Beltway Snark

I hope Dennis Blair’s taxes are in order, because right about now I’m sure Obama is looking for an excuse to throw him under the bus. Why you ask? For his grave sin of making The One look really bad.

President Obama’s national intelligence director told colleagues in a private memo last week that the harsh interrogation techniques banned by the White House did produce significant information that helped the nation in its struggle with terrorists.

“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.

Admiral Blair sent his memo on the same day the administration publicly released secret Bush administration legal memos authorizing the use of interrogation methods that the Obama White House has deemed to be illegal torture. Among other things, the Bush administration memos revealed that two captured Qaeda operatives were subjected to a form of near-drowning known as waterboarding a total of 266 times.

But wait, it gets better.

Admiral Blair’s assessment that the interrogation methods did produce important information was deleted from a condensed version of his memo released to the media last Thursday. Also deleted was a line in which he empathized with his predecessors who originally approved some of the harsh tactics after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

“I like to think I would not have approved those methods in the past,” he wrote, “but I do not fault those who made the decisions at that time, and I will absolutely defend those who carried out the interrogations within the orders they were given.”

Good job there Obama. Trying to squash evidence that enhanced interrogation works doesn’t make the evidence go away.

Is waterboarding and sticking someone in a box with a bug torture? We can debate that for decades. Does it work? That answer is pretty obvious. Taking something that produced results off the table is pretty damn dumb, no matter how you may feel about the procedure.