More On Those Memos

The controversy around the release of those memos is continuing to spiral. Yesterday I posted about how Congress -- who is now SHOCKED that this went on -- actually knew about all of this stuff for years and approved of it. Now, it gets even juicier:

Speaker Nancy Pelosi denied today that she had been told that waterboarding or other illegal interrogation methods were being used on terrorist detainees.

"We were not, I repeat, we were not told that waterboarding or any of these other interrogation methods were used. What they did tell us was they had some legislative counsel opinions," Pelosi said at an afternoon press conference. "And if and when they would be used, they would brief Congress at that time."

First, these methods weren't 'illegal' until Obama made them that way. Second, she's lying through her teeth, as we've already demonstrated. But, let's do it again.

Pelosi said she knew nothing. Then she said this:

So, now she knows they were talking about those methods but didn't realize they would actually -- GASP -- use them. Rep. Peter Hoekstra called bull:

Fox News also discovered at least 30 separate briefings about waterboarding:

FOX News has learned there were more than 30 meetings and briefings with members of Congress on the subject since 2002.

The first such briefing dealt with the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, the Al Qaeda operations chief who ran the training camps in Afghanistan where the Sept. 11 hijackers were trained. Sources said California Rep. Nancy Pelosi, now the speaker of the House, attended the meeting with then-Rep. Porter Goss, R-Fla. (who later became CIA director), and she did not raise any objections.

The briefings were given to the chairmen and ranking members of the intelligence committees in the House and Senate until 2006. That could cover Sen. John Rockefeller, W.Va., and Rep. Jane Harman, Calif., both Democrats, as well as Sen. Pat Roberts, Kan., Sen. Lindsey Graham, S.C., Sen. Richard Shelby, Ala., and Rep. Pete Hoekstra, Mich., all Republicans.

Defenders of the interrogation program note that if Congress had wanted to kill the program, all it had to do was withhold funding, which didn't happen.

There is a load of crap involved here, and it's starting to smell worse by the day!

As the controversy mounts, more calls are being made for the release of the entire set of memos that started the whole argument, in the interest of full transparency. The political fallout for this brazen attack on the previous administration is doing some serious damage, and more will come if this line is pursued. Hillbuzz puts it like this:

Scoring points with the Left by attacking the former Administration is pointless, because it will alienate people in the middle who voted for the current President, but now realize what a giant mistake they made. We have never done this sort of thing in this country. Even Ford and Carter, following Nixon, did not move backwards and attack their predecessors along political lines. This is a dangerous, dangerous precedent. A President who espouses socialist tendencies and Rules for Radicalism should be very careful when setting these sorts of precedents, because whatever he does to former President George W. Bush and his Administration will most certainly be done to him in 4 years by his Republican successor. Being weak, meek, and bowing to the Saudi King while mollycoddling terrorists sure invites a President Palin to remedy the current President’s profound testosterone deficit. Effete and naive are the order of the day in this White House; couple that with perceived attacks on the people who have kept us safe for 8 years, and add in whatever fallout will come from this Administration’s naive, genteel approach to the threats America faces, and it’s hard to imagine centrist Americans being deluded by the kumbaya malarkey four years hence. Really, more so than that, it’s hard to imagine Republicans sitting home again in four years, claiming “another Carter will get us another Reagan”, and letting someone like the current President take office believing “there’s not much damage he can do in four years”. Well, there certainly is a great deal of damage he can do in four years…and that damage is starting to show itself now.

American history is chock full of unintended consequences.

I can't say I disagree! But neither can the professionals. Former CIA chief Porter Goss, for example:

“For the first time in my experience we’ve crossed the red line of properly protecting our national security in order to gain partisan political advantage.”

Welcome to the Obama era. One telling sign of disingenuousness is that these charges are being answered by political operatives in the Obama administration rather than national security experts. The spin machine is going full speed, and people are not comforted by it.

In a statement that is almost breathtaking for its sheer audacity and hypocrisy, Obama's Attorney General Eric Holder said:

"It is certainly the intention of this administration not to play hide and seek, or not to release certain things," said Holder. "It is not our intention to try to advance a political agenda or to try to hide things from the American people."

You mean besides the fact that you literally JUST DID THIS?! Release the memos, Mr. President. Man up. Follow through on your promises and stop acting like a partisan goon for a change. After all, if you're so confident that you're right, you shouldn't fear the truth being made known, right?

All of this mess has prompted Hoekstra to call for a new investigation:

...Members of Congress calling for an investigation of the enhanced interrogation program should remember that such an investigation can't be a selective review of information, or solely focus on the lawyers who wrote the memos, or the low-level employees who carried out this program. I have asked Mr. Blair to provide me with a list of the dates, locations and names of all members of Congress who attended briefings on enhanced interrogation techniques.

Any investigation must include this information as part of a review of those in Congress and the Bush administration who reviewed and supported this program. To get a complete picture of the enhanced interrogation program, a fair investigation will also require that the Obama administration release the memos requested by former Vice President Dick Cheney on the successes of this program.

An honest and thorough review of the enhanced interrogation program must also assess the likely damage done to U.S. national security by Mr. Obama's decision to release the memos over the objections of Mr. Panetta and four of his predecessors. Such a review should assess what this decision communicated to our enemies, and also whether it will discourage intelligence professionals from offering their frank opinions in sensitive counterterrorist cases for fear that they will be prosecuted by a future administration.

Perhaps we need an investigation not of the enhanced interrogation program, but of what the Obama administration may be doing to endanger the security our nation has enjoyed because of interrogations and other antiterrorism measures implemented since Sept. 12, 2001.

An investigation into how much damage Obama has done to our national security? Boy, wouldn't that be a fat report! As Gateway Pundit put it: "It took Barack Obama less than 100 days to destroy this nation's economy and now its national security. How's that for change?"

Unbelievably, Obama is instead releasing more photographs from alleged 'torturous' abuses at Abu Ghraib, which is a very bad idea:

The photos, taken from Air Force and Army criminal investigations, are apparently not as shocking as the photographs from the Abu Ghraib investigation that became a lasting symbol of U.S. mistakes in Iraq. But some show military personnel intimidating or threatening detainees by pointing weapons at them. Military officers have been court-martialed for threatening detainees at gunpoint.

"This will constitute visual proof that, unlike the Bush administration's claim, the abuse was not confined to Abu Ghraib and was not aberrational,"said Amrit Singh, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, which obtained the agreement as part of a long-running legal battle for documents related to Bush-era anti-terror policies[...]

The duh factor is high:

Defense Department officials would not say exactly what is contained in the photos, but said they are concerned the release could incite a backlash in the Middle East.

"My sense is the president was trying to please a lot of audiences at one time and that over the last (week) he has totally failed to put the mind of the intelligence community at ease," said Mark Lowenthal, a former senior adviser to one-time CIA Director George Tenet. "He is going to end up with a national clandestine service that will not be willing to do anything because they feel he will not be there for them when they need him."

This idiotic White House is doing literally everything possible to enable our enemies and hamstring those who would defend us from those enemies.

Sleep well tonight.

There's my two cents.