Total Recall
I'll usually take a person's word for it, but I find it hard to credit Nancy Pelosi's claim she wasn't told that waterboarding was being used. Not only is it a convenient after-the-fact conversion, it goes against the recall of others. (Even if, against the evidence, she only heard waterboarding was okay, you still have to wonder why she didn't complain, since, according to what she claims now, this would mean she was told a war crime was legal.)
She's claiming the CIA lied to her. There's no good reason for them to have lied. It's not like they hid from officials what they were doing. (People think the CIA doesn't tell anyone anything, but in the War on Terror, their main problem has been their inability to keep anything secret.)
For that matter, if the Bush people wanted to hide what they were doing, they wouldn't have sought a legal opinion on enhanced interrogation to begin with. And, especially back when most of Congress was on board (Pelosi would deny how she voted back then if she thought she could get away with that, too), you normally keep the top people in Congress apprised of the latest. In fact, the evidence suggests the only worry she had at the time was the CIA wasn't doing enough.
When questioned on her recall about the briefings, Pelosi ended with this:
This was the same time the Bush administration was misleading the American people about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. They were misinforming me. At every step of the way, the [Bush] administration was misleading Congress.
This gutter strategy (which may be Pelosi's MO, but regular use doesn't make it any better) made me lose whatever sympathy I had for Speaker Pelosi and her troubled memory. The strategy of connecting whatever you can with Bush because he's unpopular at present may have worked in the 2008 elections, but it's getting tired. (Back when he was popular, even Barack Obama wanted to associate his ideas with Bush's--that's silly too.) Any talk of WMD (even if it's truthful) has nothing to do with how we treated our detainees.
posted by LAGuy @ 12:19 AM
3 Comments:
Someone made an interesting point about people's recollections and these briefings. They're like no other briefing a congresscritter ever receives, in that (1) they can't bring any aides; (2) they can't take any notes; (3) they can't afterward discuss what they heard with anyone who was not similarly briefed. Taken together, I'm willing to believe she's sincere in her recollection. Of course, that has no bearing whatsoever on the reality of what she was actually told. It's remarkably easy to convince yourself that you had heard what you wished you had heard when there's no way to correct/refresh your recollection.
"There's no good reason for them to have lied. It's not like they hid from officials what they were doing."
That statement is belied by the entire history of the CIA. They lie and hide because for the same reason that a dog barks.
Anonymous, I think you believe the CIA is like it's shown in the movies. They regularly brief top officials on what's going on, and the main thing is they had no reason to hide what they were doing, and had no reason to think they had to hide what they were doing. Other events and recollections of the time shows th is. In fact, they had every reason to tell everyone about this to give them cover if there was even the slightest chance they might get in trouble.
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