OBAMA ADMINISTRATION REBUKED - AT 9:26 A.M. ET:  In a superb piece, former CIA chief Michael Hayden and former Attorney General Michael Mukasey tear into President Obama's decision to release internal Bush administration memos on interrogations:

The Obama administration has declassified and released opinions of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) given in 2005 and earlier that analyze the legality of interrogation techniques authorized for use by the CIA. Those techniques were applied only when expressly permitted by the director, and are described in these opinions in detail, along with their limits and the safeguards applied to them.

The release of these opinions was unnecessary as a legal matter, and is unsound as a matter of policy. Its effect will be to invite the kind of institutional timidity and fear of recrimination that weakened intelligence gathering in the past, and that we came sorely to regret on Sept. 11, 2001.

And...

...public disclosure of the OLC opinions, and thus of the techniques themselves, assures that terrorists are now aware of the absolute limit of what the U.S. government could do to extract information from them, and can supplement their training accordingly and thus diminish the effectiveness of these techniques as they have the ones in the Army Field Manual.

COMMENT:  Please read the whole piece.  What we're dealing with here is a mindset in the Obama administration:  We are partially at fault for terror; Bush was a fascist; this whole war on terror is childish, and will make matters worse; we're no better than anyone else.

We are now officially back to September 10, 2001.  Our enemies know it.  Oh, wait.  We don't have enemies - just people with whom we have a cultural difference.

April 17, 2009