Amid growing pressure to punish CIA interrogators involved with torture during the Bush Administration, President Obama has chosen to create a new team of interrogators, under the control of the FBI Director, to interrogate key terrorist detainees. The “High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group,” (HIG) will be made up of members of various intelligence and law enforcement agencies but housed within the FBI and overseen by the National Security Council. The publicized purpose of this new program is to foster more cooperation between the organizations, but the real purpose is to move control over interrogations from the CIA to the White House and FBI and to turn terrorism back into a criminal matter. This is a giant mistake.

Let me state that I am wholeheartedly against torture. I think torture is ineffective and that it compromises every value this country was built on. But that does not mean terrorists deserve the same rights as American citizens. That does not mean we should go back to equating terrorists with common criminals instead of treating them as enemy combatants. That certainly does not mean we should bureaucratize, politicize, and “mirandacize” the terrorist detainment and interrogation process. That is exactly what the HIG will eventually do.

The FBI and the NSA aren’t suited for interrogations. That has always been CIA territory. If the CIA went too far, it was because they had the approval of members of the Bush Administration to do so. As usual, when the CIA messes up, there is a president to blame. Everyone blamed the CIA for not protecting us from September 11th and not having up-to-date information on Hussein’s Iraq in 2003, but how could they when they were disastrously defunded by the Clinton Administration?

The current administration looks to be taking a similar path and even Obama-appointed CIA Director Leon Panetta seems to be fed up with it. I hate to sound like a fear-monger, but I have no hope in the HIG obtaining the intelligence we need from their interrogators and managing to keep us safe. Down the road, any failure in intelligence that leaves to the loss of American lives will rest squarely on President Obama’s shoulders.

Without politicizing this further, if Republicans want to take the National Security issue back to the forefront without sounding like they support torture, HIG is definitely the issue to do it with. As we saw with Pelosi-gate, the public likes the CIA more than it likes hypocritical politicians. Republicans should do what they can to make sure our intelligence gathering doesn’t become the bureaucratic mess President Obama is promising to make everything else into.

Last 5 posts by Abel S. Delgado

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