The Pelosi/Waterboarding Story Goes Back a Bit

Newsbusters usefully notes that long before it became the contentious issue of May of 2009, news reports were indicating – quite calmly and with no heated Pelosian denials – that Pelosi and others were, indeed, briefed on the CIA’s interrogations:

In September 2002, four members of Congress met in secret for a first look at a unique CIA program designed to wring vital information from reticent terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. For more than an hour, the bipartisan group, which included current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA’s overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.

Among the techniques described, said two officials present, was waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill. But on that day, no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder, two U.S. officials said.

“The briefer was specifically asked if the methods were tough enough,” said a U.S. official who witnessed the exchange.

Congressional leaders from both parties would later seize on waterboarding as a symbol of the worst excesses of the Bush administration’s counterterrorism effort. The CIA last week admitted that videotape of an interrogation of one of the waterboarded detainees was destroyed in 2005 against the advice of Justice Department and White House officials, provoking allegations that its actions were illegal and the destruction was a coverup.

Yet long before “waterboarding” entered the public discourse, the CIA gave key legislative overseers about 30 private briefings, some of which included descriptions of that technique and other harsh interrogation methods, according to interviews with multiple U.S. officials with firsthand knowledge.

With one known exception, no formal objections were raised by the lawmakers briefed about the harsh methods during the two years in which waterboarding was employed, from 2002 to 2003, said Democrats and Republicans with direct knowledge of the matter. The lawmakers who held oversight roles during the period included Pelosi and Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) and Sens. Bob Graham (D-Fla.) and John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), as well as Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.) and Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan).

Individual lawmakers’ recollections of the early briefings varied dramatically, but officials present during the meetings described the reaction as mostly quiet acquiescence, if not outright support. “Among those being briefed, there was a pretty full understanding of what the CIA was doing,” said Goss, who chaired the House intelligence committee from 1997 to 2004 and then served as CIA director from 2004 to 2006. “And the reaction in the room was not just approval, but encouragement.”

That was from December of 2007. So, why are we talking about it, now? Because the left was trying to gin up war crimes trials against President Bush and his Administration – our side fought back by pointing out the rank hypocrisy of people like Pelosi on the issue and then Pelosi went and lied about what she knew and when she knew it. The whole fracas is the fault of the left and Pelosi’s routine dishonesty in her political actions. Had the left not been determined to “keep hate alive” vis a vis the Bush Administration had not Pelosi’s default position been to be dishonest, none of this would have ever been an issue.

Ah, what tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive…

The Rt. Hon. Gentlewoman Was Rude

Michael Gerson notes Ms. Sykes’ asperity regarding Rush Limbaugh and others of the politique adroit:

The first response to the performer on a public stage wishing the death of a stranger for political reasons was discomfort. Wanda Sykes had “crossed a line” at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner in accusing Rush Limbaugh of terrorism and treason, mocking his past drug addiction and wishing his kidneys would fail. But a counterreaction soon developed: Humor often is transgressive, and if you can’t take it, don’t dish it, and let’s everyone lighten up a bit, and can’t anyone take a joke anymore?

The initial reaction was more human…

…civility has an unavoidably moral component. The proper treatment of others conveys regard and demonstrates self-control. Rudeness sets out to dominate and humiliate. This is not only true in politics. “Precisely because rudeness is quite common,” says philosophy professor Emrys Westacott, “it is not a trivial issue. Indeed, in our day-to-day lives it is possibly responsible for more pain than any other moral failing.” Verbal violence can leave people smarting for days, or scarred for years, or pushed like a vulnerable middle-schooler toward suicide. Such hostility is broadly and correctly condemned. Why does politics seem to numb this rudimentary moral sense?

The answer, of course, is the infectious nature of incivility itself. Every excess provides the excuse for greater and opposite excess — a search for more vicious put-downs and more startling obscenities. Avoiding this escalation is one of the primary challenges of the schoolyard and one of the important attributes of a citizen. Everyone has grievances; fewer have the courage of manners. All of us need more of it.

