Last night on the Rachel Maddow Show the issue of the briefings Nancy Pelosi and other senior Democrats received on the Bush administration’s “enhanced interrogation techniques was a major topic of the program. Pelosi has previously admitted she had received a briefing on the enhanced interrogation techniques torture practices the CIA and the military “might use” which had been declared as legal by the Bush administration’s Office of Legal Counsel, but that she was never told that torture had been, or ever would be, actually being used on terrorist suspects or other detainees.
Well, yesterday, the Washington Post printed a story citing documents they received from anonymous “Intelligence Officials” claiming that Pelosi was briefed in 2002 on the torture tactics that CIA interrogators were then using against “high value” Al Qaeda prisoners:
In a 10-page memo outlining an almost seven-year history of classified briefings, intelligence officials said that Pelosi and then-Rep. Porter Goss (R-Fla.) were the first two members of Congress ever briefed on the interrogation tactics. Then the ranking member and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, respectively, Pelosi and Goss were briefed Sept. 4, 2002, one week before the first anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
The memo, issued by the Director of National Intelligence and the Central Intelligence Agency to Capitol Hill, notes the Pelosi-Goss briefing covered “EITs including the use of EITs on Abu Zubaydah.” EIT is an acronym for enhanced interrogation technique. Zubaydah was one of the earliest valuable al-Qaeda members captured and the first to have the controversial tactic known as water boarding used against him. […]
In a carefully worded statement, Pelosi’s office said today that she had never been briefed about the use of waterboarding, only that it had been approved by Bush administration lawyers as a legal technique to use in interrogations.
“As this document shows, the Speaker was briefed only once, in September 2002. The briefers described these techniques, said they were legal, but said that waterboarding had not yet been used,” said Brendan Daly, Pelosi’s spokesman.
Pelosi’s statement did not address whether she was informed that other harsh techniques were already in use during the Zubaydah interrogations.
Of course, if Pelosi knew about the torture and did nothing (and the memo released to the Post, and her own statement in response leaves open the question of what exactly she did know), that would explain a great deal about why she unilaterally declared before and after the 2006 midterm elections that “impeachment” was off the table. Clearly, she was afraid of retaliation by Republicans regarding her own role as a recipient of classified information about administration’s use of torture. Undoubtedly, she rightly feared such disclosures would jeopardize her election as Speaker of the House. Indeed, the recent leaks about the briefings she received and her response to those leaks, makes it clear that she still feels her position as Speaker may be at risk. Her office’s mealy mouthed response says far more with respect to what it fails to deny, than what it does deny.
Even if she is being truthful that she was never told waterboarding was being used by the CIA, clearly she must have known in September of 2002 that the disclosure of such information to her didn’t occur in a vacuum. She had to know that such disclosures were intended to provide cover to the Bush administration when inevitably the torture regime they implemented became public knowledge. If the Bush administration was telling her that waterboarding had been approved, the only possible inference a reasonable person could have drawn at that time was that waterboarding (and other abusive “techniques” described to her) would be employed by the CIA if they hadn’t been used already. A sophisticated politician such as Pelosi cannot legitimately argue her own naivete regarding the Bushies intentions as an excuse. Especially in light of the public propaganda campaign then being rolled out by the administration to justify a war with Iraq, she had to have known that Bush and Cheney would be pulling put all the stops to link Al Qaeda with Saddam in the minds of the public, and if that meant using torture to elicit false or misleading confessions of an Al Qaeda-Saddam connection, so be it.
In short, alarm bells should have been going off in her head when she learned that Bush had approved torture as a legitimate means to obtain “intelligence” on which to base his future actions in the “War on Terror.” Yet, by all accounts she remained silent about what she had learned. And I believe that it was that silence and inaction on her part, and on the part of other Democrats who obtained information of Bush administration abuses and crimes, which is the driving force behind the President Obama’s reluctance to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate those crimes. Because, although the Democrats did not create the torture policies, nor implement them, they stood by and did nothing to stop them when they learned what was going on. Even when the horrors of Abu Ghraib came to light in 2004, their reaction was surprisingly muted. Protests and public denunciations by individual Democrats, yes, but no real push for high profile investigations, even after they gained control of Congress after 2006.
