I'm hardly a fan of House Speaker Pelosi, so I thought about this story for awhile, trying to come up with a different take on it that wouldn't result in her looking quite so bad, so I could examine that possibility and hopefully remain objective.
I'm coming up blank.
quote:Last month, Pelosi told reporters that she was told about the legal justification for the interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, but was never told the controversial technique had been used on any detainees.
OK, so looking at this I'm only coming up with two reasonable conclusions.
1. She's lying. 2. She's very, very gullible to the point of foolishness.
1 is self-explanatory. It's difficult for me to imagine that someone in her position was kept in the dark on the actual use of 'EITs' but not the legal justification for them.
2 is like this: if we accept for the sake of argument Speaker Pelosi's integrity as absolutely beyond reproach, what about her credulity? When she was told about the legal justifications for 'EITs', did it ever occur to her to wonder why lawyers were coming up with legal justifications for them? Or did she just imagine she'd been informed of a law-student's research project or something?
It's stories like this that make it difficult to believe the Democratic party is in for years and years of prosperity and power.
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3) "Former administration intelligence officials" means the totally unqualified unflinchingly evil political hacks who have told nothing but lies to the American public since 2001. So why would youwant to believe in their honesty now?
More importantly, why the heck does the media keep granting them anonymity???
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quote:3) "Former administration intelligence officials" means the totally unqualified unflinchingly evil political hacks who have told nothing but lies to the American public since 2001. So why would you want to believe in their honesty now?
I considered that, aspectre.
But even Pelosi doesn't deny she was told about legal justifications years and years ago. Again, why did she think there were legal justifications found for 'EITs'?
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quote:3) "Former administration intelligence officials" means the totally unqualified unflinchingly evil political hacks who have told nothing but lies to the American public since 2001. So why would you want to believe in their honesty now?
I considered that, aspectre.
But even Pelosi doesn't deny she was told about legal justifications years and years ago. Again, why did she think there were legal justifications found for 'EITs'?
It all works out like you say on paper, but I personally doubt the situation boils down to a simple failure to notice that people were doing squirrely things.
I mean, she and everybody else was running around like a chicken with its head cut off post 9/11, and a lot of crap flew past the radar that nobody was expecting. I tend to think that a lot of these things, like waterboarding or the idea of interrogation or the simple reality of the enemy combatants existing in any real way was too much for a lot of the politicians to manage. I wouldn't be that surprised if she is presented with legal justifications and ideas about lots of pretty crazy things, and I would be equally unsurprised if she didn't pick up on all the crap that actually happens. Considering that the US has secret prisons in places all over the world, conducts various illegal operations, including murder and espionage, this getting past Pelosi doesn't shock me- it doesn't lead me directly to the conclusion that she's either a liar, or totally useless. I don't think the politicians, any of them, were prepared for any of what has happened in the past few years- and I apply that equally to both parties. It just so happened that the Republicans were in charge, and the general inertia of their leadership brought us in the direction of torturing people- which is not such a leap when you pile it on top of managing to invade another country with no exit strategy and a completely ludicrous public rationale for doing so.
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quote:I wouldn't be that surprised if she is presented with legal justifications and ideas about lots of pretty crazy things, and I would be equally unsurprised if she didn't pick up on all the crap that actually happens.
This getting 'past' her for a day, a week, months or even a year or more is potentially credible. This getting by her for, what was it, half a decade? Much less.
quote:It just so happened that the Republicans were in charge, and the general inertia of their leadership brought us in the direction of torturing people- which is not such a leap when you pile it on top of managing to invade another country with no exit strategy and a completely ludicrous public rationale for doing so.
This doesn't follow. If it's not such a leap, why does Speaker Pelosi (possibly) get a pass for failing to make it?
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Not that it necessarily excuses anything, but how much was she legally allowed to talk about before now?
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I don't give her a pass, but precisely because it was just *one more* thing she had to think about or not think about connected with the whole business, I am personally unsurprised that she a) didn't notice it, or b) failed to think about it. This is more an argument that the government wields way too much power for their actual level of knowledge or insight into anything.
Yes, we can choose to hold people personally responsible for things we feel they should know about, but then how many things do you think she does know about that you don't? How many things in this arena do you think she has dealt with or will deal with? Just an interesting thing to consider- I haven't made up my mind on her at all myself.
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You're seriously asking? She's utter scum, and complicit in the crimes committed against the country for the past decade. In many ways, she's even worse than the Republicans -- nobody expected anything from them, but she was supposed to fight the good fight.
