May 18, 2009--The Perpetrator & The Enabler
The Truth Commission may turn out to be the ultimate example of not being careful about what you wish for.
The Truth Commission about torture and all the issues surrounding it that many on the left have been calling for in the hope that not only will it get to the truth but also lay full blame on the Bush administration (read, Dick Cheney) for the “crimes” they perpetrated after 9/11 while building the case to invade Iraq.
It will find, they hope and expect, that Bush administration officials knew there were no weapons of mass destruction nor a connection between Saddam Hussein and the terrorist attack on America, in spite of what they were claiming in public, and so they pressed the CIA “to sex up the intelligence” and thus provide the “evidence” they wanted to justify their preemptive war.
They feel certain that rather than discovering that only “a few bad apples” were responsible for torturing “enemy combatants” and “detainees,” the Commission will find that the so-called “legal justification” and impetuous for waterboarding and other forms of “enhanced interrogation” (note this string of euphemisms), and the authorization to employ them, came directly from “the office of the vice president.” Yet another euphemism.
They are also now claiming that that “office” pressed commanders on the ground in Iraq to torture captured Iraqi officials to get them to “confess” falsely that Iraq was deeply implicated in the attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. If true, those calling for the Truth Commission claim, this would “prove” that not only was the office of the vice president involved in what would clearly be a crime, but also so was the vice president himself. The real target of all this ire and maneuvering.
As one might imagine, Republicans have been resisting the pressure to establish this body. An independent commission of the sort that was formed after John Kennedy was assassinated (the Warren Commission) and the one named after we were attacked (The 9/11 Commission). That is they were resisting until the end of last week.
That was because, seemingly out of the blue, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi was thrust front and center into the debate about torture; and by the end of the weekend the Republican counterattack on her was so successful—she, more than Dick Cheney, was emerging as the real villain in this sad drama—that now they too are calling for a full, independent investigation. But that called-for investigation (and it is a big “but”), according to, say, Newt Gingrich, who was all over the Sunday talk shows and who knows a thing or two about being tossed out of the Speaker’s chair, Newt who is rapidly ramping up his 2012 presidential campaign, is demanding a full investigation of . . . Nancy Pelosi!
Not Cheney, not the Bush White House, not the previous Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, not the CIA interrogators, not the offshore prisons and torture centers, but poor Nancy who can’t seem to get her facts straight about what she was told about waterboarding (nothing) and when she was briefed (never).
I will state it directly—minimally she is fudging.
Her story has, as they put these things in Washington, “evolved”; and traditionally, again as in Washington, when even those who do not believe in Evolution evolve their own explanations about an unsavory, craven, or potentially illegal incident (see Richard Nixon during Watergate and Bill Clinton during Monicagate as presidential examples, though of wholly different stripes), when this occurs they are surely covering something up. Now, Nancy Pelosi included.
So what will be the result of this new tempest? And what should happen?
Republicans, now perceiving some Democrat blood in the water are calling for an investigation, albeit one narrowly confined to the Speaker’s role, as if it is the moral equivalent of the Bush White House’s in this sorry mess. (See linked New York Times story.) And though Barack Obama and Democrat leaders in the Senate have been arguing that there is too much that needs to be done about our current problems that to “look back” would serve only as a distraction, there is now so much ironically bipartisan momentum to name a Commission that it is likely that one will be named, and not just to look at Nancy Pelosi’s role. There are obviously larger issues involved.
But, once established, I hope it will turn some, but not a disprortionate amount of its attention to Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats who looked the other way when the Bush administration was considering the use of torture and then remained substantially silent during the early years when they were unabashedly using it. Because in that enabling silence they became fully complicitous in these daserdly deeds and this unnessary and ruinous war.
And, I hope, that a Truth Commission will result in getting at the truth. If they find, as I expect they will, that Dick Cheney did things that were illegal he will be prosecuted; and that if Nancy Pelosi is more than “fudging,” as I suspect she is, if it turns out that she is lying, she will be forced to step down.
