Obama accused of risking national security

* Bush-era CIA director says releasing classified memos will embolden terrorist groups   [Only the ones we pay enough.]
* Senators says torture techniques should never have been allowed   [Yet the Senate leadership championed it and encouraged the rest to fall in line behind the warmongers.]
* New York Times calls for impeachment of Justice Department official who wrote one memo   [It will never happen.]

Daily Times Monitor

LAHORE: A former chief of the CIA accused President Barack Obama on Sunday of compromising national security when he released four Bush-era memos.

Michael Hayden, CIA director from 2006 to 2009, said releasing the memos outlining terror interrogation methods had emboldened terrorist groups. “What we have described for our enemies in the midst of a war are the outer limits that any American would ever go to in terms of interrogating an Al Qaeda terrorist. That’s very valuable information,” Hayden told Fox News. “By taking [certain] techniques off the table, we have made it more difficult – in a whole host of circumstances I can imagine – for CIA officers to defend the nation,” he said.

Not allowed: Senators Claire McCaskill and Lindsey Graham said, however, the techniques should not have been allowed in the first place and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel dismissed Hayden’s assertion. “One of the reasons the president was willing to let this information out was that the information was out already,” he told ABC. “Go get the New York Review of Books. It’s there,” he added.

Hayden said that four previous CIA directors as well as the current agency director, Leon Panetta, had opposed the release. The memos said, among other things, that interrogation tactics such as waterboarding, sleep deprivation and slapping did not violate laws against torture if there was no intention to cause severe pain.

Obama prohibited the use of the “enhanced interrogation techniques” shortly after taking office in January. Such techniques “undermine our moral authority and do not make us safer”, he said when the White House released the memos on Thursday.

Impeachment: In an editorial on Sunday, The New York Times called for the impeachment of Jay Bybee who was a Justice Department official when he wrote one of the memos. “These memos make it clear that Mr Bybee is unfit for a job that requires legal judgment and a respect for the constitution,” the editorial stated. The memos “were written to provide legal immunity for acts that are clearly illegal, immoral and a violation of this country’s most basic values,” it added.

McCaskill, a member of the Senate’s standing investigative subcommittee, said the Obama administration made the right decision by agreeing not to prosecute intelligence officers. However, when asked about Bybee, she said: “A lawyer that’s responsible for this kind of advice that clearly went too far in terms of stretching what our law is — it worries me that he’s sitting on the federal bench right now.” She told Fox News the US would be better off in the long run by clearly prohibiting interrogation techniques such as waterboarding.

Hayden claimed that contrary to the assertions of many critics the interrogation techniques in question had forced suspected terrorists to reveal valuable information and made the country safer. The administration’s decision to release the Bush era memos will make CIA officials less willing to engage in interrogation tactics now sanctioned by the federal government, he added. He predicted the release of the memos would be “just the beginning”. “There will be more revelations, more commissions, there will be more investigations,” Hayden said.