President Obama on Monday will visit CIA headquarters amid criticism from an ex-CIA chief that he compromised national security last week by releasing Bush-era memos on interrogation tactics.
The president will meet with CIA Director Leon Panetta, Deputy Director Stephen Kappes and other officials and also will talk to employees about the importance of the agency’s mission to national security. Obama’s visit comes a day after former CIA Director Michael Hayden said the decision to release the four memos undermined the work the agency is doing. Hayden, President Bush’s CIA director from 2006 to 2009, said the release of the memos emboldens terrorist groups such as al Qaeda. “What we have described for our enemies in the midst of a war are the outer limits that any American would ever go to in terms of interrogating an al Qaeda terrorist. That’s very valuable information,” Hayden said on “Fox News Sunday.” “By taking techniques off the table, we have made it more difficult in a whole host of circumstances I can imagine, more difficult for CIA officers to defend the nation.” He added, “If you look at what this really comprises, if you look at the documents that have been made public, it says top secret at the top. The definition of top secret is information which, if revealed, would cause grave harm to U.S. security.”
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White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel dismissed the assertion that the release of the memos undermine U.S. intelligence efforts, saying the information was no secret. “One of the reasons the president was willing to let this information out was that already the information was out,” Emanuel said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.” “So if they’re saying that you basically have exposed something, it’s been written. Go get the New York Review of Books. It’s there.” Obama said last week that withholding the memos “would only serve to deny facts that have been in the public domain for some time.” Watch for details on the interrogation techniques » “This could contribute to an inaccurate accounting of the past and fuel erroneous and inflammatory assumptions about actions taken by the United States,” he said in a statement. The memos include details on terror interrogations such as waterboarding, a technique used to simulate drowning. Obama has called the method torture. One memo showed that CIA interrogators used waterboarding at least 266 times on two top al Qaeda suspects. The administration also has come under criticism from human rights organizations after announcing that CIA officials would not be prosecuted for past waterboarding and other harsh interrogation tactics. “The president has halted the use of the interrogation techniques described in these opinions, and this administration has made clear from Day One that it will not condone torture,” Attorney General Eric Holder said last week. “We are disclosing these memos consistent with our commitment to the rule of law.” The attorney general promised that officials who used such interrogation tactics would be in the clear if their actions were consistent with Justice Department legal advice under which they were operating at the time. David Gergen, a senior political analyst for CNN, said it was crucial for the Obama administration to decide not to prosecute people in the CIA. “Because if you’re operating in the government and your superiors say something is legal, then you should be able to rely on that and not have somebody come in to you after the fact and say, ‘No, no, no, no. … Now we’re going to declare that illegal after the fact,'” he said.
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said Sunday that the release of the memos is consistent with how Obama conducts government. “It’s about transparency. It’s about accountability. And he released them. And on the other hand, he said to those CIA employees who were following what the Department of Justice told them they could do, they would not be subject to further prosecution, because it’s also about closing this chapter so we can move on to the future,” Napolitano said.
