In politics, you don’t have friends. You have enemies, opponents and collaborators, nut nobody is your friend. If you believe you have friends, you may end up with a knife in your back. The CIA might be feeling a sharp blade now.
People in Washington are now asking if Diane Feinstein has gone over to the dark side. Some people now things that she has become the latest talking head for the Obama administration, possibly even the new Manchurian candidate.
Last Thursday night on Newsmax TV’s “The Steve Malzberg Show,” political strategist Mary Matalin spoke about the hypocrisy of California’s senior senator, Diane Feinstein and her ranting against the CIA. Senator Feinstein, a Democrat, is a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Matalin says Feinstein has lost her way, because she wants to declassify a top secret report of Bush-era interrogation tactics. Feinstein suggest this declassification would “ensure that an un-American, brutal program of detention and interrogation will never again be considered or permitted.”
Feinstein is adamant about making the 6,000 page document public, according to Politico, a complete turnaround for Feinstein, who normally wants to keep such intelligence quiet. Matalin says she is perplexed with the Senator’s 180 degree turn.
“It would be laughable if it wasn’t so despicable,” Matalin said. She says Feinstein was fully aware and used to be fully supportive of the tactics used in the committee’s report. It should be noted that Matalin is a former adviser to the George W. Bush administration.
“This is way beyond hypocrisy. This is blatant, overt fabrication. She was there, everybody approved of it, everybody knew of it,” Matalin said. Senator Feinstein was the Bush administration’s critical contact in the Senate for coordination of Homeland Security information before and after 9/11. As Matalin put it, “She knows the information, she knows the lives that were saved and she knows the plots that have been thwarted.”
We have been told that the tactics used to obtain information from captured al Qaida fighters, the so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques,” were critical in the interrogation of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. We were told that information ultimately led to the successful SEAL commando raid on Osama Bin Laden’s Pakistan hideout.
Matalin says she thinks the CIA report is part of an elaborate Democratic strategy to rally the Democratic base before the midterm elections. “What’s super-despicable about this is these Democrats, for their own political purposes, for this midterm, are attacking the very public servants, our security professionals, who cannot defend themselves or will not defend themselves because they fear declassifying their rebuttal would compromise sources and methods,” Matalin said.
The former Bush strategist, reflecting on Senator Feinstein and her sudden change of position, while Democrats are down and in need of some supporting news, said “I’d say it’s worse than emotion, it’s something inexplicable and does not comport with her known reputation. It’s really sad.”
This is not the first time Feinstein has attacked the CIA recently. She approved of the CIA and NSA spying on Americans, but not when they spied on her.
There are many questions. Did Feinstein come to this position on her own because of some real concern? Did Democrat strategists formulate this idea as a way to use it to attack George W. Bush and by inference Republicans? If they did, it is a long stretch, because Feinstein and other democrats not only knew this, they approved of it.
