Enough Playing The Congressional “Torture Game”; Let’s Have “High Noon” And Be Done With It!
Let me see if I understand this correctly. No outrage from the right-wing about torture, outing an undercover CIA agent, politicizing the Justice Department, Hurricane Katrina, record budget deficits, crumbling infrastructure, and destroying the economy in less than 8 years. BUT if there is any possibility that Nancy Pelosi may have been briefed by the CIA about waterboarding then it is the crime of the century. Or is the crime of the century Obama shaking hands with Chavez, or ordering a hamburger with mustard, or using a teleprompter. This transparent "false outrage" tactic in order to deflect attention from real news is getting old fast. Let’s get busy and get all of them. We have space in our jails and folks who can replace members of Congress who end up there with the Bush Gang…have at it! But I also know this: Whenever you move forward to take part in a fight, make sure you can end it. (Otherwise what is the point?) We are half way to Concord; are you ready?
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| Is Censure The Next Stop For Pelosi? by Buck • Saturday, May 16th, 2009 - 8:08 pm I Think It’s Time That The Majority Party Pissed Or Got Off The Pot. To stand back and do nothing while that POS Gingrich continues on spreading lies is embarrassing and despicable. It sickens me. Sickens me almost as much as when Pelosi declared impeachment to be “off the table.” If we’re not going to follow the rule of law (impeachment was called for in this case), and if we’re going have a yellow streak a mile wide, I’d just as soon the democratic party went back to minority status. Isn’t that what we’re seeing anyway? This witch hunt reminds me of how the republicans went after Clinton. The democrats went on to forgive shitty republicans over that huge waste of time and money, choosing instead to turn the other cheek. And we saw what that got them. Well, here we are again. I’d like to see Pelosi prove me wrong and stomp Gingrich’s fat ass back into obscurity. But history tells us otherwise. If our democratic leaders choose not to come out swinging on this one, then the hell with the party. Gingrich: Pelosi Could Be Ousted As House Speaker If She Lied WASHINGTON (CNN) – Newt Gingrich continued his attacks on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi Saturday, saying she “defamed everyone” in the intelligence community and he can’t “see how she can serve as speaker if it turns out that she has lied about national security both to the House and to the rest of the country.” “I would expect at that point a motion of censure, and I think under the rules of the House, you can’t serve for the rest of that term if you’ve been censured,” Gingrich, a former Republican speaker of the House, said in an interview with CNN. Pelosi has been under fire from critics who say she was fully briefed on the controversial waterboarding technique — now deemed torture by the Obama administration — in 2002 and 2003. On Thursday, the California Democrat accused CIA officials of misleading her, reiterating a claim that she was briefed on such techniques only once — in September 2002 — and that she was told at the time the techniques were not being used. Pelosi said the briefing she received from the CIA was incomplete and inaccurate, and she called on the CIA to release a full transcript of the briefing. Sunday Talking Heads: May 17, 2009 By: Elliott Sunday May 17, 2009 3:59 am America the Beautiful. A lot of talk this morning about torture, but are the right questions being asked? Oh, and Nancy Pelosi is the new Lynndie England. Washington Journal: 7am – Jenn Metz, The Observer, Editor-in-Chief. 7:40am – Sarah Posner, American Prospect, Religion Writer. 8:30am – Richard Viguerie, ConservativeHQ.com, Chairman. 9:15am – Mario Cuomo, Former Governor (D-NY) 1983-95. email questions for guests to journal@c-span.org ABC's This Week: Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) and Sen. Jim Webb (D-VA). "Washington rocked with a volatile mix of national-security storylines this week, including President Barack Obama's stunning reversal on the release of photographs depicting detainee abuse, the clamor for torture prosecutions, and politics swirling over the Obama administration's promised closure of Guantanamo Bay." And more. Roundtable: George Will, James Carville, The Nation's Katrina vanden Heuvel, former senior adviser to Sen. John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign Steve Schmidt, and Liz Cheney, a former State Department official for middle east affairs. contact George CBS' Face The Nation: Rep. Peter King (R-NY), ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero, with John Dickersonand Joan Biskupic. contact Bob Schieffer Chris Matthews: Savannah Guthrie NBC News White House Correspondent; Howard Fineman Newsweek Senior Washington Correspondent; Andrew Sullivan The Atlantic Senior Editor; Michele Norris NPR Host, All Things Considered. Topics: Why has Dick Cheney become so vocal against President Obama's policies? The Supreme Court pick. contact Chris CNN's State of the Union: White House Budget Director Peter Orszag and House Minority Leader John Boehner(R-OH). contact CNN Fareed Zakaria: Former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf. "If Pakistan and Afghanistan are the biggest global stories