Nancy Pelosi Can't Keep Her Stories Straight

Most parties involved, except Nancy Pelosi herself, now says that she was thoroughly briefed on the design and employment of enhanced interrogation techniques (or torture if you prefer), and that she should have understood that fact (makes you wonder why she was on the Intelligence Committee if she couldn't understand a briefing by the intelligence community, but that's a separate issue). If she truly believed this to be an immoral action, even if she didn't quite grasp the fact that we had already used waterboarding, she should have objected. It would have been her moral duty as a senior leader. Now she's just burying herself in excuses.

According to ABC: 'ABC News’ Rick Klein reports: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was briefed on the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” on terrorist suspect Abu Zubaydah in September 2002, according to a report prepared by the Director of National Intelligence’s office and obtained by ABC News. The report, submitted to the Senate Intelligence Committee and other Capitol Hill officials Wednesday, appears to contradict Pelosi’s statement last month that she was never told about the use of waterboarding or other special interrogation tactics. Instead, she has said, she was told only that the Bush administration had legal opinions that would have supported the use of such techniques. The report details a Sept. 4, 2002 meeting between intelligence officials and Pelosi, then-House intelligence committee chairman Porter Goss, and two aides. At the time, Pelosi was the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee.'

The NYT reports that: 'The new chart of briefings, prepared by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the first full listing of briefings, appears to call into question the assertion of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that she was never told that waterboarding and other methods were used, only that the Central Intelligence Agency believed they were legal and could be used.'

I and many others wrote extensively about Porter Goss' editorial in the Washington Post stating clearly that he and others understood the briefings, and that Pelosi was derelict in her duty (or deficient in her comprehension - which is worse I wonder?) in not stating any objections at the time. Will Pelosi own up and take ownership or will she just keep finding excuses? I'm betting on the latter - she has no courage for the first.

Hypocrisy at its Shining Best

There are times when Charles Krauthammer is at best supercilious and at worst self-absorbed, but his May 1 article, 'Pelosi: Utterly Contemptible' is the Krauthammer at his best. It's a hard-hitting look at the hypocrisy and double-dealing in Congress (particularly within the Speaker's office) over the 'torture memos' and push to investigate those involved.

Did it work? The current evidence is fairly compelling. George Tenet said that the "enhanced interrogation" program alone yielded more information than everything gotten from "the FBI, the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency put together."

Michael Hayden, CIA director after waterboarding had been discontinued, writes (with former Attorney General Michael Mukasey) that "as late as 2006 ... fully half of the government's knowledge about the structure and activities of al-Qaeda came from those interrogations." Even Dennis Blair, Obama's director of national intelligence, concurs that these interrogations yielded "high value information." So much for the lazy, mindless assertion that torture never works. ...

... Today Pelosi protests "we were not -- I repeat -- were not told that waterboarding or any other of these other enhanced interrogation methods were used." She imagines that this distinction between past and present, Clintonian in its parsing, is exonerating.

On the contrary. It is self-indicting. If you are told about torture that has already occurred, you might justify silence on the grounds that what's done is done and you are simply being used in a post-facto exercise to cover the CIA's rear end. The time to protest torture, if you really are as outraged as you now pretend to be, is when the CIA tells you what it is planning to do "in the future."

Krauthammer is dead on the money in this case. Rep. Pelosi is a perfect example of the CYA culture in Washington. The one where all principles are up for sale, even patriotism, and when the fact that they were sold cheap is exposed, blame someone else. I lean toward the argument, expressed in the opening paragraphs of the article, that there are unique exceptions that would permit torture for very specific goals. However, I can respect disagreement on this issue, and wouldn't condemn an opposing view. If one takes that opposing view however, it's important to ensure that one maintains it as a consistent principle. Pelosi sold out, pure and simple. She's been caught with her pants down, and now it's someone else's fault that she didn't understand future possibility versus present (apparently she skipped the lectures in school on verb tense). Krauthammer has the right of it here as well, holding Pelosi responsible for not doing everything she could to stop the CIA and the administration if she believed so strongly that these methods were absolutely and always wrong. Instead, she offered support and greater funding. She's not a liberal - she's simply a sellout.

UPDATE - Porter Goss: No Cover from the Obama Administration

UPDATE 2: Porter Goss published a damning OpEd in the Washington Post this morning. In it he explicitly condemns members of Congress (no doubt, he was particularly referencing Pelosi) for convenient memories.
In the fall of 2002, while I was chairman of the House intelligence committee, senior members of Congress were briefed on the CIA's "High Value Terrorist Program," including the development of "enhanced interrogation techniques" and what those techniques were. This was not a one-time briefing but an ongoing subject with lots of back and forth between those members and the briefers. ... Today, I am slack-jawed to read that members claim to have not understood that the techniques on which they were briefed were to actually be employed; or that specific techniques such as "waterboarding" were never mentioned. It must be hard for most Americans of common sense to imagine how a member of Congress can forget being told about the interrogations of Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed. In that case, though, perhaps it is not amnesia but political expedience. ... The chairs and the ranking minority members of the House and Senate intelligence committees, known as the Gang of Four, were briefed that the CIA was holding and interrogating high-value terrorists.

The Congressional leadership needs to 'man-up,' now, before their own words and deeds are released by name for the public to examine. Those in glass houses need to be careful of what they throw.

UPDATE 1: To further illustrate the confused message coming from the administration, read both the President's call on the CIA to change their wicked ways, and his assurance to the agency that its members have his full support.

ABCs Jake Tapper published an article yesterday in which he cited a number of current and former CIA officers who shared their concerns that the Obama Administration is now on a path that leaves them exposed and 'without cover.' A former lawyer for the agency, Mark Lowenthal was one of the sources:

"We ask these people to do extremely dangerous things, things they've been ordered to do by legal authorities, with the understanding that they will get top cover if something goes wrong," Lowenthal says. "They don't believe they have that cover anymore." Releasing the photographs "will make it much worse," he said.

Even though President Obama has announced that the Justice Department will not prosecute CIA officers who were operating within the four corners of what they'd been told was the law, Lowenthal says members of the CIA are worried. "They feel exposed already, and this is going to increase drumbeat for an investigation or a commission" to explore detainee treatment during the Bush years, he said. "It's going to make it much harder to resist, and they fear they're then going to be thrown over."

The officers have good reason to fear this, if history is any guide. The Washington Examiner related the story of Ted Olson, who provided legal advice to President Reagan. Olson became the subject of a long-running independent counsel investigation for providing legal advice that later became politically unpopular among members of Congress. The investigation took up years of his life, went nowhere in the long run, and damaged his reputation. There's a great danger that the current thirst for 'truth' turns to a thirst for vengeance. Persecuting those who did their jobs believing their actions to be legally correct and acceptable, and possibly endangering members of the military and intelligence communities who are currently deployed when further exposures are made, is irresponsible at best. Giving a pep talk to Langley won't reassure officers who have done a dangerous job for years, and expected to be covered by the White House, no matter who holds the presidency.

The way that the administration seems to be handling this issue has, at times, appeared almost schizophrenic. Stephen Hayes exposed some of the confusion in the recent edition of The Weekly Standard. The gravest concern raised in his article is not the apparent internal debate in the administration, and between various factions of the Democratic Party, but rather than selective leaking of the memos and possible investigations, will be only for political gain. That possibility should concern any citizen.