Newt Gingrich’s Ethical Advice

Newt Gingrich is getting himself worked up about Nancy Pelosi’s fitness to be Speaker of the House.  How does Gingrich — Newt Gingrich! — of all people have any standing to call for anyone’s resignation or give anyone ethical advice?  He gave up all moral authority about fifteen years ago, as I recall.

From Ruth Marcus’s Post Partisan post:

“She really disqualified herself to be the speaker,” Gingrich told ABC’s “Good Morning America,” referring to Pelosi’s allegation that the CIA “routinely” misleads Congress. For Pelosi to remain two heartbeats from the presidency, he said, is “very dangerous for the country.”

Spare us.  The only reason Gingrich has any standing at all in the Republican Party is because, simply. there is no one else.  There’s no one with enough clout to stand up to Gingrich (and Cheney, for that matter) and tell him to go away and go away now.  People are leaving the GOP in droves — except weekly churchgoers — and they’re trotting out Gingrich to be the new face of the Republican Party.

Lest anyone forget Gingrich’s résumé, here’s a little more from Marcus (linked above):

Let’s review. Gingrich was reprimanded by the House and had to pay a $300,000 penalty for improperly using tax-deductible money for partisan political gain and for submitting false information to the ethics subcommittee investigating his conduct. An investigation by the House Ethics Committee concluded that Gingrich’s conduct represented “intentional or…reckless” disregard of House rules and that there was “reason to believe” that Gingrich knew he was providing false information.

“The violation does not represent only a single instance of reckless conduct,” a report by an investigative subcommittee concluded. “Rather, over a number of years and in a number of situations, Mr. Gingrich showed a disregard and lack of respect for the standards of conduct that applied to his activities.”

To be clear, the ethics case against Gingrich was no partisan witch hunt. The investigative subcommittee that determined he had violated ethics rules was headed by Florida Republican Porter Goss. The vote to reprimand him and impose the penalty was 395 to 28.

And Gingrich himself admitted to the violations with which he was charged. “In my name and over my signature, inaccurate, incomplete and unreliable statements were given to the committee, but I did not intend to mislead the committee,” Gingrich acknowledged. “I did not seek personal gain, but my actions did not reflect creditably on the House of Representatives.”

All this, by the way, was before the married speaker was having an affair with a congressional aide during the Clinton impeachment proceedings.

Somehow I don’t think he’s in any position to be dispensing ethics advice.

Lovely man.

He certainly is not in any position to dispense ethical advice to anyone.  This isn’t about Pelosi or what she may or may not have known and what she may or may not have done regarding torture.  It’s about Gingrich and his appalling gall in thinking that he has any standing whatever to say anything as some kind of leader. 

This ought to give you an idea about how far in the wilderness the Republicans are.  Gingrich is rumored to be gearing up for a presidential run in 2012.  They really are in their “Lord of the Flies” time, as Steve Schmidt so aptly observed.  Really.  Allowing Newt Gingrich to try to take the moral high road after giving it up so many years ago?  Rehabilitation only goes so far.

Who’s Misleading Whom?

Nancy Pelosi said today that she learned about waterboarding in 2003, long after the CIA began using the technique. 

Paul Kane’s piece (linked above):

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi today accused the CIA of “misleading” her on the use of harsh interrogation techniques in the fall of 2002, acknowledging for the first time publicly she knew alleged terrorist detainees were subjected to waterboarding more than six years ago.

Pelosi called for the CIA to release detailed notes from her own September 2002 briefing about interrogation techniques.  She said today that, at that 2002 briefing, she was told the CIA was not waterboarding detainees despite later government reports showing that a high value al Qaeda detainee had been subjected to waterboarding 83 times in the weeks leading up to Pelosi’s briefing.

“At every step of the way, the administration was misleading the Congress. And that is the issue,” Pelosi said in a heated news conference, linking the alleged misinformation on waterboarding to now discredited intelligence reports in fall 2002 about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Today was Pelosi’s first chance to address the interrogation briefing issue since the CIA released a detailed memo last Thursday outlining 40 congressional briefings given since September 2002 regarding the use of what it calls “enhanced interrogation techniques” on suspected terrorists. That memo included footnotes that appeared to contradict Pelosi’s previous statements that she was never personally briefed by Bush administration officials on the use of such tactics, including waterboading, a controversial technique that simulates drowning.

