Obama endagers National Security with memo release

Americans believe Obama’s release of CIA memos endangers national security. The 58% majority is right. Obama, for purely political benefit purposes, released partial memos exposing the interrogation tactics used against Al Qaeda detainees. The consequence is to harm and limit our porsecution of the war on terror (a phrase President Obama will not use).

Obama’s Interrogation Mess exists because Obama wanted it both ways:

In his solipsism, the president failed to foresee that the “torture” memos — memos that, as Rich Lowry shows, in fact document an assiduous effort to avoid torture — would not support his overblown rhetoric or substantiate the allegations of misconduct raised by politicized leaks from the International Committee of the Red Cross. Critics were not cowed. That, combined with Obama’s disingenuous strategy of exposing our tactics while suppressing the trove of intelligence they produced, ensured that the Right would push back aggressively.

A Frontpage article, Prosecuting Bush shows how, sadly, we are unlearning lessons that were paid for in blood already:

We have seen this before, on the frontlines of the War on Terror and in its bureaucratic boardrooms. In Party of Defeat, David Horowitz and I recount the story of Navy SEAL Marc Luttrell, who with his fellow SEALS spared a group of “goat-herders” who spotted them on a covert mission in Afghanistan. The patriots considered shooting the spies but desisted, knowing the fire they would come under for “murdering” innocent civilians – including some teenagers. Within an hour of their hesitation, al-Qaeda terrorists killed 19 SEALs. Luttrell reflected he and his men were “tortured, shot, blown up, my best buddies all dead, and all because we were afraid of the liberals back home, afraid to do what was necessary to save our own lives.” (Emphasis added.) John Murtha and John Kerry’s hyperbolic rhetoric was paid for in American blood.

The Obama decision has impact for legal advisers, as well. On August 28, 2001, the FBI’s National Security Law Unit (NSLU) denied Minneapolis FBI agent Harry Samit the right to search the laptop of Zacarias Moussaoui, the 20^th hijacker. Samit sent 70 e-mails requesting permission to search the computer, which he learned too late contained the plans for 9/11, pleading once he was “so desperate to get into Moussaoui's computer I'll take anything.” But the NSLU denied requests from Samit and his superior, Coleen Rowley, on grounds stricter than those required by the law. The caution about overstepping bureaucratic bounds engendered during the Clinton administration, the fear of professional retribution, caused them to build a fence around the law big enough to hide al-Qaeda’s sleeper cells.

This was the path to 9/11 – it is and the path back.

The Obama administration, desperate to do the bidding of the anti-Bush-deranged Left, want to go after Bush administration GWOT decision-makers who acted in good faith to wage war against Al Qaeda. The consequence of this persecution will be a return to cautious legalistic approaches that the 9/11 commission exposed as feeble and incapable of stopping terrorists. The terrorists win. America loses.

UPDATE: Liz Cheney (VP Cheney's daughter) does a great job defending Bush administration on interrogation tactics.