Questionable Policy on Interrogations [Bill Burck]
Unnamed sources from the Obama administration are taking director of national intelligence Dennis Blair to the woodshed for admitting during his congressional testimony yesterday that the underwear bomber should not have been treated as a criminal suspect after he was arrested. They even forced a pseudo-clarification out of him, which was most notable for the fact that he did not change the core of his testimony, namely that he wasn't consulted about the decision and that Abdulmutallab should have been interrogated, not read his Miranda rights.
Various media outlets report that Obama officials are saying that Blair got his facts wrong when he testified that the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group, known as HIG, should have been brought in to interrogate Abdulmutallab because the administration has not yet created the HIG. Mind you, President Obama created a task force two days after taking office in January 2009 to examine options on conducting interrogations of terrorists, and that task force announced the creation of the HIG in August 2009. The HIG was supposed to be the new administration's answer to President Bush's CIA interrogation program, which President Obama shut down immediately upon taking office.
Don't worry, the administration appears to be saying in its most reassuring tones, we couldn't have interrogated Abdulmutallab because we didn't have anyone to do it. This is preposterous on many counts, but I will focus on two obvious ones. First, there are many trained interrogators in the federal government, including military interrogators and intelligence professionals who know exactly how to conduct these types of interrogations. The Army Field Manual sets out the contours of permissible interrogations of enemy combatants, whether they are captured here or overseas. So the administration's claim that they didn't have anyone to interrogate Abdulmutallab is hogwash. Second, they would have us believe that they just haven't gotten around to setting up the HIG yet, even though the HIG was established some five months ago and the task force started looking at this issue a year ago. I don't really want to believe that, but let's take their claim at face value for a moment. Is the Obama administration really suggesting — a year after shutting down the CIA program — that they just couldn't get around to putting in place a group of highly trained professionals to question captured terrorists who are planning mass killings on U.S. soil? If this is true, I say bravo for their honesty. It's not everyday the Obama administration admits what some have suspected all along: Stopping terrorist attacks on the homeland just hasn't been at the top of their list of priorities.
— Bill Burck is a former federal prosecutor and deputy counsel to Pres. George W. Bush.
The Corner on National Review Online (21 January 2010)
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