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.

Accountability for Torture

I’ve been digesting what our country did to detainees during the Bush administration.  To say that I am disgusted is an understatement.  It’s clear that President Bush authorized torture.  It’s clear that the Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department contrived some “legal” way to say that these “enhanced” interrogation methods were not torture and were, therefore, not unlawful.  That is a crock.  This was torture, pure and simple.  You can read both the ACLU memos (linked above) and the Red Cross report for yourself.

President Obama has not ruled out legal action — prosecution — against the Bush administration officials who authorized harsh interrogation methods.  He left that decision up to Attorney General Holder.

President Obama yesterday declined to rule out legal consequences for Bush administration officials who authorized the harsh interrogation techniques applied to “high-value” terrorism suspects, saying the attorney general should determine whether they broke the law.

Obama also said that if Congress is intent on investigating the enhanced interrogation practices, an independent commission might offer a better means to do so than a congressional panel, which he indicated is more likely to split along partisan lines than to produce constructive results.

I think that at the very least there should be an independent commission.  We don’t need an impotent congressional committee trying to investigate this.  Members of the committee have a short amount of time to ask (and have answered) questions.  They invariably use that to grandstand and pontificate and rarely get many useful answers.  Congressional investigations would be a waste of time, unless they are held in addition to another investigation.

What I think would do the most good is a special prosecutor.  I’m not advocating a witch hunt.  But there must be some accountability for these acts.  (I agree with the president that those who actually carried out the harsh interrogations should not be prosecuted; government attorneys gave them legal cover.)  So those who provided the legal cover — John Yoo, Jay Bybee — as well as those who authorized this — George Bush, Dick Cheney — should spend some time defending their actions.

I believe that normally what happened in a previous administration should be left to the historians.  This isn’t a normal thing, however.  Torture is not legal under American and international law.  The United States is a signatory to the Geneva Conventions, which are meant to protect both foreign combatants and American service members from inhumane treatment.  But the Bush administration threw those protections away and gravely mistreated people in the name of “keeping America safe”.

We can’t know whether these tactics actually worked.  That really doesn’t matter, though.  Call me naïve, but America is supposed to be better than that.  We’re supposed to cry foul when other countries do this kind of thing.  We’re not supposed to commit what may constitute war crimes.  And if something like that happened, those who authorized it and contrived some legal cover for it should be prosecuted. 

These are crimes that have to be addressed before we can move on.  This can’t simply be swept under the rug.  We need a special prosecutor to fully investigate this matter and we need one now.