Editorial: Obama hides the whole story
April 24, 2009
Set aside for now the troubling changes in the Obama administration’s position on whether former Bush officials should be prosecuted for suggesting tough interrogation tactics against terrorists. Set aside the manifest unfairness of prosecuting lawyers merely for doing their job of giving legal advice. Set aside the raft of other reasonable objections to the proposed prosecutions, including a justifiable aversion to witch-hunts.
Instead, consider how flagrantly President Barack Obama violated his repeated promises that he would run a transparent and honorable administration. His administration’s selective and highly prejudicial release of only partial information about CIA interrogations clearly was designed to gin up outrage against former Bush officials. The release of the information was a pure political hit job masquerading as an act of openness.
The administration ignored near-uniform pleadings by respected intelligence professionals to keep the interrogation descriptions classified, yet refused to declassify the evidence that the interrogations saved countless American lives. Obama highlighted the alleged sins while withholding (often directly redacting) the context, the justifications, and the practical benefits gained. Then his administration went even farther. Not only did it refuse to declassify the exculpatory intelligence, but also it selectively and misleadingly edited a memo by its own national intelligence director about the program.
As reported by the New York Times’ Peter Baker, intelligence director Dennis Blair wrote a memo that included these lines: “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.” Baker then reported: “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.”
That last deleted line read as follows: “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….”
Without Baker’s reporting, those highly important judgments by Obama’s own appointee would have been buried from public view, thus stacking the deck against those whom Blair would absolve. Such dishonesty from a White House borders on the Nixonian – and violates every reasonable American’s innate sense of justice.
