The head of Bush’s WMD terrorism unit is on HuffPo tonight warning us it’s too dangerous to prosecute torturers

Saying he is against torture and supported Obama, Charles Faddis says that “initiating this inquiry, directed as it is at serving CIA officers in the field, is a disaster.”

There are two problems with that statement. First, the CIA officers calling shots from Langley under direct orders from the White House. Torture decisions were made by amateur torture “experts” at the behest of political appointees. And they started before they even had a presidential directive.

Second: as a result of torture prosecutions, the only thing CIA officers will become more “cautious” on is torture, and that is not a bad thing.

Every soldier is indoctrinated in the Law of Land Warfare in basic training. Following an illegal order (“torture the prisoners”) is illegal, and soldiers cannot use it as a defense.

The same rule applies here: they knew it was wrong, and they did it anyway.

After being disingenuous, Faddis tries to stoke fear in his readers. Saying the agency is in need of overhaul, he invokes Cheneyesque imagery:

We should be pursuing all of this with the sense of urgency that the world situation demands, moving now, before a group releases the plague in Washington or detonates a nuclear device in Manhattan.

Here’s the Amazon blurb for Faddis’s forthcoming book:

Charles Faddis, co-author of Operation Hotel California, offers gritty, hair-raising stories about the CIA, which has devolved into a giant bureaucracy of ass-coverers and careerists – not the kind of people you want in charge of preventing another 9/11. He discusses the birth of the CIA (then called the OSS) after an earlier Day of Infamy (12/7) under “Wild Bill” Donovan, the 20th-century American father of spy-craft, and how it works from the inside out, and why things have gone awry. In the face of threats that are multiplying and becoming increasingly complex, he tells why we need an effective CIA and how to go about building one.

I’m going to hazard a wild guess and say Faddis is the CIA agent other agents find annoying.