Former CIA Directors Urge Obama to Drop Investigation

This letter was publicized last Friday and received little attention from the mainstream media. It was written by seven former CIA Directors, including two who served under Bill Clinton, asking the President to call off the CIA investigation. They emphasize the same points we’ve noted:

If criminal investigations closed by career prosecutors during one administration can so easily be reopened at the direction of political appointees in the next, declinations of prosecution will be rendered meaningless. Those men and women who undertake difficult intelligence assignments in the aftermath of an attack such as September 11 must believe there is permanence in the legal rules that govern their actions. They must be free, as the Chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, Senator Lieberman, has put it: “to do their dangerous and critical jobs without worrying that years from now a future Attorney General will authorize a criminal investigation of them for behavior that a previous Attorney General concluded was authorized and legal.” Similar deference needs to be shown to fact-based decisions made by career prosecutors years ago.
Not only will some members of the intelligence community be subjected to costly financial and other burdens from what amounts to endless criminal investigations, but this approach will seriously damage the willingness of many other intelligence officers to take risks to protect the country. In our judgment such risk-taking is vital to success in the long and difficult fight against the terrorists who continue to threaten us.

They are right to ask the President to use his executive authority to call off the witch hunt, which he most certainly can.

Ed Morrissey picked up on the letter and asked a very good question in response to Dick Cheney’s recent comments to Chris Wallace (which I recently highlighted):

WALLACE: So even these cases where they went beyond the specific legal authorization, you’re OK with it?

CHENEY: I am.

Morrissey asked “What’s the limiting principle here?” Since I often emphasize principle and process, I’ll take a stab at answering that.

The principle here is that in cases that risk national security, unless there is a clear attempt to break the law, the matter should be handled internally. In this case, as is noted in the letter, the CIA has already conducted internal investigations and the one extreme case was prosecuted.

The reason I believe this should be the principle is both practical and deferential to the law. Considering the legal definition of torture, it’s not clear that there were many attempts to break the law. If we want to prosecute those who help define torture, that’s another debate, but that would be a bad idea for some of the same reasons. In this case, it seems as if the CIA agents were not significantly straying outside of the legal guidance that was provided in an attempt to cause physical harm.

I work for a healthcare company, and while we are highly regulated, we police ourselves with numerous policies and procedures that are constantly evaluated and audited. The CIA can do and has done the same. If there were blatant attempts to break the law, then an outside prosecution might be appropriate.

Dick Cheney’s statement of support may sound controversial, but we must recognize that acting beyond the specific legal authorization given does not necessarily mean breaking the law. Unless it is clear that someone was acting in such a manner, it is not appropriate to prosecute like this. Instead, an internal investigation and correction like the one that took place is preferable.

Reviewing the Baucus Healthcare Bill

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus released America’s Healthy Future Act of 2009 this week. The CBO analysis is here. It says that the bill will reduce the deficit by an estimated $49 billion over ten years — hardly “bending the curve.”

As I read the bill, I made some live notes via my Twitter feed. Here are some of the important points of the bill, some of which I’ll address below:

• Provisions for state insurance exchanges and national insurance plans, with subsidies for families up to 300% of the poverty line
• Provisions to allow plans to be sold across state lines
• Individual insurance mandates with excise taxes for those who don’t comply
• Taxes on insurance plans above a certain value
• Penalties on employers with more than 50 employees if those employees receive tax credits for the insurance exchange
• $6 billion for the creation of co-ops
• Expansion of Medicaid and CHIP eligibility
• Increase of Medicaid rebates paid by pharmaceutical manufacturers
• Creation of an Outcomes Research Institute to study clinical effectiveness of products
• No malpractice reform
• Exclusion of non-prescribed over the counter medicine from HSA/FSA/HRA/MSA reimbursement
• New requirements for 501(c)(3) hospitals
• Fees on drug and device makers and on clinical laboratories based on “market share”
• “Young Invincible” optional plan for people 25 and younger that would provide catastrophic-only coverage

Healthcare Reform Without Legal Reform

Healthcare reform without legal reform would be difficult to take seriously, considering the many issues that need clarification and the costs that malpractice lawsuits add to healthcare spending. A new poll shows that a large majority of Americans want healthcare reform to address the malpractice system, so this should be a no-brainer for President Obama.

But in the President’s yawner of an address to Congress this week, he only acknowledged that malpractice lawsuits may increase healthcare costs. There was no call to improve this system like there were several endorsements of insurance regulation.

Kim Strassel noticed this as well, and she called out the President’s evasion of the issue. She was correct to note, however, that even if the President did ask for malpractice reform, the liberal Congress isn’t going to include it in the bill anyway:

It says everything that Mr. Obama wouldn’t plump for reform as part of legislation. The president knows the Senate would never have passed it in any event. Yet even proposing it was too much for the White House’s legal lobby. Mr. Obama is instead directing his secretary of health and human services to move forward on test projects. That would be Kathleen Sebelius, who spent eight years as the head of the Kansas Trial Lawyers Association.

Hugh Hewitt recently had a good column that exposed how President Obama is asking everyone to sacrifice for healthcare reform, except the plaintiffs’ lawyers.