Under the common law, there is a legal doctrine that under certain circumstances, Qui tacet consentire videtur, that is, silence equals consent. Obviously, Pelosi was constricted by the fact that she was prohibited from disclosing any classified information she obtained at those briefings, but that should not have muzzled her completely from calling for compliance by the Bush administration with the Geneva conventions and US laws prohibiting torture and abuse regarding the detainees at Guantanamo Bay, and in Iraq and Afghanistan. Clearly she did not feel it was politically expedient to make such statements back when they might have done some good. I’m not claiming Pelosi is guilty of any crime by failing to act, but clearly she was in a unique position to know the immoral and illegal path the Bush administration was taking our country down, and she kept her mouth shut.
To me the political fallout that she and other Democratic politicians may suffer as a result of investigations into the torture regime of the Bush Presidency is not a sufficient basis to rule out those investigations, nor the potential indictments of those who planned, approved and ordered the commission of such horrible crimes which may result. If we are truly a nation of laws and not men, if President Obama intends to fulfill his promise to restore this nation to that founding principle of our Republic, than hiding behind political expediency to protect prominent Democrats is not a valid justification for avoiding what we, as a so-called “civilized” or “advanced” nation must do in the face of such lawlessness by its former rulers.
Nancy Pelosi has been, for the most part, an effective Speaker of the House. However, if she should fall from grace and be forced to resign that position because of what she knew, knew and did not do, regarding the use of torture by our government, than I for one will not shed a tear for her.
While I agree with what you say. She should be gone depending on her culpability.
But I do not understand why there isn’t a more vigorous response from anyone in Congress – Pelosi et al – that was briefed emphasizing the restrictions under which they operated.
These were after all classified, closed briefings and beyond the usual requirement of Congressional secrecy, there are the further restrictions of the PATRIOT Act and the very evident thuggery of the Bush Administration that would be aimed directly against anyone that would try to blow the whistle.
If the only choices are to dissent by sending a secret letter to the torturers which would certainly be ignored and breaking state secrets laws, I can see at least a reasonable (if not exactly persuasive) defense that there really wasn’t a feasible avenue of protest.
She could have made statements calling on the Bush administration to treat detainees in accordance with the Geneva Conventions and to avoid the temptation to employ torture without disclosing the contents of her briefing or even that she had been briefed.
Everyone should first read Marcy’s timeline analysis just to get a solid contextual basic for making judgments.
all well and good, but major problems:
One: not sure why I should believe anything the CIA says at this point about anything,
Two: even IF I did want to believe the CIA, there’s NO WAY of knowing what went on in these “briefings” with democrats in attendance because they were closed-door meetings.. convenient for ALL parties, involved.
look, all I need to know is 12 senate democrats, including Rockefeller, voted in FAVOR of the Military Commissions Act which gave approval for the use of the enhanced interrogation techniques.
am I supposed to believe these democrats did not know what they approved? give me a break, please.
Rockefeller is one of the top–if not the very number 1 most–Republican politician in the Democratic party.
At least Lincoln, Landrieu, Bayh, Baucus and the Nelsons have enough principles to render them vulnerable to manipulation by the media, the donors, or even the voting public itself!
Rockefeller, on the other hand, is like a king. He takes any position he wants on any issue he wants, regardless of the law, the Constitution or the public interest, as long as it benefits his realm and its treasury.
I would love to see Rockefeller dragged in to testify under oath before a House investigating committee about who knew what when and what did they do.
I would love to see Kucinich and Ron Paul take him apart on CSPAN.
If I weren’t in the middle of moving I’d have a ton to say re the CIA’s manipulation of this process, and examples of how they’ve manipulated similar situations in the past.
