Moe Lane

Hardly a surprise on either score: after all, I’ve been telling people for years that Nancy Pelosi knew all about the waterboarding all along. So did Glenn Reynolds.  So did, in fact, did a lot of other people. So the news (via Mark Thiessen) that a new book is out claiming that then-House Intelligence Ranking Member Nancy Pelosi and then-House Intelligence chair Porter Goss were fully briefed by the CIA on waterboarding as an interrogation technique in 2002 is not a surprise.  If true, it’s very, very damning – the book is claiming that Pelosi declined to protest the waterboarding at all, while raising objections to another procedure (which implies that this old claim that she couldn’t protest is, well, another lie) – but not a surprise.

Interestingly, it may actually be more than a he-said, she-said moment here: (more…)

…and the Law of Unintended Consequences: “Former President George W. Bush has declined an invitation to join President Barack Obama at a New York City ceremony later this week marking the death of al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden, NBC News reported on Tuesday.”  The – ‘ostensible’ is too strong a word; ‘primary’ probably works better – reason is that former President Bush chooses to not emulate Jimmy Carter’s horrible example by insinuating himself into national affairs; but there’s certainly speculation as to what the secondary reasons are.  Allahpundit’s suggestion that Bush desires to avoid what AP didn’t, but I will, call a Wellstone funeral-style campaign op makes a certain amount of sense.  Then again, so does Instapundit’s commenter’s observation that perhaps Bush didn’t feel like being insulted to his face by President Obama, in much the same way that Obama went after Rep. Paul Ryan and the US Supreme Court in venues where they had to sit there and take the hits.  I favor the latter as being the secondary reason.

And that’s where the Law of Unintended Consequences kicks in.  It is actually very likely that President Obama has no intention of listening to the fools on his side who want to use the event for Bush-bashing, if only because it’s not the antiwar movement that the President needs to woo right now; even their protesters are committed to voting for him*.  Obama needs independents and the disaffected portion of his 2008 vote, and those two demographics like seeing their Presidents take the high road.   So you’d think that he’d take it, right?

(more…)

Daniel Stone of The Daily Beast is being sloppy here…

A new study by the American Red Cross obtained exclusively by The Daily Beast found that a surprising majority—almost 60 percent—of American teenagers thought things like water-boarding or sleep deprivation are sometimes acceptable. More than half also approved of killing captured enemies in cases where the enemy had killed Americans. When asked about the reverse, 41 percent thought it was permissible for American troops to be tortured overseas. In all cases, young people showed themselves to be significantly more in favor of torture than older adults.

…and you can tell by the fact that he didn’t actually directly link to the survey in question.  At first glance it’s not exactly obvious why: after all, the question that was asked is potentially even more depressing.  The statement that got the 59% approval was: “Torturing captured enemy soldiers or fighters in order to get important military information.”  But it’s not entirely… useful to Stone, because the big question in the US government was never “Is it OK to wire up terrorists to car batteries on a regular basis?”  That was easily answered with a “No.”  The big question was, “Are interrogation techniques like waterboarding and sleep deprivation actually torture?” – an argument that Stone and his ilk clearly think is “Yes.”

(more…)

Because you never know.

Thanks to CPAC, I completely missed covering this (Glenn Reynolds reminded me of the story this morning):

Authors of waterboarding memos won’t be disciplined

Bush administration lawyers who wrote memos that paved the way for waterboarding of terrorism suspects and other harsh interrogation tactics “exercised poor judgment” but will not face discipline for their actions, according to long-awaited Justice Department documents released Friday.

I would have asked Abdul Ghani Baradar whether he thought that this exoneration – which is what this is  – had anything to do with the administration’s decision to re-implement Clinton-era tactics of extraordinary rendition, but he could not be reached for comment.

Moe Lane

PS: What’s that?  You’re from the Left, and you gave money to Democrats because you thought that they would prosecute Yoo and Bybee for doing their jobs?  And now you want that money back?  Why, how profoundly silly of you.  Next, you’ll be telling farmers to give milk back to the cows.

Hey, be personally grateful it’s not ‘give bacon back to the pigs.’

Crossposted to RedState.

I think that Allahpundit is over-analyzing the reasons why support for ‘torture’ is currently polling at 54/41 in favor (God help us all).  It looks fairly simple to me: the antiwar movement has spent the last five or six years attempting to equate waterboarding to torture.  They even more or less succeeded – but then they made a classic mistake: they assumed that stigmatization would inevitably follow.  Their thinking presumably was that if you can define X as Y, and Y is bad, then it becomes inconceivable that people could possibly support X.

Apparently, what happened instead was that they got the American people to define X as Y… and then the American people decided that perhaps this meant that Y wasn’t so bad after all.  This answer allows them to keep doing X, which was after all keeping us from losing any more national landmarks and innocent civilians to terrorist attacks.  Men not being angels, that’s enough for a justification right then and there.