of the moment (and they are), the man who can shed the most light on them is surely Pervez Musharraf - the man who resigned from power in Pakistan just nine months ago." contact CNN Fox News Sunday: Rev. Richard McBrien and Rev. Frank Pavone. "Should the nation's top Catholic university honor President Obama, an abortion rights advocate?" Then, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY). "How will Senate Republicans choose to fight back against the president's ambitious agenda?" email fns@foxnews.com NBC's Meet The Press: The Party Chairs, the Democratic National Committee's Tim Kaine and the Republican National Committee's Michael Steele. Then, the torture he said/she said debate. Roundtable: Council on Foreign Relations' Richard Haass, Newsweek's Jon Meacham, The Wall Street Journal's Peggy Noonan, and National Journal's Ron Brownstein. contact David Newsmakers: Senate Judiciary Committee chair Sen. Jeff Sessions "discusses his approach to the upcoming confirmation hearings to fill the Supreme Court vacancy left by Justice Souter's retirement." CSPAN 10am and 6pm ET Q & A: Melanie Sloan, Executive Director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, also known asCREW. CSPAN at 8pm and 11pm et, Monday 6am ET Religion & Ethics: Notre Dame Controversy -- The Catholic divide is great over President's Obama's visit. Pope's Mideast Trip Wrap-up -- Peace was the major theme of his pilgrimage. Faith Healing Court Cases -- Should parents who rely on faith healing be prosecuted? for broadcast times in your area click here 60 Minutes: Secretary Of War -- Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates discusses the war in Afghanistan in a candid and wide-ranging interview with Katie Couric, who accompanied him to Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan. AIG --Ed Liddy, the man who took over the reins of out-of-control American International Group – the failed insurance giant to which the government has made $180 billion available in aid – speaks to Steve Kroft about the gargantuan task ahead. Anna Wintour -- The sunglasses come off the high-queen of haute couture in this rare and unprecedented interview, in which the Vogue editor reveals why she always wears them and much more. To The Contrary: Topics: 1-How does the GOP woo women as voters and as politicians? 2-How U.S. environmentalists disassociated U.S population from environmental degradation. Panelists: The Heritage Foundation's Genevieve Wood; Political Analyst Melinda Henneberger; Conservative Commentator Tara Setmayer; National Organization for Women's Latifa Lyles; and Numbers USA's Rosemary Jenks. TTC online extra: Pro-life America? The majority of Americans now say they are pro-life. See what our panelists think on this week's To The Contrary Extra. for broadcast times in your area click here After Words: Mark Rudd discusses his life and his book, "Underground: My Life with SDS and the Weathermen." CSPAN, 12pm ET. CSPAN's Book TV schedule. FDL Book Salon: Our own Spencer Ackerman hosts Thomas E. Ricks to discuss The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008 "Author Thomas E. Ricks uses hundreds of hours of exclusive interviews with top officers in Iraq and extraordinary on-the-ground reportage to document the inside story of the Iraq War since late 2005 as only he can, examining the events that took place as the military was forced to reckon with itself, the surge was launched, and a very different war began." Come chat, 5pm ET. FDL Movie Night Monday: What's The Matter With Kansas? "plunges viewers into the heart of Middle America, which twice helped elect George W. Bush." Watch the trailer and then join Lisa Derrick for a discussion with the producer, Laura Cohen, and the director, Joe Winston. 8pm ET. |
Anti-War Voices Lose Influence | By Salena Zito, Tribune-Review
Sunday, May 17, 2009
Will the last activist who hopes the anti-war cause will re-emerge as a central tenet of the Democratic Party please turn out the lights on the way out the door?
Little evidence exists that any anti-war movement is alive, well and influencing policy in this country.
Certainly no voice for it is coming from Barack Obama's White House. In fact, Obama has been pretty consistent in jerking around anti-war crusaders, beginning with last summer's vote as a U.S. senator for a federal surveillance law and its provision shielding telecommunications companies that cooperated in warrantless wiretaps -- a law he previously had opposed.
The only sound coming from the left at the time was a momentary backlash from the blogosphere.
The president reinforced his dismissal of anti-war activists last week, when he performed an enormous flip and decided to halt the release of photographs of detainee abuse. He said releasing the photos would put U.S. troops at risk and inflame anti-American opinion.
On April 23, the Obama administration had said the Pentagon would hand over 44 photos of detainee abuse in Afghanistan and Iraq under the Bush administration.
Less than two years ago, the liberal public-policy group MoveOn.org ran its now-infamous "General Petraeus or General Betray Us?" ad, accusing the four-star of exaggerating the success of the troop surge in Iraq.
Go to MoveOn.org's Web site today, and ending the war is fourth behind health care, climate change and the economy in its goals for 2009, buried in a nondescript area of the site.
