Posted by Damozel | Today's Washington Post reports that certain Congressional Democrats (including Pelosi and Rockefeller) were briefed in 2002 on the CIA's special program for extracting information from detainees. (WaPo)
[F]our 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(WaPo).
But that ain't all, my friends. According to the article, the CIA gave "key legislative overseers" approximately thirty (30) private briefings. During some of these briefings, the CIA described waterboarding to those present, along with other "harsh interrogation methods."(WaPo). Well, well, well. Perhaps it's now becoming clearer why certain of our representatives in Congress have been so strangely behindhand in censuring the Bush Administration.
The law requires the CIA to brief Congress on its coverts activities, though permits them to limit briefings to certain senior Democrats. (WaPo) Most highly sensitive briefings were limited to the two top Democrats and the two top Republicans on the Congressional intelligence committees ("the Gang of Four"), though some were presented to the top four from each party ("the Gang of Eight"). (WaPo)
Among those who had "oversight roles"----and who therefore were presumably briefed---are the following Democrats: Senator Bob Graham (D-Fla.), Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif), Jane Harman (D-Calif.), and John D. Rockefeller (D-W.Va.)"(WaPo). Porter J. Goss (who was Director of the CIA at the time the tapes disappeared) and Senator Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) were also in the loop (WaPo). Goss---who chaired the House intelligence committee from 1997 to 2004) and was Director of the CIA during the time of the tapes' disappearance---says: "Among those being briefed, there was a pretty full understanding of what the CIA was doing...And the reaction in the room was not just approval, but encouragement."(WaPo)
The article concedes that we don't (yet) know what the various Democrats who received briefings individually knew or when they knew it. But for a skin-crawling account of some of the things the CIA was getting up to
after September 11, I recommend Jane Mayer's August 13, 2007 article in
The New Yorker: The Black Sites: A Rare Look Inside the CIA's Secret Interrogation Program. I want very much to know what the Democrats who were briefed knew. According The Washington Post, No lawmaker who was briefed about severe interrogation during 2002
through 2003 (the two years during which waterboarding was employed)
ever raised any formal objection, "with one known exception"---Jane Harman. (WaPo).
Pelosi wouldn't comment, but a source who claims to be "familiar with her position on the matter" says that the "enhanced interrogation techniques" described to her were "still in the planning stage," i.e., not yet implemented. (WaPo) I'm not sure how this is better, since the source "acknowledged" she didn't object. The time to raise objections is before a terrible idea is implemented.
Harman, who replaced Pelosi in January 2003, did object. "[S]he filed a classified letter to the CIA in February of that year as an official protest about the interrogation program. Harman said she had been prevented from publicly discussing the letter or the CIA's program because of strict rules of secrecy." (WaPo)
Rockefeller also wouldn't comment. (WaPo) WaPo says his "public statements" show him leading the push in 2005 for expanded congressional oversight and an investigation of CIA interrogation practices. But in a posting at his Salon blog, Glenn Greenwald has plenty to say about Rockefeller's history as an enabler of the Bush administration's interrogation program.
The Washington Post article rather snidely acknowledges that four Democrats wrote in May 2007 following a classified briefing to protest the use of waterboarding and enhanced interrogation techniques "four months after Democrats regained control of Congress and well after the CIA had forsworn further waterboarding."(WaPo) Since these four presumably didn't know until they'd been briefed about the techniques that had been used, I'm not sure why the implication (and I think there is one) that these particular four Democrats waited to protest till it was politically safe. I don't know how they could have protested until they had the information. At least they did protest.
Glenn Greenwald at Salon (via Memeorandum) enjoins Democrats not to make excuses for Congressional representatives who enabled Bush's torture regime.
This information was almost certainly leaked to the Post by intelligence officials who are highly irritated -- understandably so -- from watching the manipulative spectacle whereby these Democrats now prance around as outraged victims of policies to which they deliberately acquiesced, when they weren't fully supporting them. Numerous liberal bloggers are already drawing the only conclusions that can be drawn, and expressing their outrage and horror at the Democratic Party leadership....
And efforts to apologize for what these Congressional Democrats have done by claiming that they "were virtually helpless to respond," or suggesting that knowingly inconsequential expressions of private protest are somehow noble are counter-productive. Why excuse or apologize for the profound failure of those who seek leadership positions on the Intelligence Committee -- who, after all, are being briefed precisely because they are expected to act when they learn of illegal behavior -- when they abdicate their responsibilities? That only encourages such malfeasance to continue....
Whether it's the war in Iraq or illegal surveillance or the abolition of habeas corpus and now the systematic use of torture, it's the Bush administration that conceived of the policies, implemented them and presided over their corrupt application. But it's Congressional Democrats at the leadership level who were the key allies and enablers, never getting their hands dirty with implementation -- and thus feigning theatrical, impotent outrage once each abuse was publicly exposed -- but nonetheless working feverishly the entire time to enable all of it every step of the way. (Read more: Democratic complicity in Bush's torture regime)
Perhaps there will be public hand-wringing among Democrats who feel that they enabled these Democratic enablers.
In fairness, the environment was different then because we were closer to Sept. 11 and people were still in a panic," said one U.S. official present during the early briefings. "But there was no objecting, no hand-wringing. The attitude was, 'We don't care what you do to those guys as long as you get the information you need to protect the American people.' (WaPo)
If self-excoriation and self-blame are in the offing, I won't be joining in. I was brought up to believe that an America responds to threats with courage, not cowardice, and scorns to resort to the tactics of bullies. My parents voted Republican, and I have been a Democrat for most of my life, but abhorrence of torture wasn't something that in my parents' day split along party lines. If---I only say IF---any Democrats in Congress were so afraid of their constituents' fear that they dared not take a stand in favor of courage and common decency, they need to be held accountable by voters.
