Enhanced interrogation techniques utilized by the Bush Administration produced vital information about our nation’s biggest enemies and their activities, President Obama’s Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair announced in a memo. The New York Times reports:

President Obama’s national intelligence director told colleagues in a private memo last week that the harsh interrogation techniques banned by the White House did produce significant information that helped the nation in its struggle with terrorists.

“High value information came from interrogations in which those methods were used and provided a deeper understanding of the al Qa’ida organization that was attacking this country,” Adm. Dennis C. Blair, the intelligence director, wrote in a memo to his staff last Thursday.

Admiral Blair sent his memo on the same day the administration publicly released secret Bush administration legal memos authorizing the use of interrogation methods that the Obama White House has deemed to be illegal torture. Among other things, the Bush administration memos revealed that two captured Qaeda operatives were subjected to a form of near-drowning known as waterboarding a total of 266 times.

Oh, and the memo released by the Obama Administration last week? Yeah, it appears that some crucial information was coincidentally left out.

Admiral Blair’s assessment that the interrogation methods did produce important information was deleted from a condensed version of his memo released to the media last Thursday. Also deleted was a line in which he empathized with his predecessors who originally approved some of the harsh tactics after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

“I like to think I would not have approved those methods in the past,” he wrote, “but I do not fault those who made the decisions at that time, and I will absolutely defend those who carried out the interrogations within the orders they were given.”

So the Obama Administration was attempting to cover up the fact that the enhanced interrogation techniques produced vital information even according to its own Director of National Intelligence. How exactly does this fit with Obama’s “new era of transparency” rhetoric? It doesn’t, of course. But that was nothing more than old platitudes about accountability in the first place. The present administration could give a rat’s posterior about transparency or truth.
Via Hot Air.