Moe has posted about the DNC’s pushback to the Cheney interview. But there is much more to former Vice President Dick Cheney’s interview than Cheney’s statement that the enhanced interrogation techniques worked.

During an interview on “FOX News Sunday,” Chris Wallace asked former Vice President Dick Cheney if he thinks Democrats are soft on national security? Cheney responded affirmatively, then added that in recent years the Democrats didn’t have as strong of advocates on national defense or national security as they used to have — the pro defense wing of the Democratic party isn’t as strong as it once
was.

The video and transcript of the interview are available below.

A “Terrible, Terrible Precedent”

This was Cheney’s first interview since the Obama justice Department named a prosecutor to investigate possible CIA abuses of terror detainees. Asked about that action against CIA personnel, Cheney called it a terrible, terrible precedent:

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Yesterday I told you guys I had a credible though unconfirmed rumor that Leon Panetta had sent his resignation letter up the Barack Obama’s vacation retreat.

Spencer Ackerman, not known to believe the government when ChimpyMcBushitlerHalliburton ran it, took the CIA’s denial at face value.

Likewise, George Little from the CIA emailed me this:

I read your post at redstate.com. I don’t know where these rumors are coming from, but they’re simply false. There’s nothing to them. If ever you hear this sort of thing, it’s always beneficial for accuracy purposes to contact us.

Now, I tend to take these things for face value and having the “Spokesman, CIA Office of Public Affairs” email to deny it suggests to me that there is nothing official happening.

But I am hearing from really good sources that Panetta is leaving. Brian Ross from ABC News is also reporting that Panetta is done. So perhaps a letter was not sent, but something seems to be happening and I’m told it is all related to Eric Holder’s latest actions.

I’m hearing a very credible rumor that Leon Panetta has dispatched a resignation letter to Barack Obama on vacation.

Panetta is said to be extremely angry about the possible prosecution of CIA officers doing their job and has decided to resign in protest.

The rumor is unconfirmed, but given the sourcing I think it is safe to treat it credibly.

UPDATED: Spencer Ackerman, cast in the role of news guy, says it is not true.

Checking my spam folder, I find an email from George Little at the CIA saying it is not happening.

Misleading statements, (empty) threats of physical violence, harassing and disrespectful language, nap deprivation: the CIA is accused of employing these and other ethically troubling techniques in the interrogation of Khalid Sheikh “Bluto” Mohammad and other al Qaeda operatives in the War on Terror the Great Unpleasantness.

This being a cruel world, however, we must recognize that there is a time and place for everything. We can employ one of the liberal’s favorite tools, situational ethics, to define when the use of violence, lies, threats and torture-ish techniques are morally acceptable.

Judging from the stated and unstated attitudes of President Obama and Attorney General Holder, there are instances in which the use of such coercive tactics may be ignored or even condoned. The following situational guidelines for coercion and threats of violence are offered in the interest of clarity.

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From the diaries by Erick.

The “move on” President has announced he’s ready to “look back”.

President Barack Obama has approved creation of a new, special terrorism-era interrogation unit to be supervised by the White House, a top aide said Monday, pushing further distancing his administration from Bush administration detainee policies.

The new unit does not mean the CIA is now out of the interrogation business, deputy White House press secretary Bill Burton told reporters covering the vacationing Obama at Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard, Mass.

How convenient for this latest flip-flop to be announced just AFTER he goes into hiding for two weeks.

It seems Leon Panetta is none too happy about how this is all shaking out.

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Jed Babbin has the top story at Human Events today on the Lockerbie Bomber.

If only there were a conspiracy to blame, but there isn’t. It would be comforting, in a perverse way, to discover a home video showing Scottish Justice Minister Kenny MacAskill, CIA Director Leon Panetta and the bosses of Yale University Press smoking cigars and playing cards with Muammar Gaddafi.  

But there is no conspiracy, only a rampant loss of will to defend freedom in the West.  Today’s release of the long-awaited CIA Inspector General’s report on terrorist interrogations rides close upon the heels of Scotland’s “compassionate” release of a terrorist mass-murderer and an act of self-censorship by Yale Press that are, each in its turn, acts of surrender to the terrorist nations that war against us.

Abdel Basset Ali Al-Megrahi — an agent of Libyan intelligence — was found guilty of putting a bomb on board Pan Am flight 103 in December 1988, resulting in an explosion that killed 270 people, including 189 Americans on board and 11 Scots on the ground below.  Last week’s decision by MacAskill to free Megrahi was an act of phony compassion.  

As I see it, there are three possible ways that you could investigate claims of CIA abuse of suspected terrorists during interrogations under Bush.

