable.

For today’s leading Democrats, this position is somehow a call for “unchecked Executive power.” In years when the leading Democrat happens to occupy the Oval Office, though, it is what is known as the position of the Democratic party.

— Andrew C. McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor, is a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.

http://article.nationalreview.com/print/?q=YjRlZDQ5NDdkYTViMzNlZmMyYWViOTMxMTY3OGNmMjQ=

Obama’s Interrogation Mess

He made it, and now he’ll have to bear the consequences.

By Andrew C. McCarthy

Obamateur Hour continues.

At Politico, Josh Gerstein and Amie Parnes are reporting that Pres. Barack Obama is now backing away from the idea of an inquiry into the Bush-era enhanced-interrogation tactics — at least insofar as such a probe might be conducted by a 9/11 Commission–style panel or Pat Leahy’s proposed “truth commission.” (The Politico reports are here and here; Jen Rubin, who is closely monitoring developments at Contentions, has observations here.) The president, having started a fire by recklessly releasing memos describing interrogation tactics, and then having poured gasoline on the flames by reversing himself on the banana-republic notion of investigating his political rivals, cannot douse the resulting inferno simply by saying, Oh, never mind.

The president is reeling because he sees his legislative agenda going up in smoke. In his inexperience, he reckoned that his base on the Left would somehow be sated by the mere disclosure of Bush-era methods, coupled with vague assurances that a day of reckoning for Bush administration officials might soon be at hand. His Republican opposition, he further figured, would be cowed by his moral preening on “torture.” This, he concluded, would mean smooth sailing ahead for the more pressing business of nationalizing the economy, starting with the health-care industry.

But as George W. Bush might have warned his successor, anti-American ideologues are emboldened, not mollified, by concessions. The Left doesn’t want Bush officials exposed — they want blood, and anything less than that will be cause for revolt. Simultaneously, Obama has raised the ire of the Right. In his solipsism, the president failed to foresee that the “torture” memos — memos that, as Rich Lowry shows, in fact document an assiduous effort to avoid torture — would not support his overblown rhetoric or substantiate the allegations of misconduct raised by politicized leaks from the International Committee of the Red Cross. Critics were not cowed. That, combined with Obama’s disingenuous strategy of exposing our tactics while suppressing the trove of intelligence they produced, ensured that the Right would push back aggressively.

So now the president has chaos on his hands and no one but himself to blame for it. From the Left’s perspective, he has validated their war-crimes allegations. You can’t expect to do that and then just say, “never mind.” Senator Leahy was already agitating for an accounting before Obama’s high-wire act, as was the ACLU. Obama opened the door to prosecutions only 48 hours after his chief of staff assured a national television audience that there would be no prosecutions; having proved it can push around the weak-willed president, the Left is not going away.

Neither are Obama’s political opponents on the right. Many of us spent years frustrated by the Bush administration’s failure to defend its national-security policies effectively. President Bush’s determination to do what he thought necessary to protect America, regardless of media carping and the consequent sag in his popularity, was his most endearing trait. But his unshakable conviction that the rightness of his actions would be borne out by history, and that he therefore didn’t need to justify himself, was foolish. Yes, history will be detached, and perhaps more accurate, decades hence, but it starts being written right now. Bush ceded to the Left the narrative-writing for the War on Terror, which is why the public remains in the dark about the intelligence haul from the CIA’s interrogation program for high-level detainees, as well as from the detainees held in Guantanamo Bay, whom antiwar activists have effectively portrayed as hapless shepherds mistakenly plucked from the fields of Afghanistan and shamefully consigned to a “legal black hole.”

However unintentionally, Obama has invited an accounting. Vice President Dick Cheney has lent his still-powerful voice to the push for disclosure of the intelligence produced by the CIA interrogations, and that push is not going away, either. You can’t have an accounting with half the facts — the more important half — missing.

Just as Gitmo was not a due-process experiment, enhanced interrogation was not a Marquis de Sade study in human endurance potential. The goal, and the motivation of those involved in the effort, was to gather intelligence. That doesn’t mean “anything goes” — and the memos elucidate that restraint was an abiding concern. It does mean, though, that the effort can’t be reasonably evaluated without factoring in the obligation of those who took part in it to protect American lives, the dire straits in which they were operating, the encouragement they received from Congress and the public (remember, for example, President Clinton’s endorsement of torture to cull information in an emergency), and, most significant, the yield from the methods that were employed. If President Obama really thinks he can dance away unscathed after making a little feel-good mayhem for his side by telling only half of the story, he is mistaken.

Obama’s apparent retreat on the notion of an investigation by an independent, bipartisan panel does not retract his more explosive proposition of kicking the matter over to the Justice Department. The “truth commission” idea is bad, but the prosecution idea is — by orders of magnitude — worse. And unlike the case of a congressional commission, it’s also within Obama’s power to pull the plug on a criminal investigation. Instead, he’s entrusting the matter to Attorney General Eric Holder, who responded to his boss’s abrupt turnabout by boldly promising to “follow the evidence wherever it takes us” —because, as he and Obama mindlessly repeat, “no one is above the law.”

This underscores that it is, indeed, amateur hour. While no one is above the law, the law often is not enforced. As law-enforcement professionals will tell you, we don’t always follow the evidence wherever it takes us. If a defendant commits perjury at his trial, for example, we don’t investigate his lawyer, even though the lawyer elicited, and may well have encouraged, the false testimony. The bedrock of our system is prosecutorial discretion. How we use the government’s scarce resources is not a legal judgment but a political one that the president is elected to make, with the help of an attorney general expected to have the maturity the task demands. We don’t just “follow the evidence” — we expect that we’ve put adults in charge to decide which evidence gets followed.

Obama and Holder can’t pretend that this is not their decision to make, that the “rule of law” is a train on which they are mere passengers. At issue here is a matter of policy, not evidence: In the United States of America, should the victor in a presidential election use the enormous powers of his office to investigate and prosecute his political adversaries, and thereby begin a cycle of retribution in which policy disputes will henceforth be criminalized?

That is exactly what the Left wants. We, on the contrary, believe it would tear the country asunder, in addition to re-establishing the ethos of risk-aversion that invited 9/11. President Obama could have let sleeping dogs lie. Instead, he stirred both sides to battle stations. Now he will have to decide, and bear the consequences.

— National Review’s Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and the author of Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad (Encounter Books, 2008).

http://article.nationalreview.com/print/?q=NjRmZDc2YzUyOGE1N2Q1YjQ4MTk1NzI2NWU3MmVhZmQ=

Pelosi briefed on waterboarding in '02

Nancy Pelosi denies knowing U.S. officials used waterboarding — but GOP operatives are pointing to a 2007 Washington Post story which describes an hour-long 2002 briefing in which Pelosi was told about enhanced interrogation techniques in graphic detail.

Two unnamed officials told the paper that Pelosi, then a member of the Democratic minority, didn't raise substantial objections.

