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Jewish World Review
April 30, 2009
/ 6 Iyar 5769
Fear Not! The War on Terror Is Won
By
Bob Tyrrell
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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
Students of intelligence-gathering will tell you that
deception and outright lying are essential to the art. Having now
reviewed the controversy over who in Congress knew what about the CIA's
use of enhanced interrogation techniques, I have concluded that House
Speaker Nancy Pelosi might make a superb intelligence officer. She
claims that she was utterly unaware of the CIA's rough treatment of
terrorists detained after 9/11. She says this without betraying a hint
of deception or uncertainty. Well done, well done.
Yet a really good liar does not lie about something easily refuted. In
the case of the Hon. Pelosi's protests of ignorance, there are no fewer
than three public sources out there refuting her. One is a 2007
Washington Post report that she was included in a "bipartisan group"
from the Hill that was fully apprised of these interrogation techniques
in September 2002. Another refutation comes from former CIA Director
George Tenet's memoirs, "At the Center of the Storm," in which Tenet is
pretty open about how rough treatment cracked 9/11 mastermind Khalid
Sheikh Mohammed, who boasts of beheading journalist Danny Pearl. Tenet
also adds that he briefed "senior congressional leaders," presumably
among them the Hon. Pelosi, about another of her present concerns,
namely, warrantless wiretaps. Then there is this revelation by former
CIA Director and former Rep. Porter Goss in The Washington Post this
past weekend: "Today, I am slack-jawed to read that members (of
Congress) claim to have not understood that the techniques on which they
were briefed were to actually be employed; or that specific techniques
such as 'waterboarding' were never mentioned." So maybe the speaker of
the House would not be a very good spy.
If there is any good news to come from the Obama administration's
release of CIA documents relating to the detention and interrogation of
post-9/11 detainees, it is that Washington's post-9/11 fears of further
terrorist attacks against America have abated. It is official that the
Obama administration no longer uses the term "global war on terror." So
maybe the war is over and we all can relax.
Yet there is no question that the release of these documents and the
ongoing debate over whether to prosecute government functionaries
involved in the Bush administration's treatment of terrorists has hurt
our intelligence community, both at home and abroad. Intelligence
officers within our service have been intimidated by our own government.
Foreign intelligence officers who have been sharing intelligence with us
abroad are going to be much less forthcoming. It is a good thing that
the administration has determined that America is now secure from
terrorist threats.
This is not the first time liberal politicians have put the clamps on
our intelligence services' ability to protect the country. In 1975, the
Church Committee investigated both the CIA and the FBI, with the
consequence that congressional oversight committees were set up, which,
in the aftermath of 9/11, were accused of inhibiting our intelligence
services from pursuing al-Qaida aggressively in the 1990s. Now,
apparently, with the war on terror won, we can go back to those blissful
days.
Yet frankly, I am uneasy about this new climate here in Washington.
Historically, intelligence documents have been kept from the public eye,
not only here but also throughout the Western world. The idea is that we
do not want our enemies to be informed of what we know. In David
Reynolds' stupendous book ("In Command of History") on how Winston
Churchill wrote his World War II memoirs, Reynolds shows over and again
Churchill and his opponents in the Labour government cooperating to keep
British secrets from the public. British intelligence techniques, in
particular, were not divulged. That President Obama's administration, in
the first 100 days of its existence, would expose the intelligence
techniques used by his predecessor strikes me as reckless. Yet, on the
other hand, the global war on terror is over, so maybe everything is
going to be OK. I do, however, wonder how President Barack Obama managed
to win the war so quickly. Was it just a matter of retiring the hellish
Bush from the White House, or is there more to it?
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.
JWR contributor Bob Tyrrell is editor in chief of The American Spectator. Comment by clicking here.
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