As Obama and his administration heap praise upon themselves for killing Osama bin Laden, Attorney General Eric Holder is busy with his criminal investigation of CIA interrogators.
Yeah, that's still going on.
Daniel Henninger, the Wall Street Journal writes:
As the whole of America takes a bin Laden victory lap, let us pause to remember some of this celebrated event's most forgotten men: the Central Intelligence Agency officers who sit under the cloud of a criminal investigation begun in 2009 by Attorney General Eric Holder into their interrogations of captured terrorists.
That's right, the Americans whose interrogation of al Qaeda operatives may have put in motion the death of this mass murderer may themselves face prosecution by the country they were trying to protect.
It is time for the Holder CIA investigation to end. The death of bin Laden 10 years after 9/11 makes the Holder investigation of the CIA interrogators politically, emotionally and morally moot.
But it lives.
What a bizarre disconnect!
Unfortunately, this sort of weirdness is business as usual for the Obama administration.
In August 2009, Attorney General Holder announced that he was extending the mandate of Assistant U.S. Attorney John Durham into the CIA's so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" of terrorist detainees. Former Bush Attorney General Michael Mukasey had appointed Mr. Durham in 2008 as a special prosecutor to look into the CIA's destruction of videotapes made during interrogations of two al Qaeda operatives. That investigation ended without charges last November.
Mr. Holder decided to push the Durham investigation into a second phase. "I have concluded," he said "that the information known to me warrants opening a preliminary review into whether federal laws were violated in connection with the interrogation of specific detainees at overseas locations." Mr. Holder wasn't free-lancing; both he and Barack Obama had called waterboarding "torture."
Obama and Holder continue forward with looking at our CIA interrogators as criminals.
Rather than considering them to have played an important role in protecting the American people, Obama and Holder and the Leftist gang persist in treating them like enemies.
This week the Associated Press reported that the name of bin Laden's courier may have come from CIA interrogations of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Faraj al-Libi, who received "harsh" interrogation at CIA prisons in Poland and Romania. On Tuesday, Mr. Holder said the information came from a "mosaic of sources."
Incidentally, there will be no attempt here to establish whether CIA interrogations did or did not lead to the bin Laden courier, who led our commandos to a bedroom in Abbottabad. Just as there will be no attempt here to resolve the fastidious debate unfolding over whether the Navy Seals' shooting of an unarmed Osama bin Laden was "legal." We'll leave that to the endless grinding wheels of the law journals.
Awkward!
The CIA interrogators could be national heroes.
Obviously, the Obama administration doesn't want to know. Most specifically, they don't want us to know.
If Mr. Holder has evidence of an egregious crime, he should step forward and announce it. If not, he should use this moment to put an end to the Durham investigation. Mr. Durham is not an independent counsel, whose hallowed status makes attorneys general loath to interfere. He is a special prosecutor, appointed by the attorney general and under his authority.
On June 18 last year, Mr. Holder said in a Washington speech that Mr. Durham was "close to the end of the time that he needs and will be making recommendations to me." But nothing has happened. Asked this week about the status of this investigation, a Justice Department spokesman for Mr. Durham, whose office is in Connecticut, said the project is "still ongoing."
I agree.
If Holder has evidence of an egregious crime, tell us now. If not, stop this investigation.
It's wrong for Obama to commend the CIA piece of the "mosaic" in the nearly 10-year mission to get bin Laden while Holder is trying to pin interrogators with crimes.
Henninger concludes:
After 9/11, when the fraying started, George W. Bush passed through a seven-year political minefield of media leaks and lawsuits over the Patriot Act, surveillance, renditions, Guantanamo and CIA interrogations. Now bin Laden is dead, and Barack Obama's got the credit. We're all fine with that, just as we're fine with people chanting "USA" over the dead terrorist who tried to kill us. Now how about letting those CIA interrogators come in from the cold and join the celebration?
The Democrats, Leftists including Obama, before and after he became president, put President Bush and Vice President Cheney and the administration through hell as they waged war against bin Laden.