Joby Warrick and Dan Eggen wrote:

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.

UPDATE: A Pelosi spokesman passes along her response to the article when it first appeared, claiming that Pelosi's successor on the intel committee -- Yep, Jane Harman -- lodged a protest with the CIA when she learned waterboarding was in use.

"On one occasion, in the fall of 2002, I was briefed on interrogation techniques the Administration was considering using in the future. The Administration advised that legal counsel for the both the CIA and the Department of Justice had concluded that the techniques were legal.

I had no further briefings on the techniques. Several months later, my successor as Ranking Member of the House Intelligence Committee, Jane Harman, was briefed more extensively and advised the techniques had in fact been employed. It was my understanding at that time that Congresswoman Harman filed a letter in early 2003 to the CIA to protest the use of such techniques, a protest with which I concurred."

Lower down in the article, the authors and their sources acknowledge Pelosi & Co. were severely constrained in what they could do with the information — and had no way of knowing how the techniques would ultimately used or abused in a pre-Abu Gharaib era.

Congressional officials say the groups' ability to challenge the practices was hampered by strict rules of secrecy that prohibited them from being able to take notes or consult legal experts or members of their own staffs. And while various officials have described the briefings as detailed and graphic, it is unclear precisely what members were told about waterboarding and how it is conducted. Several officials familiar with the briefings also recalled that the meetings were marked by an atmosphere of deep concern about the possibility of an imminent terrorist attack.

"In fairness, the environment was different then because we were closer to Sept. 11 and people were still in a panic," said one U.S. official present during the early briefings. "But there was no objecting, no hand-wringing. The attitude was, 'We don't care what you do to those guys as long as you get the information you need to protect the American people.
http://www.politico.com/blogs/glennthrush/0409/Pelosi_briefed_on_waterboarding_in_02_.html

Obama Administration to Release Detainee Abuse Photos; Former CIA Official Says Former Colleagues 'Don't Believe They Have Cover Anymore'

April 24, 2009 10:23 AM

In a letter from the Justice Department to a federal judge yesterday, the Obama administration announced that the Pentagon would turn over to the American Civil Liberties Union 44 photographs showing detainee abuse of prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq during the Bush administration.

The photographs are part of a 2003 Freedom of Information Act request by the ACLU for all information relating to the treatment of detainees -- the same battle that led, last week, to President Obama's decision to release memos from the Bush Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel providing legal justifications for harsh interrogation methods that human rights groups call torture.

Courts had ruled against the Bush administration's attempts to keep the photographs from public view. ACLU attorney Amrit Singh tells ABC News that "the fact that the Obama administration opted not to seek further review is a sign that it is committed to more transparency."

Singh added that the photographs "only underscore the need for a criminal investigation and prosecution if warranted" of U.S. officials responsible for the harsh treatment of detainees.

But some experts say the move could have a chilling effect on the CIA even beyond President Obama's decision last week to release the so-called "torture memos."

Calling the ACLU push to release the photographs "prurient" and "reprehensible," Dr. Mark M. Lowenthal, former Assistant Director of Central Intelligence for Analysis and Production, tells ABC News that the Obama administration should have taken the case all the way to the Supreme Court.

"They should have fought it all the way; if they lost, they lost," Lowenthal said. "There's nothing to be gained from it. There's no substantive reason why those photos have to be released."

Lowenthal said the president's moves in the last week have left many in the CIA dispirited, based on "the undercurrent I've been getting from colleagues still in the building, or colleagues who have left not that long ago."

"We ask these people to do extremely dangerous things, things they've been ordered to do by legal authorities, with the understanding that they will get top cover if something goes wrong," Lowenthal says. "They don't believe they have that cover anymore." Releasing the photographs "will make it much worse," he said.

Even though President Obama has announced that the Justice Department will not prosecute CIA officers who were operating within the four corners of what they'd been told was the law, Lowenthal says members of the CIA are worried. "They feel exposed already, and this is going to increase drumbeat for an investigation or a commission" to explore detainee treatment during the Bush years, he said. "It's going to make it much harder to resist, and they fear they're then going to be thrown over."

The Bush administration argued that releasing these photographs would violate US obligations towards detainees and would prompt outrage and perhaps attacks against the U.S. On June 9 and June 21, 2006 judges directed the Bush administration to release 21 photographs depicting the treatment of detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan, and last September, the Second Circuit Court affirmed that decision.

The Bush administration had argued that an exemption from FOIA was needed here because of the exemption for law enforcement records that could reasonably be expected to endanger “any individual." The release of the disputed photographs, the Bush administration argued, will endanger United States troops, other Coalition forces, and civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But the court found that the exemption was not intended "as an all-purpose damper on global controversy."

The Bush administration had also argued that releasing the photographs would violated the Geneva Conventions, which protect prisoners of war and detained civilians “against insults and public curiosity." The court ruled that the Geneva Conventions "do not prohibit dissemination of images of detainees being abused when the images are redacted so as to protect the identities of the detainees, at least in situations where, as here, the purpose of the dissemination is not itself to humiliate the detainees."

Moreover, the court found that releasing "the photographs is likely to further the purposes of the Geneva Conventions by deterring future abuse of prisoners."

"There is a significant public interest in the disclosure of these photographs," the court ruled. "The defendants concede that these photographs yield evidence of governmental wrongdoing, but nonetheless argue that they add little additional value to the written summaries of the depicted events, which have already been made public. This contention disregards FOIA’s central purpose of furthering governmental accountability, and the special importance the law accords to information revealing official misconduct."

A November 6, 2008, petition for a re-hearing was denied last month.

The Obama administration could have opted to go all the way to the Supreme Court to try to keep these photographs from public view, but yesterday Acting U.S. Attorney Lev L. Dassin wrote to District Judge Alvin Hellerstein and said the Pentagon was preparing to release 21 photos at issue in the appeal, in addition to 23 others "previously identified as responsive."

The materials will be released to the ACLU no later than May 28, after which the ACLU says it will make them public. This release will come just days before President Obama travels to the volatile Middle East.

Dassin wrote that the Pentagon also was "processing for release a substantial number of other images contained in Army CID reports that have been closed during the pendency of this case."

Singh said in a statement that the photographs "will constitute visual proof that, unlike the Bush administration's claim, the abuse was not confined to Abu Ghraib and was not aberrational. Their disclosure is critical for helping the public understand the scope and scale of prisoner abuse as well as for holding senior officials accountable for authorizing or permitting such abuse."

Lowenthal said his former colleagues at the CIA were "put off" by President Obama's trip to the CIA earlier this week. "I don't think the president's speech went down very well, particularly the part when he said they made mistakes. They don't think they made mistakes. They think they acted to execute policy. And those in the intelligence service don't make policy."

Those in intelligence are "gong to become increasingly wary about doing dangerous things," Lowenthal said. "They feel at the end of the day they won't be covered. It's not irreparable right now, but it's problematic."

