Funny thing... Nobody believes Pelosi did any torturing or ordering up of any torturing. But the press smells blood so the pack is baying and running her to ground. The press has lost sight of the crime and "who dunnit". Instead they are off on the gripping personal tale of Pelosi and her fumbling under pressure.
Republican spin-meisters gleefully enjoy their handiwork. Focus is off the Bush administration and its orders to torture. Instead, the media is consumed with the he-said-she-said drama of Pelosi claiming that in a secret CIA briefing she wasn't fully and honestly briefed on torture.
Who cares? Does anybody really remember exactly what was said or not said in some meeting seven years ago? Is this a topic that should be headlined? Is the real issue
- a question of memories recalled
- the US had a policy of torture instigated by the executive branch, justified by Bush's legal team, and executed both by the CIA and by the military.
The test is simple: if you were seized by an enemy and subject to this, would you say "I was tortured!" or would you say, well, it was reasonable because these people were simply using "enhanced interrogation techniques" to see what useful information they could extract from me. I dare any of those red-blooded patriots to stand up and make the ridiculous claim that these techniques are not torture.
Maureen Dowd nails down the essentials of this case in her NY Times op-ed. Here are some key bits:
Nancy Pelosi’s bad week of blithering responses about why she did nothing after being briefed on torture has given Republicans one of their happiest — and harpy-est — weeks in a long time. They relished casting Pelosi as contemptible for not fighting harder to stop their contemptible depredations against the Constitution. That’s Cheneyesque chutzpah.Quoting bits and pieces doesn't do justice to the article. Go read the whole thing.
...
Although the briefing was classified, she could have slugged it out privately with Bush officials. But she was busy trying to be the first woman to lead a major party. And very few watchdogs — in the Democratic Party or the press — were pushing back against the Bush horde in 2002 and 2003, when magazines were gushing about W. and Cheney as conquering heroes.
Leon Panetta, the new C.I.A. chief, who is Pelosi’s friend and former Democratic House colleague from California, slapped her on Friday, saying that the agency briefers were truthful. And Jon Stewart ribbed that the glossily groomed speaker was just another “Miss California U.S.A. who’s also been revealing a little too much of herself.”
It’s discomfiting to think that the woman who’s making Joe Biden seem suave is second in line to the presidency.
Of course, a lot of the hoo-ha around Pelosi makes it sound as if she knew stuff that no one else had any inkling of, when in fact the entire world had a pretty good idea of what was happening. The Bushies plied their dark arts in broad daylight.
Besides, the question of what Pelosi knew or didn’t, or when she did or didn’t know, is irrelevant to how W. and Cheney broke the law and authorized torture.
...
Ali Soufan, the ex-F.B.I. agent who flatly calls torture “ineffective,” helped get valuable information from Abu Zubaydah, an important Al Qaeda prisoner, simply by outwitting him. Torture, he told Congress, is designed to force the subject to submit “through humiliation and cruelty” and “see the interrogator as the master who controls his pain.”
It’s a good description of the bullying approach Cheney and Rummy applied to the globe, and the Arab world. But as Soufan noted, when you try to force compliance rather than elicit cooperation, it’s prone to backfire.
... the U.S. arrested a top officer in Saddam’s security force. Even though this man was an old-fashioned P.O.W., someone in Vice’s orbit reportedly suggested that the interrogations were too gentle and that waterboarding might elicit information about the fantasized connection between Osama and Saddam.
... Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former chief of staff at State, wrote that the “harsh interrogation in April and May of 2002 ... was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and Al Qaeda.”
...
I used to agree with President Obama, that it was better to keep moving and focus on our myriad problems than wallow in the darkness of the past. But now I want a full accounting.
Update 2009may17: Brad DeLong points out a curious replication by Maureen Dowd of some words by Josh Marshall:
Dowd's column today reads:Update 2009may18: Brad DeLong has more speculation and facts about the Dowd plagiarism. Personally, I think her friend cut-and-paste and Dowd then cut-and-paste. That makes sense. And for me, that is OK. I'm not as hung up over IP (Intellectual Property) rights. My view is that we are social animals and we collaboratively create. What would bother me is if Dowd was doing this on a regular basis and refusing to acknowledge the "borrowing" of ideas. So long as she is willing to admit that she got the idea second-hand from Josh Marshall, I think that is fine. Case closed for me.More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when the Bush crowd was looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq.Josh Marshall's post last week read:More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when we were looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq.
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