The Wall Street Journal editors aptly analyze the decision to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate CIA operatives:

‘It would be unfair to prosecute dedicated men and women working to protect America for conduct that was sanctioned in advance by the Justice Department.” —Attorney General Eric Holder, April 2009

“Justice Department Names Prosecutor to Reopen CIA Abuse Cases” —Wall Street Journal, yesterday

Mr. Holder had it right the first time. His about-face yesterday, compounded by his release of a 2004 internal CIA report on that agency’s handling of terrorists, opens a political war that President Obama, the CIA and above all the country will live to regret.

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.

There is, of course, the added factor of timing. The decision, one of monumental significance to our intelligence community and national security, is announced while the president is closeted away in Martha’s Vineyard. This is political courage and transparency? Really, Obama is president—not Eric Holder—and should have the nerve to come forward, explain his decision, and tell us why we should not interpret his words to those assembled earlier at Langley as bald-faced lies. Then he pledged to the CIA employees that he intended to look forward, not back, and expressed that he would “need them more than ever.” Then he was vowing to have their backs. Now he and his attorney general have stabbed those same agents in the back.

As a colleague expressed to me yesterday, “this is a form of madness.” The Obama administration sees the CIA as the enemy, not the terrorists. It chooses to employ the full force of the federal government against our own protectors, not those who seek to murder Americans. This has long been the pathology of the Left, a conviction that efforts to defend ourselves are evil and that our enemies are figments of our imagination. The difference is that now this conviction is held by the president and his attorney general.

It is therefore not simply the CIA that should feel betrayed, but all Americans. We lack leaders who are serious and committed to defending us against implacable enemies. There is no greater failing for a president.