-- jpt

http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2009/04/obama-adminis-3.html?cid=152348855

Barack Obama: President Pantywaist - new surrender monkey on the block

President Barack Obama has recently completed the most successful foreign policy tour since Napoleon's retreat from Moscow. You name it, he blew it. What was his big deal economic programme that he was determined to drive through the G20 summit? Another massive stimulus package, globally funded and co-ordinated. Did he achieve it? Not so as you'd notice.


Barack Obama in Prague on his astonishingly successful tour

Barack is not the first New World ingenue to discover that European leaders will load him with praise, struggle sycophantically to be photographed with him and outdo him in Utopian rhetoric. But when it comes to the critical moment of opening their wallets - suddenly it is flag-day in Aberdeen. Okay, put the G20 down to inexperience, beginner's nerves, what you will.

On to Nato and the next big objective: to persuade the same European evasion experts that America, Britain and Canada should no longer bear the brunt of the Afghan struggle virtually unassisted. The Old World sucked through its teeth, said that was asking a lot - but, seeing it was Barack, to whom they could refuse nothing, they would graciously accede to his wishes.

So The One retired triumphant, having secured a massive contribution of 5,000 extra troops - all of them non-combatant, of course - which must really have put the wind up the Taliban, at the prospect of 5,000 more infidel cooks and bottle-washers swarming into the less hazardous regions of Afghanistan.

Then came the dramatic bit, the authentic West Wing script, with the President wakened in the middle of the night in Prague to be told that Kim Jong-il had just launched a Taepodong-2 missile. America had Aegis destroyers tracking the missile and could have shot it down. But Uncle Sam had a sterner reprisal in store for l'il ole Kim (as Dame Edna might call him): a multi-megaton strike of Obama hot air.

"Rules must be binding," declared Obama, referring to the fact that Kim had just breached UN Resolutions 1695 and 1718. "Violations must be punished." (Sounds ominous.) "Words must mean something." (Why, Barack? They never did before, for you - as a cursory glance at your many speeches will show.)

President Pantywaist is hopping mad and he has a strategy to cut Kim down to size: he is going to slice $1.4bn off America's missile defence programme, presumably on the calculation that Kim would feel it unsporting to hit a sitting duck, so that will spoil his fun.

Watch out, France and Co, there is a new surrender monkey on the block and, over the next four years, he will spectacularly sell out the interests of the West with every kind of liberal-delusionist initiative on nuclear disarmament and sitting down to negotiate with any power freak who wants to buy time to get a good ICBM fix on San Francisco, or wherever. If you thought the world was a tad unsafe with Dubya around, just wait until President Pantywaist gets into his stride.

Barack Obama and the CIA: why does President Pantywaist hate America so badly?

If al-Qaeda, the Taliban and the rest of the Looney Tunes brigade want to kick America to death, they had better move in quickly and grab a piece of the action before Barack Obama finishes the job himself. Never in the history of the United States has a president worked so actively against the interests of his own people - not even Jimmy Carter.

Obama's problem is that he does not know who the enemy is. To him, the enemy does not squat in caves in Waziristan, clutching automatic weapons and reciting the more militant verses from the Koran: instead, it sits around at tea parties in Kentucky quoting from the US Constitution. Obama is not at war with terrorists, but with his Republican fellow citizens. He has never abandoned the campaign trail.

That is why he opened Pandora's Box by publishing the Justice Department's legal opinions on waterboarding and other hardline interrogation techniques. He cynically subordinated the national interest to his partisan desire to embarrass the Republicans. Then he had to rush to Langley, Virginia to try to reassure a demoralised CIA that had just discovered the President of the United States was an even more formidable foe than al-Qaeda.

"Don't be discouraged by what's happened the last few weeks," he told intelligence officers. Is he kidding? Thanks to him, al-Qaeda knows the private interrogation techniques available to the US intelligence agencies and can train its operatives to withstand them - or would do so, if they had not already been outlawed.

So, next time a senior al-Qaeda hood is captured, all the CIA can do is ask him nicely if he would care to reveal when a major population centre is due to be hit by a terror spectacular, or which American city is about to be irradiated by a dirty bomb. Your view of this situation will be dictated by one simple criterion: whether or not you watched the people jumping from the twin towers.

Obama promised his CIA audience that nobody would be prosecuted for past actions. That has already been contradicted by leftist groups with a revanchist ambition to put Republicans, headed if possible by Condoleezza Rice, in the dock. Talk about playing party politics with national security. Martin Scheinin, the United Nations special investigator for human rights, claims that senior figures, including former vice president Dick Cheney, could face prosecution overseas. Ponder that - once you have got over the difficulty of locating the United Nations and human rights within the same dimension.

President Pantywaist Obama should have thought twice before sitting down to play poker with Dick Cheney. The former vice president believes documents have been selectively published and that releasing more will prove how effective the interrogation techniques were. Under Dubya's administration, there was no further atrocity on American soil after 9/11.

President Pantywaist's recent world tour, cosying up to all the bad guys, excited the ambitions of America's enemies. Here, they realised, is a sucker they can really take to the cleaners. His only enemies are fellow Americans. Which prompts the question: why does President Pantywaist hate America so badly?

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/gerald_warner/blog/2009/04/24/barack_obama_and_the_cia_why_does_president_pantywaist_hate_america_so_badly

Most Wanted' addition draws critics' fire

The FBI said Tuesday that it named an animal rights activist as the first domestic terror suspect on its Most Wanted Terrorists list because the probe had "basically come to a dead end."

But House Republicans noted that the designation of a left-wing terrorist came just a week after firestorm over a report on "right-wing extremism" that listed veterans as potential threats and defined "right-wing extremism" as including opponents of abortion and immigration.

Daniel Andreas San Diego, a 31-year-old animal rights activist, is under indictment in the 2003 bombings of two San Francisco Bay Area companies linked to an animal-testing laboratory. His designation was first reported Monday by The Washington Times.

"Basically, we have no idea where he is," Michael Heimbach, assistant director of the bureau's counterterrorism division, said during a news conference Tuesday announcing the addition. "The leads on him have gone stale."

The FBI is hoping to find San Diego with the help of the publicity generated by adding him to the list, which also features such notorious international terrorists as Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahri and Adam Gadahn, the American-born al Qaeda spokesman. Before the addition of San Diego, the list, created in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, had previously included only Islamic terrorists.

The bureau also announced an award of up to $250,000 for information leading to the arrest of San Diego.

"All of the people listed on the FBI's Most Wanted Terrorist List are a danger to the U.S. and need to be caught," Special Agent Richard Kolko said.

The announcement was made nearly a week after The Times reported on a Homeland Security Department assessment warning that war veterans could be susceptible to recruitment into "right-wing extremism." The report unleashed a firestorm of controversy and led to an apology to veterans from Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano.

