THE BOILING ISSUE - AT 6:06 P.M. ET:  President Obama said he wanted to look forward on CIA operations, not look back.  But he's refused to block the investigation of past CIA practices announced by Attorney General Holder yesterday.  Maybe the president thinks this lets him escape responsibility.  "Hey, I didn't do it, Eric Holder did it."  But the attorney general reports to the president, and Obama could have stopped this "investigation" at any time, or made it a classified matter.  He did not.

Already the news of the Justice Department probe, which will be run by one of the most left-wing justice departments we've ever had, is dividing Washington.  It will also divide the nation, but I suspect Obama will come out on the short end.  Rich Lowry has some good insight into what's happened:

PITY Leon Panetta. The CIA director counseled the Obama administration against releasing classified interrogation memos from the Bush years. And got ignored...

...Such is life at Langley under an administration betraying liberalism's typical contempt for covert action and its inevitable moral complications.

No wonder ABC News is reporting that Panetta recently uncorked a profanity-laced tirade about the Justice Department at the White House and is contemplating quitting. (The CIA denies it.)

And...

Panetta has had to write another letter to CIA employees meant to keep their morale up. For those keeping count, it's his sixth.

No matter how many missives he writes earnestly committing himself and his agency to looking ahead, the rest of his administration and party drags him back into the past.

As far as they are concerned, he's merely a front man for Bush-era criminality.

And that's the point.  There's a whole bloc within the Democratic Party that doesn't even believe in national defense, let alone the war on terror.  To them, it's Bush's (!!) war, and nothing else.  Many of these people are "anti-war" activists.  Translated into plain English, that means they're against any war America has a chance of winning.

...what possible public interest can be served in reopening murkier cases years after the fact, when the CIA already took internal action and career prosecutors already examined them?

The next time CIA officers are told that they have to be more aggressive in protecting their country, they could be forgiven for saying "no thanks."

The same thing happened in the 1970s - a Democratic Party war against the CIA, which almost destroyed the agency.  To the party-line left, this is perfectly okay. 

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, we struggled to get the balance right between our safety and our values as an open, liberal society. It'd be nice to pretend otherwise, but there is indeed such a balance.

As the IG report makes clear, the interrogations rendered important intelligence about other terrorists and other plots.

"Whether this was the only way to obtain that information will remain a legitimate area of dispute," Panetta writes in his latest letter.

That dispute rightly belongs in the political arena, not the courts. But who wants to listen to the CIA director, a shill for torturers almost by definition?

COMMENT:  Panetta is a Democrat, although a reasonable one.  That's the problem.  To be reasonable in Obama's Democratic Party, to care about the defense of the nation, is to be looked on with suspicion, to be Liebermaned.  And the president does nothing about it.  Because in his heart he knows the left is right.

August 25, 2009