the pelosi predicament...

pelosi's prevaricating is important. she and the democrats have been feigning moral outrage over enhanced interrogation techniques and it comes now to light that she new about it definitely by 2003 and possibly by September, 2002. it is important because it points to the idea that during this extraordinary time in america, both sides of the aisle were sufficiently perplexed by the unprecedented terrorist threat in america that they were willing to move outside of the time-honored box.

if pelosi knew and allowed torture to happen for the broader good at the time she should be ashamed of the now partisan witch hunt she leads to punish bush officials whom she came to loathe over the years. leave jay bybee alone if you're not willing to step down yourself.

i'm not commenting here on whether water boarding should have been used. i'm saying that if you want to play the 'blame and impeach' game then you've got to be sure you weren't complicit or you will get bitten.

if you don't belive pelosi is lying, enjoy this written sketch on her most recent press conference and watch that same conference here: (the video is 25 minutes long. skip to minute 21 when she stops talking about health care and tries to leave. it would have been better for her if she had left rather than return to the podium and talk herself into a knot so thick even a fat-cat tort lawyer would have a hard time untying it...)



some very salient commentary on the issue can be found here. from his opinion piece, "On the morality of waterboarding and other "torture," Pelosi and other senior and expert members of Congress represented their colleagues, and indeed the entire American people, in rendering the reasonable person verdict. What did they do? They gave tacit approval. In fact, according to Goss, they offered encouragement. Given the circumstances, they clearly deemed the interrogations warranted.

Moreover, the circle of approval was wider than that. As Slate's Jacob Weisberg points out, those favoring harsh interrogation at the time included Alan Dershowitz, Mark Bowden and Newsweek's Jonathan Alter. In November 2001, Alter suggested we consider "transferring some suspects to our less squeamish allies" (i.e., those that torture). And, as Weisberg notes, these were just the liberals.

So what happened? The reason Pelosi raised no objection to waterboarding at the time, the reason the American people (who by 2004 knew what was going on) strongly reelected the man who ordered these interrogations, is not because she and the rest of the American people suffered a years-long moral psychosis from which they have just now awoken. It is because at that time they were aware of the existing conditions -- our blindness to al-Qaeda's plans, the urgency of the threat, the magnitude of the suffering that might be caused by a second 9/11, the likelihood that the interrogation would extract intelligence that President Obama's own director of national intelligence now tells us was indeed "high-value information" -- and concluded that on balance it was a reasonable response to a terrible threat.

And they were right.

You can believe that Pelosi and the American public underwent a radical transformation from moral normality to complicity with war criminality back to normality. Or you can believe that their personalities and moral compasses have remained steady throughout the years, but changes in circumstances (threat, knowledge, imminence) alter the moral calculus attached to any interrogation technique.

You don't need a psychiatrist to tell you which of these theories is utterly fantastical.