Spies Slam Senate Report

by Gary Bauer, Contributing Author: Yesterday's release of the Senate Intelligence Committee's so-called "torture report" certainly dominated the headlines. But one silver lining may be that former officials are now free to defend the controversial interrogation program. There has been surprising pushback to the report by former CIA officials, media commentators and even some Democrats. For example:

• Six former CIA directors and deputy directors, who served during the Clinton, Bush and Obama Administrations, co-authored an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal defending the interrogation program. In their estimation, the committee's report amounted to "a one-sided study marred by errors of fact and interpretation -- essentially a poorly done and partisan attack on the agency that has done the most to protect America after the 9/11 attacks."
• Jose A. Rodriguez, Jr., lauded as one of the CIA's best agents, served as the director of the CIA's National Clandestine Service. When news broke in April that Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee were determined to publish a report, Rodriguez wrote in the Washington Post, "I ran the CIA interrogation program. No matter what the Senate report says, I know it worked."
  
  In a separate column last week, Rodriquez ripped into Democrat leaders for their "great hypocrisy," reminding us that these same anti-torture crusaders once essentially urged the CIA to "do all that it could" to destroy Al Qaeda. For example, in May 2002, Sen. Dianne Feinstein told the New York Times "we have to do some things that historically we have not wanted to do to protect ourselves."
• Even liberal journalists can see the duplicity of Senate Democrats. NBC's chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel told MSNBC last night:"I think this is really about changing the narrative of American history. This process went on, it was a brutal process, it was legal at the time... the CIA was asked to do it. The CIA was passing on its intelligence to the president. So, everyone in the world knew what was going on, including by the way, the Senate, which is pretending to be a bit of a babe in the woods. They knew what was going on at the time."
• Former Senator Bob Kerrey (D-NE), a decorated Vietnam veteran who served on the Senate Intelligence Committee and the 9/11 Commission, blasted the "the partisan nature of this report." According to Kerrey, committee Democrats, "started out with the premise that the CIA was guilty and then worked to prove it."

To give you some indication of just how politically biased the report is, various left-wing groups, including the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), are using the report to call on the United Nations to prosecute former Bush Administration officials for war crimes.

The ACLU, realizing that such trials are unlikely to happen, is asking President Obama to pardon George W. Bush! But I doubt President Bush has any interest in being "pardoned" by Obama or anyone else for what he did to protect America after 9/11.
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Gary Bauer is a conservative family values advocate and serves as president of American Values and chairman of the Campaign for Working Families

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