The lies of the CIA and Nancy Pelosi
16 May 2009
Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi charges the CIA with
lying to her about torture in a 2002 briefing, a charge denied by the
agency. What it is certain is that she and the Democrats have lied
systematically to the American people to obscure their complicity in
the crimes of the Bush administration.
On Thursday, Pelosi called a Capitol Hill press conference in an
attempt to clear the air about what she was told by the Central
Intelligence Agency and what she knew about torture.
A CIA report released last week claimed that in a September 2002
briefing, the agency had described torture methods, including
waterboarding, and informed Pelosi and her Republican counterpart,
Congressman Porter Goss, that they were being employed against Abu
Zubaydah, who by that time had been waterboarded at least 83 times.
While Pelosi had given the impression that she knew nothing about this
torture because the CIA failed to inform her in the 2002 briefing, it
then emerged that she had been told about the active use of
waterboarding in February 2003—just five months later—by her senior
aide based on a subsequent briefing.
In her press conference, the House speaker claimed that at the 2002
briefing, the CIA reported that the Justice Department had issued
memos arguing that waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation
techniques” were legal, but were “not being employed.”
Pelosi went on to acknowledge that after she was informed that the CIA
was torturing suspects in February 2003, she did nothing, leaving it
to her successor as the ranking Democrat on the House intelligence
committee, Congresswoman Jane Harman, to write a letter to the agency
“raising concerns.”
Her entire story strains credulity. Even if what she says is true and
the CIA did not inform her in 2002 that it was torturing Zubaydah, did
she really believe that the agency’s briefers were describing methods
of torture and Justice Department memos justifying them because the
Bush administration did not intend to use them?
Pelosi advanced another alibi. “Like all members of Congress who are
briefed on classified information,” she said. “I have signed oaths
pledging not to disclose any of that information. This is an oath I
have taken very seriously, and I’ve always abided by it.”
Like all members of Congress, she also took an oath of office “to
support and defend the Constitution of the United States,” but clearly
that pledge took a back seat to defending the secrets of an agency
known throughout the world as Murder Inc. Her oath would not have
stopped her from denouncing torture in 2003, if she had really opposed
it.
It should be recalled that in 1971 Alaska Democratic Senator Mike
Gravel, an opponent of the Vietnam War, took to the floor of the US
Senate to read into the record the so-called Pentagon Papers, a
collection of secret documents on the war, after the Justice
Department had obtained injunctions against their publication by the
New York Times and Washington Post. Gravel relied on a clause in the
US Constitution that protects members of Congress from arrest for
anything said from the floor of the House or Senate.
It would not occur to Pelosi to invoke this constitutional privilege
because she did not oppose torture. It was not her oath of secrecy
that kept her quiet but her class position. Like the rest of the well-
heeled and thoroughly vetted members of the House and Senate
intelligence panels, she defends the CIA because the agency’s
assassinations, torture, kidnappings and other crimes are carried out
in defense of the interests of America’s ruling financial oligarchy.
This is what makes all the more significant her statement at the press
conference that the CIA had lied to her and that “they mislead us all
the time.” It is an indication of the extent to which the attempt by
the Obama administration to make a partial disclosure of the Bush
administration’s record on torture and then “move forward” has thrown
the Democrats into crisis and opened up a bitter internecine struggle
within the state apparatus itself.
Pelosi’s statement provoked a terse memo from Leon Panetta, Obama’s
appointee as CIA director.
“The political debates about interrogation reached a new decibel level
yesterday when the CIA was accused of misleading Congress,” he said.
“CIA officers briefed truthfully on the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah.
It is not our policy or practice to mislead Congress. That is against
our laws and our values.”
In other words, the Democratic head of the CIA is defending the
practices carried out under the Bush administration and calling the
Democratic leader of the House of Representatives a liar. Nothing
could expose more clearly the role of the CIA and the national
security establishment as a virtual state-within-a-state, answerable
to no one.
Its power has been strengthened by the two wars of aggression launched
under Bush and continued under Obama as well as the array of
repressive legislation from the Patriot Act to the legalization of
domestic wiretapping, illegal detentions and kangaroo military
commissions, all passed with Democratic support.
It is this record that has emboldened the Republican right, which has
seized on Pelosi’s contortions on torture to make the case that nobody
in Washington has clean hands and any real investigation of torture
and the other crimes of the Bush administration would drag in the
Democrats as well.
The point is valid, but it only underscores the fact that these crimes
were the product not merely of the rabid politics of the Republican
right, but of the deep decay of American democracy under the pressure
of capitalism’s crisis and the unprecedented growth of social
inequality. This is why they were supported by both major parties, the
media and the entire political establishment.
Clearly, the Democratic Party and the Obama administration are
thoroughly compromised and cannot be entrusted with any investigation
of the crimes in which they were complicit. Any congressional
hearings, blue ribbon panel or “truth commission” as proposed by
Pelosi would be a whitewash.
This cannot be accepted. The investigation and prosecution of all
those responsible for torture, wars of aggression and the other crimes
carried out over the last eight years is vital for the defense of
democratic rights and the moral health of society. If they are not
investigated and prosecuted, these crimes will continue and be turned
increasingly against the struggles of working people in the US
itself.
