Research 2000 polling confirms that Nancy Pelosi had a tough week. Carl Hulse of the New York Times is right that the torture debate has put a dent in Pelosi’s hide. She saw a net seven percent drop in approval numbers which came about equally from declining numbers from Republicans, Democrats, and Independents. For Democrats, the problem is that Pelosi knew about waterboarding in 2003 and did nothing explicit about it. She says she concurred with a protest letter sent by Jane Harman at the time, but she didn’t co-sign it. Fair enough. Pelosi isn’t covered in glory. But here are two things that should make Republicans think twice about whatever benefit they think they are getting out of bloodying Pelosi up a bit. The first is an observation made by Hulse:
Lawmakers and senior government officials say the public furor could also give momentum to the push for an inquiry into the Bush administration’s interrogation policies as well as into what senior members of Congress knew about the treatment of detainees…
…Ms. Pelosi is not the only one with political exposure. Should any investigation determine that the C.I.A. misled members of Congress, the result could be severely damaging to the agency and to the Republican leaders who have relentlessly pressed the issue against Ms. Pelosi.
The second is something that was not immediately obvious in CIA Director Leon Panetta’s memo to CIA employees that requested that they turn down the temperature on the debate and focus on their mission.
Mr. Panetta, a former Democratic congressman from California and a longtime associate of Ms. Pelosi, issued a statement that said the agency’s “contemporaneous records from September 2002 indicate that C.I.A. officers briefed truthfully,” a rebuttal of Ms. Pelosi’s claim on Thursday that intelligence officials had lied to her…
…Mr. Panetta said it would ultimately be “up to Congress to evaluate all the evidence and reach its own conclusions about what happened.”
It might be subtle, but DCI Panetta explicitly invited Congress to investigate this matter and reach their own conclusions. In fact, he said it was their responsibility to do so.
So…keep poking Pelosi. Keep reassigning blame. If the aim is to stop a Church Committee-style humiliation, I think this might be entering into EPIC FAIL territory. The worse Pelosi looks, the more incentive she has to make her adversaries pay. And that, after all, is what the Frog demands.
It’s a bizarre debate that goes something like this: “We love torture. Pelosi knew we were torturing. Therefore, Pelosi’s guilty of knowing we were torturing. But we love torture. There’s nothing wrong with torture.” There are sites where it’s like red meat thrown to sharks. I cannot understand the glee except that anything that connects “Pelosi” and “liberal” and something bad is good.
By the way, Panetta’s statement, essentially, “It’s not our job to lie,” is typical CIA bullshit. It says nothing, doesn’t further the debate and gives no facts.
Lying is exactly the CIA’s job. Pelosi is not the first politician that they’ve tried to sabotage. Since the CIA controls the documents and the witnesses getting a real investigation would be quite difficult. Does anyone here really think that Obama will step forward to defend Pelosi here? It’ll be another “don’t ask don’t tell” and the CIA wins arguments when you don’t see the facts.
The problem with the CIA — and much of the rest of the intelligence community, the whole post-9/11 mindset, the current Israeli leadership, the Cold War leaders, etc., etc., ad nauseam — comes down to this one argument:
“Extraordinary actions are required to secure our survival, so that trumps ordinary moral and legal considerations.”
I could spend all day picking that apart in various ways, but I wouldn’t be saying anything that anyone here doesn’t already understand, which is why we are all, well, liberals who believe in the rule of law.
I will however note that the accepting the first clause as axiomatic essentially constitutes a choice to become a paranoiac, and to adopt it across an agency with next to no oversight and accountability will inevitably lead to the concentration of vast extralegal powers in the hands of a bunch of paranoiacs who consider themselves unaccountable to mere democracy.
The take-away lesson here, as in most of the last sixty years and especially the last eight, is that most of the qualities we admire in human beings — morality, reason, honesty, curiosity, humaneness — can only be cultivated by setting aside fear. Otherwise, as Booman has had cause to write about a lot lately, you turn into a bedwetting coward who’s ready to shred the Constitution and retreat into the storm cellar at the prospect of putting a handful of foreigners in one of our most notorious (and notoriously escape-proof) supermax prisons.
It’s time we stopped letting the cowards run the show.
There is a peculiar form of logic employed in this issue. Tu quoque is a fallacy, and much of the implementation of policy leading up to the war was designed to produce Democratic “dirty hands” even when they weren’t being fully informed.
I believe that the Democrats were both informed and uninformed, since there were complaints — for instance — which indicated that the 2002 NIE was being twisted (comparisons between the wording of declassified and then classified versions show this) but there were also complaints by Democrats of being left out of the loop, and this was later shown to be true.
In any case, Democrats were legally unable to object to administration disclosures since the nature of classified materials made it a crime to do so. Bob Graham referred to this legal bind generally, which was the only way he could refer to it since the details couldn’t be discussed.
I’m less interested in the trope of the CIA, since it’s not necessarily about the entirity but the specific. Rooting out the “stay behind” troops in the CIA is my concern. The politicization of the CIA occurred around the time that Goss took over and we haven’t been able to root out the bad seed the way we could with the DOJ.
I was reminded of the influx of people into WINPAC in 2002. Much of the CIA still refused to back the Iraq-al Queda connection so they had remove the recalcitrants and insert compliant analysts. The problem goes even further than whatever was incubated during this period, since much of the coverup since then has been aimed at erasing the fingerprints from attempts to establish connections between 911, Iraq and Iran. I don’t doubt that the Niger forgeries were attempts to plant incriminating evidence by elements within or without the CIA, and Ladeen certainly comes to mind. And there is no doubt that other efforts to create incriminating connections have occurred, in fact, it seems to be Cheney’s MO, with Team B, etc.
This also shines the light on the system that Cheney and certainly the CIA so adeptly played. Cheney and now somewhat Pelosi, Jello Jay and Harman are doubling down on the illegalities of discussing or making public the contents of the classified debriefings, then and now. It’s a fascinating game of chicken and since the CIA were the only ones allowed to take notes, they may end up holding the cards that count.
The system itself of utter secrecy stomps oversight into the dirt.
Note the GOP play here is to force Pelosi to resign her gavel without an investigation of any kind.
We’ll see if the Sunday shows go for the resignation angle and ignore the investigation, or go for the investigation instead. We’ll also see if Pelosi is given an opportunity to defend herself.
If tomorrow’s political shows are full of Republicans calling for Nancy to step down, a token Democrat centrist or two giving a half-assed defense and hosts speculating on who’s going to replace Pelosi as Speaker, then the GOP has completely won the torture argument.
If however we see Democrats saying “We want an investigation, and we want it to include what all of Congress knew at the time, Republican leaders and the White House as well as Democrats” and the GOP is on the defensive the whole time, then the sun really is rising to shine light on the torture regime.
Nancy Pelosi was in fact given three Sunday show slots, but turned them all down to be with her family this weekend.
I don’t know if that’s smart of her. Republicans will say she’s dodging the controversy and they will trash her. Who will put the conversation back on the Bush torture regime tomorrow?
however…she is still calling for a truth commission, whatever that is.
and she is pretty much alone on that….so im giving her points for it.
We’ve come a long way, baby.
The show must go on.
Neither Ms Pelosi nor Mr Reid are what I’d call outstanding leaders – they owe their positions to seniority, not ability.
Some of us on the left have wanted different leadership in both positions for a good two years now.
I don’t know what Ms Pelosi was told or wasn’t told – it doesn’t change my impression that she is an inept speaker at best.
And the same goes for Harry Reid – “Give ’em Hell, Harry”? I have a hard time believing he can even fight his way out of bed in the morning.