Monday, April 20, 2009

Latest On Obama’s Release of Memos

Fox News reports - - -

President Obama on Monday pledged his "full support" to the CIA, assuring the covert agency he would vigorously protect the security and identities of its members after his administration last week released classified memos on interrogation techniques.

The release drew criticism from former CIA directors including Michael Hayden, who worried that the disclosure of Justice Department memos would have a chilling effect on agents' ability to operate in the field.

But Obama, in his first public visit to the agency's Langley headquarters, voiced unwavering support for the CIA as he stood beside Director Leon Panetta.

The rest of Fox’s report’s here.

JinC Regular Tarheel Hawkeye comments

I haven't commented on the Obama fiscal policies because I really don't have much expertise in that area.

On the other hand, I have a great deal of experience in the intelligence field: twelve years in clandestine collection activities in Asia, nine of those years in an undercover capacity; twenty years as a counterintelligence officer; and 13 years as a senior counterintelligence and anti-terrorist analyst.

I join with all the former directors of the CIA in condemning Obama's release of the documents pertaining to interrogation of terrorists.

He has not only unnecessarily revealed sensitive classified information, but has also made perfectly clear to our enemies just how far we can go in dealing with captured terrorists.

This colossal blunder has another result: it will make our field operatives gun-shy and could well result in the deaths of our troops.

In short, there was absolutely nothing to be gained by this foolish act except to make a few leftist political hacks feel good about themselves.
President Obama not only needs to speak to the very real harms Tarheel Hawkeye’s mentioned. He also needs to explain why he released only memos revealing what methods the U. S. has used while still keeping classified memos that reveal we gained critical information that apparently helped protect Americans and others.

This from Fox News just minutes ago - - -

Now that the memos showing the rulings of interrogation techniques have been released, the Obama administration should release additional documents that show what the interrogations yielded, former Vice President Dick Cheney told FOX News on Monday.

In an interview with FOX News' Sean Hannity to be aired on "Hannity" Monday night, Cheney questioned the point of releasing the legal decisions behind the interrogations but not the outcome of them.

"One of the things that I find a little bit disturbing about this recent disclosure is they put out the legal memos, the memos that the CIA got from the Office of Legal Counsel, but they didn't put out the memos that showed the success of the effort," Cheney said.

Cheney said he's asked that the documents be declassified because he has remained silent on the confidential information, but he knows how successful the interrogation process was and wants the rest of the country to understand.

"I haven't talked about it, but I know specifically of reports that I read, that I saw, that lay out what we learned through the interrogation process and what the consequences were for the country," Cheney said.

"I've now formally asked the CIA to take steps to declassify those memos so we can lay them out there and the American people have a chance to see what we obtained and what we learned and how good the intelligence was."

The rest of this latest Fox story’s here.

Folks, I’ll be watching Hannity tonight and posting tomorrow.

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

JinC -
Check out Dorothy Rabinowitz's op ed piece in today's (Wed. April 22) WSJ. I think that she is spot on in her analysis.
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