You may recall that Michael Hayden, Bush's CIA chief, and the former head of the NSA, once explained away his illegal domestic eavesdropping by saying that had he followed the law, it would have required him to present his case and to fill out "paperwork." Now Mr. Hayden is - surprise surprise - criticizing Obama for telling our enemies that we don't do torture. Hayden explains:
"What we have described for our enemies in the midst of a war are the outer limits that any American would ever go to in terms of interrogating an al Qaeda terrorist. That's very valuable information," Hayden said during an appearance on "Fox News Sunday."Yeah, that's cute. Except that the US agreed a long time ago that torture was off the table. And even John McCain is opposed to torture. But of course, Hayden has a more personal reason for opposing the release of information pertaining to the torture of foreign prisoners. Mr. Hayden, I suspect, isn't very interested in spending the rest of his life in some foreign prison as a war criminal.
"By taking [certain] techniques off the table, we have made it more difficult -- in a whole host of circumstances I can imagine -- for CIA officers to defend the nation," he said.
