The 2007 Washington Post article recalling Nacy Pelosi's 2002 briefings on harsh interrogation techniques and other details of the government's counter-terrorism strategy has been revisited in recent days, in response to administration and congressional Democrats' preening on torture becoming ever more shrill and dishonest.
Pelosi is now said to be "pushing back" on accusations she was fully briefed on the programs in 2002 and 2003 , and today Bret Stephens suggests an amnesia defense might make more sense than the story she's trying to spin this week.
Maybe, for instance, the speaker doesn't remember that in September 2002, as ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, she was one of four members of Congress who were briefed by the CIA about the interrogation methods the agency was using on leading detainees. "For more than an hour," the Washington Post reported in 2007, "the bipartisan group . . . was given a virtual tour of the CIA's overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk."Among the techniques described," the story continued, "was waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill. But on that day, no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder."
Former CIA Director Porter Goss can't believe what he's hearing from the Speaker.
Noemie Emery says "let the hearings begin". Permit me a longish excerpt and then go read the rest. From the top...
Some Democrats, from the White House on down, are pushing the idea of a "truth commission," Ã la South Africa, to deal with the "harsh measures" used by the Bush administration in interrogating al Qaeda detainees. Good. Let's have lots of truthtelling. Please bring it on.Let's tell the truth about Bush's conduct of the war on terror, which is that it's been a success. His ultimate legacy hasn't been written--Iraq is improved, but not out of danger--but the one thing that can be said without reservation is that the country was kept safe. He delivered on the main charge of his office in time of emergency, in a crisis without guidelines or precedent. Attacks took place in Spain, and in London, in Indonesia and India, but not on American soil, which was the obvious target of choice. Bush couldn't say this before he left office, for obvious reasons, and after he left, attention switched to the new president. This little fact dropped down the memory hole, but with all this discussion, it will rise to the surface. Let the hearings begin!
Also dropped down the memory hole--along with the names of all the Democrats who thought Saddam was a menace who cried out for removal--is what the ambience was like in late 2001 and 2002, when fears of anthrax and suitcase bombs ran rampant, and people on all sides tried to seem tough. Let's tell the truth about all the liberals who went on record supporting real torture, not to
mention the Democrats in Congress, when it was cool to want to seem tough on our enemies, who couldn't be too warlike. Then war and tough measures stopped being cool, and "world opinion" became more important. Nothing like statements under oath to revive ancient memories! And rewind the tapes.Let's get at the truth too about the word "torture," which to different people, means different things. Some think "torture" means standing on the 98th floor of a burning skyscraper and realizing you have a choice between jumping and being incinerated. Some think torture is being crushed when a building implodes around you. Some think torture is not thinking you might drown for several minutes, but looking at burning buildings on television and knowing that people you love are inside them. They remember that being crushed, incinerated, or killed in a jump from the 98th story happened to almost 3,000 blameless Americans (as well as a number of foreigners), and that 125 Pentagon employees were killed at their desks, while many survivors suffered terrible burns. They think the choice between stopping this from happening again by slapping around or scaring the hell out of a cluster of brigands, or leaving the brigands alone and letting it happen again, is a no-brainer.
Always must reading is Andy McCarthy...
The president is reeling because he sees his legislative agenda going up in smoke. In his inexperience, he reckoned that his base on the Left would somehow be sated by the mere disclosure of Bush-era methods, coupled with vague assurances that a day of reckoning for Bush administration officials might soon be at hand. His Republican opposition, he further figured, would be cowed by his moral preening on “torture.†This, he concluded, would mean smooth sailing ahead for the more pressing business of nationalizing the economy, starting with the health-care industry.But as George W. Bush might have warned his successor, anti-American ideologues are emboldened, not mollified, by concessions. The Left doesn’t want Bush officials exposed — they want blood, and anything less than that will be cause for revolt. Simultaneously, Obama has raised the ire of the Right. In his solipsism, the president failed to foresee that the “torture†memos — memos that, as Rich Lowry shows, in fact document an assiduous effort to avoid torture — would not support his overblown rhetoric or substantiate the allegations of misconduct raised by politicized leaks from the International Committee of the Red Cross. Critics were not cowed. That, combined with Obama’s disingenuous strategy of exposing our tactics while suppressing the trove of intelligence they produced, ensured that the Right would push back aggressively.
So now the president has chaos on his hands and no one but himself to blame for it. From the Left’s perspective, he has validated their war-crimes allegations. You can’t expect to do that and then just say, “never mind.â€
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However unintentionally, Obama has invited an accounting. Vice President Dick Cheney has lent his still-powerful voice to the push for disclosure of the intelligence produced by the CIA interrogations, and that push is not going away, either. You can’t have an accounting with half the facts — the more important half — missing.
UPDATE 4/28:
William McGurn in the WSJ:
Over the past few years, the Democrats have moved to ban waterboarding only when it was clear that such a bill would not pass -- or would be vetoed by George W. Bush. In September 2006, Sen. Edward Kennedy introduced an amendment to the Military Commissions Act that would have effectively defined waterboarding as a war crime, and it was defeated largely along partisan lines. In February 2008, when Democrats were in control of Congress, they made a big fuss about sending a bill that would have limited interrogation to techniques found in the Army field manual. They did so knowing President Bush would veto it, and that he had the votes to sustain that veto.Today the Democrats have an even larger majority -- plus a president who would sign such legislation. So why the call for a truth commission instead? The answer is a nasty one: If Congress made waterboarding illegal now, they would be making clear that it was not illegal before.
And more today from Andy McCarthy - A Dishonest Debate:
What is going on beneath President Obama’s theatrics about “our values†(again, meaning his values) is a cynical farce. If our values were really at stake, if there were a consensus among us (i.e., Americans) that harsh interrogation tactics could never be justified, the Democrat-controlled Congress would outlaw them today and bask in the resulting adulation. But there is no such legislation, because the goal here has nothing to do with improving American policy.The goal is vengeance, pure and simple.
What the Left wants is the previous administration in handcuffs. Their fantasy is to put President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, and Attorney General Gonzales on trial. (The CIA director should be in there, too, but George Tenet is inconvenient: a Democrat, a Clinton holdover, and an architect of extraordinary rendition, the Clinton-era policy under which alien terrorists were kidnapped and transferred to torture countries.) Leftists sense that the whole enchilada, at least for now, is beyond their reach. For present purposes, there are proxies aplenty: Bush Justice Department, Pentagon, and White House lawyers.
The Left would turn the ruinous, career-destroying machinery of criminal investigation against former government officials who, acting under an obligation to protect the United States, labored day and night over the vexing legal challenges of modern international terrorism. These lawyers never employed a single coercive tactic themselves; they professionally evaluated the legal viability of such tactics. Democrats would place these public servants in legal jeopardy, and send a paralyzing message to current and future national-security officials, for the offense of concluding that U.S. interrogation tactics were not against the law. That was, it should be reiterated, precisely the same conclusion that led Ted Kennedy to propose a change in the law, and the same conclusion that enabled Nancy Pelosi and other top Democrats to encourage the CIA when congressional leaders were exhaustively briefed about the interrogation program in 2002 and 2003.
Peter Wehner - Morality and Enhanced Interrogation Techniques
Posted by dan at April 27, 2009 10:51 PM