Indeed. We’re caught in a bind – people have staked out positions and the more stupid the position staked out, the less likely a person is to surrender it. While there are some on the right who have fallen in to this trap, most are on the left…thus for each conservative who calls the Code Pink ladies traitors, there are a score of leftists who will call mild disapproval of gay marriage as proof of “homophobia”. The reason why con artists do well is that they work on the fact that people will do just about anything to avoid being noticed as a fool. Its the underpinning of the Big Lie – the Big Embarrassment. Admission of error is, next to forgiving, the hardest thing a human being can do. And if one is desperate to avoid exposure as an idiot, then just pushing on further becomes a natural thing…rather than admit to being an idiot on, say, the issue of Affirmative Action, leftists are now pushing for the even greater idiocy of reparations. On and on it goes.

How to stop it? I don’t think we’ll be able to any time soon. Too much of the elite in our society are caught in the fool’s bind. If you think its hard for a screeching demonstrator on the street to admit to error, imagine how hard it is for people with Ivy League degrees to do so. I expect, actually, a higher and higher level of incivility as time goes on until the political left is utterly crushed.

Question of the Day

How many times will Obama have to bow to President Bush’s superior war leadership before liberals start to realize that President Bush was right about the war?

President Obama’s endorsements of Bush-Cheney antiterror policies are by now routine: for example, opposing the release of prisoner abuse photographs and support for indefinite detention for some detainees, and that’s just this week. More remarkable is White House creativity in portraying these U-turns as epic change. Witness yesterday’s announcement endorsing military commissions.

White House officials insist that their tribunals will be kinder and gentler, stressing additional due-process safeguards for terrorists on trial for war crimes. But the debate that has convulsed the political system since 9/11 isn’t about procedural nuances. It has been over core principles, with Democrats decrying a “shadow justice system” and claiming that “Our Constitution and our Uniform Code of Military Justice provide a framework for dealing with the terrorists.”

The latter quote is from a speech by Senator Obama in 2007 denouncing “a legal framework that does not work.” He also referred to the civilian criminal justice system and courts martial that Democrats then claimed, and many still claim, are the right venues for antiterror prosecutions. After the Supreme Court’s Boumediene decision gave terrorists habeas rights, Mr. Obama again laid into the Bush Administration’s “legal black hole” and “dangerously flawed legal approach,” which “undermines the very values we are fighting to defend.”

At least some people in the White House must now be embarrassed by their boss’s switcheroo…

Indeed. Look, credit to Obama for doing the right thing here and in other aspects of anti-terror policy. While I do worry that not enough grit is evident in the Obama Administration to tough it out when things go wrong, I am pleased that – for the most part – Obama’s campaign rhetoric about the war has proven to be just that: campaign rhetoric. Dangerous and slanderous rhetoric, to be sure. It is now abundantly clear that the decision to oppose President Bush’s war policy was based entirely upon the desire to be in opposition rather than the result of careful reasoning.

The kook left base, of course, just took their marching orders – they were told that President Bush was a war criminal, and that is what they believe…but, what now? The war criminal is now being copied, in great detail and with only cosmetic changes, by The One – what are kook lefties to do now? Hopefully, they’ll start thinking and come to the understanding that their leaders are interested in power and not much else. The path to power was to be paved with making the heroic President Bush into the odious President Bush. Mission Accomplished, as it were. But now Obama has to govern and he can’t afford to allow any weakness on his part to result in even one American death being traced to a change in policy between himself and President Bush. If Obama were to really release the hard-core Gitmo detainees and even one of them were to kill an American in a terrorist act, that would be end game for Obama – he’d be crushed in a landslide in 2012, regardless of what else happened. He knows this – too bad his supporters don’t seem to realize it.

Subversive Phrase of the Day

If only liberals would think, they’d understand this:

Everyone wants to live at the expense of the state. They forget that the state lives at the expense of everyone. – Frederic Bastiat

Hillary Clinton's Lips Were Moving

And thus we know, in that grandest of Clinton traditions, that she was lying:

Last month Secretary of State Hilary Clinton told Congress that half of the women she had seen in Brazilian hospitals “were fighting for their lives against botched abortions.” After her comments she was asked to produce evidence as to when she had visited the hospitals or statistics to back her claim, but neither she nor her staffers have been able to produce any evidence.

Clinton, who last year falsely claimed that she had been involved in a sniper attack as First Lady when she visited Bosnia, is now making another claim: half the women in Brazilian hospitals are “fighting for their lives against botched abortions.”