"With an anti-war Democrat in the White House, the anti-war activists are cutting him some slack -- for now," says Purdue University political scientist Bert Rockman. "I have no doubt that an anti-war movement will eventually focus on the Afghan-Pakistan front ... it will be up to Obama to explain what is at stake."
A year from now, if circumstances have not changed or worsened on the Afghan-Pakistan front, Obama will have trouble holding the center against left-wing Democrats and right-wing Republicans. So far, he has been politically agile in explaining through reason what is at stake -- but agility has its limits.
Note that the debate so far has been about tactics rather than necessities, according to Rockman. That's why Gen. David McKiernan was replaced as U.S. commander in Afghanistan -- "not that he was an incompetent commander, but he may have been the wrong one for this kind of war."
The Obama administration appears to be planning to wage war there with decreasing risks to Afghan civilians but likely increasing risks to our own soldiers. There will be less high-penetration ordnance and more dependence on cultivating intelligence sources and carefully targeted strikes -- "which is why a Special Forces general is the new commander in Afghanistan," Rockman adds.
Tactics that cause increased casualties for our troops are apt to stimulate anti-war fever, however.
"Where is Code Pink" -- another liberal activist group -- "or MoveOn.org today?" asks Republican strategist Alex Castellanos. "Is it all OK if Barack Obama does it?
"Being against the war was something the left used to draw a bright line between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama," he says. "But there is no cause now, because there was no cause then."
St. Louis University law professor Joel Goldstein says the anti-war movement has lost steam for at least three reasons: It was centered on a widespread lack of faith in the Bush administration; real concerns about Afghanistan and Pakistan that implicate our security interests have emerged; the economy now has the attention of the public and the media.
The left ousted Republicans it was convinced were intent on continuing the war in Iraq, so the "anti-war effort necessarily loses its steam," Goldstein adds.
While President Obama gingerly takes ownership of the war in Afghanistan -- pumping up troop levels, hand-picking his own commander, adding Pakistan as part of the solution and the problem -- he is disowning anti-war activists who voted for him, expecting him to put an end to all wars.
Unfortunately for them, they have nowhere else to go, Castellanos says, "so the noise you will hear from them will be voiceless."
Obama Can’t Turn the Page on Bush
By FRANK RICH
Published: May 16, 2009
TO paraphrase Al Pacino in “Godfather III,” just when we thought we were out, the Bush mob keeps pulling us back in. And will keep doing so. No matter how hard President Obama tries to turn the page on the previous administration, he can’t. Until there is true transparency and true accountability, revelations of that unresolved eight-year nightmare will keep raining down drip by drip, disrupting the new administration’s high ambitions.
That’s why the president’s flip-flop on the release of detainee abuse photos — whatever his motivation — is a fool’s errand. The pictures will eventually emerge anyway, either because of leaks (if they haven’t started already) or because the federal appeals court decision upholding their release remains in force. And here’s a bet: These images will not prove the most shocking evidence of Bush administration sins still to come.
There are many dots yet to be connected, and not just on torture. This Sunday, GQ magazine is posting on its Web site an article adding new details to the ample dossier on how Donald Rumsfeld’s corrupt and incompetent Defense Department cost American lives and compromised national security. The piece is not the work of a partisan but the Texan journalist Robert Draper, author of “Dead Certain,” the 2007 Bush biography that had the blessing (and cooperation) of the former president and his top brass. It draws on interviews with more than a dozen high-level Bush loyalists.
Draper reports that Rumsfeld’s monomaniacal determination to protect his Pentagon turf led him to hobble and antagonize America’s most willing allies in Iraq, Britain and Australia, and even to undermine his own soldiers. But Draper’s biggest find is a collection of daily cover sheets that Rumsfeld approved for the Secretary of Defense Worldwide Intelligence Update, a highly classified digest prepared for a tiny audience, including the president, and often delivered by hand to the White House by the defense secretary himself. These cover sheets greeted Bush each day with triumphal color photos of the war headlined by biblical quotations. GQ is posting 11 of them, and they are seriously creepy.
Take the one dated April 3, 2003, two weeks into the invasion, just as Shock and Awe hit its first potholes. Two days earlier, on April 1, a panicky Pentagon had begun spreading its hyped, fictional account of the rescue of Pvt. Jessica Lynch to distract from troubling news of setbacks. On April 2, Gen. Joseph Hoar, the commander in chief of the United States Central Command from 1991-94, haddeclared on the Times Op-Ed page that Rumsfeld had sent too few troops to Iraq. And so the Worldwide Intelligence Update for April 3 bullied Bush with Joshua 1:9: “Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be terrified; do not be discouraged, for the LORD your God will be with you wherever you go.” (Including, as it happened, into a quagmire.)