1. Don’t.  This would infuriate the Left, most of whom spent considerable amounts of time, effort, and money to elect a President and Congress that would revisit the Salem Witch Trials (with possibly even the mass hangings); and give no net gain to the Right (it’s what they should be doing, anyway), the CIA (ditto), and the Middle (they just don’t care).
2. Do.  This would infuriate the CIA, a bureaucracy that easily outmatches the current administration in the arcane art of Beltway warfare; quietly please the Right (as that means that a lot of embarrassing* documents would finally get put in the public record); and give no net gain to the Left(it’s what they should be doing, anyway) and the Middle (they just don’t care).
3. Do, but ostensibly only those claims that violated Bush-era guidelines.  This would anger the CIA (ex post facto career blighting), the Left (it’d legitimize the guidelines), the Right (tailor-made for scapegoating); and give no net gain to the Middle (they just don’t care).  In other words, it’d be the single most politically tone-deaf solution.

So yes, that’s the one that they’re going with.

Moe Lane

PS: Oh, you want a solution?  Easy.  The administration comes out and says that now that it’s had a chance to look at all the information, they’ve changed their mind on their previous position with regard to appropriateness of the Bush administration’s counter-terrorism strategy; and that they’ll be doing a thorough review with the CIA to fix the system to make sure that anything that slipped through the cracks won’t happen again.  Then they actually do the review in a bipartisan fashion, with enough well-known CIA advocates involved to reassure the Agency that there’s not going to be a witch hunt.  That satisfies everybody.

Well, everybody except the Hard Left, but what are they going to do?  Vote Republican?

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

Now we’re entering the second week of the contretemps over whether or not the CIA wrongfully concealed a program from the Congress.

What began as a slanging match between the CIA and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) now has the CIA teetering on the brink of open warfare with its long time allies, Congressional Democrats.

The genesis of this was a baldfaced attempt by Pelosi’s creature, Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee Silvestre Reyes (D-TX),  to extract Pelosi from her unenviable position as a laughingstock and notorious liar.

This is by no means a new position for Pelosi but the latest manifestation occurred when her rather casual disregard for the truth was revealed by accusing the CIA of not briefing her on the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques used on al-Qaeda prisoners and she was called on her mendacity by numerous colleagues as well as the CIA. Techniques, by the way, which saved lives, prevented attacks, disrupted al-Qaeda networks, and resulted in the capture of some high ranking members of al-Qaeda and affiliated organizations. And as a result of being captured and interrogated the average prisoner has gained 20 pounds.

On July 7, some staffer from Reyes’s office, probably wearing a brown paper bag over his head, slipped a letter from Reyes under the door of ranking member Pete Hoekstra, after work hours, (I am not making this up) claiming the CIA had lied to the committee on some unspecified matter and stating he intended to investigate the CIA’s reporting procedures. Hoekstra has rightfully referred to that incident as “one of the most bizarre episodes in politics that I’ve seen in my time here in Washington.”

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I’m on record that this story is a distraction designed to take the heat off Nancy Pelosi lying about and smearing the CIA. It is also a distraction for conservatives who tend to focus on national security issues instead of things like socialized healthcare.

Nonetheless, while Democrats are screaming that evil Dick Cheney did not tell them about a CIA program, the former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency says Congress did know about it.

Former CIA Director Michael V. Hayden angrily struck back Saturday at assertions that the Bush administration’s post-9/11 surveillance program was more far-reaching than imagined and was largely concealed from congressional overseers.

In an interview with the Associated Press, Hayden said that top members of Congress were kept well informed all along the way, notwithstanding protests from some that they were kept in the dark.

It is worth nothing that Michael Hayden, when appointed Director of the CIA, was a career military guy. He was not a Republican or Democrat partisan, unlike Leon Panetta, a long time Democrat partisan now in charge. Panetta has decided to play political games at the behest of the Obama administration to distract Americans from Obama’s legislative policies.

Remember, it was only a couple of months ago that an Obama administration official told David Broder of the Washington Post that Obama was suffering because Bush was not in the news any more. This is a way to get him back in the news as a distraction.

How many Americans are going to get killed while the Obama administration plays games with our national security?

The NRCC will be launching a barrage of television, radio, phone, and physical advertisements today at specific Democratic-controlled House Districts. The theme of the message: Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s attacks on the CIA, the implications of those attacks, and the curious disinterest in selected House Democrats in facing up to those implications. The television ad for MD-01’s Frank Kratovil sums it up:

If the CIA deceived the Speaker of the House, then the CIA is committing a crime. The GOP has been saying for a couple of weeks now that Speaker Pelosi needs to provide either evidence or an apology; and when she provided neither, the GOP called for a bipartisan investigation of the CIA. Speaker Pelosi and her cronies in the House had it squashed. So the NRCC is going to ask selected voters how they feel about the idea that their legislators may be supporting a slanderer and liar.

