Last night on the Rachel Maddow Show the issue of the briefings Nancy Pelosi and other senior Democrats received on the Bush administration’s “enhanced interrogation techniques was a major topic of the program. Pelosi has previously admitted she had received a briefing on the enhanced interrogation techniques torture practices the CIA and the military “might use” which had been declared as legal by the Bush administration’s Office of Legal Counsel, but that she was never told that torture had been, or ever would be, actually being used on terrorist suspects or other detainees.
Well, yesterday, the Washington Post printed a story citing documents they received from anonymous “Intelligence Officials” claiming that Pelosi was briefed in 2002 on the torture tactics that CIA interrogators were then using against “high value” Al Qaeda prisoners:
In a 10-page memo outlining an almost seven-year history of classified briefings, intelligence officials said that Pelosi and then-Rep. Porter Goss (R-Fla.) were the first two members of Congress ever briefed on the interrogation tactics. Then the ranking member and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, respectively, Pelosi and Goss were briefed Sept. 4, 2002, one week before the first anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
The memo, issued by the Director of National Intelligence and the Central Intelligence Agency to Capitol Hill, notes the Pelosi-Goss briefing covered “EITs including the use of EITs on Abu Zubaydah.” EIT is an acronym for enhanced interrogation technique. Zubaydah was one of the earliest valuable al-Qaeda members captured and the first to have the controversial tactic known as water boarding used against him. […]
In a carefully worded statement, Pelosi’s office said today that she had never been briefed about the use of waterboarding, only that it had been approved by Bush administration lawyers as a legal technique to use in interrogations.
“As this document shows, the Speaker was briefed only once, in September 2002. The briefers described these techniques, said they were legal, but said that waterboarding had not yet been used,” said Brendan Daly, Pelosi’s spokesman.
Pelosi’s statement did not address whether she was informed that other harsh techniques were already in use during the Zubaydah interrogations.
Of course, if Pelosi knew about the torture and did nothing (and the memo released to the Post, and her own statement in response leaves open the question of what exactly she did know), that would explain a great deal about why she unilaterally declared before and after the 2006 midterm elections that “impeachment” was off the table. Clearly, she was afraid of retaliation by Republicans regarding her own role as a recipient of classified information about administration’s use of torture. Undoubtedly, she rightly feared such disclosures would jeopardize her election as Speaker of the House. Indeed, the recent leaks about the briefings she received and her response to those leaks, makes it clear that she still feels her position as Speaker may be at risk. Her office’s mealy mouthed response says far more with respect to what it fails to deny, than what it does deny.
Even if she is being truthful that she was never told waterboarding was being used by the CIA, clearly she must have known in September of 2002 that the disclosure of such information to her didn’t occur in a vacuum. She had to know that such disclosures were intended to provide cover to the Bush administration when inevitably the torture regime they implemented became public knowledge. If the Bush administration was telling her that waterboarding had been approved, the only possible inference a reasonable person could have drawn at that time was that waterboarding (and other abusive “techniques” described to her) would be employed by the CIA if they hadn’t been used already. A sophisticated politician such as Pelosi cannot legitimately argue her own naivete regarding the Bushies intentions as an excuse. Especially in light of the public propaganda campaign then being rolled out by the administration to justify a war with Iraq, she had to have known that Bush and Cheney would be pulling put all the stops to link Al Qaeda with Saddam in the minds of the public, and if that meant using torture to elicit false or misleading confessions of an Al Qaeda-Saddam connection, so be it.
In short, alarm bells should have been going off in her head when she learned that Bush had approved torture as a legitimate means to obtain “intelligence” on which to base his future actions in the “War on Terror.” Yet, by all accounts she remained silent about what she had learned. And I believe that it was that silence and inaction on her part, and on the part of other Democrats who obtained information of Bush administration abuses and crimes, which is the driving force behind the President Obama’s reluctance to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate those crimes. Because, although the Democrats did not create the torture policies, nor implement them, they stood by and did nothing to stop them when they learned what was going on. Even when the horrors of Abu Ghraib came to light in 2004, their reaction was surprisingly muted. Protests and public denunciations by individual Democrats, yes, but no real push for high profile investigations, even after they gained control of Congress after 2006.
Under the common law, there is a legal doctrine that under certain circumstances, Qui tacet consentire videtur, that is, silence equals consent. Obviously, Pelosi was constricted by the fact that she was prohibited from disclosing any classified information she obtained at those briefings, but that should not have muzzled her completely from calling for compliance by the Bush administration with the Geneva conventions and US laws prohibiting torture and abuse regarding the detainees at Guantanamo Bay, and in Iraq and Afghanistan. Clearly she did not feel it was politically expedient to make such statements back when they might have done some good. I’m not claiming Pelosi is guilty of any crime by failing to act, but clearly she was in a unique position to know the immoral and illegal path the Bush administration was taking our country down, and she kept her mouth shut.
To me the political fallout that she and other Democratic politicians may suffer as a result of investigations into the torture regime of the Bush Presidency is not a sufficient basis to rule out those investigations, nor the potential indictments of those who planned, approved and ordered the commission of such horrible crimes which may result. If we are truly a nation of laws and not men, if President Obama intends to fulfill his promise to restore this nation to that founding principle of our Republic, than hiding behind political expediency to protect prominent Democrats is not a valid justification for avoiding what we, as a so-called “civilized” or “advanced” nation must do in the face of such lawlessness by its former rulers.
Nancy Pelosi has been, for the most part, an effective Speaker of the House. However, if she should fall from grace and be forced to resign that position because of what she knew, knew and did not do, regarding the use of torture by our government, than I for one will not shed a tear for her.