What’s up with that? As Draper writes, Rumsfeld is not known for ostentatious displays of piety. He was cynically playing the religious angle to seduce and manipulate a president who frequently quoted the Bible. But the secretary’s actions were not just oily; he was also taking a risk with national security. If these official daily collages of Crusade-like messaging and war imagery had been leaked, they would have reinforced the Muslim world’s apocalyptic fear that America was waging a religious war. As one alarmed Pentagon hand told Draper, the fallout “would be as bad as Abu Ghraib.”
The GQ article isn’t the only revelation of previously unknown Bush Defense Department misbehavior to emerge this month. Just two weeks ago, the Obama Pentagon revealed that a major cover-up of corruption had taken place at the Bush Pentagon on Jan. 14 of this year — just six days before Bush left office. This strange incident — reported in The Times but largely ignored by Washington correspondents preparing for their annual dinner — deserves far more attention and follow-up.
What happened on Jan. 14 was the release of a report from the Pentagon’s internal watchdog, the inspector general. It had been ordered up in response to a scandaluncovered last year by David Barstow, an investigative reporter for The Times. Barstow had found that the Bush Pentagon fielded a clandestine network of retired military officers and defense officials to spread administration talking points on television, radio and in print while posing as objective “military analysts.” Many of these propagandists worked for military contractors with billions of dollars of business at stake in Pentagon procurement. Many were recipients of junkets and high-level special briefings unavailable to the legitimate press. Yet the public was never told of these conflicts of interest when these “analysts” appeared on the evening news to provide rosy assessments of what they tended to call “the real situation on the ground in Iraq.”
When Barstow’s story broke, more than 45 members of Congress demanded an inquiry. The Pentagon’s inspector general went to work, and its Jan. 14 report was the result. It found no wrongdoing by the Pentagon. Indeed, when Barstow won the Pulitzer Prize last month, Rumsfeld’s current spokesman cited the inspector general’s “exoneration” to attack the Times articles as fiction.
But the Pentagon took another look at this exoneration, and announced on May 5 that the inspector general’s report, not The Times’s reporting, was fiction. The report, it turns out, was riddled with factual errors and included little actual investigation of Barstow’s charges. The inspector general’s office had barely glanced at the 8,000 pages of e-mail that Barstow had used as evidence, and interviewed only seven of the 70 disputed analysts. In other words, the report was a whitewash. The Obama Pentagon officially rescinded it — an almost unprecedented step — and even removed it from its Web site.
Network news operations ignored the unmasking of this last-minute Bush Pentagon cover-up, as they had the original Barstow articles — surely not because they had been patsies for the Bush P.R. machine. But the story is actually far larger than this one particular incident. If the Pentagon inspector general’s office could whitewash this scandal, what else did it whitewash?
In 2005, to take just one example, the same office released a report on how Boeing colluded with low-level Pentagon bad apples on an inflated (and ultimately canceled) $30 billion air-tanker deal. At the time, even John Warner, then the go-to Republican senator on military affairs, didn’t buy the heavily redacted report’s claim that Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, were ignorant of what Warner called “the most significant defense procurement mismanagement in contemporary history.” The Pentagon inspector general who presided over that exoneration soon fled to become an executive at the parent company of another Pentagon contractor, Blackwater.
But the new administration doesn’t want to revisit this history any more than it wants to dwell on torture. Once the inspector general’s report on the military analysts was rescinded, the Obama Pentagon declared the matter closed. The White House seems to be taking its cues from the Reagan-Bush 41 speechwriter Peggy Noonan. “Sometimes I think just keep walking,” she said on ABC’s “This Week” as the torture memos surfaced. “Some of life has to be mysterious.” Imagine if she’d been at Nuremberg!
The administration can’t “just keep walking” because it is losing control of the story. The Beltway punditocracy keeps repeating the cliché that only the A.C.L.U. and the president’s “left-wing base” want accountability, but that’s not the case. Americans know that the Iraq war is not over. A key revelation in last month’s Senate Armed Services Committee report on detainees — that torture was used to try to coerce prisoners into “confirming” a bogus Al Qaeda-Saddam Hussein link to sell that war — is finally attracting attention. The more we learn piecemeal of this history, the more bipartisan and voluble the call for full transparency has become.
And I do mean bipartisan. Both Dick Cheney, hoping to prove that torture “worked,” and Nancy Pelosi, fending off accusations of hypocrisy on torture, have now asked for classified C.I.A. documents to be made public. When a duo this unlikely, however inadvertently, is on the same side of an issue, the wave is rising too fast for any White House to control. Court cases, including appeals by the “bad apples” made scapegoats for Abu Ghraib, will yank more secrets into the daylight and enlist more anxious past and present officials into the Cheney-Pelosi demands for disclosure.
