Bush aides rip ‘torture memos’ release

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.

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