Ping Pong Politics Over CIA

James Carafano / July 15, 2009

Playing politics with national security is always a bad idea. It’s been hard to tell that watching the back-and-forth in Washington over the role of the CIA in the War on Terror. The administration and partisan forces in Congress have been whipsawing back and forth between trying to kowtow the ACLU, trying to continue to campaign against Bush-Cheney, and not letting the professionals in Justice and the CIA think they have been thrown to the wolves.

Arguably, all this started with a catfight between Obama and former Vice President Cheney. On April 16, the Justice Department released documents on terrorist interrogation tactics used by the CIA after 9/11. There were immediate cries that the memos showed the Bush policies to be both wrong and wrongheaded. Cheney cried foul, calling on the Administration to declassify and release additional material that described the full scope and context of the program, including the effectiveness of the CIA interrogations. The Administration said no to (more…)