Also, check out House Minority Leader John Boehner's comment at U.S. News, "Pelosi Should Retract Her CIA Accusations and Apologize":
It is no accident that our nation has not been attacked since Sept. 11, 2001. Our intelligence professionals have done a marvelous job keeping us safe. Faced with threats never before seen in our history, they have provided our troops critical information they need to fight our enemies abroad and protect our citizens here at home. They deserve our gratitude because, as Central Intelligence Director Leon Panetta said of the agency's work in a letter to its employees last Friday, "our national security depends on it."Read the entire essay at the link.
Indeed, good intelligence equals good national security, and we should be doing everything we can to support the work of our intelligence professionals. That is why I was so alarmed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's accusations last week that CIA officials lied to Congress about its terrorist interrogation program. When asked by a reporter last Thursday whether she was accusing the CIA of lying to her at the Sept. 4, 2002 briefing she participated in with then Rep. Porter Goss, a Florida Republican, she said "yes." She then dug the hole deeper by saying "they mislead us all the time."
Accusing our intelligence professionals of lying to Congress is a very serious charge. If true, the speaker should produce evidence supporting her claim and turn it over to the Justice Department for potential prosecution. If she is unwilling to do so, then she should retract her statement and apologize to the men and women who dedicate their lives to protecting our nation. It is as simple as that, and as of this writing, the ball remains squarely in the speaker's court.
At the same press conference last Thursday, the speaker echoed Republicans' long-standing call for the CIA to release detailed briefing notes that would provide a fuller picture of who was briefed about the techniques, when the briefings occurred, and what those who received the briefings did in response. If she is serious, the speaker should publicly call on the CIA director to release those briefing notes so the American people can judge for themselves.
Plus, more at Memeorandum. See also, William Jacobson, "Nancy Pelosi Is The Central Issue."
4 comments:
Have you encountered the left's counter arguement to this?
It involves Bush, his evilness, the assumption that courts will rule waterboarding torture (which they haven't), yelling that Pelosi's hypocritical calls for trials don't matter and that we won't get attacked again.
It's all hypocrisy, Jordan. President Bush never lied. Pelosi's lies are so evident it's not even funny.
I am rather hoping Pelosi keeps her speakership.
The vapid and essentially AWOL republicans need all the help they can get between now and the mid-term elections.
-Dave
American courts (two criminal and one civil) have ruled that waterboarding is torture at least three times: once when we prosecuted Japanese soldiers for waterboarding American POWs, once in a civil case against the Marcos regime for using waterboarding to torture Phillipino dissidents, and once to convict a Texas sheriff for coercing confessions from suspects using the technique.
The question isn't wheter waterboarding is torture: it is. We may not even want to worry very much about the moral degeneracy, sadistic nature, and dishonorable effects of using the technique. The question is whether prosecuting soldiers, intelligence officials, and politicians who practiced it should be prosecuted for doing so.
Such prosecutions could have military and political costs that are simply too high--if you prefer the easy wrong to the hard right.
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