While health care is plainly the Number One story of the week, we should not lose sight of the Democrats’ shenanigans over national security. Marc Thiessen, picking over a story in the Washington Post, confirms what Dick Cheney and many conservatives have long argued — that enhanced interrogation techniques produced identifiable and clear results, specifically allowing for the capture of al-Qaeda terrorist Jose Padilla. It turns out that Abu Zubaydah, who was subjected to such techniques, was a “font of information,” just as Cheney and others had claimed. Thiessen concludes:
The bottom line is that today’s story in the Post proves that (1) the original Post assertion that “not a single significant plot was foiled as a result of Abu Zubaida’s tortured confessions” is flat wrong — the Padilla plot was broken up because of the CIA’s use of enhanced interrogation techniques; and (2) [former FBI agent] Ali Soufan’s assertion that he got this information before the implementation of enhanced interrogation techniques is false.
And that brings us back to the Obama administration’s hide-the-ball selective disclosure concerning Bush-era interrogation techniques. Their excised document release can now be seen as a dishonest attempt to conceal the Bush administration’s successful efforts in the war on terror and to prop up their own moral grandstanding. Only by concealing the facts from the American people could they pull this off. And in this, they seriously underestimated the push-back they would receive.
While we are talking about grandstanding, the Obama administration is only outdone by the House Democratic leadership, which has now dropped any pretense of playing a constructive role in overseeing the intelligence apparatus in the war on terror. No, they are spending their time these days carrying water for Nancy Pelosi. In a strikingly blunt op-ed, Rep. Pete Hoekstra, the head Republican on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, calls out the Democrats for politicizing the committee and for dereliction of duty. He goes after the Democrats for their latest gambit — the allegation that Cheney ordered the CIA not to brief Congress on a plan to assassinate al-Qaeda targets:
CIA Director Panetta refused to back the allegation that Cheney gave such an order. Former CIA Director Michael Hayden flatly denied that he’d ever been instructed not to brief Congress. Now Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair has also distanced himself from these over-the-top allegations by House Democrats.There’s also been a flurry of bizarre letters from House Intelligence Committee members about this matter suggesting that Democrats are no longer interested in bipartisan oversight of intelligence. One was slipped under a Republican staff member’s door after business hours. I first learned about it from the news media.
[. . .]
These new allegations, letters and calls for investigations are part of a strategy by Democrats to attack intelligence personnel and agencies. Why? To protect House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — who is in hot water over her May 14 comments that the CIA “lies all the time” and misled her about enhanced interrogation of terrorist suspects.A major consequence of this Democratic effort to politicize intelligence is that the House Intelligence Committee has essentially stopped doing meaningful work. The 2010 intelligence-authorization bill was so poorly drafted (and loaded with language to protect Pelosi) that President Obama threatened a veto, forcing Democratic leaders to pull the bill from consideration this month.
[. . .]
The full committee also has failed to meaningfully act on numerous calls by Republicans to conduct an investigation of the findings of a fall 2008 CIA Inspector General report that exhaustively substantiated claims (as opposed to the speaker’s hollow, contradicted assertions) that the agency misled Congress about a 2001 shoot-down of a civilian airplane over Peru in 2001 which killed two Americans.
Disarray by House Democrats on intelligence oversight is seriously damaging the morale of US intelligence officers and their ability to do their jobs. How can Democrats claim they are serious about national security when they are exploiting intelligence and attacking intelligence professionals for political advantage?
What we take away from all this is the abject lack of seriousness both in the administration and in Congress concerning national security. They are obsessed with scoring points against an administration that left six months ago and focusing their energies not on enhancing our intelligence gathering but on posturing to their base. They have, it seems, forgotten we are at war. Their battles are against long-departed government officials, the very ones who, as it turns out, kept us safe from the threats the current crew is ignoring. There are few parallels for the irresponsible conduct we have seen. As the American people learn more, their distrust of Pelosi (already evident in poll after poll) may soon turn to disgust — and then to anger at a Congress and administration lacking in the maturity we expect from our leaders, most especially in a time of war.
