A Time for Change

Nancy Pelosi finally decided to zip it up and stand by her prior statements (see video above).   Republicans have been demanding an investigation and some have even said that Pelosi needs to step down (the loudest one have been in trouble himself for serious ethics violations).  Democrats are standing by Pelosi and have fended off an investigation, which would have been ridiculous.  Republicans wanted to investigate Pelosi, but they are against holding any member of the Bush administration accountable?  How ridiculously partisan.

The Washington Post reports today that both Democrats and Republicans have been pouring over the classified intelligence briefing memos at issue and that while the Republicans claim that the documents clearly demonstrate that Pelosi knew about torture techniques being used by the Bush administration in 2002, Democrats disagree.

Republicans who have seen the documents say they present a clear case that Pelosi (D-Calif.) was told about the waterboarding of a key al-Qaeda operative, rejecting her accusation that the CIA intentionally misled her about the interrogation technique, which simulates drowning. “I came away feeling comfortable in saying the speaker owes the [intelligence] community an apology at the least,” said  Rep. Mike Rogers (Mich.), a former FBI agent.

But Democrats, as well as some former intelligence officials, warn that the documents are far from definitive and reflect only after-the-fact recollections from CIA briefers who never intended to produce full transcripts of te sessions. “You can have a lot of interpretation either way,” said Rep. C.A.  Dutch Ruppersberger (Md.), who said he “sped-read” the documents this week.

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Members of Congress are largely divided into two camps: One says that the CIA intentionally withheld information about the tactics it was already using against detainees, even as it was providing Congress with intelligence that led to an overwhelming bipartisan vote supporting the use of force in Iraq to rid Saddam Hussein of weapons of mass destruction. The other says that Pelosi is covering up her original tacit support of techniques that she now labels as torture.

Pelosi and leading Republicans have asked for the briefing memos to be declassified, each side seeming to think their release will vindicate its cause. And on Thursday, House Democrats blocked a Republican effort to form a special committee to investigate Pelosi’s allegation that CIA officials misled her.

The media has ccompletely missed the point that it was not Pelosi who authorized torture. The issue of what Pelosi knew and when is simply an attempt to divert the media’s attention from the certainty of what the Bush administration knew.  Moreover, what should really be investigated is why Condi Rice had Phillip Zelikow give her a second opinion on torture and then after he had given her opinion that it was illegal that the memos were collected for destruction. In a recent video that I poster on this blog, she had the audacity to defend torture.  She was almost shaking when she confronted a student when her questined her about the subject.  The excuse is always, you don’t know what it was like after 9/11 and the decisions we had to make.  

Can there be any doubt by now that Cheney, Rice, Bush and Rumsfeld had a hysterical reaction to a national tragedy.  They only invaded Afghanistan because they had to, they allowed bin Laden to escape to Pakistan, they allowed the presence of al qaeda and other terrorist cells to escalate to a near point of no return in Pakistan because they were focused on the folly known as the war in Iraq.

I feel ill when I hear the Sith Lord Cheney talk about how they kept America safe.  9/11 happened under the Bush administration watch when he was on vacation.  The intelligence was in Rice’s hands and he had access to it.  It was just not a priority.  Tax cuts for the rich were far more important than national security.  Cheney was more focused on paying off his corporate buddies and insiders.

Bill Clinton had one incident during his administration too so if you use Cheney’slogic, Clinto was able to keep the US safe after that one incident without torture.

Most importantly, the single most important omission from the Cheney revisionist history tour is that he was intimately involved in waterboarding to try to come up with some link between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein after the US had already invaded Iraq.  Waterboarding to buttress the lies that took us to war should be a reason to shut down Cheney’s revisionist history tour and to put him in jail.  My preference would be Gitmo since he feels so strongly about keeping it open because as far as I am concerned, Cheney, not Obama, has been the cause of putting America in the most danger ever over the last 8 years.

Go back to your hole Dick and pray that Obama doesn’t come to his sense and let Holder loose on you.  Even if you don’t get prosecuted here, you’ll never be completely free because you will not be able to travel for fear of being brought to judgment in another country for your war crimes.

That is not enough for me, but it is at least something.

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