Yesterday I wondered whose side Eric Holder is on. After reading this from the Wall Street Journal I don’t think I want to know.
This is a trap the Administration set for itself. Mr. Obama and his team have attempted to appease their political left by publicly denouncing the Bush Administration’s national security policies, even as they claimed to want to forget the past. Their disparagement has only fed the liberal demand for Bush prosecutions and increased the pressure on Mr. Holder to appoint a prosecutor.
Justice threw kerosene on those politics yesterday with its release of findings compiled by the CIA’s inspector general in 2004 about the agency’s detention and interrogation of terrorists. The ACLU had won a court order for their release. We were still reading its hundreds of pages at deadline, but most of the supposedly damning details had already been leaked. The new bits include the fact that interrogators threatened terrorists with a gun shot in a nearby room, with a power drill and cigarette smoke, and against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s family. We suspect millions of Americans will be shocked to learn that these unshocking details are all that the uproar over “torture” is about. [...]
Mr. Holder’s decision has already re-energized demands to prosecute the Bush lawyers who wrote the legal opinions that authorized enhanced interrogations. As New York liberal Representative Jerry Nadler declared recently, going after the CIA interrogators who “waterboarded” a detainee with “eight ounces” of water rather than the Bush lawyers who decreed they could only use three ounces, would be “terrible.”
All of this will further demoralize a CIA that has already been stigmatized by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats as an agency populated by rogues who lied to Congress. This is the same agency that Mr. Obama and all Americans are counting on wage a war against al Qaeda and deter future terrorist attacks. The message that Mr. Holder’s criminal probe will send to thousands of men and women is that they had better not do anything remotely controversial on behalf of American safety, even with a lawyer’s permission. This war against our own war fighters comes just as President Obama’s counterterror escalation in Afghanistan is getting more difficult.
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By threatening to prosecute CIA officials, the Obama Administration is taking ownership of future troubles in a way that will only do itself harm. Like the Church and Pike probes of the 1970s, Americans will once again see that the Democratic Party cares as much or more about settling scores against fellow Americans as it does about fighting the war on terror. Mr. Holder yesterday acknowledged that his decision to reopen the old CIA wounds would be “controversial.” He will soon learn how much.
Again. I urge you to read the entire article. This administration is putting the desires of its leftist base ahead of the safety of the American people, all for a witch hunt against a former administration. Its official folks, we are now a banana republic. Isn’t this what happens in banana republics – administrations going after predecessors after villifying them?
Congratulations, America! So much for looking forward.
Just wait until the economy catches up the Justice Department.
By the time these guys are done wrecking this country, we will look with envy at the banana republics. It would be better than a real Communist dictatorship.
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