Spies Come Out to Criticize Memos' Release

WASHINGTON, April 25, 2009— -- The debate over the interrogation memos is so intense that now even the spies are speaking up.

Former Bush CIA chief Porter Goss said in an op-ed published today in the Washington Post, that the Obama administration had "crossed the line" by releasing the memos.

"We can't have a secret intelligence service, if we keep giving away all the secrets," he wrote.

Goss excoriates lawmakers who say they were never given a full and clear picture about the interrogation tactics the CIA was considering using against high value terrorist suspects in U.S. detention.

"In the fall of 2002, while I was chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, senior members of Congress were briefed on the CIA's 'high value terrorist program,' including the development of 'enhanced interrogation techniques' and what those techniques were," he wrote.

"Today, I am slack-jawed to read that members claim to have not understood that the techniques on which they were briefed were to actually be employed; or that specific techniques such as 'waterboarding' were never mentioned," Goss' op-ed continued. "It must be hard for most Americans of common sense to imagine how a member of Congress can forget being told about the interrogations of Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed. In that case, though, perhaps it is not amnesia but political expedience."

Other former CIA officials have also spoken out against the Obama administratin's decision to release the memos, saying it has put intelligence gathering operations at risk and demoralized the agency writ large.

"People in the intelligence community have the sense that they're really not being backed up, that this administration is not really giving them their cover that they feel they need," former intelligence officer Mark Lowenthal said.

And it has put former agents like Mike Scheuer, the former head of the CIA unit in charge of tracking Osama bin Laden, on the defensive.

"The real problem for a lot of the officers who were involved in this, including myself, was we were very certain that the interrogation procedures procured information that was worth having," he said.