The Republicans want to make sure that they don’t go down on Bush-Cheney torture, so they’ve decided to try to drag Speaker Pelosi down into it. They may have miscalculated because Pelosi is fighting back. The most extraordinary take on the fight that just boiled over comes from Dan Baltz.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s extraordinary accusation that the Bush administration lied to Congress about the use of harsh interrogation techniques dramatically raised the stakes in the growing debate over the Bush administration’s anti-terrorism policies even as it raised some questions about the speaker’s credibility.
… But in attempting to defend herself, Pelosi took the remarkable step of trying to shift the focus of blame to the CIA and the Bush administration, claiming that the CIA accounts represented a diversionary tactic in the real debate over the interrogation policies. That amounted to a virtual declaration of war against the CIA at a time when the Obama administration already has rattled morale at the agency with the release of Justice Department memos authorizing the harsh interrogation techniques.
Someone needs to tell me why it’s an “extraordinary accusation” that the Bush administration lied to Congress.
This is our problem and has been since the run up to the Iraq war. Many in the traditional media were, and evidently still are, willing to ignore what was done by the Bush White House on the run up to the war, which now includes the bombshell that Dick Cheney wanted people waterboarded hoping their flushed out confessions would lead to the WMDs that went missing.
As for Obama’s problems with the “rattles morale at the agency,” well, tough. We’ve got bigger problems than an unwilling President to do the job he promised, or turning the page from the cherry-picking, stove piping CIA of the Bush-Cheney years. Let them sweat.
Yesterday the Bush-Cheney torture plot thickened, advancing a horrific possibility that could change this debate forever. Did Dick Cheney push torture to try to get evidence on WMD in Iraq? After the invasion failed to lead to Saddam’s alleged stockpiles, did Dick Cheney push torture to prove they were right?
Robert Windrem has evidence that leads to the answer:
In his new book, Hide and Seek: The Search for Truth in Iraq, and in an interview with The Daily Beast, Duelfer says he heard from “some in Washington at very senior levels (not in the CIA),” who thought Khudayr’s interrogation had been “too gentle” and suggested another route, one that they believed has proven effective elsewhere. “They asked if enhanced measures, such as waterboarding, should be used,” Duelfer writes. “The executive authorities addressing those measures made clear that such techniques could legally be applied only to terrorism cases, and our debriefings were not as yet terrorism-related. The debriefings were just debriefings, even for this creature.”
Duelfer will not disclose who in Washington had proposed the use of waterboarding, saying only: “The language I can use is what has been cleared.” In fact, two senior U.S. intelligence officials at the time tell The Daily Beast that the suggestion to waterboard came from the Office of Vice President Cheney.…
But what people are missing is that if we don’t follow the threads we’ll never be able to turn this page. That what Vice President Dick Cheney did or wanted done or pushed to have done will be on all of us. If President Obama doesn’t do anything about it, however, we will never be rid of it.
But as always, the progressive community, a far more efficient thinking machine than a handful of strategists and advisers, is looking ahead and raising a unified alarm. The message is this: anything less than absolute moral clarity from Democrats, who now control the levers of power, will enshrine Bush’s abuses and undermine the rule of law for generations to come.
However, as I’ve been saying for a while now, the results of Obama ignoring the gravity of this situation go way beyond the immediate. While the Republicans target Pelosi, Dick Cheney’s side bet continue to rides, which I wrote about days ago. That he can develop a narrative and put it into the political bloodstream that America allegedly became “less safe” the moment Obama began dismantling the Bush-Cheney torture policies. He’s betting that when the day comes that we’re hit again, whenever that is, he can point to that day, when he was warning that Bush-Cheney policies kept us safe. With Cheney believing all the blame will then fall on Democrats, because people have short memories, with the Rep. having another chapter in the “Dems are soft on national security” book they can exploit. Cynical, but that’s Cheney. He’s seeing down the field. Dems are not. This needs to change and fast.
We need to find out if the allegations against Cheney on torture and the Iraq war are real, because this goes beyond simply keeping America safe. It goes to the tactics used by the Bush administration and the lengths they would go to in order to save themselves. Remember back to when no WMDs were found? The Republican argument for preemptive war and their foreign policy collapsed on this revelation. That we went to war on a lie. If torture is wrapped up in proving the Iraq war was worth it, the lies that took us into Iraq will be compounded, Bush-Cheney’s role in torture fully revealed. They tortured to save themselves.
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