If I'd been so frightened I was willing to have my government stop at nothing to make me feel it could protect me, I would have voted Republican.
At Sadly, No! Gavin raises some questions about the source of this information that ought to be raised, while The Hon. Dr. St. Rev. Bradley S. Rocket expresses the outrage that the allegations require. (I Feel Sick [Updated])
Gavin's cautionary words:
I’d be sort of careful with this story. Most of it is sourced to Porter Goss, “a U.S. official who witnessed the exchange,” “several officials familiar with the briefings,” “one U.S. official present during the early briefings,” and similar characters — i.e., possibly the familiar coterie of Republicans planting stories and shifting blame. Even when true, these stories are often trivial.(I Feel Sick [Updated])
The Unapologetic Mexican ("Politician, Impeach Thyself"): "Ready for a third party yet?"
Lambert at Corrente: (We are Democrats. They are enablers) "Well, I guess now I know why impeachment was “off the table.” Anybody for Barney Frank as the new speaker?"
Avedon Caroll's Sideshow ("On the landscape") raises the question whether the lop-sidedness of the article should make readers leery of the underlying agenda (deflecting blame from Republicans). Yes and no. Yes, I recognize in all this an objective of deflecting---or sharing--- blame, and yes, I can distinguish between the implementers and the enablers. But if---I say IF---key Democrats in Congress were, let us say, "accessories before the fact," I want to know it. So no, I don't particularly care if the information was leaked in pursuit of an agenda of sharing blame. With respect to blame, I'm prepared to play it where it lays (so to speak).
I guess it comes down to this: a Democrat who would condone---explicity, implicitly, tacitly, silently, or through a wink, nod, or yawn--- the program described in Jane Mayer's article is not a Democrat to me. But I am not going to condemn any individual Democrat till I know a lot more than I know now.
At Swampland, Joe Klein seems to think we shouldn't be too hard on the Democrats who went along with "the program." In fact, he pretty much says exactly what I just wrote (which worries me a bit).
Now, there is going to be a lot of shouting and breast-beating over this. Republicans will say, "See! See! The Democrats knew all along!" Some of the more extreme elements on the left-wing of the Democratic Party will lapse into their traditional wailing about the Bush-appeasing weakness of their party leaders. But the Washington Post reporters and their sources make clear that these briefings took place in the months after the September 11 attacks. There was fear that we would be attacked again by terrorists, and on a regular basis. Few were thinking clearly about the nature of the threat and how to deal with it. (By the time Harman was briefed, in 2003, people were thinking more clearly--hence her letter of protest.) (Waterboard Memories)
But I am not one of "the more extreme elements on the left-wing of the Democratic Party." Furthermore, the reason we send these dipshits to Congress in the first place is because they undertake to represent us better than we would represent ourselves. They hold themselves out as people who are qualified to lead---i.e., people who can go on thinking clearly in a crisis, which is what people in power have to be able to do. They also hold themselves out as people who represent the ideals of the Democratic party.
I realize that there are probably exceptions around somewhere, I don't know any Democrat who condones---or would ever have condoned--- the use of torture. And personally I don't know any Democrat who was more afraid of a terrorist attack than of the Bush administration doing the wrong thing in response. The people I knew who were shit-scared enough to be willing for the government to do anything it took to give them the illusion it could protect them from the baddies were all Republicans.
Congressional leaders---Democrat or Republican---are supposed to lead, not follow along like sheep. Shut up, Joe Klein.
But of course he doesn't.
What the United States stands for now, and in the future, should be far more important than where we stood during the post-9/11 panic. The U.S. military and most Democrats are completely opposed to "enhanced" interrogation techniques. Some Republicans, including many of the presidential candidates, sadly are not. But it is essential for the nation's moral health and for our standing in the world that Congress passes and the President signs legislation that makes it absolutely clear that waterboarding is torture and torture is not acceptable--that we reaffirm the Geneva Conventions and the interrogation techniques outlined in the Army Field Manual. (Waterboard Memories)
Yes to the part where we do what's essential to our nation's moral health. But as for the "that was then, this is now" argument: Nonsense. This is mere wishful drivelling on the part of Joe Klein. The reason we are in our current predicament vis-a-vis the Bush Administration is that we kept getting it wrong then. The only thing that can restore equilibrium is a thorough repudiation now of any collaboration with or enabling of policies then.
It is essential to our nation's political and moral health that we Democrats send a strong message to our representatives that we expect them to base their actions on principle, not on momentary periods of national panic. I don't think fear of the administration or Al Qaeda or of the Administration kept Democratic representatives (assuming all this is true) from taking a principled stand. I expect it was fear of the polls. And therein lies the problem which Democrats must address.
Other blogger responses are on view at Memeorandum.
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LINKED
Hill Briefed on Waterboarding in 2002 (WaPo)
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/12/09/democrats/
I just keep thinking about how Bush kept saying that he had been reporting to members in Congress and that members of Congress knew all about this stuff over the last few years and every time he said it, I just rolled my eyes. No one in Congress ever came forward and said that they had been part of any review of such information. Now this is coming out.
But I've been saying for a long time that everyone in Congress who voted for the Patriot Act should be voted out, especially the ones who voted for it a second time.
Posted by: J. Lynne | December 14, 2007 at 02:25 PM