Blogs For Victory

The former CIA head Porter Goss lays out the facts:

Since leaving my post as CIA director almost three years ago, I have remained largely silent on the public stage. I am speaking out now because I feel our government has crossed the red line between properly protecting our national security and trying to gain partisan political advantage. We can’t have a secret intelligence service if we keep giving away all the secrets…

…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. It must be hard for most Americans of common sense to imagine how a member of Congress can forget being told about the interrogations of Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed. In that case, though, perhaps it is not amnesia but political expedience.

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…

Indeed – now its politically expedient to be all in a huff about alleged torture; 7 years ago, it was politically expedient to be in a huff about terrorism. But that was before the Democrats made the cynical calculation that being in favor of defeat would do more for them than helping America to victory. Its not that Democrats wanted so much for America to lose, but the fact that they saw no upside to US victory if the GOP was in charge. Democrat leaders, it must be kept in mind, only care about retaining and increasing their power. If US victory would be credited to Republicans, then what is the point in it?

You just watch – if Obama gets into a jam over Pakistan or Iran or what have you, all of a sudden Democrats will be in favor of strong measures and complete national unity behind the President…because that would work to their advantage. We’re dealing with people, in the Democrat leadership, who are the perfect human ciphers…mere voids who provide nothing useful but who feel entitled to power and wealth. While they are fully in charge the fate of millions might turn on whether or not the Democrat leadership figures it is electorally advantage to do something about it.