The President’s decision yesterday to release Office of Legal Counsel documents about CIA interrogation techniques is one of the clearest examples yet of his naivete or dangerously ideological motivations. Yes, the ACLU had sued for release of the documents, but such documents have been kept classified for the safety of national security, and he didn’t have to make them public. This was “willful blindness” at its best.
Former CIA Director Michael Hayden and former Attorney General Michael Mukasey have written a fantastic explanation for why this was a poor decision. The op-ed should be read, understood, and passed on. They write:
Although evidence shows that the Army Field Manual, which is available online, is already used by al Qaeda for training purposes, it was certainly the president’s right to suspend use of any technique. However, public disclosure of the OLC opinions, and thus of the techniques themselves, assures that terrorists are now aware of the absolute limit of what the U.S. government could do to extract information from them, and can supplement their training accordingly and thus diminish the effectiveness of these techniques as they have the ones in the Army Field Manual.
Moreover, disclosure of the details of the program pre-empts the study of the president’s task force and assures that the suspension imposed by the president’s executive order is effectively permanent. There would be little point in the president authorizing measures whose nature and precise limits have already been disclosed in detail to those whose resolve we hope to overcome. This conflicts with the sworn promise of the current director of the CIA, Leon Panetta, who testified in aid of securing Senate confirmation that if he thought he needed additional authority to conduct interrogation to get necessary information, he would seek it from the president. By allowing this disclosure, President Obama has tied not only his own hands but also the hands of any future administration faced with the prospect of attack.
Hayden and Mukasey also take to task the argument against the effectiveness of these methods. For more on these issues, see our recommended reading section.
Also read Bill Kristol, who wonders if we still consider ourselves at war. With DHS warning of right-wing extremists and the EPA declaring CO2 a threat to humanity, one must wonder if we truly have lost sight of the real threats we face.
UPDATE: Hayden was on Fox News Sunday this weekend. The transcript is worth reading. Some key exhanges:
WALLACE: The White House says that four former CIA directors, including you, all advised against the release of these so-called torture memos. Specifically, what were you asked and what did you say?
HAYDEN: I wasn’t asked. We weren’t asked. We were informed as a courtesy by the agency that this was a pending decision, and all of us self-initiated, voluntarily, to call the White House and express our views.
I should add, too, that the current director, Director Panetta, shared our views. I mean, if you look — if you look at what this really comprises, if you look at the documents that have been made public, it says top secret at the top. The definition of top secret is information which, if revealed, would cause grave harm to U.S. security.
And you had the current director and, according to the press accounts, his four previous predecessors all saying that those documents were appropriately classified, which means that they viewed the documents as — the release of them would be a grave threat to national security.
Now, the president made a different decision fully within his authority. The president is the ultimate classification authority.
[...]
HAYDEN: I don’t know. What — I mean, it’s not an unlimited universe of techniques that we would find acceptable as a people.
And what we have practically done is taken this body of techniques off the table even while this study is under way. That was one of the things that I discussed with White House officials.
This seems to moot the president’s own commission to decide whether or not the techniques of the Army Field Manual are adequate in all cases.
WALLACE: So are you suggesting that we no longer will have, whatever he decides on, the ability to extract the information we need?
HAYDEN: I think that teaching our enemies our outer limits, by taking techniques off the table, we have made it more difficult in a whole host of circumstances I can imagine, more difficult for CIA officers to defend the nation.
There’s another point, too, that I have to make. And it’s just not the tactical effect of this technique or that. It’s the broader effect on CIA officers.
I mean, if you’re a current CIA officer today — in fact, I know this has happened at the agency after the release of these documents. Officers are saying, “The things I’m doing now — will this happen to me in five year because of the things I am doing now?”
And the answer they’ve been given by senior leadership is the only answer possible, which is, “I can’t guarantee you that won’t happen, but I do know it won’t happen under this president.”
Now, think what that means. The basic foundation of the legitimacy of the agency’s action has shifted from some durability of law to a product of the American political process. That puts agency officers in a horrible position.
So I think the really dangerous effect of this, Chris, is that you will have agency officers stepping back from the kinds of things that the nation expects them to do. I mean, if you were to go to an agency officer today and say, “Go do this,” and, “Why am I authorized to do this?”
And I say, “Well, it’s authorized by the president. The attorney general says it’s lawful. And it’s been briefed to Congress.” That agency officer’s going to say, “Yeah, I know, but I see what’s going on here now. Have you run it by the ACLU? What’s the New York Times editorial board think? Have you discussed this with any potential presidential candidates?”
You’re going to have this agency on the front line of defending you in this current war playing back from the line.
[...]
HAYDEN: It’s difficult for me to judge the president. I don’t think I would do that. But Mr. Gibbs’ comments bring another reality fully in front of us. It’s what I’ll call, without meaning any irreverence to anybody, a really inconvenient truth.
Most of the people who oppose these techniques want to be able to say, “I don’t want my nation doing this,” which is a purely honorable position, “and they didn’t work anyway.” That back half of the sentence isn’t true.
The facts of the case are that the use of these techniques against these terrorists made us safer. It really did work. The president’s speech, President Bush in September of ‘06, outlined how one detainee led to another, led to another, with the use of these techniques.
The honorable position you have to take if you want us not to do this — and believe me, if the nation says, “Don’t do it,” the CIA won’t do it. The honorable position has to be, “Even though these techniques worked, I don’t want you to do that.” That takes courage. The other sentence doesn’t.
[...]
WALLACE: Let me ask you a couple of questions. We’re beginning to run out of time. One more on this, and then on a couple of other subjects.
President Obama says there will be no prosecution of CIA officers who relied on these memos. Is that the end of it, or do you expect something further in terms of congressional investigations and more lawsuits?
HAYDEN: Oh, God, no, it’s not the end of it. If you look at the letters that Director Panetta and Director Blair put out to the intelligence community workforce, near the end of both letters they make it very clear — I mean, literally, explicitly say — this is not the end of it.
In fact, they suggest it’s just the beginning. There will be more revelations. There will be more commissions. There will be more investigations. And this to an agency, again, I repeat, that is at war and is on the front lines defending America.
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