Opinion

TONE DEAF ON TERROR

If nothing else, President Obama’s decision to overrule his own intelligence officials and release Bush-era legal memos justifying what The New York Times sanctimoniously described as the CIA’s “brutal” interrogation techniques proves what a bunch of pushovers we Americans are.

Al Qaeda kidnaps Americans, tortures them, then decapitates them on TV.

We deprive captives of sleep, push them into walls and put harmless caterpillars that we say are poisonous in their cells.

Then we’re the ones who are condemned as the worst human-rights violators on the planet.

To be sure, Obama did promise that no one who undertook such practices would be prosecuted — though he pointedly refused to make such guarantees for those who authorized the work.

It took literally minutes before Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Pat Leahy (D-Vt.) was demanding a South Africa-style “truth commission” to probe such techniques. And the ACLU, whose lawsuit provoked the memos’ release, wants a special prosecutor appointed.

The White House insisted Obama “thought very long and hard” about releasing the memos as he tried to balance “the impact on national security” with “his belief in transparency.”

Sad to say, national security lost out.

Or, as former Attorney General Michael Mukasey and ex-CIA Director Michael Hayden argued in a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece, the net “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.”

In fact, as they also noted, these techniques worked — and yielded information that not only led to the arrest of al Qaeda leaders Khalid Sheik Mohammed and Ramzi bin al Shibh, but also disrupted numerous terrorist plots aimed at both America and Europe.

So why did Obama feel the need to release these memos, which spell out in excruciating detail the limits of past US resolve to protect the homeland?

As National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair tellingly noted, the memos were written as the CIA was trying to prevent a repeat of 9/11 — a task at which the Bush administration notably succeeded.

Still, he added, “those methods, read on a bright, sunny, safe day in April 2009, appear graphic and disturbing.”

There you go: The dark post-9/11 days are gone and everything is “bright, sunny [and] safe.” America no longer needs such techniques because there is no more threat, no more terrorism.

We hope and pray that Obama & Co. will not be forced to eat those words.