http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2009/05/07/1925394.aspx
Republicans warn Holder on torture
NBC's Pete Williams
MSNBC: May 7, 2009
At a hearing today with Attorney General Eric Holder, Republican members of
a Senate Appropriations subcommittee suggested that any potential criminal
investigation into the CIA's harsh interrogation methods might not easily be
contained.
Both Lamar Alexander of Tennessee and Richard Shelby of Alabama pressed
Holder on the CIA's "rendition" program that moved terrorism suspects from
one country to another.
Didn't that happen during the Clinton administration?
Yes, Holder said.
"How many did you approve?" they asked.
Holder said he'd check the record.
The clear suggestion was, if any criminal investigation is opened,
Republicans would push to get it expanded beyond events during the Bush
administration. Alexander, for example, asked several times whether members
of Congress, who were told about the interrogation methods, should also be
investigated.
As for a potential investigation of the lawyers who wrote the Justice
Department's Office of Legal Counsel opinions approving harsh interrogation
methods, Holder said -- as he has several times now -- that he remains
skeptical.
"We're not trying to do anything that would be perceived as partisan," he
said. "We want to move forward to the extent we can."
Today's hearing also provided another avenue for members of Congress to tell
the Obama administration they're very worried about bringing Guantanamo Bay
detainees into the U.S., where they might be released. Holder said no one
who was dangerous or a threat to the community would be released anywhere in
the world.
***
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090513_pelosi_the_enabler/
Pelosi The Enabler
By Robert Scheer
Truthdig: May 12, 2009
Nancy Pelosi is no Dick Cheney, nor a George W. Bush. She was neither the
author of a systematic policy of torture nor has she been, like Cheney and
most top Republicans in Congress, an enduring apologist for its practice. It
is a nonsensical distraction to place her failure to speak out courageously
as a critic of the Bush policies on the same level as those who engineered
one of the most shameful debacles in U.S. history.
But what she, and anyone else who went along with this evil, as
lackadaisically as she now claims, should be confronted with are the serious
implications of their passive acquiescence. Why did she not speak up, or if
it were a matter of a lack of reliable information, demand an accounting
from the executive branch, as befits a leader of the loyal opposition in
Congress?
If the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, and later House
Democratic leader, lacked the authority to publicly question a policy of
torture, then how can we condemn, indeed imprison, ordinary soldiers who
thought it their duty to follow orders?
Even though Abu Zubaydah had been waterboarded 83 times before the September
2002 briefing of Pelosi, she now claims she was told only that the practice
might be used and that it had been approved by the Bush Justice Department
as legal. Wasn't that approval in itself sufficiently alarming to justify a
strong and public dissent? Certainly that would have been the appropriate
response when Pelosi aide Michael Sheehy, along with Rep. Jane Harman,
D-Calif., were informed by the CIA in no uncertain terms five months later
that Zubaydah had been subjected to specific "enhanced" methods including
waterboarding. Pelosi admits to possessing that information, but according
to one of her aides quoted in Politico, after Harman's letter questioning
the practice received "no response" from the CIA, "there was nothing more
that could be done."
Why not? Does the CIA or the White House that directs its activities stand
above the law without any congressional restraint, as mandated by the U. S.
Constitution that Pelosi has sworn to uphold?
Should the members of the 9/11 Presidential Commission not have been
informed that two of the "key witnesses" upon whom their report was based
had provided the information critical to the report's conclusions only after
being waterboarded a total of 266 times? On Page 146 of that report, there
appears a boxed disclaimer that even the commissioners, possessed of high
security clearances, were not allowed to meet, let alone cross-examine, the
witnesses or even talk with those who did the interrogations.
As the presidential commissioners conceded in their report, "We submitted
questions for use in the interrogations, but had no control over whether,
when or how questions of particular interest would be asked. Nor were we
allowed to talk to the interrogators so that we could better judge the
credibility of the detainees and clarify ambiguities in the reporting."
In short, the basic narrative of the origins and conduct of the 9/11 attack
that so fundamentally perverted American politics relied on cherry-picked
information that the White House and its operative in the field chose to
release to the commission. As a result, we the public still know nothing of
certainty about the financing of the terrorist organization emanating from
Saudi Arabia and the UAE or the logistical support supplied to the Taliban
and al-Qaida by agencies of the government of Pakistan.
What the public was offered was not an unvarnished look at the available
evidence concerning the attack but rather a fear campaign justifying an
undifferentiated and illogically constructed international war on terror. As
Steve Elmendorf, chief of staff to Rep. Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., the Democratic
leader following 9/11, put it: "You have to remember, in the 2002 period,
the whole atmospherics, it was all about scaring people every day."
That fear-mongering drove a majority of Democrats to support the president
in his invasion of Iraq, the one Arab nation where al-Qaida had been most
brutally oppressed by its sworn enemy, Saddam Hussein, who had nothing to do
with the 9/11 attack. The "key witnesses" affirmed that reality even after
being subjected to torture, which would have proven deeply embarrassing to
the Bush administration were it revealed in open court proceedings.
By acquiescing to the cover-up of unpleasant truths in the treatment of
prisoners, Pelosi contributed to the betrayal of the ideal of public
accountability that is the bedrock of our system of governance, which
Congress is charged with protecting.
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