It will soon be every man for himself. “Did President Bush know everything you knew?” Bob Schieffer asked Cheney on “Face the Nation” last Sunday. The former vice president’s uncharacteristically stumbling and qualified answer — “I certainly, yeah, have every reason to believe he knew...” — suggests that the Bush White House’s once-united front is starting to crack under pressure.
I’m not a fan of Washington’s blue-ribbon commissions, where political compromises can trump the truth. But the 9/11 investigation did illuminate how, a month after Bush received an intelligence brief titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.,” 3,000 Americans were slaughtered on his and Cheney’s watch. If the Obama administration really wants to move on from the dark Bush era, it will need a new commission, backed up by serious law enforcement, to shed light on where every body is buried.
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There seems to be a lot of intentional confusion over who said what. Republicans, including former CIA chief and minority leader of the House Intelligence Committee, Porter Goss, have been accusing Nancy Pelosi of lying. Marcy Wheeler has an absolutely fabulous summation.
A number of people are panicking about Leon Panetta’s statement to CIA employees, believing it rebuts Nancy Pelosi’s statement.
There is a long tradition in Washington of making political hay out of our business. It predates my service with this great institution, and it will be around long after I’m gone. But the political debates about interrogation reached a new decibel level yesterday when the CIA was accused of misleading Congress.
Let me be clear: It is not our policy or practice to mislead Congress. That is against our laws and our values. As the Agency indicated previously in response to Congressional inquiries, our contemporaneous records from September 2002 indicate that CIA officers briefed truthfully on the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, describing “the enhanced techniques that had been employed.” Ultimately, it is up to Congress to evaluate all the evidence and reach its own conclusions about what happened.
My advice — indeed, my direction — to you is straightforward: ignore the noise and stay focused on your mission. We have too much work to do to be distracted from our job of protecting this country.
We are an Agency of high integrity, professionalism, and dedication. Our task is to tell it like it is—even if that’s not what people always want to hear. Keep it up. Our national security depends on it.
But there’s a better way to understand this.
First, look at Panetta’s statement about the briefings themselves.
As the Agency indicated previously in response to Congressional inquiries, our contemporaneous records from September 2002 indicate that CIA officers briefed truthfully on the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, describing “the enhanced techniques that had been employed.” Ultimately, it is up to Congress to evaluate all the evidence and reach its own conclusions about what happened.
Panetta is stating two things:
- The contemporaneous records (that is, the CIA briefer’s own notes on the briefing) show that the briefers “briefed truthfully … describing ‘the enhanced techniques that had been employed’” on Zubaydah.
- It is up to Congress to evaluate this evidence and “reach its own conclusions about what happened.”
Now, first of all, Panetta is not saying (nor has anyone said, not even Porter Goss) that the briefers briefed Congress that these techniques had been used. I know this sounds weasely, but until someone says, in plain language, that the CIA told Congress those techniques had already been used on Abu Zubaydah, we should assume that’s not what the notes reflect, because if they did, you can be sure both the briefing list and the public statements would say so. But no one is saying that. And against that background, Panetta is reiterating the statement that Congress should determine what happened–a reiteration of the admission that CIA’s own briefing records are not the totality of the story.
The CIA briefing list records that the following people participated in the briefing: Nancy Pelosi, her staffer Michael Sheehy, Porter Goss, his staffer Tim Sample, briefers from the CounterTerrorism Center (CTC), and the Office of Congressional Affairs (OCA; elsewhere, we’ve been told four people, total, from CIA attended).
While CIA doesn’t say it, the chances are very good that the head of CTC was among the four CIA officials who attended that briefing–he probably led the briefing. On September 4, 2002, the head of CTC was Jose Rodriguez.
Jose Rodriguez, you’ll recall, is one of the key suspects in the torture tape destruction.
Rodriguez admits to overseeing the destruction of the torture tapes, though he excuses doing so with this story (delivered by his lawyer, leaker extraordinaire Bob Bennett):
Rodriguez, whom the CIA honored with a medal in August for “Extraordinary Fidelity and Essential Service,” declined requests for an interview. But his attorney said he acted in the belief that he was carrying out the agency’s stated intention for nearly three years. “Since 2002, the CIA wanted to destroy the tapes to protect the identity and lives of its officers and for other counterintelligence reasons,” Bennett said in a written response to questions from The Washington Post.
“In 2003 the leadership of intelligence committees were told about the CIA’s intent to destroy the tapes. In 2005, CIA lawyers again advised the National Clandestine Service that they had the authority to destroy the tapes and it was legal to do so. It is unfortunate,” Bennett continued, “that under the pressure of a Congressional and criminal investigation, history is now being revised, and some people are running for cover.”
