Friday, May 15, 2009

Omission Watch: ABC, CBS and NBC Ignore Pelosi’s Torture Hypocrisy | NewsBusters.org


Omission Watch: ABC, CBS and NBC Ignore Pelosi’s Torture Hypocrisy | NewsBusters.org
Posted by Frank Smith at 15.5.09

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

courant.com/news/nationworld/la-na-pelosi-torture15-2009may15,0,4533696.story

Courant.com
Pelosi says CIA misled Congress about waterboarding
The House speaker, accused of hypocrisy by the GOP, says she was told at a 2002 briefing that waterboarding was not being employed. Also, the CIA rejects Cheney's request to declassify memos.
By Greg Miller

May 15, 2009

Reporting from Washington

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Thursday accused the Bush administration and the CIA of misleading Congress about waterboarding prisoners, escalating a political fight with Republicans over her knowledge of the treatment of detainees.

Separately Thursday, the CIA rejected a request from former Vice President Dick Cheney to declassify memos that Cheney has said show that the agency's severe interrogation methods were crucial to getting information from detainees that helped disrupt terrorism plots.

The two developments underscore how the classified details of the CIA's interrogation operations are fueling political skirmishes months after the program was shut down by President Obama.

In her most detailed account to date, Pelosi said she was told during a classified briefing in September 2002 that the CIA was not engaged in waterboarding, even though records now indicate that the agency had employed the method dozens of times on an Al Qaeda suspect one month earlier.

"The CIA was misleading the Congress" as part of a broader Bush administration pattern of deception about its activities, said Pelosi (D-San Francisco).

"The only mention of waterboarding at that briefing was that it was not being employed," she said, adding, "We now know that earlier, they were."

Pelosi's comments amount to an allegation that the CIA violated its legal obligation to keep congressional leaders accurately informed. Republicans responded by ratcheting up their criticism of Pelosi.

"I think the problem is that the speaker has had way too many stories on this issue," said House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio).

Boehner said that given the briefings that were provided to Pelosi and other Democrats, their recent criticism, following their initial silence, is an attempt "to have it both ways."

"It's pretty clear that they were well aware of what these enhanced interrogation techniques were," he said.

Sen. Christopher S. Bond (R-Mo.), the ranking Republican on the intelligence committee, said it was "outrageous that a member of Congress would call our terror-fighters liars."

The controversy has become a political side-show to the broader debate over CIA interrogation methods that Obama banned during his first week in office -- a decision that Cheney and other Republicans have alleged will make the nation less safe.

Pelosi has been among the most vocal critics of the Bush administration's counter-terrorism measures. On Thursday, she reiterated her call for the creation of a “truth commission” to investigate Bush-era practices.

Republicans have opposed that idea and warned that any such undertaking also would bring scrutiny to Democratic lawmakers. They have focused in particular on Pelosi, accusing her of hypocrisy for failing to attempt to stop the interrogation practices until well after she had learned about them in detail.

Pelosi said no protest would have mattered to Bush administration officials, and she pointed to competing legal opinions within the administration that had been brushed aside. Instead, she said her priority was to help deliver a Democratic majority to Congress as a way of terminating Bush administration policies.

The attacks on Pelosi gained traction last week when the CIA released a chart that showed she and former Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.), who were then the top members of the House Intelligence Committee, were the first lawmakers to be told of the CIA's interrogation program.

The table said both members attended a briefing in September 2002 during which the CIA described the particular interrogation techniques "that had been employed." In August of that year, records now show, the CIA used the waterboarding method on Al Qaeda suspect Abu Zubaydah at least 83 times.

The table did not indicate whether waterboarding was specifically mentioned in 2002, but it did show that a senior aide to Pelosi attended a 2003 briefing in which the method was discussed.

Pelosi acknowledged that she was then informed by the aide that waterboarding was being used but noted that the disclosure came just one month before the U.S. invasion of Iraq. "At the same time," she said, "the administration was misleading the Congress on the weapons of mass destruction."

The CIA did not respond to Pelosi's charges that the agency misled Congress. Agency spokesman George Little said, "The language in the chart . . . is true to the language in the agency's records."

Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee met with reporters Thursday to defend Pelosi and said the CIA routinely withheld key information in classified briefings.

"You have to play 20 questions with them," said Rep. Anna G. Eshoo (D-Menlo Park). "They are not forthcoming with information."

Rep. Silvestre Reyes (D-Texas), the chairman of the panel, said he intended to introduce legislation that would impose new standards on what the CIA is required to report to Congress.

In a separate matter, Cheney on Thursday lost -- at least for now -- his effort to have the government declassify memos describing the success of the CIA program. Cheney had requested their release in March.

In a letter to the National Archives, where the records are kept, the CIA said it could not declassify the documents because they were subject to an ongoing Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

"For that reason -- and that reason only -- CIA did not accept Mr. Cheney's request," said another CIA spokesman, Paul Gimigliano.

The civil liberties groups that filed the lawsuit criticized the CIA's decision, noting the irony that the agency was citing a suit seeking the documents' release as justification for not doing so.

"It is unusual for Amnesty International to find itself on the same side . . . as Cheney," said Tom Parker, a counter-terrorism expert at the organization. "But we welcome his late conversion to the value of transparency in government."

greg.miller@latimes.com



Copyright © 2009, The Los Angeles Times

May 15, 2009 at 7:00 AM
Anonymous said...

