President Obama’s decision to release top-secret Justice Department “torture memos” has unleashed a flurry of criticism from members of the Bush administration who had previously refrained from knocking the new commander-in-chief.
Mr. Bush’s former attorney general, Michael B. Mukasey who was chosen because he was a political moderate and his former CIA chief, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, issued a withering denunciation of the decision in an editorial.
Dana Perino, Mr. Bush’s former press secretary, was on television and her cell phone saying that Mr. Obama’s move was “reckless.”
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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 choice to release 126 pages of previously classified details about legal arguments for “enhanced interrogation techniques” that some believe to be 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 said in a phone interview.
“The idea to kind of air this internal deliberation of our intelligence community looks to be a shortsighted and politically motivated one,” he said.
Mrs. Perino was animated in her criticism of Mr. Obama’s decision, and in her defense of Mr. Bush and the policies devised by his administration after the September 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, accusing 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.
So far, the two top-ranking Bush administration officials who have most publicly and consistently taken on the Obama White House to date former Vice President Dick Cheney and top political adviser Karl Rove have not yet 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 give an opinion.
And Mr. Bush himself, back home in Texas, has not broken his vow to remain silent on Obama decisions.
But 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 Washington 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 it 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, who has made such techniques illegal while his administration reviews whether techniques beyond the Army Field Manual should be allowed for trained intelligence specialists, said on Thursday that after thinking long and hard on the matter, he believed “exceptional circumstances” required that he not hold back the amount of detail that was released.
“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.
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