That is, Rodriguez doesn’t deny having the torture tapes destroyed–tapes showing Abu Zubaydah’s torture, which Rodriguez probably briefed Nancy Pelosi incompletely on on September 4, 2002. Rather, he says that 1) they had intended to destroy the tapes going back to 2002, 2) Congress had been briefed on the plan to destroy them in 2003, and 3) Rodriguez got the legal okay to destroy them in 2005.
With that in mind, consider that the other key suspect in the torture tape destruction is Porter Goss, in the role he played in 2005 as Director of Central Intelligence. We know that Goss was explicitly warned, in writing, not to destroy the torture tapes. We know that Goss didn’t tell Rodriguez not to destroy the tapes. And there are reasons to believe that the rest of Goss’ story about the torture tape is less than forthcoming.
So Jose Rodriguez, may have, at a time when (he now says) he was already thinking about destroying the torture tapes of Abu Zubaydah’s torture, briefed Nancy Pelosi and Porter Goss on the techniques used to torture Zubaydah. He, or someone else at the briefing, went back afterwards and wrote down what he remembered from the briefing, which is that he described the techniques used on Zubaydah (though not neecssarily that he had told Pelosi and Goss those techniques had been used). Porter Goss has said Nancy Pelosi is nuts not to have assumed–at that time–that they were going to use waterboarding going forward. But even he, thus far, has not claimed that CIA told them torture had already been used.
We’ve got Nancy Pelosi in a briefing with (probably) the two prime suspects from the torture tape destruction. She has said CIA misled them, then, about whether or not CIA had already used torture. And neither Goss nor the CIA generally (representing CTC and therefore probably Rodriguez) is really disputing that they didn’t tell her that torture had already been used.
Now do you understand why people are coming after Pelosi so aggressively, even though there appears to be no disagreement about whether CIA told Congress torture had already been used?
Okay, with that in mind, return to the bulk of Panetta’s comment, where he tells everyone not to get distracted, where he says that CIA does not have a policy of lying to Congress.
There is a long tradition in Washington of making political hay out of our business. It predates my service with this great institution, and it will be around long after I’m gone. But the political debates about interrogation reached a new decibel level yesterday when the CIA was accused of misleading Congress.
Let me be clear: It is not our policy or practice to mislead Congress. That is against our laws and our values. As the Agency indicated previously in response to Congressional inquiries, our contemporaneous records from September 2002 indicate that CIA officers briefed truthfully on the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, describing “the enhanced techniques that had been employed.” Ultimately, it is up to Congress to evaluate all the evidence and reach its own conclusions about what happened.
My advice — indeed, my direction — to you is straightforward: ignore the noise and stay focused on your mission.
This is a statement reflecting not just the worries at CIA that they’ve been sold out again, asked to break the law, but then hung out to dry after the fact. This is a statement given at a time when the very people being investigated (probably)–Rodriguez and Goss–are two of the three key players in the briefing at the time.And this is a statement that narrowly affirms the accuracy of the briefing (given the briefing notes), while admitting that Congress should determine the full story. Yes, Panetta gives that narrow defense of CIA’s statement. But the bulk of Panetta’s statement implores the rest of CIA not to get hung up on the circus happening around them.
Panetta is doing two things. First, affirming that CIA has not misrepresented what got recorded in the briefing notes and that the language of the briefing notes is accurate–as far as that goes. And, at the same time, casting doubt on the full meaning of the statement while imploring the rest of CIA not to get distracted by yet another challenge to CIA’s credibility.
NSP/Tikkun Core Vision--and why you should read or re-read it now!
Tikkun - Berkeley,CA,USA
... Huffington Post, Salon.com, or the emails from moveon.org to see the striking absence of our kind of perspective and approach to contemporary politics, ...
THE VILLAGERS THROW DOWN ON NANCY PELOSI
Our national press corps truly is one of the strangest groups of people in the world. It takes a really superficial herd to decide that the villain of the torture policy is ... House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Maureen Dowd expounded her own raving, factually challenged version of the accusation in Cheney, Master of Pain New York Times 05/17/09. MoDo declared:
The stylish grandmother acted like a stammering child caught red-handed, refusing to admit any fault and pointing the finger at a convenient scapegoat. She charged the C.I.A. with misleading Congress, which is sort of like saying the butler did it, or accusing a generic thuggish-looking guy in a knit cap with gang tattoos to distract from your sin.
Yes, we live in a world where our leading celebrity pundits are aghast at the very notion that the CIA might lie about something like this.
To see several of the horde swarm to the attack at one, you can check out Meet the Press for 05/17/09.
MoDo does manage to say, after seven paragraphs trashing Speaker Pelosi as an utterly contemptible liar and pathetic phony - women in powerful positions always send MoDo's deeply strange gender obsessions into orbit:
Besides, the question of what Pelosi knew or didn’t, or when she did or didn’t know, is irrelevant to how W. and Cheney broke the law and authorized torture.