“But I do not understand why there isn’t a more vigorous response from anyone in Congress..”
QUID PRO QUO.
look, the rather large, painful lesson here is when it comes to major policy areas; Israel, Latin America, stupid/ineffective drug laws, war profiteering, prison reform, etc., it is irrelevant which “political party” occupies the whitehouse or has a “majority’ in congress.
WHY would anyone think Pelosi has one shred of credibility after she took impeachment off the table in 2006? SHE saw fit to pre-emptively kick to the curb one of the major checks and balances tool made available to congress in our Constitution????
the silence of the rest of the “democrats” (other than actual democrats like Kucinich) was deafening.
congressional democrats are totally complicit with bu$hco on the war mongering and torture “needed” to support the bogus war on terror.
There are a couple of newscasters with the integrity to rise above partisanship to condemn torture, wherever it is found, and I hope Rachel Maddow is one of them.
I didn’t see the show, but I’ll look at the podcast later.
Pelosi
Pelosi is a professional politician who is committed to promoting a legislative agenda that is visible to the public as being pro-working-families.
There is no rising to her stature in American politics without a willingness and history to be flexible and self-serving whenever expedient.
Her unwillingness to spill the beans in 2002 is a perfect example of her conflicting loyalties. As much as she has done–or, appears to have done–for the Congress and American people, her failure to confront the bad guys or blow the whistle, and now to try and cover her collusion up, is something that would disqualify her from being President of the Mickey Mouse Club, and it should get her booted out of Congress immediately until if and when an investigative panel can exonerate her.
Exactly.
I don’t think Pelosi is that self-serving. She took impeachment off the table not because impeachment proceedings might have gotten her into hot water, but because they would have made our leaders accountable, which would have completely undermined our present system of government.
the number one reason she took it off the table was because it would have ended in an acquittal in the Senate. Number two was because she knew the status quo was going to thrust her party even further into the majority and make a Democratic president more likely. Only after those two considerations do we get to the issue of some Democrats (including her) looking bad.
Acquittal in the Senate didn’t stop the Republicans from impeaching Clinton. Even if he was acquitted, there is no question that Bush would have been significantly weakened had he been impeached. But weakening Bush would not have served Democratic interests, since that would have undermined their strategy of blaming everything on the Republicans, while simultaneously enabling them.
If Watergate is anything to go by, impeaching Bush would have led to even greater Democratic gains. Democrats however were willing to sacrifice some gains in Congress in order to preserve the present lack of accountability of our rulers.
Given that Bush was as unpopular as Nixon, the argument that Democrats didn’t want to risk blowback from impeachment simply doesn’t hold any water. And that ignores the fact that not impeaching Bush demonstrated conclusively that the Democrats, as well as the Republicans, have abandoned the concept of the rule of law.
Any impeachment could only have come after January 2007.
By that time, Bush was weakened more than we knew. Subsequent events just piled on.
I maintain that until we actually get an conviction in the impeachment of a President for real, egregious high crimes or misdemeanors, the impeachment power of the Congress is a joke when it applies to presidents. That would be a good reason not to impeach when there was certain failure to convict.
If however, impeachment hearings brought out information so egregious that a large majority of voters were outraged, especially voters in “red states”, conviction might have been possible. But that is betting that the investigation didn’t run out the clock.
If however, impeachment hearings brought out information so egregious that a large majority of voters were outraged, especially voters in “red states”, conviction might have been possible.
Proponents of impeachment have always argued that if impeachment proceeding would take place, the game would change, because of the high publicity that would be given to the Bush regime’s criminality. That criminality has always been a matter of public record: most of the public has been unaware of it, because the elite media has ignored it. Impeachment proceeding would have made the public aware of it.
Public awareness was not sufficient to push the politics in the Senate. There needed to be sufficient outrage to spring enough Republican Senators to vote for conviction.
And Republican party unity was, and still is, very strong. About the only thing they have going for them right now; they’re sticking together in voting.
