Obama’s Intel Chief: Harsh Interrogations Work

No shit.

The Obama administration’s top intelligence official privately told employees last week that “high value information” was obtained in interrogations that included harsh techniques approved by former President George W. Bush.

“A deeper understanding of the Al Qaeda network” resulted, National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair said in the memo, in which he added, “I like to think I would not have approved those methods in the past.” The Associated Press obtained a copy of the memo.

Critics of the harsh methods — waterboarding, face slapping, sleep deprivation and other techniques — have called them torture. President Obama said Tuesday they showed the United States “losing our moral bearings” and said they would not be used while he is in office. But he did not say whether he believed they worked.

Let’s see…Islamic terrorists have no moral reservations toward killing men, women, and children, for “Allah”, but he thinks we’re “losing moral bearings”. He’s lost his bearings and a screw or two.

Obama ordered the release of long-secret Bush-era documents on the subject last week, and Blair circulated his memo declaring that useful information was obtained at the same time.

In a public statement released the same day, Blair did not say that interrogations using the techniques had yielded useful information.

……It said, “The information gained from these techniques was valuable in some instances, but there is no way of knowing whether the same information could have been obtained through other means.”

The emergence of Blair’s memo added another layer of complexity to an issue that has plagued the Obama administration in recent days.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/04/21/intelligence-director-high-value-information-obtained-harsh-interrogations/

Private admission, public denial. To appease his fans, Obama tries to put horns and a tail on the Bush administration’s successful counter-terrorism programs.

Obama won’t prosecute anyone, because he can’t.

Aside from the fact that several members of the Democratic Party knew about the interrogation methods,
Obama knows that if he allows prosecution he will have to release the classified information gleaned from the interrogations, which will prove they were sucessful. Instead, he’ll try to politicize the intelligence because the truth would be inconvenient. The whole attempt to blame Bush and denounce what turned out to be productive interrogations, will blow up in his face.