Obama's bad faith on CIA investigation

NY Times:

With the appointment of a prosecutor to investigate detainee abuses, long-simmering conflicts between the Central Intelligence Agency and the Justice Department burst into plain view this week, threatening relations between two critical players on President Obama’s national security team.

The tension between the agencies complicates how the administration handles delicate national security issues, particularly the tracking and capturing of suspected terrorists overseas. It also may distract Mr. Obama, who is trying to move beyond the battles of the Bush years to focus on an ambitious domestic agenda, most notably health care legislation.

The strains became evident inside the administration in the past several weeks. In July, Leon E. Panetta, the C.I.A. director, tried to head off the investigation, administration officials said. He sent the C.I.A.’s top lawyer, Stephen W. Preston, to Justice to persuade aides to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to abandon any plans for an inquiry.

Mr. Preston presented what was, in effect, a closing argument in defense of the C.I.A., contending that many potential cases against intelligence operatives were legally flawed and noting that they had already been investigated, some more than once. In none, he said, had prosecutors found grounds for charges.

But the Justice Department was unmoved, officials said. Despite the C.I.A. pressure and the stated desire of the White House not to dwell on the past, Mr. Holder went ahead with an investigation that will determine whether agents broke the law in their brutal interrogations.

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"Stated desire"--really? Obama is trying to have it both ways, and appears to be getting away with in this story. If the President did not want an investigation he could stop it and if Holder insisted on one he could and should be fired. Both the President and Holder are playing to the kook base of the Democrat party and they are putting our national security at risk in the middle of a war. I think the writer gets it right by using the term "stated desire." The President's actions certainly belie his "desire."

By aggressively releasing terrorist and looking to prosecute those who have been defending us from the terrorist, the President and Holder have told us who they are. Voters should remember that, and they probably will in the event of another attack that is not stopped because these guys were more concerned with the discomfort of the enemy than stopping his mass murder attacks on our citizens.