And ironically, that unity is why they are so badly beaten right now. The clung to Bush without criticism of him; now they are paying the price.
Let’s put the onus where it belongs. Republican Senators’ failure to grasp that what was going on was (1) unconstitutional and (2) illegal, or not caring as long as their party was on top.
Points well taken. No matter what wrongdoings were exposed by impeachment hearings, Republicans would not vote to convict: we are not dealing with the Republicans from the Nixon era, who still had some sense of lawfulness and the common good.
Still, I don’t see that as making impeachment itself pointless or counterproductive. I don’t buy your argument that impeaching without getting a conviction would have made the impeachment power of Congress more of a “joke” than it already is.
If the Dems had impeached, responsibility for the criminality of the Bush regime would have fallen solely on the Republicans. Since they did not impeach however, the Democrats share in it, and that can never be undone.
That doesn’t say very much for upholding the rule of law, does it?
no, it doesn’t. And I have in my archives dozens of pieces where I argued for impeachment.
I think it is important to remember the political atmosphere at the time of those briefings. Bush and company were riding a tsunami of patriotic fever and corporate media were beating the war drums so loudly you could hear them in your sleep. In that environment, anyone who even remotely questioned anything at all about what the Bush administration was doing risked immediate public condemnation along with accusations of everything from being soft on terror to outright treason. The handful of Democrats who were briefed about the EIT well before anyone else outside the Bush bubble must have felt enormous pressure to go along and keep their mouths shut. To have spoken out at the time would probably have ended their political careers.
That said, I don’t think that excuses Pelosi or anyone else who kept silent at the time, and it certainly does not excuse her failure to act on that knowledge after the 2006 midterms when she had the power to do something and instead acted unilaterally to prevent action. Certainly there were people of good conscience among the personnel at the Nazi death camps who knew that what they were participating in was immoral and illegal, and were in fact war crimes. Like Pelosi and Goss in 2002, they would have known that speaking out would not have stopped the juggernaut and would only have resulted in their own destruction. And as we all know, that did not save them from judgement at Nuremberg. That they knew and did not act, did not speak out, in some ways made their guilt even greater.
Given the atmosphere of 2002 I can understand Pelosi’s silence at the time. I suspect most of us here would have done the same. And I can understand her reluctance in 2006 to have it all come to light. But that makes it all the more damning that she chose, as Speaker, to try to prevent it. There is another legal phrase that I hear from time to time. Pelosi knew or should have known that what she was told in secret in 2002 sooner or later would come out and sooner or later would require proper investigation and, where warranted, prosecution. When she unilaterally took impeachment “off the table” as the newly minted Speaker, she moved herself at least a little ways from qui tacet to active complicity. And every day she obstructs the inevitable course of justice, she makes herself even more complicit.
Given the atmosphere of 2002 I can understand Pelosi’s silence at the time.
So can I. I’m not really bothered by her not putting up any resistance at the time. What bothers me is that she did nothing substantial to resist Bush once (1) she had the real power to do, being Speaker of the House; (2) Bush’s popularity had plummeted, so that the same atmosphere no longer prevailed.
pelosi the liar:
her office flipped out on em when I called, yelling, screaming, and trying to talk over me.
she totally knew, and did nothing at all. the only person to raise objections was jane harman.
And those were Porter Goss and who?
“US official” can mean a Republican Congressman.
As for the staff flipping out, I’m sure that the phone lines are being hammered today – with the Foxnuts calling on command, and the outraged Democrats who haven’t bothered to be skeptical piling on.
How would you like to be a staffer catching indignation from both directions? At some point, would you lose it?
Staff indignation is not proof of guilt of anything.
check the date of my linked text. it was from april 9, not today.
Seems like when Pelosi’s moment of truth came, in 2006 after the midterms (if not in 2002 after that infamous briefing), she failed her ethical test as both a human being and a national leader. Judging from her present behavior, she shows no remorse nor desire to redeem either her own reputation or that of the nation as well.