We should give MoDo and even the Villagers some credit here. It's now become acceptable for the Beltway Village to call torture by the name "torture", without the modifiers they've insisted on using up until the last week or so, e.g., "so-called torture", "what some describe as torture". And MoDo actually mentions the word "law", which is far more than you can say of the Shields-and-Brooks Clown Show of this past Friday.
But this is pretty faint praise of MoDo, whose column mainly reflects the obviously Republican-friendly meme that the Beltway Village has adopted wholesale, which is that Pelosi is a Big Liar and a terrible hypocrite. The fact is that we the public and presumably our so-called press corps don't have any solid evidence of what was said in those now-infamous briefings. Pelosi has said all along that she was not briefed in detail about what tortures the administration (specifically the CIA) was using, although the Village narrative that MoDo runs with as though it were Gospel truth is that Pelosi has been changing her story in some kind of guilty way.
Now, I'm obviously willing to defend Nancy Pelosi on this. The Republicans knew attacking her over this issue would appeal to the dysfunctions of what some describe as our press corps. Because it muddles that discussion about the fact that serious crimes were committed in the torture policy. It reassures the Villagers that all serious responsible people don't care whether crimes were committed in the torture policy, only "the left". Pelosi is also what the Democrats have badly needed in their Congressional leadership and urgently need in the Senate: a actual partisan leader. The Big Pundits think (Democratic) leaders in Congress should be "bipartisan" and should "reach across the aisle". Like Harry "I can't do anything until someone shows me we already have 60 votes" Reid.
It's also not clear to me that any of the Democratic and Republican members of Congress who received classified briefings on matters relating to the torture program committed any kind of crime by now trying to blow the lid off the program publicly. That doesn't necessarily make them profiles in courage. But part of the trap Cheney was setting with those selective briefings was that if the Dems exposed information from those briefings publicly, they could be accused of being unreliable with classified information, of endangering the troops, of committing treason, and so on. The danger of Republicans taking such a risk to expose the torture program they supported was negligible to the vanishing point.
If any Members of Congress committed actual crimes in connection with the torture program, they should prosecuted along with everyone else for whom there is good evidence of criminal behavior in that program.
But the accusations against Pelosi are based on a breathtakingly careless neglect of the facts in the public record up to this point. Bob "the Daily Howler" Somerby is not a particular fan of Pelosi; he thinks she makes weak public statements for Democratic positions. In They sometimes invent your first time 05/16/09, he looks at the current popular press script against Nancy Pelosi and finds it to be fake. Part of the current anti-Pelosi script is that she has been guiltily changing her story about the briefings. He describes the particular journalisticinfotainment technique involved:
[J]ournalists love the claim of "rolling disclosure" in a matter like this (though only if they want to make some pol a target, of course). Such belated disclosure is taken as a sign of the targeted pol’s bad faith. It’s a sign that the target had something to hide, that she wouldn’t be truthful until she was forced. Mainstream journalism of the 1990s is litteredwith episodes of this type. ...
Sad but true: When “journalists” get somebody in their sites, they simply luvv making this type of claim. Recent history teaches a grisly lesson: Even when rolling disclosurehasn’t occurred, “journalists” will sometimes pretend otherwise. They will sometimes ignore the very reports they themselves have typed in the past, so much do they want to pretend that their target never said this before. ...
In the world of love and romance, it’s said that you always remember your first time. In modern pseudo-journalism, they sometimes invent a pol’s first time, erasing her realfirst time in the process.
Actually, Somerby criticizes her for apparent carelessness in her comments on the CIA. I think he's being too critical of her on that point. But his is a reality-based criticism, based on his observations of how she frames issues as a key national Party leader. The Beltway Village practice is to fix on a script and squeeze the facts into it. Or, if necessary, just reinvent the facts.
Marcy Wheeler, who just won the prestigious Sidney Hillman Award for her investigative journalism online, has been following the torture crime story in great detail. She has been regularly challenging the current press corps narrative about that Vile Big Liar Pelosi on her Emptywheel blog, such as in The Two Torture Tape Suspects, the Pelosi Briefing, and the Panetta Statement 05/16/09. Marcy is an invaluable resource for those following this story. Indispensable at this point.
You will search MoDo's latest breakdown and the Meet the Press transcript in vain for anything remotely like the following explanation from Marcy referring to CIA Director Leon Panetta's letter which in the Village narrative was a decisive smack-down of Pelosi:
Panetta is stating two things:
- The contemporaneous records (that is, the CIA briefer's own notes on the briefing) show that the briefers "briefed truthfully ... describing 'the enhanced techniques that had been employed'" on Zubaydah.
