One might have thought, given his purported war epiphany, that Holder would prioritize the valid laws designed to protect Americans from jihadists over the invalid non-laws designed to protect Democrats from losing their congressional majority.

The CIA’s remaining enhanced techniques remain classified. As the Times elaborates, top current and former intelligence officials are energetically lobbying to keep it that way.

They are being beaten back, however, by Holder and his staffers. Carrying the water for congressional Democrats beholden to the antiwar Left, they would release the memos on the theory that, since President Obama has limited coercion to the benign tactics in the Army Field M...

One might have thought, given his purported war epiphany, that Holder would prioritize the valid laws designed to protect Americans from jihadists over the invalid non-laws designed to protect Democrats from losing their congressional majority.

The CIA’s remaining enhanced techniques remain classified. As the Times elaborates, top current and former intelligence officials are energetically lobbying to keep it that way.

They are being beaten back, however, by Holder and his staffers. Carrying the water for congressional Democrats beholden to the antiwar Left, they would release the memos on the theory that, since President Obama has limited coercion to the benign tactics in the Army Field Manual (AFM), enhanced measures are no longer authorized; thus, the argument goes, there can be no harm in exposing them.

From a national-security perspective, this is absurd.If that is true, it is by no means clear that some of those methods have outlived their usefulness. But even if that were not the case, we know that al-Qaeda and other accomplished terror groups teach interrogation resistance — just as our military subjects some of its own members to waterboarding (despite claims that it is torture) for counter-interrogation training. If we understand we are at war, why would we help our enemies? The point of these intelligence interrogations is to thwart terrorist attacks and save lives. Why would we describe for terrorists the enhanced tactics we have used, knowing they will train against those tactics — secure in the knowledge that, by learning to resist them, they will perfect their ability to defeat the milder methods we are using?

As Holder well knows, tactics do not have to be disclosed in order to ensure that we are behaving humanely. Acting in good faith and with appropriate congressional review, legal and intelligence officials can strike a balance absent a public airing that can only make our enemies more efficient at killing us.