Closing Arguments: History Shows Targeting the CIA is Perilous Move
by John Yoo.
A young, fresh face campaigns for the presidency by attacking the CIA: “Our government should justify the character and moral principles of the American people, and our foreign policy should not short-circuit that for temporary advantage,” he says. He promises to never “do anything as president that would be a contravention of the moral and ethical standards that I would exemplify in my own life as an individual.”
He wins the election and begins to decimate the intelligence agencies. Barack Obama? No. Jimmy Carter.
The Carter administration’s national-security record should not serve as a model for any president. But unless Obama changes course, he risks duplicating the intelligence disasters of the ’70s, and endangering the nation.
Last month, the president and Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. launched a destructive investigation into the CIA’s detention and interrogation of al-Qaeda leaders. Several of the detainees were directly involved with the planning and execution of the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. They were captured at a time when our government feared a second wave of attacks.
Our nation’s leaders made the difficult decision to use coercive interrogation methods to learn as quickly as possible what these hardened al-Qaeda operatives knew. As one of many government lawyers who worked on these counterterrorism programs, I can attest to the terrible pressure of time and events in the months after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Knowledgeable officials expected that al-Qaeda would try again – soon – and in a more devastating fashion. But as we pause to remember the Sept. 11 attacks eight years later, fair-minded people should take heart that there has been no follow-up attack in the
Their reward is an open-ended investigation, and in some instances the disturbing reopening of cases closed by career prosecutors. Others have written about the financial ruin in store for agents and analysts whose focus will shift from the enemy to their legal bills. What has gone less well understood is what the investigation will do to the CIA as an institution at a time when it serves as the nation’s eyes and ears and, sometimes, the sword and shield, during war against a shadowy, covert enemy.
The Carter presidency serves as a warning. Attacking “
The message was clear, and as a result CIA agents became risk-averse. After all, if you might be fired or prosecuted for doing something, the safest thing to do is nothing.
The effects of this decimation of our intelligence capabilities continue. The intelligence agencies failed to stop the 9/11 attacks and do not appear to have penetrated al-Qaeda’s leadership. As the Silberman-Robb Commission reported in 2005, the intelligence community’s estimates on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were almost totally mistaken. The cause was not political pressure, according to the commission, but the CIA’s lack of spies in
Even the most fervent antiwar activists should welcome an effective intelligence service. If the CIA had accurately judged
All intelligence involves probabilities and educated guesses, but effective intelligence can actually provide the information needed to avoid costly wars.
Henry L. Stimson, secretary of state under President Herbert Hoover, once explained the shuttering of the
Persecuting the CIA risks another surprise attack or major intelligence failure.
[John Yoo (jyoo@law.berkeley.edu), a former Bush administration Justice Department official, teaches law at the