President Obama’s decision to release top-secret Justice Department “torture memos” has sparked a flurry of criticism from members of the Bush administration who had previously refrained from knocking the new commander in chief.
Dana Perino, Mr. Bush’s former press secretary, attacked Mr. Obama’s move in an interview and on television as “reckless.”
Mr. Bush’s former attorney general, Michael B. Mukasey, considered a political moderate, and his former CIA chief, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, issued a withering denunciation of the decision in an editorial.
Even the mild-tempered Dan Bartlett, one of Mr. Bush’s most trusted counselors for more than seven years at the White House, condemned the decision to release 126 pages of previously classified legal arguments for “enhanced interrogation techniques” that some critics condemn as torture.
“The entire effort is a very slippery slope that seems to be more aimed at satisfying political considerations than actually the substance of intelligence operations. I cannot think of a rational public policy consideration for releasing these,” Mr. Bartlett told The Washington Times.
“The idea to kind of air this internal deliberation of our intelligence community looks to be a shortsighted and politically motivated one,” he said.
So far, the two top-ranking Bush administration officials who have most publicly taken on the Obama White House to date - former vice president Dick Cheney and top political adviser Karl Rove - have not spoken out on the issue.
Mr. Rove declined to comment in an e-mail response, and an assistant to Mr. Cheney said the former vice president had not yet chosen to offer an opinion.
And Mr. Bush himself, back home in Texas, has not broken his vow to remain silent on the decisions of his successor.
Mrs. Perino was animated in her criticism of Mr. Obama’s decision, strongly defending Mr. Bush and the policies of his administration after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
“At best, this was a foolhardy decision and at worst it’s reckless, and I’m afraid it was the latter,” she said in a phone interview. She accused Mr. Obama of “pandering to a small group of people that claim to really care about” the issue.
“I don’t really think anybody in al Qaeda is thinking today maybe they should change their tactics of planning mass casualties in the U.S. or beheading captives just because the United States in limited cases uses sleep deprivation to try to get intelligence,” she said.
She blasted those who have attacked Mr. Bush’s decisions as condoning torture and consider themselves “moral and upstanding while George Bush led the country astray.”
“We kept this country safe for 7 1/2 years and it’s time they gave us some credit for it,” she said.
Mr. Mukasey and Gen. Hayden’s 1,695-word editorial in the Wall Street Journal was a blow-by-blow rebuttal to Mr. Obama’s stated rationale for releasing the memos.
“The release of these opinions was unnecessary as a legal matter, and is unsound as a matter of policy,” they wrote. “Its effect will be to invite the kind of institutional timidity and fear of recrimination that weakened intelligence gathering in the past, and that we came sorely to regret on Sept. 11, 2001.”
Gen. Hayden told The Times in an interview Thursday evening that publicizing specific techniques - which included putting insects in a “confinement box” that held a prisoner, depriving detainees of sleep for more than four days, and slapping them in the face and abdomen - was in effect taking such practices off the table in the future.
Gen. Hayden and Mr. Mukasey said that these techniques have been used on less than one-third of 100 detainees placed in the CIA’s special program for “hard-core prisoners.”
Mr. Obama has made such techniques illegal while his administration reviews whether techniques beyond the Army Field Manual should be allowed for trained intelligence specialists.
He said on Thursday that he decided to release the memos after thinking “long and hard” on the matter, according to senior adviser David Axelrod.
With his own advisers divided, Mr. Obama said he concluded that “exceptional circumstances” required him to act.
“Withholding these memos would only serve to deny facts that have been in the public domain for some time. This could contribute to an inaccurate accounting of the past, and fuel erroneous and inflammatory assumptions about actions taken by the United States,” Mr. Obama said.
White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said Thursday that “the president doesn’t believe it’s the existence of enhanced interrogation techniques in memos that have made us less safe.”
“It is the use of those techniques … in the view of the world that have made us less safe, and that is precisely the reason by which the president moved swiftly to end that practice by use of this government,” Mr. Gibbs said.
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