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Darth Vader was always cool...

Former Vice President Dick Cheney, on Sean Hannity’s show on FoxNews, today stated that he wanted greater declassification of intelligence memos to prove that the enhanced interrogation techniques in fact did work.  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.

“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.”

Of course this comes on the same day that President Obama went to Langley to defend his release of the legal memos defending harsh interrogations.  The whole episode in fact proves a couple points.  First, as I stated in a previous article, the release of the legal memos could not be the end of declassification, only the beginning, because it raises more questions than it answers.

Second, we do not yet know if these interrogation techniques were in fact productive or not…a critical component in deciding whether or not we should ever use them.  Only the most liberal thinkers would say, for example, that in a ’24′ scenario (i.e. the Fox TV show) that we could still not use harsh interrogation.  Public polls have backed that up.

Third, and most important, is that we have no idea where the President will set the red line on interrogation.  Clearly waterboarding is out.  What about caterpillars?  We just don’t know.

Simply put, liberals wanted to have this discussion.  It should be interesting to see if the media picks up on this story, and if it has any legs.  The reality is that criticizing is easy, making law is hard.

Ultimately, if you are going to have the debate, only 2 questions matter:  are these interrogations effective, and are they moral?  The second question Obama appears to have answered.  However, the former?  If you look at the interrogation memos released by the White House, they actually give a lot of proof that the interrogations were in fact effective.  For example:

“the CIA believes ‘the intelligence acquired from these interrogations has been a key reason why al Qaeda has failed to launch a spectacular attack in the West since 11 September 2001.’ . . . In particular, the CIA believes that it would have been unable to obtain critical information from numerous detainees, including [Khalid Sheik Mohammed] and Abu Zubaydah, without these enhanced techniques.”

The memo notes that “[i]nterrogations of [Abu] Zubaydah — again, once enhanced techniques were employed — furnished detailed information regarding al Qaeda’s ‘organizational structure, key operatives, and modus operandi’ and identified KSM as the mastermind of the September 11 attacks.” This information helped the intelligence community plan the operation that captured KSM. It went on: “Zubaydah and KSM also supplied important information about al-Zarqawi and his network” in Iraq, which helped our operations against al-Qaeda in that country.

In other words, there was clear benefits to these interrogations.  CIA officials reiterated some of these opinions on Tuesday, stating that large scale attacks on Los Angeles were halted by information from these interrogations.  Liberals who tell you otherwise are not telling the truth.

Cheney called Obama’s bluff.  Now, Obama and his administration have to actively govern, and with governing comes the responsibility that if they make a mistake, thousands, if not millions, of lives could be lost because of their decision.  Obama has made a lot of easy decisions that have cost him no political capital what so ever.  Leadership means living with your decisions; this issue may be much different, especially if he has to atually make a rational decision.

Much easier to complain from the bleachers, isn’t it?

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SK6TVqbsKVk

UPDATE:  Well, didn’t take long for President Obama to flip-flop on this issue. 24 hours after going to Langley, VA and promising CIA employees that there would be no interrogations on the harsh terror interrogations, Obama reversed course.  He also suggested that if there is any sort of investigation into these past policies and practices, he would be more inclined to support an independent commission outside the typical congressional hearing process.  This is a complete reversal of statements that he made yesterday.  The only difference:  Obama is going after conservative legal positions instead of actions.  Obama has now politicized the CIA to a level that we have nost seen in decades.  Why should anyone in the military or intelligence services take the President’s word from now on?

Furthermore, Obama’s own head of intelligence, Dennis Blair, sent a memo to top White House officials last week stating the interrogations did yield high value information.  Obama didn’t mention that.  Apprently, neither did the New York Times…which conveniently omitted that memo from their coverage.

Hillary Clinton tried to deflect the topic, basically taking a dig at Cheney during Congressional hearings…of course, Rep. Rohrabacher didn’t let her get away with that nonsense….good for him.