After video tapes showed that Clinton was not actually under sniper fire when she was in Bosnia, she said she had a “different memory of the event.” Later she said, “So I made a mistake. That happens. It proves I’m human, which, you know, for some people, is a revelation.”

The National Catholic Register contacted Department of State spokeswoman Laura Tischler to see if there was any record of Clinton’s trip to Brazilian hospitals. Tischler said, “I am unable to confirm where or when the trip she referred to in her testimony was — where specifically in Brazil she was visiting or when the trip occurred.”

Representative Chris Smith, who asked the question that prompted Clinton’s response, remarked, “Pro-abortion activists have a long history of making these type of unsubstantiated claims. That’s how they drive policy — with gross exaggeration of numbers, hyperbole and junk science,” according to the NCR.

Not just pro-abortion people – the left has this penchant for just making up an alarming factoid to buttress whatever argument they happen to be making at the moment. People with retentive memories might recall all the post-Columbine massacre assertions that this or that number of kids were killed by guns every day in America…trouble was, all the figures bruited about exceeded the number of juveniles killed by guns per year. Its always good to pause and think about it each time a liberal makes an assertion.

Hillary’s absurd assertion about the prevalence of post-botched-abortion cases in Brazilian hospitals is one of the easier ones. I mean, honestly, how many people in Brazil are seeking an abortion at any given moment? Not enough, I’ll warrant, to fill up hospital wards, even supposing that all of them were of the botched variety. The pro-abortion loves to put out this sort of nonsense – this way they can paint the pro-life side as heartless and cruel…it is we, on our side, who want women to die…because we hate them, or something. An old – but still used – pro-abortion talking point is the absurdly inflated numbers on pre-Roe deaths from “back alley” abortions…and then, presto, Roe was decided and abortion deaths became such a small number as to never, ever need to be looked in to or studied in any way, shape or form. Apparently scores of doctors stepped forth post-Roe because they all really wanted to perform abortions all along.

Yeah, right – the people who performed the legal abortions post-Roe were the same people performing the “back alley” abortion pre-Roe. All they did was hang out a shingle – and if deaths were rare post-Roe, then they were almost certainly rare pre-Roe because, you know, “back alley” abortions weren’t done in back alleys…they were done on the sly at medical facilities were doctors would bend or break the rules about abortion. Its hard to strip away the thick and varied layers of lies the left has put out about abortion, as well as every other issue advocated by the left. It takes a while to demonstrate just one lie for what it is – and thus liberals glibly lie all the time because they know that not all the lies will be uncovered (I’m talking here, of course, about liberal leaders – the servile rank and file of liberalism doesn’t question anything and certainly doesn’t think anything through…they think they’re saying the truth because liberal leaders told them it was).

The truth, though, will out – we’re going to win this fight because we’re fighting lies designed to facilitate evil. Such things can go on for a while, but not forever…as the USSR and other bits of wickedness learned.

Panetta Says Pelosi Was Told the Truth

The story:

CIA Director Leon Panetta challenged House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s accusations that the agency lied to her, writing a memo to his agents saying she received nothing but the truth.

Panetta said that “ultimately, it is up to Congress to evaluate all the evidence and reach its own conclusions about what happened.”

Pelosi (D-Calif.) infuriated Republicans this week when she said in a news conference that she was “misled” by CIA officials during a briefing in 2002 about whether the U.S. was waterboarding alleged terrorist detainees.

Panetta, President Obama’s pick to run the clandestine agency and President Clinton’s former chief of staff, wrote in a memo to CIA employees Friday that “CIA officers briefed truthfully on the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, describing ‘the enhanced techniques that had been employed,’” according to CIA records.

“We are an agency of high integrity, professionalism and dedication,” Panetta said in the memo. “Our task is to tell it like it is — even if that’s not what people always want to hear. Keep it up. Our national security depends on it.”

