Natalie Gonnella
With this week's raid on Osama bin Laden's Pakistan compound, conservatives are again calling on President Obama to ask Eric Holder and the Department of Justice to drop their current review of CIA operatives and the use of force in post 9/11 interrogation techniques.
Although the administration has so far refused, politicians and pundits alike are urging the President and the Attorney General to rethink their previous decision to reinvestigate the case, which has dragged on since August 2009 (the originally review was previously closed in 2007 under the Bush administration).
Here's a look at what a number of conservatives had to say this week about the issue:
In an interview with Fox News Sunday, former Vice President Dick Cheney said of the situation:
It's unfortunate. These men deserve to be decorated. They don't deserve to be prosecuted...And, now, we're in a situation where the Obama administration won't abide by the findings of the career lawyer who checked it out originally in the first place, but they have kept it open and refused to close it….I'm saying it is an outrage that we would go after the people who deserve the credit for keeping us safe for 7 1/2 years. And that these men -- all devoted, capable officials -- shouldn't have to look over their shoulder and worry that if they follow the orders of this president to carry out this interrogation program, that at some point down the road, when there's a change in policy, that they can expect to be prosecuted. It's a terrible precedent.
In a short blog post via NRO's The Corner, Mona Charen weighed in on the issue with the following questions:
Here is what President Obama needs to be asked:
You authorized a risky operation to find and kill Osama bin Laden. Following your orders, a SEAL team shot him through the eye and the chest. Imagine that your successor is an even more left-wing Democrat than you are. Or imagine that he/she is a libertarian. Either might assert that the operation violated the law in some way. Would you approve of a Justice Department investigation into the actions of the SEALs? Do you think it be okay if, under the next administration, they will be obliged to hire lawyers and worry about their own and the their families’ futures? If not, will you instruct Eric Holder to call off the dogs who are currrently investigating the CIA for interrogating the terrorists who led you to Osama bin Laden?
Speaking with Fox News, Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee Mike Rogers commented
You can't have it both ways...You can't have the attorney general prosecuting CIA interrogators, by the way, who may have gotten information that may have aided in catching Usama bin Laden...It just doesn't make any sense to me
Prospective 2012 contender and former Senator Rick Santorum, during an interview with Sean Hannity, said of the the investigations:
[This] tells you this president doesn't understand what it takes to defend America. His greatest foreign policy success was because of a president who understood what it takes to fight an asymmetric threat, this terroristic threat, and that you have to use the means to combat that. We are not in a conventional military battle where you can use conventional means. This president is making decisions like this one that is not going to keep us safe in the future.
In his weekly WSJ column, Dan Henninger wrote:
As the whole of America takes a bin Laden victory lap, let us pause to remember some of this celebrated event’s most forgotten men: the Central Intelligence Agency officers who sit under the cloud of a criminal investigation begun in 2009 by Attorney General Eric Holder into their interrogations of captured terrorists.
That’s right, the Americans whose interrogation of al Qaeda operatives may have put in motion the death of this mass murderer may themselves face prosecution by the country they were trying to protect.
It is time for the Holder CIA investigation to end. The death of bin Laden 10 years after 9/11 makes the Holder investigation of the CIA interrogators politically, emotionally and morally moot.
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