The speaker is engulfed by her own game of political retribution.
Given House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's acknowledged skill at torturing the Bush Administration in recent years, it no doubt afforded her critics some pleasure yesterday to watch her twist in the wind in front of the press over what she knew and when about the CIA's terrorist interrogations.
I must admit, I enjoyed it.
With mockery even from Jon Stewart on Comedy Central, Mrs. Pelosi has turned herself into a spectacle about a subject that she and fellow Democrats had themselves reduced to a spectacle of demagogic accusation and blame, repeatedly threatening to put Bush officials in the dock for "condoning torture."
Permit us, then, to reel in this travesty and attempt to put both Speaker Pelosi and her targets in the Bush Administration into perspective. No, better yet, let Speaker Pelosi's California colleague, Senator Dianne Feinstein, do it. Asked this week about Mrs. Pelosi's variable recollections, Senator Feinstein, who chairs the Intelligence Committee, responded: "I think it's a tempest in a teapot really to say, Well, Speaker Pelosi should have known all of this, she should have stopped this, she should have done this or done that. I don't want to make an apology for anybody, but in 2002, it wasn't 2006, '07, '08 or '09. It was right after 9/11, and there were in fact discussions about a second wave of attacks."
| GWB was popular, and the Repubs were in charge, and the country really was concerned about additional terrorist attacks, so it wouldn't have gone over well for the House Minority Leader, a noted weak-kneed liberal and nanny, to start making noises over the enhanced interrogation techniques. Nancy had to wait for her minions at MoveOn, CCR, Media Matters, etc to tear Bush down a fair bit before she could start whining. The military calls it, 'preparing the battle-space' ... |
Indeed there were discussions about a second wave of attacks in 2002. In an interview two years ago, former CIA Director George Tenet said of that post-attack period: "I've got reports of nuclear weapons in New York City, apartment buildings that are going to be blown up, planes that are going to fly into airports all over again." It was precisely in this atmosphere, months after the initial, horrific attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, that the CIA asked the Justice Department for legal guidance on the now-famous "EITs," or enhanced interrogation techniques at the center of this current tempest.
Bush lawyers such as John Yoo and Jay Bybee produced memorandums carefully setting out the legal limits of what the CIA could do. Also in 2002, the CIA began the briefings of Congress on these interrogations that now haunt Speaker Pelosi.
| Pelosi could have done the brave but politically stupid thing: she could have drawn a line in the sand and said, in effect, it doesn't matter how many Americans are at risk, waterboarding is wrong. She instead chose to be cowardly, craven, and still in power today. |
If Washington were still able to conduct a national-security policy fitting the world's lone superpower, the Feinstein standard would apply to both Nancy Pelosi and the Bush officials. Instead, Congressional Democrats, unable to let go of their long Bush obsession, persist in calling for a Truth Commission, as did Ms. Pelosi herself yesterday in her prepared statement.
| As long as Pelosi testifies first. And as long as I get to question her. |
Amid her rope-a-dope session with a suddenly pugnacious press corps, Speaker Pelosi said one other thing that deserves attention by people still hoping to save Washington from itself. She suggested that we "must review" the National Security Act of 1947 with an eye toward giving "larger numbers of Congress" access to classified briefings. This in the interest of "proper oversight."
Is she serious? The mess that now engulfs her and other Democrats can be solved by giving more Congressfolk access to the nation's most sensitive secrets? Only a Member of Congress could conclude that you can enhance political accountability by making it more diffuse.
| But it does allow more politicos to have more access to information that is useful in the knife-and-dagger work done in the halls of Congress. Such interesting 'gossip' that one could hear ... |
Back in the 1970s, Congress in the spectacle of the Church-Pike hearings pilloried the CIA for being what Senator Frank Church called a "rogue elephant on the rampage." That exercise, it is now widely acknowledged, damaged U.S. intelligence-gathering for a generation.
Speaker Pelosi, John Conyers, Carl Levin and their supporters are now close to repeating this destructive exercise with hearings intended to be little more than bear-baitings of the defeated Bush Administration. President Obama in his fashion tries to split the difference by asserting that the CIA interrogators will somehow be fenced off from any such exercise while leaving the door open to prosecution of those who wrote the legal opinions.
This Administration uses the word "responsibility" a lot, and it would improve the charged political atmosphere of Washington considerably if senior officials there took the idea more seriously. Speaker Pelosi and other senior Members of Congress were brought into the complex loop of the post-September 11 world with a long series of CIA briefings, as the law requires. Now, when disclosure of the details of those briefings undermines the Democrats' political game, Mrs. Pelosi tries to dump responsibility back onto the CIA. Yesterday she even said the agency "gave me inaccurate and incomplete information." So CIA officials now led by Obama appointee Leon Panetta are lying. No wonder this draws the ridicule of comedians.
| And retribution by the CIA. They simply won't forgive a politician who calls them a liar, especially not after the Church hearings debacle ... |
Whatever one's politics may be, there has to be some recognition that Washington -- the U.S. government -- simply can't function if it is endlessly entangled in the exquisitely argued, one might say absurd, blame-games that she and some Democrats are running against former Bush officials, and that now threaten the political standing of the Speaker herself.
| Not to mention what would happen if, in 2013, President Palin has a nasty streak in her and decided to let slip the hounds ... |
Barack Obama won the election and as President he now has a government to run. With that responsibility comes the necessity to make difficult decisions, as those he has made on prisoner photos and military tribunals attest. If he is to succeed, he needs a capital city of responsible partners, not a running circus with the Speaker of the House at the center, blaming everyone else as she flees from any responsibility for what she heard and did. |