I’m glad that Panetta came to the defense of his troops on this – as I said when his appointment was announced, he is one of the few adults in the ranks of the Democrat leadership and he’s earned the gratitude of all Americans. It becomes ever more clear that Pelosi is caught in a trap of her own making – had she just told the truth from the beginning (ie, “I was ok with it back then, but I’ve changed my mind) then she wouldn’t have any trouble. But hatred of President Bush and pandering to the kook left outweighed any sense of honor on Pelosi’s part – Pelosi and Co wanted some sort of war crimes tribunal for President Bush and they could only sustain such insanity by pretending they weren’t living in America in 2002 and 2003 (you know, back when Democrats were attempting to out war-hawk the GOP).

It is clear that Pelosi must resign for the good of the nation – much as I’d like her to stick around as a millstone ’round the necks of Democrats it doesn’t serve America’s interests to have someone like Pelosi in charge of the people’s House.

UPDATE: Legal Insurrection asserts, correctly, that seeing as Pelosi has accused the CIA of criminal acts, its time for her to put up, or shut up.

Government Employees Warned Off Drudge

Huh?

The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Massachusetts directed employees earlier this month not to log onto the Drudge Report website with government-issued computers due to potential viruses on the site.

In an e-mail message sent May 4, Paul Harvey, an information-technology official for the Boston office, wrote that security specialists with the U.S. Attorney’s Office at the Department of Justice asked them “to reformat/reimage two computers because the user visited the drudgereport.com site.”

“Please avoid the Drudgereport website from the [United States Attorney’s Office] computers,” Harvey wrote.

Harvey said that if employees had a “work-related reason to visit the site,” access could be provided off the government network.

Asked why the conservative-leaning news aggregator and President Barack Obama critic was flagged by Internet security officials, Tracy Schmaler, a Department of Justice spokeswoman, said it was because “a malicious code was found contained in a Web ad on Drudge.”

Schmaler also said the request to stay off Drudge wasn’t politically motivated and said it was sent only to the office in Massachusetts. She also said other popular sites were later found to have potential viruses, including ESPN.com.

I smell some bull hooey here, folks…

$17,500,000,000,000.00

That is the unfunded liability for Social Security:

Economists generally believe that the appropriate way of calculating the program’s long-term cost is to do so in perpetuity, adjusted for the rate of interest, something called discounting or present value.

Social Security’s actuaries make such a calculation on page 64. It says that Social Security’s unfunded liability in perpetuity is $17.5 trillion (treating the trust fund as meaningless). The program would need that much money today in a real trust fund outside the government earning a true return to pay for all the benefits that have been promised over and above future Social Security taxes. In effect, the capital stock of the nation would have to be $17.5 trillion larger than it is right now. Alternatively, the payroll tax rate would have to rise by 4%.

To put it another way, Social Security’s unfunded liability equals 1.3% of the gross domestic product. So if we were to fund its deficit with general revenues, income taxes would have to rise by 1.3% of GDP immediately and forever. With the personal income tax raising about 10% of GDP in coming years, according to the Congressional Budget Office, this means that every taxpayer would have to pay 13% more just to make sure that all Social Security benefits currently promised will be paid.

And if you think that’s bad, the unfunded liability of Medicare is $36,400,000,000,000.00 – putting the total SS/Medicare liability at $53,900,000,000,000.00. That’s quite a chunk of change, boys and girls; but not the end of it. The author of the linked piece points out that when you add in Medicare B and D you get $106,400,000,000,000.00, a figure a bit more than twice as large as the privately held wealth of the United States of America. And do keep in mind that this is just the Social Security/Medicare part of our government…doesn’t include national defense or law enforcement (you know, the two actual primary activities of government). Bottom line is that we’d need to increase income taxes by 81% to cover the shortfall. Or massively cut benefits – or do a terrible combination of both (everyone paying more for less).

It can’t be sustained – only an immediate and massive retrenchment of government can allow us to get out of this hole and permit us to set up a fully privatized SS system. I did a bit of tongue in cheek budget balancing the other day but in real terms, spending has to come down by at least 50% – and this means next year we should spend about $1.5 trillion dollars, without impairing national defense or law enforcement. DoD and Justice can do with some cuts, but the money is going to actually have to come out of Dept of Education, Transportation, Housing…all the liberal flapdoodle piled on over the past 75 years. It has to go. The whole thing was a massive vote-buying scam, and now the bill for those purchased votes has come due.

Friday Morning Open Thread

Been a while since we had one. Have at it, boys and girls.

Subversive Phrase of the Day

From C. S. Lewis:

Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.