Thank God they had the character and the toughness to not be swayed by polls. Thank God they stood up to the attacks by the Dems and did what was necessary to protect us.
With bin Laden dead, and Leon Panetta admitting valuable intelligence was gained via the CIA, it's time to end the criminal investigation of the CIA interrogators.
Is it possible for Obama to put politics and his visions of reelection aside, just for a moment?
We'll see.
2 comments:
Hmmm. What about investigating and prosecuting them for interrogating U.S. citizens on U.S. soil (prior to 9/11) who weren't terrorists and had nothing to do with terrorism (except to be against it, that is, supporters of U.S. counterterrorism)? Would that be okay, or are these guys shielded from any investigation and prosecution merely because they're patriots? That's what happened to me in August of 2001. A guy named Dr. R. Scott Shumate, a CIA shrink who was the subject of protests signed by many fellow members of his professional society (the APA), he showed up at my doorstep in St. Louis one day replete with a local cop and a stenographer. No charges, ensued, I hadn't done anything wrong ("not even close", I'm a law school grad with a clean record), and it wasn't until a few years later that I even discovered he was a CIA (and CIFA) employee. Some would say that if a CIA operative can't even get THAT right (don't investigate U.S. citizens at home), maybe they get a lot of more difficult things wrong, like which people are combat soldiers who deserve interrogation and which people were simply civilians in the wrong place at the wrong time -- interrogation of the latter constituting a form of collateral damage inflammatory to the enemy's cause. Just pointing out that badges shouldn't protect people from investigations, and you seem to be implying the opposite ("they work to save us, ergo they can do no wrong")
Signed,
Jon Burdick
Conservative SuperPatriot
Here's another angle. Anyone catch Tom Donilon (Obama's National Security Advisor) laughing off the bush-league attempts of FOX News' Chris Wallace the other day? Mr. Wallace appeared to be almost frothing at the mouth (or, at least as much as so lackluster a personality could seem to) in his various awkward attempts to try to pigeonhole Donilon into admitting that "were it not for enhanced interrogation, we wouldn't have gotten Osama". That's a statement blindly groped at by folks who are either under investigation or, like Wallace, mistakenly beating the band in their defense. I'm no fan of Obama and in nowise a Dem or a liberal, but I heartily applaud Donilon's analysis that "we would have discovered that information [OBL's whereabouts] by other means" -- i.e., same analysis which occurs in criminal trials when a defendant claims evidence was improperly seized, but the prosecution shows the evidence would ave been discovered anyway by legitimate means (the doctrine of "inevitable discovery"). I'm just a layman, but Donilon's position strikes me as demonstrating our true strength in the field of counterterrorism, which may be briefly (though not loosely) described as "Defense in Depth". Just how "strong" are we if we wouldn't have gotten OBL "but for" the enhanced interrogations -- are you sure you want to send that particular signal? Does anyone really believe that? Sounds far more plausible to me that the same CIA fellers who allegedly destroyed tapes of the interrogations (because gosh, if the enemy saw them, they'd know who we are) are (sadly) now trying to thwart a legitimate investigation with a claim that enhanced interrogation was a necessary part of the recipe which resulted in Osama being cooked. What comes to mind in this context is another phrase you come across a lot in the field of law: such-and-such claim or so-and-so's position "strains the credulity of the court".
Yeah, I have to say, Chris Wallace of FOX News sure looked and sounded like he was a puppet on a stage parroting what his bosses had him primed, primped and prompted for. One of the many reasons I watch FOX a lot less than I used to. Him, Conservative? Well, maybe on the surface, at least. Too many so-called "conservatives" simply parrot what other, more famous "conservatives" tell them to, without thinking through the ramifications of what they're trumpeting (a result of slipshod analysis). Simple concept, Mr. Wallace: "A policy is not conservative merely because Rupert Murdoch says it is." Enhanced interrogation should not be a method of first resort, generally speaking. We retain the moral high ground only to the extent that we limit its use appropriately. QED
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