Blair House

Add Obama's current Director of National Intelligence, Adm. Dennis Blair, to the list of torture non-apologists.

President Obama’s national intelligence director told colleagues in a private memo last week that the harsh interrogation techniques banned by the White House did produce significant information that helped the nation in its struggle with terrorists.

“High value information came from interrogations in which those methods were used and provided a deeper understanding of the al Qa’ida organization that was attacking this country,” Adm. Dennis C. Blair, the intelligence director, wrote in a memo to his staff last Thursday.

Admiral Blair sent his memo on the same day the administration publicly released secret Bush administration legal memos authorizing the use of interrogation methods that the Obama White House has deemed to be illegal torture. Among other things, the Bush administration memos revealed that two captured Qaeda operatives were subjected to a form of near-drowning known as waterboarding a total of 266 times.

Admiral Blair’s assessment that the interrogation methods did produce important information was deleted from a condensed version of his memo released to the media last Thursday. Also deleted was a line in which he empathized with his predecessors who originally approved some of the harsh tactics after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

“I like to think I would not have approved those methods in the past,” he wrote, “but I do not fault those who made the decisions at that time, and I will absolutely defend those who carried out the interrogations within the orders they were given.”

If Obama's DNI, the person in charge of the entire US intel community, is basically saying torture worked, and is going over the President's head to the press saying that he clearly disagrees with the White House assessment on these methods, then Barack Obama has a serious problem within his intelligence directorate.

It's one thing to have former Bush officials running around the op-ed pages saying that waterboarding people hundreds of times saved the country when reports exist that say no plots were actually foiled. It's entirely another to have your own appointees stab you in the back like that and say "Yeah, I absolutely believe torture was worth it."

This is about as loud as a public "With all due respect, screw you, Mr. President!" gets in Washington. Ball's in Obama's court now.

[UPDATE] The reality was that Bush pushed torture and it didn't work. It all comes back to that. If Obama's officials insist it did, there's a problem. And from the beginning the military planned to use torture even before it was approved by Bush.

The ends do not justify the means.