Good Monday! The start of a new work week. Time to get busy, shift a few paradigms, revolutionize outside the box, send some kudos faxblasts. How ’bout a beer?
Seems as if all those Democrats ponitificating about waterboarding, well, you know, knew about it. And approved of it
In September 2002, four members of Congress met in secret for a first look at a unique CIA program designed to wring vital information from reticent terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. For more than an hour, the bipartisan group, which included current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), 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, said two officials present, 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, two U.S. officials said.
“The briefer was specifically asked if the methods were tough enough,” said a U.S. official who witnessed the exchange.
Congressional leaders from both parties would later seize on waterboarding as a symbol of the worst excesses of the Bush administration’s counterterrorism effort. The CIA last week admitted that videotape of an interrogation of one of the waterboarded detainees was destroyed in 2005 against the advice of Justice Department and White House officials, provoking allegations that its actions were illegal and the destruction was a coverup.
I would dearly like to know who asked if the methods were tough enough, perhaps we will get some confirmation this week on that point.
With one known exception, no formal objections were raised by the lawmakers briefed about the harsh methods during the two years in which waterboarding was employed, from 2002 to 2003, said Democrats and Republicans with direct knowledge of the matter. The lawmakers who held oversight roles during the period included Pelosi and Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) and Sens. Bob Graham (D-Fla.) and John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), as well as Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.) and Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan).
And, then, Democrats seized upon waterboarding, after it had already been abandoned, as a means of assaulting the Bush administration. If only they would go after the Islamic extremists with the same vigor. Of course, the two seem to be on the same side.
Over at Instapundit: Reader Joseph Beaulieu has a difficult question for Pelosi, et al., on waterboarding: “If it was an acceptable practice five years ago, when the world was a more dangerous place, then what has happened in the past five years to make the world a less dangerous place where such harsh methods are no longer necessary?”
Captain Ed: That doesn’t settle the question as to whether waterboarding constitutes torture, but it certainly calls into question the notion that politics has nothing to do with the debate.
Bryan at Hot Air: Notice what else Pelosi knew about: The CIA’s so-called black sites where terrorists were being held overseas. And she did not object.
A cruise through the left-o-sphere, via Memeorandum, finds that most of the left are upset with Democrats for approving waterboarding of people directly associated with the group that, you know, killed 3,000 of our friends and neighbors. But, here are a few that have gone stark raving loony
AMERICAblog, whose post is entitled “Did Bush approve CIA leak to embarrass Pelosi?” It’s pretty clear that either one of the Republican members of Congress at the meeting, or the CIA, decided to leak what happened at a super-classified post-9/11 briefing in order to embarrass Pelosi and the Democrats. And I don’t doubt for a minute that Bush approved the leak, as he always does.
The conspiracy theory lives at Crooks and Liars, though, sadly, no mention of Karl Rove: When I first read this report, I admit that I got angry. Then I got smart. Look carefully at the names named in this report. Isn’t it interesting that the WaPo reporters made sure to point out the Democrats in attendance when Congress was still operating under a Republican majority? Hmmm….who do you suppose could have leaked this story to the press to perhaps deflect from their own negative stories? Â
Open Left thinks we went nuts after the minor issue of 9.11: Nevertheless, our collective failures, and Nancy Pelosi’s specific moral albatross, is to address this country’s use of torture. We keep 2 million people in prison, in violent conditions where many of them are tortured, and we do it because it makes a certain fear-based lifestyle easier to manage. Atoning for our moment of overt lunacy in 2002 means acknowledging where it came from, and working to build a different society.
Maybe I should have made this post part of the Prozac Diaries series instead of Beer Monday?
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