Nancy Pelosi, Torture, and the Bush Narrative

During happier times.

There is a lot more at stake with the Nancy Pelosi/torture issue than whether she’s a liar.  It goes deeper than that.  Over the years Nancy Pelosi has made a career of appealing to her rabidly anti-Republican base (I live in her Congressional District so I know of which I speak) by taking the moral high ground.  So for her – thus far – to be exposed as having known about EITs (Enhanced Interrogation Techniques) and to have not done anything not only takes her off her high moral horse but also removes any power in her attacks on the moral leadership of G.W. Bush.

I do not agree with Democratic Representative Jane Harman’s politics but I can respect somebody who stands up for what they truly believe in.  Ms. Harman did object to the interrogation methods used by the Bush administration and she wrote a letter about it saying so:

But the former intelligence official familiar with the matter noted that Goss has given only one on-the-record interview on these CIA controversies since leaving the CIA director job. In the December 2007 interview, he said that Congressional leaders, including Representatives Pelosi and Goss himself, Sen. Bob Graham (D-FL) and Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL), and later Rep. Harman, Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) and Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS), had been briefed on CIA waterboarding back in 2002 and 2003. “Among those being briefed, there was a pretty full understanding of what the CIA was doing,” Goss told the Washington Post. “And the reaction in the room was not just approval, but encouragement.”

Who was the lone lawmaker the article identified as objecting to the program?

Jane Harman.

Harman objected and did what she could about it.

In fact, Ms. Harman’s letter has been classified and not yet released but she has confirmed its existence.

Harman was so alarmed by what she had heard, she drafted a short letter to the CIA’s general counsel to express “profound” concerns with the tactic — going so far as to ask if waterboarding had been personally “approved by the president.”

Why did Nancy, who knew of the letter’s existence, not either sign it herself or draft a missive of her own?  And if Harman knew of the “torture” how could Pelosi not have known the same thing?

Pelosi stirred up a lot of anger about G.W. Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, and the rest of his administration.  Some of it was justified but not the volume and degree that she took it to.  Calling a sitting president “incompetent” loses much of its gravitas when you are exposed as a moral coward yourself and that is why this “torture” debate is so important and why, at least for now, Pelosi is on the losing end of it.

Did you like this article? Get new articles daily for free via RSS or Email.