- It is up to Congress to evaluate this evidence and "reach its own conclusions about what happened."
Now, first of all, Panetta is not saying (nor has anyone said, not even Porter Goss) that the briefers briefed Congress that these techniques had been used. I know this sounds weasely, but until someone says, in plain language, that the CIA told Congress those techniques had already been used on Abu Zubaydah, we should assume that's not what the notes reflect, because if they did, you can be sure both the briefing list and the public statements would say so. But no one is saying that. And against that background, Panetta is reiterating the statement that Congress should determine what happened--a reiteration of the admission that CIA's own briefing records are not the totality of the story.
The CIA briefing list records that the following people participated in the briefing: Nancy Pelosi, her staffer Michael Sheehy, Porter Goss, his staffer Tim Sample, briefers from the CounterTerrorism Center (CTC), and the Office of Congressional Affairs (OCA; elsewhere, we've been told four people, total, from CIA attended).
While CIA doesn't say it, the chances are very good that the head of CTC was among the four CIA officials who attended that briefing--he probably led the briefing. On September 4, 2002, the head of CTC was Jose Rodriguez.
Jose Rodriguez, you'll recall, is one of the key suspects in the torture tape destruction.
Marcy is still practicing what in most of the world is known as "journalism". She's not running beyond the available facts here, she's actually paying attention to them. She indicates what different kinds of claims would put the (real) story into a different light. Compare that one column of hers with media celebrity Maureen Dowd's. One is journalism, the other is raving, unhindered by facts.
It's not that Marcy's approach pretends to be neutral, objective or value-free. On the contrary, she practices advocacy journalism. She wants the perpetrators in the torture program charged and prosecuted. But that doesn't prevent her from having integrity in her reporting and writing. MoDo isn't advocating anything but Village idiocy. And her writing has no integrity whatsoever.
On the other side of the fog being kicked up by the Villagers, Marcy points out a particular reason why defenders of the torture program are coming after Pelosi so hard on those briefings: the crimes themselves are coming to light in very explicit ways now, and the torture-crime scandal is accelerating, despite the remarkable consensus among the political elites and the national press that the whole issue should go away and God forbid that any high-level criminals should be prosecuted over the torture crimes. And the various acts of deception used to cover them up until this point are also coming to light at a seemingly accelerated pace. The briefings to Congress are a key political defense of the program. If it is shown conclusively that the CIA or other intelligence officials were lying to the Congressional Democrats who are supposed to be part of their alibi, another big piece of the torturers' self-defense will have fallen.
In that light, Marcy gives this entirely plausible reading of Panetta's action in releasing the letter last week:
This is a statement reflecting not just the worries at CIA that they've been sold out again, asked to break the law, but then hung out to dry after the fact. This is a statement given at a time when the very people being investigated (probably)--Rodriguez and Goss--are two of the three key players in the briefing at the time.And this is a statement that narrowly affirms the accuracy of the briefing (given the briefing notes), while admitting that Congress should determine the full story. Yes, Panetta gives that narrow defense of CIA's statement. But the bulk of Panetta's statement implores the rest of CIA not to get hung up on the circus happening around them.
Panetta is doing two things. First, affirming that CIA has not misrepresented what got recorded in the briefing notes and that the language of the briefing notes is accurate--as far as that goes. And, at the same time, casting doubt on the full meaning of the statement while imploring the rest of CIA not to get distracted by yet another challenge to CIA's credibility.
This is not going away. Even in the best case - that perpetrators at all levels are prosecuted soon - the torture issue will haunt US policy for decades.
Michael K. Casler, Las Vegas | Sun, May 17, 2009 (2:05 a.m.)
Nobody except the participants know what was said in the CIA interrogation briefings that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and others attended. Unfortunately, you cannot believe what the participants tell you because of their self-interest. My belief is that the truth is where it was when President George W. Bush asked Congress for the power to go to war in Iraq if necessary.
Many members of Congress had grave reservations (expressed after the fact) about giving President Bush this power. They gave it to him because they lacked the courage of their convictions and were afraid that if they voted no and another 9/11 took place, they would be blamed.
It is highly likely the same scenario unfolded for Ms. Pelosi and others in the interrogation briefings. Just as it was understood that President Bush could use the power granted to invade Iraq, not standing up and fighting the approval of “enhanced interrogation” techniques could lead to their use on captured suspected terrorists.
The problem was the same. If you voted your convictions and these techniques were not allowed and another 9/11 happened, you would be blamed. The result was silence and tacit approval by Ms. Pelosi and others.
The real problem here is not just with Ms. Pelosi but the majority of Congress. They do not have the courage of their convictions and their first priority is to remain in office.
We really need to elect some people whose first priority is to do what they believe is right, regardless of possible consequences. We have precious few of those people in office today.
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