“Paralyzing risk aversion” redux
The Obama administration has released 80 mind-numbing pages of detailed legal memoranda (PDF here) on CIA interrogation techniques. John Hinderaker finds them legally persuasive. We’re amazed that so much lawyering went on at all.
We recall a previous post of ours about the “paralyzing risk aversion” that existed even in the Bush White House. As Jack Goldsmith noted: “Many people think the Bush administration has been indifferent to wartime legal constraints. But the opposite is true: the administration has been strangled by law, and since September 11, 2001 this war has been lawyered to death.”
A former Bush administration official said that Obama’s releasing the documents did harm to national secuity: “It’s damaging because these are techniques that work, and by Obama’s action today, we are telling the terrorists what they are…We have laid it all out for our enemies. This is totally unnecessary…Publicizing the techniques does grave damage to our national security by ensuring they can never be used again — even in a ticking-time-bomb scenario where thousands or even millions of American lives are at stake.”
The Bush administration official got it wrong: the harm is not so much in letting our enemies know our interrogation techniques (though that indeed seems harmful). But perhaps the greater harm is in letting our enemies know that America is now the kind of country that will waste tens of thousands of man hours preparing and debating legal opinions before it gets around to even beginning the interrogation.
If things were that bad under Bush, just imagine how they are now under Obama.