Ex-Va. Gov. Gilmore: Congress Must Give Guidelines on Intel

There is no excuse if the CIA misled Congress on enhanced interrogation of terrorist detainees, says Jim Gilmore, Virginia's former Republican governor. Gilmore, who has worked in the realm of intelligence during parts of his public career, also said that Congress is at fault for never laying out guidelines for the rules of intelligence gathering.

Gilmore spoke to Newsmax Tuesday hours after the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence unveiled its scathing report on Bush-era interrogation techniques of terrorist detainees 10 years ago.

Along with serving as a U.S. Army intelligence officer stationed in Germany, the Virginian was chairman of the Congressional Advisory Panel to Assess Domestic Capabilities for Terrorism Involving Weapons of Mass Destruction. Commonly known as the "Gilmore Commission" and staffed by the Rand Corporation, the panel studied terrorism from 1999-2003 and presented five reports to Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

"There are lots of different reactions to the report today," said Gilmore, referring to Senate report concluding the CIA engaged in torture and never gathered any "life or death" information from detainees.

If it is true that the CIA under Bush-era Director Michael Hayden "kept Congress in the dark a decade ago regarding the interrogation of prisoners," Gilmore told us, "it is totally wrong. There is no excuse for misleading Congress."

But, citing recent statements from Attorney General Eric Holder, the former prosecutor and onetime attorney general of Virginia said prosecutions of anyone involved in the alleged torture a decade ago "are highly unlikely."

In condemning misrepresentation to Congress by the intelligence community as well as torture itself ("We yield the high ground when we do that"), Gilmore did point out that the intelligence operatives "have not gotten any serious guidance from Congress as to what is proper and what isn’t.

"The Senate Intelligence Committee has not determined if everyone was following their guidance because, to my knowledge, they never spelled out any guidance."

Making the dos and don'ts of intelligence gathering public, however, is dangerous according to Gilmore. In so doing, he told us, "It's telling the enemy one less thing we'll do to them. And in terrorists such as al Qaida and ISIS, we are facing an enemy who has said that the entire population of the U.S. are civilian combatants and fair game for attack.

"This is more a war on civilians than anything, very much like that the Russians waged against us in the Cold War. And the enemy today are as ugly and dirty as the Russians were in the days of the Soviet Union."

Although Gilmore believes the Senate report should be "carefully evaluated" to determine if domestic statutes or if the Geneva convention for treatment of prisoners were violated, "we should never forget that the intelligence community is our first line of defense in a different kind of war, much like the Cold War was. And we should never forget a real war is coming and we had better be prepared."

John Gizzi is chief political columnist and White House correspondent for Newsmax.