OUTRAGE GROWING OVER CIA PROBE - AT 8:53 A.M. ET:  It took only a day or two to get started, but we sense a growing outrage over Attorney General Eric Holder's decision to resurrect ancient investigations into CIA treatment of terror detainees early in the Bush administration.  American soldiers are in the field, CIA agents are on the front line, rogue regimes are growing increasingly defiant, and Americans are investigating themselves.  Sounds like a grade C Hollywood comedy. 

Victoria Toensing, a conservative Washington lawyer who's worked on terrorism issues in the executive and legislative branches, has some tough words for this administration in NRO Online.  She writes of the interrogators who stepped forward to help this country in the harrowing days after the September, 2001, attacks, and are now under scrutiny and threat:

Even though an earlier investigation by career prosecutors reviewed the same conduct and refused prosecution of all but one contract employee who was brought to trial in 2007. Even though congressional leaders had knowledge of the interrogation techniques and made no attempt to stop them. Even though the conduct is more than six years old. Even though the CIA has taken administrative action against some of the personnel involved in the interrogations. Even though being just a target of a criminal investigation costs thousands of dollars in legal fees. Even though being just a target of a criminal investigation takes a horrendous mental toll. Even though the morale of the CIA will plunge to the depths it did in the wake of the Church Committee attacks. Even though the release of the names of those being scrutinized will make them terrorist targets for the rest of their lives. Even if they are cleared.

COMMENT:  But the people behind this new series of investigations don't care.  They represent the left wing of the Democratic Party.  Harry Truman threw their kind out of the party in 1948, and they then rallied around Henry Wallace, an otherwise decent man who was naive enough to crawl into bed with genuine, certified reds.  (He later distanced himself from them.)  Their ideological comrades came back in the sixties and seventies, and have had an inordinate influence in the party ever since. 

The fault lays squarely with Barack Obama.  He could stop these reckless and damaging probes, which are likely to shatter the morale of our intelligence services, and at least damage the morale even of our armed forces.  But the fact is that he doesn't really want to.  Barack Obama likes this sort of thing.  It represents who he really is...and the American people are finding out.

August 26, 2009