Here is part of an article that is on NRO, today, about Holder and his role in this.
Is there any more important context crying out for transparency than a Justice Department misstep that could have cost American lives?
This misstep, it is worth remembering, does not occur in a vacuum. President Obama has stocked his Justice Department with lawyers who have spent (or whose firms have spent) the last eight years volunteering their services to America’s enemies. This includes Attorney General Holder himself, whose former firm’s website continues to brag about representing 18 alien enemy combatants and about attacking the validity of the Bush-era military commissions. (Those would be the same commissions that President Obama suddenly decided aren’t so bad after all, according to the administration’s most recent Friday Night Bad News Dump.)
It can be no coincidence that, with this DOJ team in place, we’ve already seen: the premature announcement of the closure of Guantánamo Bay, when there was clearly no plan for what to do about the detainees; the outright release of Binyam Mohammed, who plotted with “Dirty Bomber” Jose Padilla to attack American cities; the purging of the terms “enemy combatant” and “war”; the release of the CIA memos over the strenuous objection of the intelligence community, and in a shamefully dishonest manner that revealed interrogation tactics but suppressed from public view the life-saving information the tactics yielded; the announcement of an investigation of Bush-administration lawyers and the leaking of information from the related ethics probe; AG Holder’s under-the-radar suggestion that he’d cooperate with Spain’s investigation of Bush administration officials; the sweetheart plea deal for Ali al-Marri (a terrorist who, like Binyam Mohammed, was planning to conduct a post-9/11 second wave of mass-murder attacks in the U.S.); the plan to release trained terrorists in the U.S. in violation of federal immigration law (to say nothing of common sense); and, now, the decision to release the prisoner-abuse photos that the president, thankfully, has rescinded. That’s quite a track record in just a hundred days. There is palpable ground for concern that DOJ decisions are not being made with the best interests of American national security in mind.
Will Attorney General Holder release the Justice Department memos that led to his inexplicable decision to publicize photos President Obama concedes would have endangered our troops? If Holder won’t voluntarily disclose them, will Congress demand that he do so? After all, though some say it’s time to look forward, not back, today’s Democrats are quick to point out that all of us — other than Nancy Pelosi — must come clean and learn from the mistakes of history if we are to avoid repeating them.
Or is this one truth that Pat Leahy would just as soon not have a commission over?
— National Review’s Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and the author of Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad (Encounter Books, 2008). \
Your post is very interesting, probably the most important one on the thread so far.
Not to delve too deep into this, but Pelosi is on shakier ground than it looks. Even though she is specifically attacking the CIA on the issue of waterboarding, the counterattack may stray from that topic, and onto other things she knew about and kept quiet over.
Does the intelligence community want to go there? No. Will they, out of self defense? You bet. She may be emotionally blinded and power tripping, but her targets are intelligent, careful and prepared. They'll continue to resist until either she backs off, or is brought down by public opinion and loses her power to affect them. That point will be reached long before any intelligence officers wind up on trial.
Or so I would imagine. :-)