Democrats charged Tuesday that the CIA has released documents about congressional briefings on harsh interrogation techniques in order to deflect attention and blame away from itself.Read it here.
“I think there is so much embarrassment in some quarters [of the CIA] that people are going to try to shift some of the responsibility to others — that’s what I think,” said Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), who sat on the Senate Intelligence Committee and was briefed on interrogation techniques five times between 2006 and 2007.
Well now, this is rich. The CIA for years has been selectively leaking to advance or protect its institutional interests heedless of what harm doing so might wreak on the incumbent administration, its policies, Congress, or indeed the nation it is supposed to serve. The CIA, in short, has long been a subversive institution. So long as the Bush administration was the one being subverted Democrats gleefully took advantage of the situation and became active accomplices in the crime. Now that they are the ones being targeted they are squealing to high heaven. This goes beyond mere hypocrisy -- their acquiescence to and even promotion of CIA criminality in the past in order to gain temporary political advantage is not only despicable, it is downright dangerous. But now, the Dems have an opportunity to at least partially atone for past sins. They should come down hard and long on the CIA. Heads should roll -- lots of them -- people should go to jail, and the Veteran Intelligence Professionals should be terrorized to the point where they will never, ever, again dare to undermine the agendas and directions of their political superiors.