Mind you, it’s not the waterboarding that’s the problem here: it’s that this strategy also makes it slightly easier for the CIA to feel better about handing over suspected terrorists caught abroad to say, France; who will hand them over to, say, Egypt; who will hand them over to people with car batteries.  Which is bad, by the way; but it’s now also easier.

Oops?

Moe Lane

PS: Yes, all of this was incredibly stupid of the antiwar movement – not to mention morally shortsighted of them.  Antiwar progressives, remember?

Crossposted to RedState.

Oh, stop squirming. Having the chip put in doesn’t hurt *that* much.

I’m sorry to have to tell you folks at The Gawker this, but it’s over.  You’ve been tagged by the guy from the cow college as Outside the Pale, and you’re not coming back from that.

It’s like this: you were fine with this post, for a given value of fine: you took precisely the line that was expected of you with the Mancow narrative.  Right-wing shock-jock gets waterboarded, now thinks it’s torture, yadda yadda and the Online Left cheers while it reaches for the tis… well, I’ll be polite.  If you had left it there, nothing further would have gone on.  But then you made the mistake of actually deciding that the evidence that this was a publicity stunt was actually worth publicizing.  So you got yelled at for it, a little; but you just kept pushing. So now you got yelled at, for real – and it doesn’t matter in the slightest that it’s by a rampaging buffoon who believes that Cheney had secret death squads.  Or that you actually agree with him that waterboarding really is torture.  Or anything else, at this point. (more…)

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.

[UPDATE]: And welcome, Protein Wisdom readers.  You may be amused by Morgan Freeman doing a Barenaked Ladies cover.

…because now they have an acceptable devil figure to blame it all on. Via @vermontaigne (and Protein Wisdom):

Cheney’s torture trap for Democrats

[Note: Salon defines 'waterboarding' as 'torture' throughout this article. Please calibrate your semantic filters accordingly. - ML]

You might have thought getting torture back in the news would be a bad move for any Republican; after all, it was the Bush administration that authorized the torturing. But the last few days have shown Dick Cheney knew exactly what he was doing when he went on TV last week and started talking about “enhanced interrogation”: It was a masterstroke of bureaucratic warfare.

[snip multiple paragraphs that dance around the fact that Pelosi Knew All Along.]

Cheney, safely ensconced in his McLean, Va., mansion, must be chortling all the way to his cave every night. After three decades in the top levels of U.S. government, he knows better than most how to set his opponents against themselves.

You have to understand that this sort of thing is the product of a certain kind of mindset. Let’s say that you’re a person who has adopted a particular set of beliefs – for whatever reason – that you have come to depend on as being an integral part of why you consider yourself to be a good person. And let’s say that these beliefs have been reinforced and validated by certain outside individuals, through a series of deliberately provocative statements and actions. And let’s finally say that it becomes clear that those people have been lying to you with those statements and actions – and without them, the set of beliefs that you’re relying on now come into serious question. You have two options at this point. The first is to critically examine your beliefs, and be prepared to change them; the second is to find something else that would validate them.
(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…)

It sort of stops working after the third try, you know.

The Speaker of the House has come up with yet another reason for why she didn’t say anything about waterboarding at the time:

Pelosi defense: couldn’t object in ’03

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi learned in early 2003 that the Bush administration was waterboarding terror detainees but didn’t protest directly out of respect for “appropriate” legislative channels, a person familiar with the situation said Monday.

The Pelosi camp’s version of events is intended to answer two key questions posed by her critics: When, precisely, did she first learn about waterboarding? And why didn’t she do more to stop it?

Because, apparently, “All along” and “because it didn’t poll well at the time” won’t satisfy anybody at this point. Both Cold Fury and AoSHQ have a good deal of righteous scorn on this one; I’m just going to touch fairly briefly on what this means, going forward. (more…)

Hi, Activist Left.

[Further UPDATE]: Welcome, Instapundit readers. Umm. I dunno. Zombie MMORPG, maybe?

[UPDATE] You’d think that they thought that none of this would ever come out.

—–

Pelosi knew about the waterboarding.

She knew all along.

According to the memo the very first briefing listed is 9/4/02 with then Rep. Porter Goss & Pelosi.  The summary of the briefing says:

“Briefing on EITs including use of EITs on Abu Zubaydah, background on authorities, and a description of the particular EITs that had been employed.”

This directly contradicts Pelosi’s story, that “we were not told that waterboarding or any of these other enhanced interrogation methods were used.“

And here’s the important thing: we knew this already, and so did you.  You’ve been lying to the American people about this for six or so years solely because that way you could maybe stop the screaming that was going on in your own head.  It didn’t work, but then, it never was going to: you really shouldn’t have tried it in the first place. (more…)