The Truth Commission about torture and all the issues surrounding it that many on the left have been calling for in the hope that not only will it get to the truth but also lay full blame on the Bush administration (read, Dick Cheney) for the “crimes” they perpetrated after 9/11 while building the case to invade Iraq.
It will find, they hope and expect, that Bush administration officials knew there were no weapons of mass destruction nor a connection between Saddam Hussein and the terrorist attack on America, in spite of what they were claiming in public, and so they pressed the CIA “to sex up the intelligence” and thus provide the “evidence” they wanted to justify their preemptive war.
They feel certain that rather than discovering that only “a few bad apples” were responsible for torturing “enemy combatants” and “detainees,” the Commission will find that the so-called “legal justification” and impetuous for waterboarding and other forms of “enhanced interrogation” (note this string of euphemisms), and the authorization to employ them, came directly from “the office of the vice president.” Yet another euphemism.
They are also now claiming that that “office” pressed commanders on the ground in Iraq to torture captured Iraqi officials to get them to “confess” falsely that Iraq was deeply implicated in the attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. If true, those calling for the Truth Commission claim, this would “prove” that not only was the office of the vice president involved in what would clearly be a crime, but also so was the vice president himself. The real target of all this ire and maneuvering.
As one might imagine, Republicans have been resisting the pressure to establish this body. An independent commission of the sort that was formed after John Kennedy was assassinated (the Warren Commission) and the one named after we were attacked (The 9/11 Commission). That is they were resisting until the end of last week.
That was because, seemingly out of the blue, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi was thrust front and center into the debate about torture; and by the end of the weekend the Republican counterattack on her was so successful—she, more than Dick Cheney, was emerging as the real villain in this sad drama—that now they too are calling for a full, independent investigation. But that called-for investigation (and it is a big “but”), according to, say, Newt Gingrich, who was all over the Sunday talk shows and who knows a thing or two about being tossed out of the Speaker’s chair, Newt who is rapidly ramping up his 2012 presidential campaign, is demanding a full investigation of . . . Nancy Pelosi!
Not Cheney, not the Bush White House, not the previous Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, not the CIA interrogators, not the offshore prisons and torture centers, but poor Nancy who can’t seem to get her facts straight about what she was told about waterboarding (nothing) and when she was briefed (never).
I will state it directly—minimally she is fudging.
Her story has, as they put these things in Washington, “evolved”; and traditionally, again as in Washington, when even those who do not believe in Evolution evolve their own explanations about an unsavory, craven, or potentially illegal incident (see Richard Nixon during Watergate and Bill Clinton during Monicagate as presidential examples, though of wholly different stripes), when this occurs they are surely covering something up. Now, Nancy Pelosi included.
So what will be the result of this new tempest? And what should happen?
Republicans, now perceiving some Democrat blood in the water are calling for an investigation, albeit one narrowly confined to the Speaker’s role, as if it is the moral equivalent of the Bush White House’s in this sorry mess. (See linked New York Times story.) And though Barack Obama and Democrat leaders in the Senate have been arguing that there is too much that needs to be done about our current problems that to “look back” would serve only as a distraction, there is now so much ironically bipartisan momentum to name a Commission that it is likely that one will be named, and not just to look at Nancy Pelosi’s role. There are obviously larger issues involved.
But, once established, I hope it will turn some, but not a disprortionate amount of its attention to Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats who looked the other way when the Bush administration was considering the use of torture and then remained substantially silent during the early years when they were unabashedly using it. Because in that enabling silence they became fully complicitous in these daserdly deeds and this unnessary and ruinous war.
And, I hope, that a Truth Commission will result in getting at the truth. If they find, as I expect they will, that Dick Cheney did things that were illegal he will be prosecuted; and that if Nancy Pelosi is more than “fudging,” as I suspect she is, if it turns out that she is lying, she will be forced to step down.
posted by Steven Zwerling at
6:20 AM
1 Comments:
Surely Igor know the version of Obama birth certificate he posted is forgery. As Russian, he should know about such thing. But he obviously does not know that Obama was elected by American people. Something he not familiar with--a real election. Also, Igor, why so concerned about Nancy Pelosi and not Dick Cheney? Where, by the way, was he born?
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