FBI officials said the process to put San Diego on the most-wanted list had begun more than a year ago, but two Republicans on the House Homeland Security Committee noted the juxtaposition to the recent controversy and questioned the Obama administration's priorities.

"I find it amazing that in a mere three months, the Obama administration is focusing its attention and our national resources on an animal rights activist - whose crimes were committed in 2003 - instead of radical Islamic terrorism, narcotics traffickers" and others, said Rep. Mark Souder, Indiana Republican. "Soon, perhaps, the administration can tackle their larger concern about Ron Paul supporters, pro-life activists and veterans."

Rep. Pete Olson, Texas Republican, noted than "people like [San Diego] belong on this list, not because he is a far-left radical, but because he has and will put American lives in danger. This is a stark contrast to my fellow veterans who have come under unwarranted scrutiny by this administration for their unwavering patriotism. They have fought for our freedom and kept us safe, but are now considered a threat along with San Diego."

Mr. Heimbach said animal rights and environmental extremists such as San Diego have collectively committed more than 1,800 crimes and caused more than $110 million in damages. He said the FBI is currently investigating about 170 incidents of animal rights or environmental extremism.

Authorities said such attacks typically target property, but that is what may set San Diego apart. San Diego planted two bombs during one of the attacks; the second set to detonate after the first.

"It is possible that this device was planted to target first responders," Mr. Heimbach said.

No one was killed or injured in either early-morning attack, but the explosions damaged the corporate offices of two biotechnology companies, Chiron Life Sciences Center in Emeryville, Calif., and Shaklee Corp. in Pleasanton, Calif.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/apr/22/activist-listed-as-case-at-dead-end/

Obama Earth Day Flights Burned More Than 9,000 Gallons Of Fuel

It happens every time a president leaves town to make an Earth Day speech. Reporters scramble to point out how much fuel was expended so the President could talk about conserving energy and using alternative fuels.

In flying to and from Iowa today, President Obama took two flights on Air Force One and four on Marine One.

The press office at Andrews AFB wouldn’t give me the fuel consumption numbers for the 747 that serves as Air Force One without the approval of the White House Press Office, which as I write this has yet to be given.

But Boeing says its 747 burns about 5 gallons of fuel per mile. It’s 895 miles from Washington to Des Moines, so a round trip brings the fuel consumption for the fixed-wing portion of the President’s trip to 8,950 gallons.

(AP )

The trip also put President Obama on Marine One for round-trip flights between the White House and Andrews AFB and between Des Moines International Airport and Newton, Iowa, site of his Earth Day speech. It totaled about an hour of flight time. The VH-3D that serves as Marine One consumes about 1200 pounds of fuel per hour which comes out to about 166 gallons consumed flying the President today.

Not included in these calculations are the presidential vehicles that took him the short distance from the landing zone in Newton to the event site at the Trinity Structural Towers Manufacturing Plant.

In his speech there, President Obama called for a “new era of energy exploration in America.”

At a plant that manufactures the towers for wind turbines, he urged Americans to support his plan for promoting expanded use of alternative and renewable fuels.

And he announced that for the first time, the Interior Department would be leasing federal waters for projects to generate electricity from wind and ocean currents.

President Obama could have saved at least 9,116 gallons of fuel by giving his speech at the White House – but no wind turbines are manufactured here.

http://www.cbsnews.com/track/rss/blogs/2009/04/22/politics/politicalhotsheet/entry4962384.shtml?CMP=OTC-RSSFeed&source=RSS&attr=PoliticalHotsheet_4962384

Porter Goss: Obama Decision "Crossed a Red Line"

Porter Goss, former CIA Director and past chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, blasted the Obama administration for releasing Justice Department memos on harsh interrogation techniques. “For the first time in my experience we’ve crossed the red line of properly protecting our national security in order to gain partisan political advantage,” Goss said in an interview.

Goss, a former CIA operative, has made few public comments since leaving his post as DCI in September 2006. In December 2007, he told a Washington Post reporter that members of Congress had been fully briefed on the CIA’s special interrogation program. “Among those being briefed, there was a pretty full understanding of what the CIA was doing,” Goss told the Post. “And the reaction in the room was not just approval, but encouragement.”

In a letter to his intelligence community colleagues last Thursday, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair described those briefings. “From 2002 through 2006 when the use of these techniques ended, the leadership of the CIA repeatedly reported their activities both to Executive Branch policymakers and to members of Congress, and received permission to continue to use the techniques.”

That passage from Blair’s letter – along with another confirming that the interrogations produced “high-value information” that provided a “deeper understanding of the al Qaeda organization attacking this country” – was dropped when language from the letter was released publicly. A spokesman for Blair attributed to the omission to normal editing procedures.

In an interview this morning, senior Bush administration official accused the DNI of “politicizing intelligence” by attempting to hide his judgment that the program had produced valuable results. This official also accused the Obama administration of double standards, citing its professed belief in transparency and its unwillingness – at least so far – to declassify memos that demonstrate the value of the interrogation techniques Obama has banned.

Other Republicans have pointed out that with the exception of Blair, the Obama administration has defending the policies using political figures – like Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod – rather than top national security advisers.

“You can imagine what it would have looked like, if on a sensitive intelligence matter involving the CIA and this controversy, if we sent Karl Rove out to do this briefing. And that’s in effect what’s happened here,” says a high-ranking official from the Bush White House. “And I assume that’s because they saw it primarily as a political issue – because it’s being debated inside as a political issue –because it’s about appeasing the left, whose support they sought during the campaign. And Axelrod is more of an expert on that crowd that anybody else. It also says to me he was in all the meetings where they were debating this question – whether or not Obama had better go forward with some kind of investigation.”

The official was referring to an article by Politico’s Mike Allen, in which Axelrod characterized Obama’s move as “a weighty decision.” Axelrod added: “He thought very long and hard about it, consulted widely. … He’s been thinking about this for four weeks, really.”

Allen later reported that Axelrod made the comments during an interview he and others at Politico conducted for another article. Axelrod, Allen wrote, gave he and his colleagues a “preview of the decision on the memos.”
http://www.weeklystandard.com/weblogs/TWSFP/2009/04/goss_obama_decision_crossed_a.aspP

Congress Knew About the Interrogations

Obama should release the memo on the attacks prevented.

APRIL 22, 2009, 8:47 P.M. ET

By PETER HOEKSTRA

Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair got it right last week when he noted how easy it is to condemn the enhanced interrogation program "on a bright sunny day in April 2009." Reactions to this former CIA program, which was used against senior al Qaeda suspects in 2002 and 2003, are demonstrating how little President Barack Obama and some Democratic members of Congress understand the dire threats to our nation.

George Tenet, who served as CIA director under Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, believes the enhanced interrogations program saved lives. He told CBS's "60 Minutes" in April 2007: "I know this program alone is worth more than the FBI, the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency put together have been able to tell us."

Last week, Mr. Blair made a similar statement in an internal memo to his staff when he wrote that "[h]igh 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."