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The Torture Debate, Continued

By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, May 15, 2009



This month, I wrote a column outlining two exceptions to the no-torture rule: the ticking time bomb scenario and its less extreme variant in which a high-value terrorist refuses to divulge crucial information that could save innocent lives. The column elicited protest and opposition that were, shall we say, spirited.

And occasionally stupid. Dan Froomkin, writing for washingtonpost.com and echoing a common meme among my critics, asserted that "the ticking time bomb scenario only exists in two places: On TV and in the dark fantasies of power-crazed and morally deficient authoritarians." (He later helpfully suggested that my moral deficiencies derived from "watching TV and fantasizing about being Jack Bauer.")

On Oct. 9, 1994, Israeli Cpl. Nachshon Waxman was kidnapped by Palestinian terrorists. The Israelis captured the driver of the car. He was interrogated with methods so brutal that they violated Israel's existing 1987 interrogation guidelines, which themselves were revoked in 1999 by the Israeli Supreme Court as unconscionably harsh. The Israeli prime minister who ordered this enhanced interrogation (as we now say) explained without apology: "If we'd been so careful to follow the [1987] Landau Commission [guidelines], we would never have found out where Waxman was being held."

Who was that prime minister? Yitzhak Rabin, Nobel Peace laureate. The fact that Waxman died in the rescue raid compounds the tragedy but changes nothing of Rabin's moral calculus.

That moral calculus is important. Even John McCain says that in ticking time bomb scenarios you "do what you have to do." The no-torture principle is not inviolable. One therefore has to think about what kind of transgressive interrogation might be permissible in the less pristine circumstance of the high-value terrorist who knows about less imminent attacks. (By the way, I've never seen five seconds of "24.")

My column also pointed out the contemptible hypocrisy of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who is feigning outrage now about techniques that she knew about and did nothing to stop at the time.

My critics say: So what if Pelosi is a hypocrite? Her behavior doesn't change the truth about torture.

But it does. The fact that Pelosi (and her intelligence aide) and then-House Intelligence Committee Chairman Porter Goss and dozens of other members of Congress knew about the enhanced interrogation and said nothing, and did nothing to cut off the funding, tells us something very important.

Our jurisprudence has the "reasonable man" standard. A jury is asked to consider what a reasonable person would do under certain urgent circumstances.

On the morality of waterboarding and other "torture," Pelosi and other senior and expert members of Congress represented their colleagues, and indeed the entire American people, in rendering the reasonable person verdict. What did they do? They gave tacit approval. In fact, according to Goss, they offered encouragement. Given the circumstances, they clearly deemed the interrogations warranted.

Moreover, the circle of approval was wider than that. As Slate's Jacob Weisberg points out, those favoring harsh interrogation at the time included Alan Dershowitz, Mark Bowden and Newsweek's Jonathan Alter. In November 2001, Alter suggested we consider "transferring some suspects to our less squeamish allies" (i.e., those that torture). And, as Weisberg notes, these were just the liberals.

So what happened? The reason Pelosi raised no objection to waterboarding at the time, the reason the American people (who by 2004 knew what was going on) strongly reelected the man who ordered these interrogations, is not because she and the rest of the American people suffered a years-long moral psychosis from which they have just now awoken. It is because at that time they were aware of the existing conditions -- our blindness to al-Qaeda's plans, the urgency of the threat, the magnitude of the suffering that might be caused by a second 9/11, the likelihood that the interrogation would extract intelligence that President Obama's own director of national intelligence now tells us was indeed "high-value information" -- and concluded that on balance it was a reasonable response to a terrible threat.

And they were right.

You can believe that Pelosi and the American public underwent a radical transformation from moral normality to complicity with war criminality back to normality. Or you can believe that their personalities and moral compasses have remained steady throughout the years, but changes in circumstances (threat, knowledge, imminence) alter the moral calculus attached to any interrogation technique.

You don't need a psychiatrist to tell you which of these theories is utterly fantastical.

letters@charleskrauthammer.com




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May 15, 2009 at 8:08 AM
Anonymous said...

I saw that Pelosi is expected to lose the speakership over this scandal that is becoming bigger with every lie she tells.

May 15, 2009 at 9:56 AM
Lou Salvio said...

Frank:
I can't say for sure that U.S. House Speaker Pelosi is dumb or just ignorant. I can offer the opinion that she is dangerous. If some catastrophe were to befall Obama and Biden, she is next in line to be our PRESIDENT! God help us.

May 15, 2009 at 12:08 PM
Anonymous said...

Maybe Sean Hannity is correct. A special counsel is needed to investigate Pelosi!

May 15, 2009 at 10:32 PM
Anonymous said...

According to a statement made by John Larson on national TV yesterday, Nancy Pelosi has more integrity in her little pinky than Karl Rove and Dick Cheney have in their whole bodies.

It appeared that Larson was joining Pelosi in accusing the CIA of lying. What else would be expect from a liberal nut job from Connecticut?

May 16, 2009 at 11:47 AM
Anonymous said...

when Democrates lose power, they go insane; fighting among themselves

May 16, 2009 at 1:44 PM
Anonymous said...

Everytime I see John Larson standing behind Nancy Pelosi in television close ups and statements, it makes me want to throw up. It wasn't long ago that he went to CCSU and lived off campus in Belvidere, a great friend of Joe Harper.

All these incumbents want is to vote for whatever it takes to get back in again and increase the value of their pension and status.

Unless we have an uprising in this state, we will be stuck with wimps.
Glenn Beck might show us the way!

May 16, 2009 at 7:37 PM

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