Let her and the rest of these spineless cowards get tortured. I'll feign surprise after the fact.
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It's all about plausible deniability. It's like someone asking "hypothetically" how someone would get rid of a body without leaving any evidence, and then asking to borrow your car and a tarp.
Technically, you weren't told of any wrongdoing specifically, and you can later say "I didn't know" (even though you may have known full well what was going on) without actually lying.
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quote:Technically, you weren't told of any wrongdoing specifically, and you can later say "I didn't know" (even though you may have known full well what was going on) without actually lying.
Granted. It's just that in my own politics, once you start saying technically about gravely serious matters like this...that's when you've started lying, or thinking about lying.
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The problem with the I didn't know defense is that the person being asked about how to hypothetically get rid of the body is a homicide investigator. While the cop can say, I didn't know, part of their job is to be suspicious.
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quote:The problem with the I didn't know defense is that the person being asked about how to hypothetically get rid of the body is a homicide investigator. While the cop can say, I didn't know, part of their job is to be suspicious.
quote:The problem with the I didn't know defense is that the person being asked about how to hypothetically get rid of the body is a homicide investigator. While the cop can say, I didn't know, part of their job is to be suspicious.
But he's busy!
To be clear, I'm not chalking this up to "busy." I'm talking about the unreality of these kinds of discussions to someone who lives a political and bureaucratic existence- I find it possible that the gravity of the situation simply never occurred to Pelosi. That doesn't make her a fantastic person or politician, but it's something that can be said of a lot, A LOT, of people.
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quote:To be clear, I'm not chalking this up to "busy." I'm talking about the unreality of these kinds of discussions to someone who lives a political and bureaucratic existence- I find it possible that the gravity of the situation simply never occurred to Pelosi.
I can see that as 'possible' too, I suppose...but given that she's worked hard to take leadership roles in the US House of Representatives...well, to me, if the reality escaped her, that's about as weak an excuse as 'she's busy'.
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I'm not a particular fan of Pelosi but I can think of at least one other interpretation that would put her in a more positive light.
Have you read any of the torture memos. I've browsed through a couple of them and the way the memos are written they sound very much like they are drawing a hard line on torture. What they say is "Here is the line you can not cross". Unless you are very familiar with interrogation or reading them with the aid of lots of legal and journalist commentary, it isn't obvious that what the memos are really doing is moving the line to allow interrogation methods that were previously banned.
I can easily imagine that when the Bush administration briefed congressional leaders, they did it in such away as to obscure what was going on. It would have been easy for them to be completely factually accurate and still obscure the fact that they were legalizing things banned under the Geneva convention.
I have no idea if this is what actually happened or not. Its possible the administration went in and said, "Here is a list of things banned by the Geneva convention that we have decided to allow interrogators to use on terror suspects", but I since they aren't that straight forward about in the memos and they aren't being that straight forward about it now, it seems unlikely they would have taken that simple straight forward approach briefing congressional leaders.
To be fare, no member of congress is an expert on every area of law. They have a staff of experts that help them review things but in a classified situation like this, I expect they are forbidden from passing the information on to a staff member for detailed review. In fact, its unlikely they were given hard copies of anything in these briefings. It isn't entirely reasonable to expect congressional leaders to have instantly grasped all the details, context and ramifications of anything they hear in a classified briefing.
I don't know whether or not Pelosi clearly understood that the Bush administration was legalizing torture in the briefing. I'm just saying there is an explanation that does not demand that she was either naive, incompetent or hypocritical. Its possible she didn't clearly understand because the administration did their best to obscure the issue even while they were telling congress about it.
[ May 11, 2009, 07:55 PM: Message edited by: The Rabbit ]
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quote: I don't know whether or not Pelosi clearly understood that the Bush administration was legalizing torture in the briefing. I'm just saying there is an explanation that does not demand that she was either naive, incompetent or hypocritical. Its possible she didn't clearly understand because the administration did their best to obscure the issue even while they were telling congress about it.
To me, this would still be a species of incompetence-though much more charitable than the one I personally suspect she's guilty of. As Speaker of the House, she's one of the most senior and powerful people in charge of serving as the 'check and balance' on the Executive Branch.
Having failed to do so smacks to me of incompetence, though it could be the 'incredibly inept' kind or just the 'didn't quite measure up despite being hard-working and well-intentioned' kind.
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