Obama and the CIA

The Wall Street Journal

President Obama last Monday paid his first formal visit to CIA headquarters, in order, as he put it, to "underscore the importance" of the agency and let its staff "know that you've got my full support." Assuming he means it, the President should immediately declassify all memos concerning what intelligence was gleaned, and what plots foiled, by the interrogations of high-level al-Qaida detainees in the wake of Sept. 11.

This suggestion was first made by former Vice President Dick Cheney, who said he found it "a little bit disturbing" that the Obama administration had decided to release four Justice Department memos detailing the CIA's interrogation practices while not giving the full picture of what the interrogations yielded in actionable intelligence. Yes, it really is disturbing, especially given the bogus media narrative that has now developed around those memos.

Thus, contrary to the claim that the memos detail "brutal" techniques used by the CIA in its interrogation of detainees (including Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed), what they mainly show is the lengths to which the Justice Department went not to cross the line into torture. "Torture is abhorrent both to American law and values and to international norms," wrote then-principal deputy assistant attorney general Steven Bradbury on the very first page of his May 10, 2005, memo. Regarding waterboarding, an August 2002 memo from then-assistant attorney general (now federal judge) Jay Bybee stresses that the CIA had informed him that "the procedures will be stopped if deemed medically necessary to prevent severe mental or physical harm."

The memos also give the lie to a leaked 2007 report from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), based exclusively on the say-so of KSM and other "high-value" detainees, that "an improvised thick collar ... was placed around their necks and used by their interrogators to slam them against the walls."

As the Bybee memo notes, the "wall" was a "flexible false wall ... constructed to create a loud sound"; that "it is the individual's shoulder blades that hit the wall"; and that the purpose of the collar was "to help prevent whiplash." If this is torture, the word has lost all meaning.

Meanwhile, this is the third time an ICRC report about U.S. treatment of the detainees has been leaked, in violation of its own longstanding policies and of the agreement by which its representatives are allowed to visit prisoners. The Red Cross appears to have made little or no attempt to investigate whether KSM's claims were exaggerated. The episode shows again that the ICRC has become as much a political, as humanitarian, operation.

Also instructive is the context in which the interrogations took place -- less than a year after the Sept. 11 attacks. Writing about Abu Zubaydeh, whom the CIA believed "is one of the highest ranking members" of al-Qaida, Mr. Bybee wrote that "the interrogation team is certain that he has additional information that he refuses to divulge. Specifically, he is withholding information regarding terrorist networks in the United States or in Saudi Arabia and information regarding plans to conduct attacks within the United States or against our interests overseas. Zubaydeh has become accustomed to a certain level of treatment and displays no signs of willingness to disclose further information."

In other words, CIA interrogators wanted to use these techniques in 2002 to break a terrorist they believed had information that could potentially save American lives. Rest assured that if the CIA hadn't taken these steps and the U.S. had been hit again, the same people denouncing these memos now would have been demanding another 9/11 Commission to deplore their inaction.

The memos give considerable indication both of the sheer quantity, as well as some of the specifics, of the intelligence gathered through the interrogations. "You have informed us," wrote Mr. Bradbury in the May 30, 2005, memo, "that the interrogation of KSM -- once enhanced techniques were employed -- led to the discovery of a KSM plot, the 'Second Wave,' 'to use East Asian operatives to crash a hijacked airliner into' a building in Los Angeles. You have informed us that information obtained from KSM also led to the capture of ... Hambali, and the discovery of the Guraba Cell ... tasked with the execution of the 'Second Wave.'"

All in all, Mr. Bybee added, "the intelligence derived from CIA detainees has resulted in more than 6,000 intelligence reports and, in 2004, accounted for approximately half of CTC's [the CIA[']s Counterterrorist Center] reporting on al-Qaida."

In a saner world (or at least one that accurately reported on original documents), all of this would be a point of pride for the CIA. It would serve as evidence of the Bush Administration's scrupulousness regarding the life and health of the detainees, and demonstrate how wrong are the claims that harsh interrogations yielded no useful intelligence.

Instead, the release of the memos has unleashed the liberal mob, with renewed calls in Congress for a "truth commission" and even, perhaps, Judge Bybee's impeachment and prosecutions of the other authors. Mr. Obama has hinted that while his administration won't prosecute CIA officials, it may try to sate the mob by going after Bush officials who wrote the memos.

One major concern here is what Mr. Obama's decision to release these memos says about his own political leadership. He claims that one of his goals as president is to restore more comity to our politics, especially concerning national security. He also knows he needs a CIA willing to take risks to keep the country safe. Yet Mr. Obama seems more than willing to indulge the revenge fantasies of the left, as long as its potential victims served a different president. And while he is willing to release classified documents about interrogation techniques, Mr. Obama refuses to release documents that more fully discuss their results.

All of this might appease the president's MoveOn.org base, but he can't expect to satisfy them without also weakening American intelligence capabilities. The risk-averse CIA that so grievously failed in the run-up to Sept. 11 was a product of a spy culture that still remembered the Church Committee of the 1970s and the Iran-Contra recriminations of the 1980s. Mr. Obama needs to stop this score-settling now, and he can start by promptly releasing the documents that reveal what the CIA learned from its interrogations.