Douglas Turner: Release of secret papers by Obama is a mistake
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WASHINGTON — Those who claim that harsh interrogation tactics are a break with American traditions, as President Obama has done, are offering up a childish mirage.
In the wars America won— in less than four years—our intelligence agencies did what was necessary.
By contrast, Obama and radical allies on his left spent last week tantalizing our terrorist enemies and the public with the release of classified interrogation documents and holding out the possibility of show trials of Bush administration officials.
In these clumsy moves, Obama has come close to impaling himself on the strongest suit that President George W. Bush left the Republican Party. And that is that Bush kept the 50 states safe for the seven years and four months after 9/11.
America has never endorsed brutality for its own sake, but its war heroes saw starkly what had to be done to win.
Here’s what Major Gen. William J. Donovan, the founder of the Central Intelligence Agency, said decades ago: “Espionage is not a nice thing. Nor are the methods employed exemplary. We face an enemy who believes one of his chief weapons is terror. But we will turn terror against him.”
Donovan, America’s most decorated soldier and perhaps the most talented man Buffalo ever produced, was a mentor of Barnaby C. Keeney, who, while he was president of Brown University, worked for the CIA’s covert operations.
Keeney, when a history professor at Brown, told select students, including me, about tactics he and his colleagues used on German prisoners when they worked for Donovan during World War II. They included sleep deprivation, light deprivation, isolation and protracted exposure to temperature extremes.
Our agents in what was then the Office of Strategic Services created by FDR used cruel psychological methods on some prisoners. These interrogation practices, drawn from German and Russian information, were described in Arthur Koestler’s anti- Soviet novel “Darkness at Noon.”
During the Cold War, the Army Intelligence Center near Baltimore, Md., introduced counter-espionage trainees, including me, to these very tactics. Some were employed in pantomime during war games.
Keeney in 1962 covertly set up a CIA front called MK-ULTRA, which used the National Institutes of Health and other federal agencies to conduct tests on unwitting federal inmates, the overwhelming majority of whom were black, to chart the effect of hallucinogenic drugs.
All of this is reprehensible, horrible stuff. But it was generated by well-meaning American officers from what has been called “The Greatest Generation” to keep America safe.
None of this behavior can be justified in the open, certainly not as the worst memories of 9/11 fade as a result of the security blanket provided by the Bush administration.
Obama, by releasing the secret papers on waterboarding and other harsh treatment of terror suspects, has signaled a massive generational and cultural change. Two issues have not been addressed: Will the terrorists reciprocate, and what will Obama do if they don’t?
At week’s end Obama seemed to be trying to pull back from audaciously partisan threats to investigate and possibly prosecute Bush officials, including former Vice President Dick Cheney, for supposed war crimes.
Yet with the release of the interrogation documents, the toothpaste is out of the tube and it will be impossible to stuff it back in case of another attack on American soil on Obama’s watch.
•••
Yet another broken Obama campaign promise. In 2008, then Sen. Obama told NBC’s Tim Russert he would renegotiate NAFTA to include labor and environmental clauses. A week ago Obama’s pro-NAFTA trade ambassador, Ron Kirk, announced the treaty would not be redrawn.
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