Earlier this week President Obama defended his controversial releasing of top-secret memos detailing the CIA’s use of harsh interrogations under the Bush administration. Despite vocal opposition from four former CIA directors and several senior agency officials, Obama defended his decision saying “[he] acted primarily because of the exceptional circumstances that surrounded these memos, particularly the fact that so much of the information was public.” What Obama didn’t say was why his administration has thus far excluded an evaluation of the intelligence gained from these techniques from the public record. Since Obama has long since maintained that the harsh interrogation methods of the Bush administration didn’t make us safer, you would expect him to take advantage of an opportunity to show the America people evidence of their failure. But what if, as Former Vice President Dick Cheney suggested, a full disclosure showed the success of the effort? Unsurprisingly, the left would be unlikely to contradict the promulgated myth that the harsh interrogation methods of the Bush administration amounted to an assortment of fairy tales and contrived half-truths.

Fundamentally the Obama’s opposition to these methods hinges on two things, an assurance that they don’t produce good intelligence and that they represent a contradiction to the values of this country that hurts our image internationally. If President Obama opposes the use of waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods that he considers to be counter to the core values of this country, he shouldn’t be afraid to release evidence of their successful application in the past. After all, what’s wrong is wrong even if it saved American’s lives. For an administration that claimed a new era of transparent government you’d expect that all that hope and change might give the American people an honest debate, especially if the evidence showed the ineffectiveness of the Bush administration’s policies (along with slam dunking any Cheney criticism).

That is of course unless the harsh interrogation methods of the Bush administration saved American lives.

Unfortunately, we may very well be witnessing selective declassification designed to fuel an ill-conceived and highly partisan witch hunt. While most Americans still don’t have a lot of nice things to say about former President Bush, they probably don’t want to spend the next four years watching a retroactive persecution of the last eight. If President Obama goes ahead with his witch hunt he will certainly be giving the Republicans a lot of ammunition for the future. After all, it is difficult to see how Obama could maintain his manufactured halo of bipartisanship while simultaneously supporting Patrick Lahey’s spurious “truth commission”. As a candidate whose claim to fame was a supposed foundation of hopey changey bipartisanship, Republicans would be wise to remind America of the differences between candidate Obama and President Obama.

Last 5 posts by Emil G. Maine

• Why America Needs More Clunkers - August 1st, 2009
• Picking The Right Fight - April 15th, 2009
• The Limitations of Popularity - April 8th, 2009
• Learning from Rahm - April 2nd, 2009