Moe Lane

And as I noted yesterday, what an interesting war it will be. Via AoSHQ:

Justice Dept. Report Advises Pursuing C.I.A. Abuse Cases

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department’s ethics office has recommended reversing the Bush administration and reopening nearly a dozen prisoner-abuse cases, potentially exposing Central Intelligence Agency employees and contractors to prosecution for brutal treatment of terrorism suspects, according to a person officially briefed on the matter.

[snip]

With the release of the details on Monday and the formal advice that at least some cases be reopened, it now seems all but certain that the appointment of a prosecutor or other concrete steps will follow, posing significant new problems for the C.I.A. It is politically awkward, too, for Mr. Holder because President Obama has said that he would rather move forward than get bogged down in the issue at the expense of his own agenda.

My reading of the article suggests that the focus of this is not Bush administration policies, but is instead on how the CIA carried those policies out. This should prove interesting: the CIA is already dealing with new Director Leon Panetta’s epic-level bungling of the ‘assassination program’ nonsense, and this is going to do nothing to persuade the career bureaucrats in the Agency that the current administration isn’t planning to hang them all out to dry. Having lived through one Church Committee, I suspect that the CIA is not inclined to endure another.

I don’t exactly have ‘a pox on both their houses’ attitude towards this, but I do consider this to be a bit of a karmic balancing for both the White House and the CIA.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

As I see it, there are three possible ways that you could investigate claims of CIA abuse of suspected terrorists during interrogations under Bush.

1. Don’t.  This would infuriate the Left, most of whom spent considerable amounts of time, effort, and money to elect a President and Congress that would revisit the Salem Witch Trials (with possibly even the mass hangings); and give no net gain to the Right (it’s what they should be doing, anyway), the CIA (ditto), and the Middle (they just don’t care).
2. Do.  This would infuriate the CIA, a bureaucracy that easily outmatches the current administration in the arcane art of Beltway warfare; quietly please the Right (as that means that a lot of embarrassing* documents would finally get put in the public record); and give no net gain to the Left (it’s what they should be doing, anyway) and the Middle (they just don’t care).
3. Do, but ostensibly only those claims that violated Bush-era guidelines.  This would anger the CIA (ex post facto career blighting), the Left (it’d legitimize the guidelines), the Right (tailor-made for scapegoating); and give no net gain to the Middle (they just don’t care).  In other words, it’d be the single most politically tone-deaf solution.

So yes, that’s the one that they’re going with.

Moe Lane

PS: Oh, you want a solution?  Easy.  The administration comes out and says that now that it’s had a chance to look at all the information, they’ve changed their mind on their previous position with regard to appropriateness of the Bush administration’s counter-terrorism strategy; and that they’ll be doing a thorough review with the CIA to fix the system to make sure that anything that slipped through the cracks won’t happen again.  Then they actually do the review in a bipartisan fashion, with enough well-known CIA advocates involved to reassure the Agency that there’s not going to be a witch hunt.  That satisfies everybody.

Well, everybody except the Hard Left, but what are they going to do?  Vote Republican?

Crossposted to RedState.

I was originally going to go with something from Coleridge, but an albatross necklace is not exactly the image that either I or the GOP was trying to invoke, here.

The NRCC will be launching a barrage of television, radio, phone, and physical advertisements today at specific Democratic-controlled House Districts. The theme of the message: Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s attacks on the CIA, the implications of those attacks, and the curious disinterest in selected House Democrats in facing up to those implications. The television ad for MD-01′s Frank Kratovil sums it up:

If the CIA deceived the Speaker of the House, then the CIA is committing a crime. The GOP has been saying for a couple of weeks now that Speaker Pelosi needs to provide either evidence or an apology; and when she provided neither, the GOP called for a bipartisan investigation of the CIA. Speaker Pelosi and her cronies in the House had it squashed.  So the NRCC is going to ask selected voters how they feel about the idea that their legislators may be supporting a slanderer and liar.

Specific breakdown of names/type of advertisements below the fold: I’ll be updating with the scripts once I get them.

Moe Lane (more…)

Although I plan to email them about that.

Nothing much happened yesterday, huh? Aside from a lot of people yelling over this rather innocuous ad, apparently:

Allahpundit and Legal Insurrection I’ll forgive: they’re merely offering tactical advice, not taking seriously Lefty faux-outrage currently being cataloged (along with other reactions) by The Other McCain, Little Miss Attila, Protein Wisdom, & The Sundries Shack. Personally, I’ll start taking said Left-outrage more seriously when they start reacting to attempted media rapes of conservative female public figures in any way besides helping to pin the victim’s shoulders to the table.

Oops, did I just type that out? I guess that means that a bunch of online would-be pundits who stood up and cheered when their side beat feminism to death with a tire iron as part of their winning Presidential election strategy won’t like me any more, then.

Gee.
Darn.
Shucks.

Moe Lane

PS: If you don’t like the way that we mock the Speaker of the House for being not only a liar, but a stupid liar, here’s a thought: replace her with someone who isn’t a stupid liar.

