Brave Sir Barack

George W. Bush said that his role was to be “the decider”. His successor, trying to be as little like Bush as possible (except for continuing his wars, keeping on his Fed chairman, etc.), has apparently decided to let the decisions be made elsewhere. His entourage in Martha’s Vineyard assured us yesterday that the idea of dredging up and reinvestigating old allegations against CIA interrogators was Eric Holder’s alone; the President, the attorney-general’s nominal superior, had nothing to do with it.

If that account were true (and does anyone believe it?), it would hardly be creditable to the President. He casually let a subordinate convulse a major government agency? Or holds the reins so loosely that an upheaval can occur without his advance knowledge? If there are compelling reasons to subject CIA officers to the financial and psychological agony of a special counsel’s attentions, the President himself should be taking the lead in explaining what the are. As matters stand, unelected officials act and a chorus of left-wing columnists and bloggers explains.

A few years from now, after the suspects have exhausted their savings on lawyers, the investigations will peter out. The worst of the accusations in the resurrected inspector-general’s report, if true, might be misdemeanors. Many are far from matters for the criminal courts. As an experiment, see how interested the nearest cop on the beat is in your complaint that so-and-so blew cigar smoke in your face. I doubt that the special counsel will ever reach the point of specifying actual criminal statutes that have been violated, much less seeking indictments (which would by then very likely be barred by statutes of limitations; the events recounted by the IG are already half a decade or more in the past).

As a corollary to the pleasure of hounding intelligence agencies and the hope of finding a way to indict Dick Cheney, the Obama Administration has assured terrorists that their secrets are safe even if individual operatives are captured. Training mufsidun to resist questioning carried out in accordance with the Army Field Manual will be a breeze. The manual’s techniques were devised to elicit information from rank-and-file enemy soldiers and deserters, men who often have little ideological commitment and are willing to cooperate under mild pressure or in return for small favors. As guidelines for getting useful intelligence from fanatics, they are risible.

As a small consolation, there is the prospect that vilifying CIA agents may be the Administration’s way of mollifying the nutroots before it retreats from the central tenets of Obamacare. A very small consolation: Socialized medicine really isn’t as bad as terrorism. If we must have one or the other, the President attorney-general has made the wrong choice.

Meanwhile, I wonder whether Mr. Holder, so sensitive to the possibility that threats to his family might upset a hardened terrorist, will be looking into the seizure of an accused embezzler in Afghanistan and his less than gentle transport to the U.S. If the defendant is to be believed, he was denied food for 30 hours, held in a freezing room, kept bound, gagged and blindfolded throughout an 18-hour flight, and told that, if he did not confess to the charges against him, he would never see his wife and children again. He may be lying, just as many captured mufsidun have lied about how they were treated at Guantanamo. If he is telling a semblance of the truth, this incident is quite a bit more shocking than the abuses alleged by the CIA inspector-general. Using harsh methods to obtain information needed to save lives is a world apart from making threats in order to extract a confession from someone accused of a white collar crime. Reassurance that the Justice Department grasps that distinction would be welcome.

Further reading: The Wall Street Journal, “The Real CIA News”:

As for examples of “unauthorized techniques,” the IG explains that the most “significant”—an accusation that an interrogator threatened a detainee with a gun and a power drill—was the subject of a separate investigation. As for the rest—“the making of threats, blowing cigar smoke, employing certain stress positions, the use of a stiff brush on a detainee, and stepping on a detainee’s ankle shackles”—the IG report says the “allegations were disputed or too ambiguous to reach any authoritative determination” and “did not warrant separate investigations or administrative actions.”

The most revealing portion of the IG report documents the program’s results. The CIA’s “detention and interrogation of terrorists has provided intelligence that has enabled the identification and apprehension of other terrorists and warned of terrorist plots planned for the United States and around the world.” That included the identification of Jose Padilla and Binyam Muhammed, who planned to detonate a dirty bomb, and the arrest of previously unknown members of an al Qaeda cell in Karachi, Pakistan, designated to pilot an aircraft attack in the U.S. The information also made the CIA aware of plots to attack the U.S. consulate in Karachi, hijack aircraft to fly into Heathrow, loosen track spikes to derail a U.S. train, blow up U.S. gas stations, fly an airplane into a California building, and cut the lines of suspension bridges in New York.