Yet last week Mr. Obama overruled the advice of his CIA director, Leon Panetta, and four prior CIA directors by releasing the details of the enhanced interrogation program. Former CIA director Michael Hayden has stated clearly that declassifying the memos will make it more difficult for the CIA to defend the nation.

It was not necessary to release details of the enhanced interrogation techniques, because members of Congress from both parties have been fully aware of them since the program began in 2002. We believed it was something that had to be done in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks to keep our nation safe. After many long and contentious debates, Congress repeatedly approved and funded this program on a bipartisan basis in both Republican and Democratic Congresses.

Last week, Mr. Obama argued that those who implemented this program should not be prosecuted -- even though the release of the memos still places many individuals at other forms of unfair legal risk. It appeared that Mr. Obama understood it would be unfair to prosecute U.S. government employees for carrying out a policy that had been fully vetted and approved by the executive branch and Congress. The president explained this decision with these gracious words: "nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past." I agreed.

Unfortunately, on April 21, Mr. Obama backtracked and opened the door to possible prosecution of Justice Department attorneys who provided legal advice with respect to the enhanced interrogations program. The president also signaled that he may support some kind of independent inquiry into the program. It seems that he has capitulated to left-wing groups and some in Congress who are demanding show trials over this program.

Members of Congress calling for an investigation of the enhanced interrogation program should remember that such an investigation can't be a selective review of information, or solely focus on the lawyers who wrote the memos, or the low-level employees who carried out this program. I have asked Mr. Blair to provide me with a list of the dates, locations and names of all members of Congress who attended briefings on enhanced interrogation techniques.

Any investigation must include this information as part of a review of those in Congress and the Bush administration who reviewed and supported this program. To get a complete picture of the enhanced interrogation program, a fair investigation will also require that the Obama administration release the memos requested by former Vice President Dick Cheney on the successes of this program.

An honest and thorough review of the enhanced interrogation program must also assess the likely damage done to U.S. national security by Mr. Obama's decision to release the memos over the objections of Mr. Panetta and four of his predecessors. Such a review should assess what this decision communicated to our enemies, and also whether it will discourage intelligence professionals from offering their frank opinions in sensitive counterterrorist cases for fear that they will be prosecuted by a future administration.

Perhaps we need an investigation not of the enhanced interrogation program, but of what the Obama administration may be doing to endanger the security our nation has enjoyed because of interrogations and other antiterrorism measures implemented since Sept. 12, 2001.

Mr. Hoekstra, a congressman from Michigan, is ranking Republican on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124044188941045415.html

The border for dummies

National Post editorial board

Can someone please tell us how U. S. Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano got her job? She appears to be about as knowledgeable about border issues as a late-night radio call-in yahoo.

In an interview broadcast Monday on the CBC, Ms. Napolitano attempted to justify her call for stricter border security on the premise that "suspected or known terrorists" have entered the U. S. across the Canadian border, including the perpetrators of the 9/11 attack.

All the 9/11 terrorists, of course, entered the United States directly from overseas. The notion that some arrived via Canada is a myth that briefly popped up in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, and was then quickly debunked.

Informed of her error, Ms. Napolitano blustered: "I can't talk to that. I can talk about the future. And here's the future. The future is we have borders."

Just what does that mean, exactly?

Just a few weeks ago, Ms. Napolitano equated Canada's border to Mexico's, suggesting they deserved the same treatment. Mexico is engulfed in a drug war that left more than 5,000 dead last year, and which is spawning a spillover kidnapping epidemic in Arizona. So many Mexicans enter the United States illegally that a multi-billion-dollar barrier has been built from Texas to California to keep them out.

In Canada, on the other hand, the main problem is congestion resulting from cross-border trade. Not quite the same thing, is it?

http://www.nationalpost.com/story-printer.html?id=1520295

NYT: Harsh techniques worked, intel chief says

Private memo says interrogation methods helped nation in terrorism fight

By Peter Baker

The New York Times

updated 10:21 p.m. ET, Tues., April 21, 2009

WASHINGTON - 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 legal memos 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.

Some parts of memo deleted
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.

“I like to think I would not have approved those methods in the past,” he wrote, “but I do not fault those who made the decisions at that time, and I will absolutely defend those who carried out the interrogations within the orders they were given.”

A spokeswoman for Admiral Blair said the lines were cut in the normal editing process of shortening an internal memo into a media statement emphasizing his concern that the public understand the context of the decisions made in the past and the fact that they followed legal orders.

"The information gained from these techniques was valuable in some instances, but there is no way of knowing whether the same information could have been obtained through other means,” Admiral Blair said in a written statement issued last night. “The bottom line is these techniques have hurt our image around the world, the damage they have done to our interests far outweighed whatever benefit they gave us and they are not essential to our national security."

Admiral Blair’s private memo was provided by a critic of Mr. Obama’s policy. His assessment could bolster Bush administration veterans who argue that the interrogations were an important tool in the battle against al Qaeda.

Techniques 'made us safer'
Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency under Mr. Bush, said on Fox News Sunday last weekend that “the use of these techniques against these terrorists made us safer. It really did work.” Former Vice President Dick Cheney, in a separate interview with Fox, endorsed that conclusion and said he has asked the C.I.A. to declassify memos detailing the gains from the harsh interrogations.

Several news accounts, including one in the New York Times last week, have quoted former intelligence officials saying the harsh interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, a Qaeda operative who was waterboarded 83 times, did not produce information that foiled terror plots. The Bush administration has long argued that harsh questioning of Qaeda operatives like Zubaydah helped prevent a planned attack on Los Angeles and cited passages in the memos released last week to bolster that conclusion.

The White House would not address the question of whether the tactics have been effective on Tuesday but fired back at Mr. Cheney. “We’ve had an at least two-year policy disagreement with the vice president of the United States,” Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary. “That policy disagreement is whether or not you can uphold the values in which this country was founded at the same time that you protect the citizens that live in that country.”

Mr. Obama’s team has cast doubt on the effectiveness of the harsh interrogations, but in a visit to the C.I.A. this week, the president did not directly question that. Instead, he said, that any sacrifice from banning those tactics was worth it to uphold the nation’s belief in rule of law.

“I’m sure that sometimes it seems as if that means we’re operating with one hand tied behind our back or that those who would argue for a higher standard are naïve,” he said. “I understand that. You know, I watch the cable shows once in a while.”

But he added: “What makes the United States special, and what makes you special, is precisely the fact that we are willing to uphold our values and our ideals even when it’s hard, not just when it’s easy.”

'Torture is not moral'
The assessment by Admiral Blair represents a shift for him since he took office. When he was nominated for the position and appeared before the Senate intelligence committee on Jan. 22, he said: “I believe strongly that torture is not moral, legal or effective.” But he declined to assess whether the interrogation program under Mr. Bush had worked.

