Obama's screw up on interrogating terrorist

Jed Babbin:

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Under one of the new executive orders, Obama has prohibited the use of any interrogation method not described in the US Army Field Manual on prisoner interrogation. If this is really his intent, President Obama is -- on just his second full day in office -- guilty of reckless endangerment of our intelligence operators, our military and possibly even our civilian population at home.

The Army Field Manual is a public document. According to several intelligence community sources, al-Queda has re-published it (in its entirety) on some of its terrorist websites.

Those same sources said, with considerable frustration in their voices, that one of the main reasons former President Bush allowed additional interrogation methods to be used is that al-Queda (and other terrorist groups) train their people all too well on how to thwart the interrogation methods in the Army manual.

By limiting the permissible techniques to those in the manual, Obama has effectively abandoned the idea of gathering intelligence by questioning terrorists.

Interrogation is a mind game. To get information from the (pardon the redundancy) resisting detainee requires trickery, psychological pressure and manipulation of the person’s beliefs, prejudices and weaknesses. If the detainee knows what is going on in an interrogation -- how the interrogator is trying to manipulate him into cooperation, how long and how far the questioning can go -- he can avoid revealing anything valuable to the interrogator.

If Obama actually intends to do this, he will weaken our intelligence gathering abilities to pre-9-11 levels. Then we had virtually no human intelligence capability and relied almost entirely on satellites and electronic intercepts.

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Obama is too immersed in the failed lawfare policies of the past. He better hope that Bush has so weakened the enemy that he can't mount a serious attack, because with his new rules the chances of us discovering it are remote.

This is either an elaborate head fake to fool the liberals and the enemy or it is a screw up of untold proportions. Obama did leave himself an out on the CIA interrogations on a case by case basis, but that seems a little to hands on for a President.