The fight to hold accountable those who ordered, participated and
covered up for these crimes can only be seriously undertaken by
working people themselves as part of the struggle to build their own
mass political movement fighting for socialism.
Bill Van Auken
On May 17, 7:40 am, "d.b.baker" <[email protected]> wrote:
> [Q] - Uh-oh. Nancy Pelosi’s performance at her press conference re
> waterboarding has raised, according to the Washington Post, “troubling
> new questions about the Speaker’s credibility.” The dreaded T-word:
> “troubling.”
>
> I doubt it will “trouble” the media for long, or at least not to the
> extent of bringing the Pelosi speakership to a sudden end — and
> needless to say I’m all in favor of Nancy remaining the face of
> congressional Democrats until November 2010. But her inconsistent
> statements do suggest a useful way of looking at America’s tortured
> “torture” debate:
>
> Question: What does Dick Cheney think of waterboarding?
>
> He’s in favor of it. He was in favor of it then, he’s in favor of it
> now. He doesn’t think it’s torture, and he supports having it on the
> books as a vital option. On his recent TV appearances, he sometimes
> gives the impression he would not be entirely averse to performing a
> demonstration on his interviewers, but generally he believes its use
> should be a tad more circumscribed. He is entirely consistent.
>
> Question: What does Nancy Pelosi think of waterboarding?
>
> No, I mean really. Away from the cameras, away from the Capitol, in
> the deepest recesses of her (if she’ll forgive my naivete) soul.
> Sitting on a mountaintop, contemplating the distant horizon, chewing
> thoughtfully on a cranberry-almond granola bar, what does she truly
> believe about waterboarding?
>
> Does she support it? Well, according to the CIA, she did way back
> when, over six years ago.
>
> Does she oppose it? According to Speaker Pelosi, yes. In her varying
> accounts, she’s (a) accused the CIA of consciously “misleading the
> Congress of the United States” as to what they were doing; (b)
> admitted to having been briefed that waterboarding was in the playbook
> but that “we were not — I repeat — were not told that waterboarding or
> any of these other enhanced interrogation methods were used”; (c)
> belatedly conceded that she’d known back in February 2003 that
> waterboarding was being used but had been apprised of the fact by “a
> member of my staff.” As she said on Thursday, instead of doing
> anything about it, she decided to focus on getting more Democrats
> elected to the House.
>
> It’s worth noting that, by most if not all of her multiple accounts,
> Nancy Pelosi is as guilty of torture as anybody else. That’s not an
> airy rhetorical flourish but a statement of law. As National Review’s
> Andy McCarthy points out, under Section 2340A(c) of the relevant
> statute, a person who conspires to torture is subject to the same
> penalties as the actual torturer. Once Speaker Pelosi was informed
> that waterboarding was part of the plan and that it was actually being
> used, she was in on the conspiracy, and as up to her neck in it as
> whoever it was who was actually sticking it to poor old Abu Zubaydah
> and the other blameless lads.
>
> That is, if you believe waterboarding is “torture.”
>
> I don’t believe it’s torture. Nor does Dick Cheney. But Nancy Pelosi
> does. Or so she has said, latterly.
>
> Alarmed by her erratic public performance, the speaker’s fellow San
> Francisco Democrat Dianne Feinstein attempted to put an end to Nancy’s
> self-torture session. “I don’t want to make an apology for anybody,”
> said Senator Feinstein, “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.”
>
> Indeed. In effect, the senator is saying waterboarding was acceptable
> in 2002, but not by 2009. The waterboarding didn’t change, but the
> country did. It was no longer America’s war but Bush’s war. And it was
> no longer a bipartisan interrogation technique that enjoyed the
> explicit approval of both parties’ leaderships, but a grubby Bush-
> Cheney-Rummy war crime.
>
> Dianne Feinstein has provided the least worst explanation for her
> colleague’s behavior. The alternative — that Speaker Pelosi is a
> contemptible opportunist hack playing the cheapest but most
> destructive kind of politics with key elements of national security —
> is, of course, unthinkable. Senator Feinstein says airily that no
> reasonable person would hold dear Nancy to account for what she
> supported all those years ago. But it’s okay to hold Cheney or some no-
> name Justice Department backroom boy to account?
>
> Well, sure. It’s the Miss USA standard of political integrity: Carrie
> Prejean and Barack Obama have the same publicly stated views on gay
> marriage. But the politically correct enforcers know that Barack
> doesn’t mean it, so that’s okay, whereas Carrie does, so that’s a hate
> crime. In the torture debate, Pelosi is Obama and Dick Cheney is
> Carrie Prejean. Dick means it, because to him this is an issue of
> national security. Nancy doesn’t, because to her it’s about the
> shifting breezes of political viability.
>
> But it does make you wonder whether a superpower with this kind of
> leadership class should really be going to war at all. Over at the New
> York Times, the elderly schoolgirl Maureen Dowd riffed off Cheney’s
> defense of waterboarding and argued that, no matter when the next
> terrorist attack comes, the former vice president would be the one
> primarily responsible. He is, she said, “a force multiplier for
> Muslims who hate America.” - Mark
> Steynhttp://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YmQ5ZTA3NDE2NjE3YTEyNjY3ZjJlNzQ2...
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