“Do you believe the C.I.A.’s interrogation detention program has been effective?” Senator Christopher Bond, a Missouri Republican, asked him.

“I’ll have to look into that more closely before I can give you a good answer on that one,” Admiral Blair answered.

This article, "Banned Techniques Yielded 'High Value Information'," first appeared in The New York Times.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30335592/print/1/displaymode/1098/

The Case for the ‘Torture Memos’

The debate over the just-released Justice Department memorandums on interrogation techniques ended as soon as they were dubbed the “torture memos.” Forevermore, they will be remembered as the legal lowlights of a “dark and painful chapter in our history,” as Pres. Barack Obama put it.

Rightly considered, the memos should be a source of pride. They represent a nation of laws struggling to defend itself against a savage, lawless enemy while adhering to its legal commitments and norms. Most societies throughout human history wouldn’t have bothered.

The memos cite conduct that is indisputably torture from a court case involving Serbs abusing Muslims in Bosnia: “severe beatings to the genitals, head, and other parts of the body with metal pipes and various other items; removal of teeth with pliers; kicking in the face and ribs; breaking of bones and ribs and dislocation of fingers; cutting a figure into the victim’s forehead; hanging the victim and beating him; extreme limitations of food and water; and subjection to games of ‘Russian roulette.’ ”

In contrast, we carefully parsed each of our techniques to ensure it wouldn’t cause “severe physical or mental pain or suffering.” This touchingly legalistic exercise at times took on a comic aspect. We could put a caterpillar in a box with a detainee afraid of stinging insects, Abu Zubaydah, so long as we didn’t falsely tell him the caterpillar was a threat to sting. We could put detainees in diapers so long as “the diaper is checked regularly and changed as needed to prevent skin irritation.”

The practice of “walling” was characteristic. A report of the International Committee of the Red Cross made it seem a brutish exercise involving slamming the heads of recalcitrant detainees against walls. The memos make it clear that the detainees were thrown against fake, flexible walls, with their necks swathed in towels to prevent whiplash. The point was to push their shoulder blades against the wall to make a loud, startling noise.

Not exactly Torquemada. Several of the harshest methods — sleep deprivation, stress positions, and waterboarding — could easily constitute torture, depending on their application. The tone of the press coverage makes the very act of subjecting these methods to close legal analysis seem dirty, as if the Justice Department should have come down with a case of the vapors when asked for guidance.

But there is a line somewhere between the highly restricted methods approved in the Army Field Manual for interrogation of enemy soldiers and illegal torture. The only way to find and honor that line is by lots of lawyerly analysis of practices that — in the words of Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair — “read on a bright, sunny, safe day in April 2009, appear graphic and disturbing.”

Blair’s point is an important one — context matters. If any of these methods was used against domestic criminal suspects, it would shock the conscience. They were instead deployed against terrorists with information about their network and perhaps ongoing plots. U.S. officials have dueling obligations in such circumstances, both to abide by our laws and to protect the public. Balancing these obligations is necessarily a fraught, complicated task; it can only seem simple in retrospect, when the threat appears to have receded.

Reasonable people can disagree about whether the Bush administration succeeded in its balancing act. Waterboarding has always been the most controversial method, and it was used 183 times — in short bursts not exceeding 40 seconds — against top al-Qaeda captive Khalid Sheikh Muhammad in March 2003. Were intelligence benefits gained commensurate with the frequent resort to this method?

If we had a more mature political culture, this and other questions could be thoroughly examined by a special congressional committee. (As it happens, the CIA produced a memo on the benefits of the interrogation program that has never been released.) But such an inquiry would inevitably descend into a hyperpoliticized takedown of the CIA and the Bush Justice Department for “war crimes.” The frenzied reception of the “torture memos” is just a preview.
— Rich Lowry is the editor of National Review.

A tortured debate over the 'torture memos'

By Jeff Jacoby Globe Columnist / April 22, 2009

ON THIS PAGE a few years ago I wrote several columns arguing that torture was never acceptable - not even "as a last and desperate option" in the war against jihadist terrorism, a war I strongly support. At a time when not only conservative hawks but even some notable liberals were making the case for using torture to thwart Al Qaeda, I contended that the cruel abuse of terrorist detainees was something we could never countenance - not just because torture is illegal, unreliable, and a threat to the innocent, but because it is one of those practices that a civilized society cannot engage in without undermining its right to call itself civilized.

Rereading those columns amid the tumult over the Justice Department "torture memos" released last week, I see little that I would change. I am still convinced, as I wrote in 2005, that interrogation techniques amounting to torture "cross the line that separates us from the enemy we are trying to defeat."

Yet the Bush-era memos strike me as much more thoughtful than most of the moral preening and tendentious grandstanding they set off. Congressman Jerrold Nadler, a senior Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, apoplectically declares that the memos not only authorized torture "without a shadow of a doubt," they "gave explicit instruction on how to carry it out." The New York Times pronounces them "a journey into depravity." A petition at Democrats.com urges the appointment of a special prosecutor for "torture . . . and other heinous crimes of the Bush Administration."

What's missing from all this sanctimony and censure is any acknowledgement of the circumstances under which the CIA interrogations took place, let alone the successes with which they have been credited. That may be a good way to score easy political points. It doesn't add much to the public discourse.

Context matters. Actions that are indisputably beyond the pale under normal conditions - waterboarding a prisoner, for example - can take on a very different aspect when conditions are abnormal, as they surely were in the terrifying wake of 9/11.

"We did not have a clear understanding of the enemy we were dealing with," recalled Dennis Blair, the Obama administration's director of national intelligence, in his statement accompanying the declassified memos last week. "Our every effort was focused on preventing further attacks that would kill more Americans." Knowing little about Al Qaeda's capabilities, desperately seeking to head off another slaughter, fearing the worst, the government's highest priority was to extract critical intelligence from Al Qaeda detainees.

That was the state of affairs when the CIA sought legal approval to use harsher interrogation methods. "Those methods, read on a bright, sunny, safe day in April 2009, appear graphic and disturbing," Blair's statement said. But there was nothing sunny or safe about the post-9/11 emergency in which they were used. Any honest discussion of the memos authorizing them ought to say so.

Particularly when those memos indicate that the "enhanced interrogation techniques" saved lives. According to Deputy Assistant Attorney General Steven Bradbury's memo dated May 30, 2005, "intelligence acquired from these interrogations has been a key reason why Al Qaeda has failed to launch a spectacular attack in the West" since 9/11. Senior terrorist Khalid Sheikh Mohammed at first "resisted giving any answers" when asked about future attacks, but waterboarding led him to divulge "specific, actionable intelligence." One result was the foiling of Al Qaeda's planned "Second Wave" - a 9/11-like plot to crash a hijacked airliner into a Los Angeles skyscraper.