Crossposted to RedState.

Come out to play.

Pelosi turns down Sunday show invitations

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) turned down invitations to be on several Sunday morning talk shows and is instead spending the weekend with her family.

The Speaker was invited to appear on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” ABC’s “This Week,” “Fox News Sunday” and CNN’s “State of the Union,” according to sources at the networks.

The Warriors, because I like AofSHQ.

Crossposted to RedState.

This rattled:

(Via johnny dollar’s place, via Hot Air)

Good thing none of these people had knives with them.

Crossposted to RedState.

It’s like a demented tennis match:

CIA director says Pelosi received the truth

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.

[snip]

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.”

(Via Riehl World View, via AoSHQ)

…and that last statement translates to, as near as I can tell, “Go ahead and hit her again.” Add that to the apparent dismissive attitude of Panetta towards Speaker Pelosi’s allegations (I think that he referred to it as ‘noise’), and you get the feeling that the CIA is prepared to be the brick wall that the Speaker is pounding her head against for as long as the Speaker feels like pounding. That suggests that there’s a lot of paperwork still out there that can accidentally-on purpose show up when the time is right.
(more…)

[UPDATE] Welcome, Instapundit readers. The theme song for this affair is here.

…he’s been getting briefings from them for decades, with no complaints:

See also here, here, & here.

Ed Morrissey heard laughter in the above: I’m not as sure, but if it is there it’s both understandable and justified. Joe Lieberman’s taken a lot of garbage from Pelosi’s ideological cohorts over the years, and even though he’s easily given better than he’s gotten the thought of a little more payback is clearly not an unwelcome one. In fact, I think that Lieberman’s enjoying this more than the neocons are, and we’re wondering whether Hoyer’s going to try to get Pelosi removed, or just neutralized.

Personally, I’m for a nice grudge war where I can root for injuries.

Moe Lane

Watching the video (H/T: AoSHQ) of the press conference was fascinating, particularly the parts where the Speaker of the House kept harping on weapons of mass destruction as if the subject was relevant. She looked for all the world like a pigeon who had been trained to peck at a button in exchange for birdseed; only, she kept pecking the button, and no birdseed was coming out…

Crossposted to RedState.

A pair of stories (HT: Hot Air Headlines, here and here) illustrate the sudden appearance of troubles for the Speaker of the House rather neatly. First, the general:

Democrats: CIA is out to get us

Democrats charged Tuesday that the CIA has released documents about congressional briefings on harsh interrogation techniques in order to deflect attention and blame away from itself.

and now, the specific:

Source: Aide told Pelosi waterboarding had been used

WASHINGTON (CNN) — A source close to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi now confirms that Pelosi was told in February 2003 by her intelligence aide, Michael Sheehy, that waterboarding was actually used on CIA detainee Abu Zubaydah.

This appears to contradict Pelosi’s account that she was never told waterboarding actually happened, only that the administration was considering using it.

Which is a nice way of putting it*. (more…)

If you can’t turn this story about a code sculpture that the CIA still hasn’t cracked into game-fodder, you’re not trying hard enough.

This would be the point where I would normally claim to have the answer, except that I’d probably get hunted down by rampaging crypto enthusiasts. Darned if I know what it means, in other words.

(Via Instapundit)

Release them all.

(Via Andrew Malcolm) Former Vice President Dick Cheney has indicated that last week’s disclosure / distraction involving four CIA ‘torture’ memos is critically incomplete, as it fails to give results. He wants the full story released:

“One of the things that I find a little bit disturbing about this recent disclosure,” Cheney tells Hannity, “is they put out the legal memos, the memos that the CIA got from the Office of Legal Counsel, but they didn’t put out the memos that showed the success of the effort. And there are reports that show specifically what we gained as a result of this activity. They have not been declassified.”

“I formally asked that they be declassified now. I haven’t announced this up until now, I haven’t talked about it, but I know specifically of reports that I read, that I saw that lay out what we learned through the interrogation process and what the consequences were for the country.”

“And I’ve now formally asked the CIA to take steps to declassify those memos so we can lay them out there and the American people have a chance to see what we obtained and what we learned and how good the intelligence was, as well as to see this debate over the legal opinions.”

(more…)

Never say that you were not told.

I’m not nearly as sanguine about this as Ed was:

EXCLUSIVE: Loophole allows terrorist detentions

President Obama’s executive order closing CIA “black sites” contains a little-noticed exception that allows the spy agency to continue to operate temporary detention facilities abroad.
[snip]

Current and former U.S. officials, who spoke on the condition that they aren’t identified because of the sensitivity of the subject, said such temporary facilities around the world will remain open, giving the administration the opportunity to seize and hold assumed terrorists.

The detentions would be temporary. Suspects either would be brought later to the United States for trial or sent to other countries where they are wanted and can face trial.

…I wasn’t sanguine when I noticed this last week, and I’m not sanguine about it now. (more…)