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CIA interrogation flap a political thing

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BY RICH LOWRY

KING FEATURES SYNDICATE

Published: August 29, 2009

Pity Leon Panetta. The CIA director counseled the Obama administration against releasing classified interrogation memos from the Bush years - and got ignored.

Then, Nancy Pelosi said his agency lied to her about post-9/11 interrogations, and Democrats rushed to try to back up the House speaker.

Now, Attorney General Eric Holder has tasked a prosecutor with looking into reopening criminal cases against CIA employees and contractors.

Such is life at Langley under an administration betraying liberalism's typical contempt for covert action and its inevitable moral complications.

If Panetta were shrewd, he'd make a play for a position that would command more respect - say, assistant secretary for planning and evaluation at the Department of Health and Human Services.

Panetta has had to write another letter to CIA employees meant to keep their morale up. For those keeping count, it's his sixth. No matter how many missives he writes earnestly committing himself and his agency to looking ahead, the rest of his administration and party drags him back into the past. As far as they are concerned, he's merely a front man for Bush-era criminality.

In response to an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit, a judge ordered the administration to release a 2004 CIA inspector general report about interrogation practices.

Although often discomfiting reading (one incident involved a power drill), the report also outlines the CIA's nearly obsessive quest for legal guidance and its intolerance for unauthorized methods as piddling as blowing cigar smoke at detainees.

Consider the fate of the CIA officer who used a gun to frighten Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the alleged mastermind of the USS Cole bombing. The officer did it in 2002.

The agency immediately called him back to headquarters. He faced an internal accountability board, suffered a reprimand and eventually resigned. The Justice Department looked into the case because threatening a detainee with "imminent death" is torture, but declined to prosecute. Proving torture in a court of law, where seemingly mincing legal distinctions matter, is much harder than braying about it on op-ed pages.

The next time CIA officers are told that they have to be more aggressive in protecting their country, they could be forgiven for saying no thanks. One prescient officer quoted in the report said he knew interrogators would be hounded for their work, but unfortunately, it had to be done.

Of course, no one wants to hear the words "power drill" and "interrogation" in the same sentence, except perhaps in a review of a Quentin Tarantino movie. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, we struggled to get the balance right between our safety and our values as an open, liberal society. It'd be nice to pretend otherwise, but there is indeed such a balance.

The dispute over the balance point rightly belongs in the political arena, not the courts.

But who wants to listen to the CIA director, a shill for torturers almost by definition?

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