But what if it hadn't been foiled? Suppose the CIA had been denied permission to use brutal interrogation tactics, and Al Qaeda had consequently gone on to murder thousands of additional victims in California. What kind of conversation would we be having once it became known that the refusal to subject KSM to waterboarding had come at so steep a price? How many of those now blasting the Bush administration for allowing torture would be blasting it instead for not preventing a second bloodbath?

None of this is meant as a defense of torture, which I oppose as adamantly as ever. But even those of us who were against the Bush interrogation policy should be able to acknowledge the good faith of those who disagreed and the exigency in which they found themselves. To say nothing of the lives their decisions may have saved.

Jeff Jacoby can be reached at jacoby@globe.com.

==============
I don't always agree with Jeff Jacoby, but I think he does a good job in this column of striking a balance. I also think the Bush Administration showed balance in their approach to these difficult issues (unlike the unhinged nonsense being spouted by so many ill-informed critics). As a lawyer, let me break this down for you. By its own terms, the Geneva Conventions only apply to "High Contracting Parties." Al Qaeda is not a signatory to the Geneva Conventions and so their fighters are not entitled to its protections. The only legal bar to the tactics that were used against the two or three senior Al Qaeda members, and the only possible basis for prosecution of the lawyers who wrote the memos in question, is the US anti-torture statute (US Code, Title 18, Part 1, Chapter 113C, § 2340). Looking at the memos and the aforementioned statute, it seems to me that the Justice Department lawyers did a good job of providing lawful guidance to the CIA about what they could and could not do in seeking actionable intelligence from these terrorist leaders. Now that President Obama's own Director of National Intelligence has confirmed that these interrogations produced "high-value information," it seems clear that the Bush Administration was reasonable in using the tactics in question against a very small number of detainees.

And for those of you who say "torture" is always ineffective because the subjects will say anything they think their interrogators want to hear in order to stop the pain, what if the interrogators only want the truth? It seems to me you are confusing torture to obtain a confession (KGB, Gestapo, etc.) from coercive interrogation to gain actionable intelligence. The CIA was not trying to get KSM to confess to anything; they wanted information about future attacks. Logic, and the admission by Obama's DNI, suggests that even committed terrorists will tell the truth about future attacks if given sufficient motivation. Now that they no longer have any useful information, they should be left to (humanely) rot in their cells for the rest of their lives. But if there is another attack or if we capture another senior Al Qaeda leader, "harsh interrogation tactics" will again be legal and appropriate. And I predict that in such circumstances President Obama will authorize such tactics.

Obama Blames America

Demonizing Harry Truman may not play well with voters.

By DOROTHY RABINOWITZ

The president of the United States has completed another outing abroad in his now standard form: as the un-Bush. At one stop after another -- the latest in Latin America, where Hugo Chávez expressed wishes to be his friend -- Barack Obama fulfilled his campaign vows to show the nations of the world that a new American leadership stood ready to atone for the transgressions of the old.

All went as expected in these travels, not counting certain unforeseen results of that triumphal European tour. The images of that trip, in which Mr. Obama dazzled ecstatic Europeans with citations of the offenses against international goodwill and humanity committed by the nation he leads, are now firmly imprinted on the minds of Americans. That this is so, and that it is not good news for him, is truth of a kind not quite fathomable to this president and his men.

Now, on the heels of those travels, comes his release of the guidelines known as "torture memos" -- a decision designed to emphasize, again, the superior ethical and moral leadership the world can expect from this administration as compared with that of presidencies past. This exercise in comparisons is one of which Mr. Obama may well never tire.

The memos' publication had its consequences, most of them intentional. First, declaring his intention to have a forward-looking administration, the president had, to his credit, announced that there would be no trials of CIA personnel involved in the interrogations of terrorists.

Then came the memos. With his decision to release them, Mr. Obama guaranteed an instant explosion of outrage of a kind that could never have happened otherwise, notwithstanding his claim that most of the contents were already public. The results of the president's decision were predictable. Each day now brings, in the usual media quarters, fevered exhortations calling for the trials and punishment of Bush administration officials.

This decision may also have unintended consequences, none more interesting perhaps than the effects of the nonstop repetition of the president's rationale for this act. We could begin to see the possibilities clearly on Sunday, when White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel appeared on ABC's "This Week With George Stephanopoulos," where he confronted questions about the memo decision.

Turning aside the quest for answers to knotty questions -- including several on the point that most of what we now know about al Qaeda had been gleaned precisely from these enhanced interrogations -- Mr. Emanuel indicated that the Obama administration was guided by higher concerns. He proceeded patiently, to explain. By revealing the memos, with their detailed information on those interrogation techniques (now banned), we had elevated our moral status in the eyes of the world. More important, we had improved our standing in the eyes of potential terrorists. This would undermine al Qaeda, Mr. Emanuel explained, because those interrogations of ours helped to enlist terrorists to their cause. All of which was why the publication of the memos -- news of which would presumably touch the hearts of militants around the world -- would make America safer.

There is always danger in repeating propositions like this often, among them the likelihood that their irrationality will begin to make itself clear to anyone hearing it over time.

Any number of people listening to Mr. Emanuel -- those acquainted with terror's recent history, at any rate -- would have recalled, instantly, the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the attack on the USS Cole, and the rest of the unending chain of terror assaults mounted against Americans long before anyone had ever heard of enhanced interrogation techniques.

In his appearance before employees of the CIA Monday -- part inspirational, part pep rally -- Mr. Obama held forth on the need to improve our image in the world, and on how in adhering to this great nation's principles of justice and right we could only be made safer. He was here to assure the employees of the CIA of his support, to explain, again, the release of those memos. And to describe, as he did, with some eloquence, how great and exceptional a democracy we were.

That no such estimation of the United States managed to infiltrate the content or tone of the president's remarks during his European tour -- nary a hint -- we know, and it is not surprising. He had gone to Europe not as the voice of his nation, but as a missionary with a message of atonement for its errors. Which were, as he perceived them -- arrogance, dismissiveness, Guantanamo, deficiencies in its attitudes toward the Muslim world, and the presidency of Harry Truman and his decision to drop the atomic bomb, which ended World War II.

No sitting American president had ever delivered indictments of this kind while abroad, or for that matter at home, or been so ostentatiously modest about the character and accomplishment of the nation he led. He was mediator, an agent of change, a judge, apportioning blame -- and he was above the battle.

None of this display during Mr. Obama's recent travels could have come as a surprise to legions of his supporters, nor would many of them be daunted by their new president's preoccupation with our moral failures. Five decades of teaching in colleges and universities across the land, portraying the U.S. as a power mainly responsible for injustice and evil, whose military might was ever a danger to the world -- a nation built on the fruits of greed, rapacity and racism -- have had their effect. The products of this education find nothing strange in a president quick to focus on the theme of American moral failure. He may not share many of their views, but there is, nonetheless, much that they find familiar about him.

The same can't be said for the large numbers of Americans who caught up with the details of the president's apology tour. Presidents have been transformed by office, and Mr. Obama may yet be one of them. But on the evidence so far, he has, as few presidents before him, much to transform. Or, at least, to understand.

