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Pelosi Doing Harm, Not Helping to Fight Torture
Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit
[Good commentary, and Pelosi and the rest of the obedient Dems deserve
to be dragged over the coals. They are despicable. -NY Transfer]
sent by MichaelP
Opinion
Capital Times (Madison) - Dec 13, 2007
http://www.madison.com/tct/opinion/261918
Pelosi hurting, not helping, on torture issue
by John Nichols
Associate Editor
Few serious observers of the congressional condition will deny that
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has been a disappointing leader for
Democrats. But now she appears to be something more troubling: a
serious hindrance to the fight against the use of the crudest and most
objectionable torture techniques.
Democrats and Republicans with a conscience have gotten a good deal of
traction in recent months in their battle to identify the use by U.S.
interrogators of waterboarding -- a technique that simulates drowning
in order to cause extreme mental distress to prisoners -- as what it
is: torture.
Arizona Sen. John McCain, a GOP presidential contender, has been
particularly powerful in his denunciations of this barbarous endeavor.
Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., and key
members of the Senate Judiciary Committee have effectively pressed the
issue on a number of fronts.
Now, however, comes the news that Pelosi knew as early as 2002 that the
U.S. was using waterboarding and other torture techniques and, far from
objecting, appears to have cheered the tactics on.
The Wa****ngton Post re****ts that Pelosi, then a senior member of the
House Intelligence Committee, was informed by CIA officials at a secret
briefing in September 2002 that waterboarding and other forms of
torture were being used on suspected al-Qaida operatives. That's bad.
Even worse is the revelation that Pelosi was apparently sup****tive.
According to the news re****ts, Pelosi had no complaint about
waterboarding during a closed-door session she attended with Florida
congressman ****ter Goss, a Republican who would go on to head the
Central Intelligence Agency; Kansas Republican Sen. Pat Roberts; and
Florida Democratic Sen. Bob Graham.
"The reaction in the room was not just approval, but encouragement,"
recalls Goss.
How encouraging? It is re****ted that two of the legislators demanded to
know if waterboarding and other methods that were being employed "were
tough enough" forms of torture to produce the desired levels of mental
anguish to force information from suspects who, under the Geneva
Conventions and the U.S. Constitution, cannot be subjected to cruel or
unusual punishment.
Was Pelosi one of the "tough enough" cheerleaders for waterboarding?
That is not clear, as the speaker has refused to comment directly
regarding her knowledge of torture techniques and encouragement of
their use. Another member of the House who is closely allied with
Pelosi did tell the Post, however, that the California Democrat
attended the session, recalled that waterboarding was discussed, and
"did not object" at the time to that particular torture technique.
If this is the case, Pelosi can reasonably be said to have provided aid
to the Bush administration's efforts to deviate not just from the
standards set by international agreements regarding war crimes but from
the provision of the Bill of Rights that establishes basic requirements
with regard to the treatment of prisoners in the custody of the U.S.
Those deviations are precisely the sort of impeachable offenses that
Pelosi has said are "off the table." Her association with the
administration on the matter of torture necessarily calls into question
the speaker's credibility on questions of how and when to hold the
administration to account.
It also raises a more mundane political question: At a point when
Republicans like John McCain are earning points with their forthright
stances against waterboarding, isn't the credibility and the potential
effectiveness of the House Democratic Caucus as an honest player in the
debate profoundly harmed by the involvement of its leader in
behind-the-scenes meetings that by all accounts encouraged the use of
that technique?
John Nichols is associate editor of The Capital Times.
*
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