Anyone hoping for meaningful tort reform that would reduce or eliminate “defensive medicine” (which is only part of the legal reform needed in healthcare) is dreaming. This Congress will not allow it. The plaintiffs’ lawyers contribute too much to Democrats and represent an important part of the liberal ideology that is hostile to business.

Because President Obama and the Democrat Congress will not seriously attempt to reform an important area that both sides recognize raises healthcare costs, we can see what their true priorities are.

George Will Sparks Healthy Afghanistan Debate

George Will’s provocative column on Afghanistan has, not surprisingly, brought the war back into the mainstream political discussion. The column was timely, as General McChrystal is recommending some strategic changes that may lead to an increase in the level of troops. George Will is critical of the idea of nation-building:

U.S. strategy is “clear, hold and build.” Clear? Taliban forces can evaporate and then return, confident that U.S. forces will forever be too few to hold gains. Hence nation-building would be impossible even if we knew how, and even if Afghanistan were not the second-worst place to try: The Brookings Institution ranks Somalia as the only nation with a weaker state.

His point is a good one, and Andy McCarthy echoes this criticism of nation-building in Afghanistan. McCarthy reminds us of why we went into Afghanistan in the first place, and of the ideology we must continue to confront:

The reason for going to war in Afghanistan was that al-Qaeda was there. The Bush administration was content to live with the Taliban ruling Afghanistan. They are a tyrannical lot, but Islam doctrinally and culturally lends itself to tyranny. The Taliban’s brutalization of the Afghan people was not our military concern. That was a problem for the State Department to take up with our “allies” — like Pakistan, which created the Taliban, and Saudi Arabia, which helped Pakistan sustain it. Our military issue with the Taliban was bin Laden. Had the Taliban agreed to our terms, there would have been no invasion of Afghanistan.

Notwithstanding al-Qaeda’s departure, the idea now seems to be that we should substantially escalate our military involvement in Afghanistan to replicate the experiment that supposedly worked so well in Iraq. It’s the age of Obama, so our commanders are talking not about combat but about a stimulus package to fight the “culture of poverty.” As military officials described it to the New York Times, “the overriding goal of American and NATO forces would not be so much to kill Taliban insurgents as to make ordinary Afghans feel secure, and thus isolate the insurgents. That means using force less and focusing on economic development and good governance.” This is consistent with the delusional belief that terrorism is caused by poverty, corruption, resentment, Guantanamo Bay, enhanced interrogation tactics, Israel — in short, anything other than an ideology rooted in Islamic scripture. But before we all laugh George Will out of the room, we might remember that the Taliban was not our reason for invading. We would not have gone to war to save Afghanistan from the Taliban — which is to say, to save Afghanistan from itself.

Andy McCarthy’s concern for a counterinsurgency that ignores the underlying ideology adopted by terrorists is warranted, but Michael Ledeen explains how a counterinsurgency is supposed to work:

Finally, the mater of counterinsurgency doctrine: Winning the support of the people in order to defeat the insurgents is not the same as promoting democracy. The best book I know on counterinsurgency was written by David Galula, a French officer in Algeria. He was adamant that wars of this sort are won by the side that gains the support of the people. It is not a question of democracy, and it is not won as a result of ideology. He insisted that ideology has very little to do with the final outcome. It is all about winning and losing; the people support the side they believe is going to win, and that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. They might prefer democracy, but they will always go with the winner.

While we do need to confront the ideology, a counterinsurgency that wins the support of the people can be effective, as we’ve seen in Iraq.

It is fair to question the strategy in Afghanistan, but George Will’s suggestion to conduct the war from “offshore” doesn’t seem likely to be effective. As Peter Wehner writes:

To recapitulate: Will urges the United States to adopt a “comprehensively revised policy: America should do only what can be done from offshore, using intelligence, drones, cruise missiles, airstrikes, and small, potent special forces units, concentrating on the porous 1,500-mile border with Pakistan, a nation that actually matters.”

But what the best minds in the military will tell you—what the people who have actually overseen counterinsurgency success will say—is that drones, cruise missiles, and air strikes will not succeed without the appropriate human intelligence, without some kind of military infrastructure in place, without eyes and ears to direct us to the appropriate targets. This requires boots on the ground.

In addition, the Taliban continues to maintain sanctuaries in Afghanistan. As General David Petraeus, the head of U.S. Central Command, told Michael Gerson: “You can’t take out sanctuaries with predator strikes. We are not going to carpet-bomb. Distance puts limits on what you can do.” So the goal Will wants to achieve (to effectively strike against the Taliban) is impossible to achieve with the strategy he endorses (moving offshore and relying on technology). The wise approach is a counterinsurgency strategy tailored to the situation in Afghanistan—which is precisely what the new American commander there, General Stanley McChrystal, is in the process of designing.

There is good debate taking place, thanks to Will’s column. Some other views to read are those of  David Frum, Michael Gerson, Bill Kristol, Max Boot,  Fred Kagan (and here), Robert Kagan, Rich Lowry, Michael O’Hanlon and Bruce Riedel, and the WSJ editorial page.

---