Inexcusable Lapse

By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Friday, April 17, 2009 4:20 PM PT

War On Terror: Imagine a president of the United States, within his first hundred days, revealing secrets that help terrorists kill. The secret memos on enhanced interrogation, now made public, do exactly that.


We are told by President Obama's senior adviser David Axelrod that the president agonized for four weeks over the "weighty decision" to make public memoranda detailing the specifics of the CIA's tough interrogation of high-value terrorist detainees such as 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammad.

For most other presidents, it would have taken maybe four minutes, required little soul-searching and resulted in the opposite choice.

What on earth could the president have been thinking in revealing the nuts and bolts of how we extract information from al-Qaida operatives to prevent the success of their terrorist operations?

What could have possessed him to make public the steps our interrogators go through, the limits of pain and discomfort they (but not the prisoners) know they will not exceed, and the analytical classification and specific purpose of each of the various techniques?

These top secrets will arm Islamist jihadists with knowledge that will be invaluable to them. Future terrorist detainees will now know, for instance, that their interrogations are under continual video surveillance to make sure no lasting medical or psychological consequences result from the techniques used. Will they now teach themselves to fake such ill effects?

Terrorists will know that when they are placed in a tiny container in "cramped confinement" it will last only "up to two hours," as a declassified memo from the Justice Department to the CIA noted. They will know that "stress positions" are used "only to induce temporary muscle fatigue" not "severe physical pain."

They will now know that when subjected to "water dousing" they need not have the slightest fear of hypothermia, because every precaution is taken to keep the temperature of both the room and the water itself far above freezing.

They will know sleep deprivation inflicted by the interrogators seldom exceeds 96 hours, and they'll know the specifics and purposes behind the relatively mild technique of "dietary manipulation."

What the president has given to our enemies is a treasure chest of defensive weapons. Within the caves of the mountainous Pakistan/Afghanistan border, Islamofascist plotters must wonder how self-destructively corrupt their American adversaries have to be to allow such materials to land in their hands.

The piece of information that may be of most value to terrorists is the government's assessment that waterboarding was "the most traumatic of the enhanced interrogation techniques" and implicitly the most effective.

Terrorist groups around the world will now know that waterboarding was "authorized for, at most, one 30-day period, during which the technique can actually be applied on no more than five days" with "no more than two sessions in any 24-hour period."

Each session lasted no more than two hours, consisting of, at most, six applications of water for 10 seconds each time, for a total of no longer than 12 minutes per each 24-hour period. Presumably the issue is academic since the Obama administration has officially prohibited waterboarding.

There is no more valuable tool for subjects of interrogation than to know what they will be subjected to. How in good conscience could our president have given this gift to those trying to destroy us?