In a statement today, the agency stood by its memo, which said that Pelosi and then-Rep. Porter Goss (R-Fla.), the top members of the intelligence committee at the time, were briefed on Sept. 4, 2002 on the “the use of EITS” on an al Qaeda prisoner. “The language in the chart–’a description of the particular EITs that had been employed’–is true to the language in the Agency’s records,” a CIA spokesman said.

However, the agency reiterated its pronouncement from last week, when CIA Director Leon Panetta wrote to Congress that agency officials were relying on old “notes that summarized the best recollections of those individuals.” Classified memos, with more detailed accounts of those recollection [sic], remain under seal at the agency’s Langley, Va., headquarters, where members of the intelligence committees are allowed only to review them.

 

The agency is reviewing the bipartisan request, from Pelosi and Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), currently the ranking member of the House intelligence committee, to release the detailed summaries of that particular briefing.

Republicans have accused Pelosi of having full knowledge of the use of waterboarding and of tacitly supporting the program, noting that she never lodged any protest with the CIA about the issue or registered any complaint with Bush White House officials. Hoekstra, at a press briefing after Pelosi’s remarks, suggested that every classified briefing he has been a part of ended with intelligence officials asking lawmakers, “Are we OK to move forward on this?”

Last month President Obama released Bush-era Justice Department documents that provided the legal basis for the use of waterboarding and other harsh tactics on detainees, in interrogations that took place in so-called “dark sites” overseas. After the release of the legal memos Pelosi joined other Democrats in calling for a “truth commission” to investigate those legal memos authorizing tactics that critics have said was torture, outlawed by international treaties.

Obama has rejected calls for such a commission, saying it would become a highly politicized issue that would do little to enhance public knowledge. However, the Senate Intelligence Committee is conducting a broad review of the interrogation techniques.

Under pressure from Republicans to address when she learned of waterboarding, Pelosi for several weeks has insisted she was never briefed on the use of waterboarding. She did not point out that in December 2007 she issued a little-noticed statement that said she became aware of waterboarding in February 2003, when she left the intelligence committee to become House minority leader and Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) succeeded her on the panel. Harman was briefed Feb. 5, 2003 about the use of waterboarding and told that tapes existed of the waterboarding of one detainee.

As the Washington Post reported Saturday, Pelosi’s top aide on intelligence matters also attended the Harman briefing, a fact that Pelosi omitted from her statements on the issue for the past several years. Today she acknowledged that her aide, Michael Sheehy, subsequently told her about the waterboarding interrogations.

It’s unclear if at that time Pelosi also learned that the detainee, Abu Zubaida, had been subjected to the harsh interrogation tactics before her September briefing.

She deflected criticism from Republicans that she did not object to waterboarding by suggesting that she supported Harman. who wrote a letter to the CIA general counsel questioning the techniques and whether President Bush knew of their use.

“That is the proper person to send the letter,” Pelosi said, explaining that she was then the House minority leader and was not the “appropriate” person to object to the technique.

“My job was to change the majority in Congress and to change — to fight to have a new president, because what was happening was not consistent with our values. … Something that had to be changed. We did that. We have a new president,” she said.

That’s quite a mealy-mouthed statement from Pelosi.  “My job was to change the majority…”  Please.  Spare me the dithering.  It might be the partisan nature of her job.  But what about actually leading the nation?  What about actually doing what’s right and not necessarily what’s politically expedient?  (OK, that last one might be a little naïve.)

This whole brouhaha shows why we absolutely have to have an independent commission or special prosecutor to fully investigate this torture mess.  And make no mistake, it is a stain on our nation.  We need to know who knew what and when they knew it.  What questions did they ask?  Did they object?  Or did they wholeheartedly endorse what the CIA, president, and vice-president want to do?  And who’s lying?  Only then can we decide if prosecutions are warranted.  But we have to know what happened and who made it happened before we can move forward.

Nancy Pelosi

Yesterday I said that I thought Nancy Pelosi was largely ineffective.  I may have been wrong.  This is an excellent (if long) piece on the Speaker by Michelle Cottle.  I was looking at her performance through the lens of legislation passed and her dealings with the White House.  She certainly does know how to wield power and how to play the political game, largely behind the scenes, keeping her caucus together and stymieing President Bush at nearly every turn.