You have to get up early in the morning to beat the dishonesty of Rep. Pete Hoekstra's op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today:
George Tenet, who served as CIA director under Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, believes the enhanced interrogations program saved lives. He told CBS's "60 Minutes" in April 2007: "I know this program alone is worth more than the FBI, the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency put together have been able to tell us."
Last week, Mr. Blair made a similar statement in an internal memo to his staff when he wrote that "[h]igh value information came from interrogations in which those methods were used and provided a deeper understanding of the al Qa'ida organization that was attacking this country."
The right has degenerated from simply arguing that torture works and is legal to arguing that it's so effective that it trumps all other forms of intelligence gathering. Call it the "all you need is torture" platform.
Hoekstra also eliminates the context of Blair's remarks in order to misrepresent them -- Blair concluded that "the bottom line is these techniques have hurt our image around the world, the damage they have done to our interests far outweighed whatever benefit they gave us and they are not essential to our national security," which is a substantially different takeaway from the idea that torture was more valuable than the CIA, the FBI, and the NSA put together.
Hoekstra argues that "it was not necessary to release details of the enhanced interrogation techniques, because members of Congress from both parties have been fully aware of them since the program began in 2002." He adds that "it appeared that Mr. Obama understood it would be unfair to prosecute U.S. government employees for carrying out a policy that had been fully vetted and approved by the executive branch and Congress." So Hoekstra believes the government is entitled to break the law in secret as long as it does so by committee.
Hoekstra never acknowledges that the "enhanced interrogations" constituted torture, because then he'd have to argue that government officials are above the law. But that's essentially what he's arguing anyway.
-- A. Serwer
