NYC Letter: Pants On Fire V Redux

Day 97 of CHOPE

Porter Goss, director of the CIA from September 2004 to May 2006 and chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence from 1997 to 2004, writing in WaPo, is shocked to discover the incomprehension and sanitized memories of his former committee colleagues.

SECURITY BEFORE POLITICS

April 25, 2009 (WaPo) - A disturbing epidemic of amnesia seems to be plaguing my former colleagues on Capitol Hill. After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, members of the committees charged with overseeing our nation's intelligence services had no higher priority than stopping al-Qaeda. In the fall of 2002, while I was chairman of the House intelligence committee, senior members of Congress were briefed on the CIA's "High Value Terrorist* Program," including the development of "enhanced interrogation techniques" and what those techniques were. This was not a one-time briefing but an ongoing subject with lots of back and forth between those members and the briefers.

Today, I am slack-jawed to read that members claim to have not understood that the techniques on which they were briefed were to actually be employed; or that specific techniques such as "waterboarding" were never mentioned.

Now, who might Mr. Goss have in mind here?

Let me be clear. It is my recollection that:

• The chairs and the ranking minority members of the House and Senate intelligence committees, known as the Gang of Four, were briefed that the CIA was holding and interrogating high-value terrorists.

• We understood what the CIA was doing.

• We gave the CIA our bipartisan support.

• We gave the CIA funding to carry out its activities.

• On a bipartisan basis, we asked if the CIA needed more support from Congress to carry out its mission against al-Qaeda.

I do not recall a single objection from my colleagues. They did not vote to stop authorizing CIA funding.

And for those who now reveal filed "memorandums for the record" suggesting concern, real concern should have been expressed immediately -- to the committee chairs, the briefers, the House speaker or minority leader, the CIA director or the president's national security adviser -- and not quietly filed away in case the day came when the political winds shifted. And shifted they have.

... The suggestion that we are safer now because information about interrogation techniques is in the public domain conjures up images of unicorns and fairy dust. We have given our enemy invaluable information about the rules by which we operate. ... "Name, rank and serial number" does not apply to non-state actors but is, regrettably, the only question this administration wants us to ask. Instead of taking risks, our intelligence officers will soon resort to wordsmithing cables to headquarters while opportunities to neutralize brutal radicals are lost.

We can't have a secret intelligence service if we keep giving away all the secrets.

Perhaps you are a faintheart about what the left bruits as "torture". Perhaps you think that a high value terrorist's commodious comfort trumps preventing the murder of those you hold dear or your own self. [Pause.] If so, dear reader, you are too beautiful for this world.

However before you huddle with your new-found friends on the left, consider what the left is willing to sanction, the eggs it is willing to break for its more perfect world omelet. Here is then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright on 60 Minutes back in May 1996:

Lesley Stahl on U.S. sanctions against Iraq: We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright: I think this is a very hard choice, but the price--we think the price is worth it.

A half million children dead. Even if the truth is something less, Ms. Albright's sang-froid is very froid indeed.

If you are too beautiful for "enhanced interrogation techniques", ah, then, dear reader, you are too too beautiful for the easy conscience of the left.

CHOPE.

Reveal. Accuse. Amnesia.

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* Please note these are not suspects in the criminal due process sense. These men are hardened terrorists, who openly declare themselves terrorists, openly admit to acts of terrorism, openly promote acts of terrorism, and led recognized terrorist groups that took pains to be credited for their acts of terrorism. They have all pronounced themselves in open war with the decadent West in general, the United States in particular, and the kaffir wherever they are found. And they are all complicit in a long history of heinous terrorist acts committed almost exclusively against the weak and defenseless.