Friday, April 17, 2009

Interrogation Memos Released

The Obama administration has authorized the release of memos in which the CIA requested legal opinions from the Justice Department regarding whether harsh interrogation techniques could used against a few al Qaeda detainees.

In those memos it shows that those techniques were be used in very limited circumstances, one example of those limited circumstances was when the CIA had cause to believe the person detained has knowledge of pending terrorist attacks.

Because the CIA relied on the legal opinions offered by the DOJ, it makes sense that Obama has stated he will not pursue any action to be taken against those CIA members involved.

Predictably the far left is having a fit over this release as well as the fact that Obama will not try to prosecute the CIA members for doing their job to stop pending terrorist attacks, but all in all, considering the information we have seen in recent years about how much intelligence was extracted and what arrests said information led to, as well as foiled terrorist attempts, the CIA did it's job and deserves nothing less than our heartfelt thanks.... something the left simply is incapable of understanding.

The Wall Street Journal provides the perfect example of what I referred to above:

The terrorist Abu Zubaydah (sometimes derided as a low-level operative of questionable reliability, but who was in fact close to KSM and other senior al Qaeda leaders) disclosed some information voluntarily. But he was coerced into disclosing information that led to the capture of Ramzi bin al Shibh, another of the planners of Sept. 11, who in turn disclosed information which -- when combined with what was learned from Abu Zubaydah -- helped lead to the capture of KSM and other senior terrorists, and the disruption of follow-on plots aimed at both Europe and the U.S. Details of these successes, and the methods used to obtain them, were disclosed repeatedly in more than 30 congressional briefings and hearings beginning in 2002, and open to all members of the Intelligence Committees of both Houses of Congress beginning in September 2006. Any protestation of ignorance of those details, particularly by members of those committees, is pretense.


That piece was written by Gen. Michael Hayden, who is the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and Mr. Michael Mukasey, is the former attorney general of the United States.

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