Since that bridge too far to Europe, ordinary Americans, including some who voted for Mr. Obama, have shown evidence of a quiet but durable resentment over the list of grievances against the United States that the president brought to the world's attention while overseas. There are certain things that can't be taken back. There are images that are hard to forget. Anger of this kind has an enduring power that could, in the end, haunt this presidency.

Ms. Rabinowitz is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124035759650041105.html

Geneva Absurdity, January 24, 2002 11:20 a.m.

Long before Iraq. The controversy over Guantanamo is maddening in its absurdity and dishonesty. January 24, 2002 11:20 a.m.

hat is it that the Bush administration's European critics like so much about civilian casualties? It's a natural question, given the Europeans' evident contempt for one of the purposes of the Geneva Convention: to deter un-uniformed soldiers from hiding among the civilian population — a practice that obviously makes it impossible for an attacking army to distinguish between legitimate targets and noncombatants. In other words, the Geneva Convention seeks to protect innocent civilians by keeping soldiers in uniform, and by defining those combatants who don't wear uniforms as being outside the rules of warfare and undeserving of the privileges afforded to legitimate prisoners of war. During the bombing in Afghanistan we heard a lot from the Europeans about collateral damages, so it is strange that they should now turn around and be willing to overlook the chief cause of civilian casualties in Afghanistan: al Qaeda and Taliban troops who not only didn't wear uniforms, but actively hide among civilians. One might even think that the Europeans would be especially eager to define al Qaeda and the Taliban as outside the rules of civilized combat, given (again) the Europeans' understandable concern with protecting civilian populations from the depredations of war. But that, of course, would require following a consistent moral principle rather than simply a knee-jerk anti-Americanism: i.e., the Americans are wrong when they bomb terrorists who are hiding among civilians, and wrong when they try to follow rules to discourage terrorists from hiding among civilians. This is just one of the aspects of the controversy over Guantanamo that is maddening in its absurdity and dishonesty (for NR's take, see the editorial from the latest issue). And — to pick out another thread of the European reasoning here — if our allies care so much about the Geneva Convention, shouldn't they insist that governments have to actually sign it to be considered a party to it? Not only has al Qaeda not signed the Geneva Convention, al Qaeda and the Taliban aren't even governments. Remember, it wasn't just the United States that said that the Taliban wasn't the legitimate government of Afghanistan, even the United Nations took that position. At its heart, the Geneva Convention, as Cornell's Jeremy Rabkin explains, is about reciprocity between governments — you treat our prisoners decently, we'll treat yours decently. Saying it applies to al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners is like saying the START II agreement should apply to relations between the U.S. and Belgium, or — even more aptly — to U.S. relations with the Hell's Angels. Because al Qaeda and the Taliban are, in essence, armed, criminal gangs, and nothing more. Also, if they really are lawful combatants, as the administration's critics seems to suggest, that would lead toward a nasty conclusion: that the attacks on the Khobar Towers, the U.S.S. Cole, and (maybe) even the Pentagon were justified acts of war carried out on legitimate military targets, and so the perpetrators can't be tried for their actions any more than a U.S. pilot could be tried for blowing up a Taliban arms depot. For crystal-clear thinking on these issues, the best source is Ruth Wedgwood, a law professor at Yale and Johns Hopkins. She considers the whole Geneva Convention controversy a bit of a sideshow. According to Wedgwood, even if the Convention applied (which she insists it doesn't), it still allows for interrogation of prisoners, doesn't require you to jeopardize camp security if it would be endangered by providing certain amenities (i.e., the Geneva Convention isn't a suicide pact), and allows for military trials. Even many conservatives have been puzzling over the question of what body of law these prisoners would be tried under. Wedgwood explains that this area tends to be governed by customary law, especially the customs that have grown up around the Hague Convention of 1907. The Guantanamo prisoners can be held to account for "unlawful belligerency" (just what it sounds like), for violating "the rules of proportionality" (even if you attack a military target, it has to be done with requisite care not to kill civilians), and other violations of "the rules and customs of war." What if none of the prisoners in Guantanamo directly participated in terrorist attacks? It doesn't matter. The Anglo-American concept of conspiracy is quite broad, Wedgwood says, and al Qaeda could easily be considered a "single purpose entity" — like a "RICO enterprise" in the U.S. — devoted to murder and mayhem. Simply joining al Qaeda would be the crime. Of course, the Europeans still need to figure out if it's that, or joining the U.S. military, that's the worst offense. http://www.nationalreview.com/lowry/lowry012402.shtml

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-obama-advisor22-2009apr22,0,1997286.story

From the Los Angeles Times

Muslim woman's appointment as Obama advisor draws cautious optimism

Dalia Mogahed, a veiled Egyptian American, will advise President Obama on prejudices and problems faced by Muslims. Many Arabs hope it's a step toward reversing stereotyping.

By Noha El-Hennawy

April 22, 2009

Reporting from Cairo — Egyptians are cautiously rejoicing over the recent appointment of a veiled Egyptian American Muslim woman as an advisor to President Obama.

Dalia Mogahed, senior analyst and executive director of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies, was appointed this month to Obama's Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships.

Arabs are closely watching for signs that the new leadership in Washington is making efforts to improve relations with Islam, which many Muslims believe were severely damaged during the eight years of the Bush administration. The selection of Mogahed is viewed by many in the Middle East as a step by Obama to move beyond the stereotypes and prejudices that Muslims believe they have encountered since the attacks Sept. 11, 2001.

"Dalia Mogahed is the best example of a successful Muslim woman. She proves that the Muslim should be successful in all fields, at least in [her] area of specialization," a commentator wrote on the website of the independent daily Al Masry al Youm.

The Egyptian-born Mogahed moved with her family to the United States almost 30 years ago. Recently, she co-wrote the book "Who Speaks for Islam?" with John Esposito, an American political science professor who has been criticized by some as an Islamic apologist. Mogahed and Esposito published an opinion piece this month in The Times on American ignorance of Islam and the Muslim world.

"My work focuses on studying Muslims, the way they think and their views," Mogahed was quoted as saying on the website of the Saudi-owned Al Arabiya satellite news channel. "Then I should tell the president about their problems and needs, especially that lately Muslims have been perceived as a source of problems and as incapable of taking part in solving international problems and that they should work on themselves. Now we want to say that Muslims are capable of providing solutions."

Yet, Mogahed's declaration that her loyalty goes first to the United States, published Monday in an interview with Al Masry al Youm, disappointed some people.

"I wish your loyalty was to your Islam first, Egypt second and your Arabism third and then to anything else," wrote a reader identifying himself as the Tiger of Arabs. "I am afraid that they might make a fool out of you and use you as a cover for policies that don't serve Egypt and the Arab and Muslim world."

El-Hennawy is in The Times' Cairo Bureau.