When Politics Backfires UPDATE: Probe Possible?

There’s an update to this post at the bottom

Maybe Barack Obama had never experienced any of his plans backfiring before. That would begin to explain why he released the Bush interrogation memos with the intention of casting an even darker shadow on the Bush years, without realizing that the very memos he was about to release showed that the “enhanced interrogation methods,” including waterboarding, kinda worked.

Obama said the releasing the memos was required by law and said they would help us forget a “a dark and painful chapter in our history.” That’s obviously not the reason he released them, he released them for political reasons. After Dick Cheney said that Obama’s foreign policy plans were making us less safe, Obama wanted to fire back, and what better way then to turn the tables on Cheney and release some memos that would be a painful reminder of the “dark and painful chapter in our history.”

Unfortunately that’s not what happened.

Turns out the memos said that harsh interrogation methods, used sparingly, helped save the United States from an attack on Los Angeles. The memo didn’t just say that it saved us from an attack, it named a specific attack that these interrogation methods thwarted.

The CIA made the assertion in the 2005 memo, and CIA officials have refused to recant. They stand firm on their belief that the methods helped stop an attack on this country.

Then Dennis Blair, Obama’s national intelligence director, wrote a memo to his staff last Thursday that explained that the interrogation methods worked and yielded a better understanding of Al Qaeda.

“High 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,” Adm. Dennis C. Blair, the intelligence director, wrote in a memo to his staff last Thursday.

However, that very important and extraordinarily relevant information was omitted from the condensed version of the memo that the White House sent to the media.

Uh-oh, suddenly Obama’s political play has severely backfired.

However, Obama is still trying to suck all of the political clout he can out of these memos. He told reporters on Tuesday that the memos demonstrate that the nation lost its “moral bearings” in the Bush years. To be honest, I’d rather lose a little “moral bearing” (and I would argue that we didn’t, but let’s pretend we did) than lose innocent lives to another terrorist attack.

The political backfiring gets even better though. As I mentioned in yesterday’s daily chew, there was a select group of congressmen that were briefed on these new interrogation methods. Pete Hoekstra has said that if the White House releases the memos of the Congressional briefing it will show that democratic leadership, namely Nancy Pelosi, knew exactly what was going and didn’t object.

Pelosi already denied she had ever been briefed on these “enhanced interrogation methods” (or as I like to call them, successful interrogation methods). In the same day it was revealed that she in fact was briefed in 2002, and then she came out and admitted she was but said the briefings were vague, or something like that.

Either way, the democrats need to run as far away from these memos as possible. They clearly show that Bush did everything in his power to protect us during his eight years, and it just so happens that what he did worked.

Maybe he’s not as big of an idiot as the media makes him out to be.

UPDATE: Fox News is now reporting that Obama is considering the possibility of launching a congressional investigation into the Justice Department lawyers who authorized these interrogation techniques.

It seems that Obama is still attempting to suck on the teat of political clout stemming from the release of these memos. However, the Fox News article makes it seem that Obama is approaching this issue very slowly, and very cautiously.

“As a general deal, I think that we should be looking forward and not backwards,” he said. “I do worry about this getting so politicized that we cannot function effectively, and it hampers our ability to carry out national security operations.”

But at a closed-door bipartisan meeting with congressional leaders Thursday, Obama reportedly resisted pressure from Democrats to probe Bush officials. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., told Obama she wants a “Truth Commission” to investigate the interrogation policies — an option that several congressional Democrats support.

If Pelosi wants it, Pelosi will get it. I don’t think there’s any doubt to the fact that Pelosi is the one running Washington right now. By the way with a dopey name like “truth commission” pretty much all of the credibility is sucked out of the panel before it’s even assembled. We also can’t forget, as I’ve mentioned several times now, that Pelosi knew about these “enhanced interrogation methods” as early as 2002. We know for certain that she was at least aware they might be used, whether or not she knew any more from any other briefings is still up in the air.

I think investigating these interrogation methods is a huge waste of everyone’s time, and I think Obama and Pelosi both know it. This is all about politics, the democrats won the congressional elections in 2006 and the presidential election in 2008 because of Bush. He was the scapegoat, they blamed anything and everything on him and they did a tremendous job stereotyping the entire republican party to his beliefs and his name.

However, that scapegoat is gone now. That trump card is out of the deck. They have nothing to grasp onto. So they’re retreating back to Bush. They’re looking at the past. They’ll sashay anti-Bush examples to the public until the cows come home and scream “look at how bad that was, you don’t want that again!”

That can only work for so long, who knows it may already be exhausted. But they’ll try it. Remember, politics has nothing to do with what’s right, it has to do with what gets you elected.

–jb

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