Politics vs National Security
by Mike on Apr.22, 2009, under Political
Whereas former President George Bush courageously put up with slings and arrows for most of his administration in order to stay the course on national security, President Obama has proven that he places politics far and away above national security, and for this we should be very, very concerned.
In his attempt to smear the Bush administration by releasing the memos which detail enahanced interrogation techniques, President Obama has weakened our national security in a number of ways:
He has provided Al Queda and other terrorist organizations with a veritable training manual on how to overcome these techniques.
Although he traipsed down to Langley to provide a pep talk to the CIA, release of these memos will likely have a chilling effect on agents who may be disuaded from using similar enhanced techniques in the future due to the potential prosecution risks.
Release of these memos will likely have a chilling effect on future government attorneys who will be reluctant to take unpopular, yet legally supportable positions in the interest of national security, if there is potentially prosecution risk from future administrations.
Finally, by disclosing these memos and decrying these techniques, he has taken a powerful tool out of the hands of our intelligence service. How do we know these techniques are powerful? The memos tell us outright some of the successes, and the silence of the redacted text is deafening. Mark Thiessen has written an interesting piece at the Washington Post regarding the effectiveness of these techniques. Additionally, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair acknowledged in a memo to the intelligence community that Bush-era interrogation practices yielded had “high-value information,” then omitted that admission from a public version of his assessment.
Is this the kind of change we wanted – trading national security for hardball politics? I think not.