Specific breakdown of names/type of advertisements below the fold: I’ll be updating with the scripts once I get them.

Moe Lane

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Nothing much happened yesterday, huh? Aside from a lot of people yelling over this rather innocuous ad, apparently:

Allahpundit and Legal Insurrection I’ll forgive: they’re merely offering tactical advice, not taking seriously Lefty faux-outrage currently being cataloged (along with other reactions) by The Other McCain, Little Miss Attila, Protein Wisdom, & The Sundries Shack. Personally, I’ll start taking said Left-outrage more seriously when they start reacting to attempted media rapes of conservative female public figures in any way besides helping to pin the victim’s shoulders to the table.

Oops, did I just type that out? I guess that means that a bunch of online would-be pundits who stood up and cheered when their side beat feminism to death with a tire iron as part of their winning Presidential election strategy won’t like me any more, then.

Gee.
Darn.
Shucks.

Moe Lane

PS: If you don’t like the way that we mock the Speaker of the House for being not only a liar, but a stupid liar, here’s a thought: replace her with someone who isn’t a stupid liar.

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

Update by Jeff @ 12:41pm: Speaker Pelosi’s protectorate in the House has buried the GOP’s request that, if the CIA actually did lie to Congress, it be brought to their attention vis-a-vis a bipartisan investigation. The reason? If the CIA didn’t actually lie to the Congress, then Pelosi’s in some very, very hot water.

If you’re curious, by the way, Reps. Ron Paul (R-TX) and Walter Jones (R-NC) were the two Republicans who voted to keep the truth behind Pelosi’s and the CIA’s conflicting accounts under wraps. The rest of the vote was party-line.

A senior House GOP aide this morning confirmed that House Republicans will demand a bipartisan investigation of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) accusations that members of the Central Intelligence Agency “misled the Congress” in their briefings on terrorist detainees and interrogation techniques.

According to the source:

Lying to Congress of the United States is a serious crime. The Speaker has had a full week now to either put up the evidence to support the serious allegation she has leveled against the hardworking men and women of America’s intelligence community, or retract and apologize. She’s done neither. There is no choice now. A bipartisan investigation of the Speaker’s allegations is needed to get to the facts, and Republicans are done waiting.

Speaker Pelosi and her aides have been ducking the matter all week, and Democratic leaders are clearly trying to run out the clock and get to the Memorial Day recess in hopes the storm surrounding the Speaker will simply blow away once members leave town. That is unacceptable, given the serious nature of her allegations and the implications they have for our intelligence community, where her comments threaten to shred morale among the dedicated professionals serving our country.

The text of the resolution is below the fold.

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As the scandal over House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s and other top Congressional Democrats’ bald-faced lies to the American people about what and when they knew of enhanced interrogation techniques enters its second week, questions are beginning to be raised about the Obama Administration’s role in the release of information contradicting Pelosi’s account of briefings she received.  Specifically, inquiring minds are wondering whether the White House signed off on CIA Director Leon Panetta’s internal agency memo responding to Pelosi’s accusation that the CIA had misled Congress in its briefings on the techniques.

That question has been answered.  The White House knew about the memo, and alerted Pelosi that it was going public.

“The Central Intelligence Agency gave House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., advanced warning before CIA Chief Leon Panetta sent a memo to employees at the spy agency that countered Pelosi’s claim that the agency lied to Congress about waterboarding.

A CIA official, but not Panetta, made the call to Pelosi. [...]

The aide said Pelosi protested Panetta’s memo on the call to no avail.”

Now, new questions are raised.  Pelosi must surely be wondering why a president of her own party is allowing the release of information that will make her look bad in the press; why he is remaining silent on the issue; and why he is taking no action to try and stem the feeding frenzy surrounding her.

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It’s like a demented tennis match:

CIA director says Pelosi received the truth

CIA Director Leon Panetta challenged House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s accusations that the agency lied to her, writing a memo to his agents saying she received nothing but the truth.

[snip]

Panetta, President Obama’s pick to run the clandestine agency and President Clinton’s former chief of staff, wrote in a memo to CIA employees Friday that “CIA officers briefed truthfully on the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, describing ‘the enhanced techniques that had been employed,’” according to CIA records.

“We are an agency of high integrity, professionalism and dedication,” Panetta said in the memo. “Our task is to tell it like it is — even if that’s not what people always want to hear. Keep it up. Our national security depends on it.”

(Via Riehl World View, via AoSHQ)

…and that last statement translates to, as near as I can tell, “Go ahead and hit her again.” Add that to the apparent dismissive attitude of Panetta towards Speaker Pelosi’s allegations (I think that he referred to it as ‘noise’), and you get the feeling that the CIA is prepared to be the brick wall that the Speaker is pounding her head against for as long as the Speaker feels like pounding. That suggests that there’s a lot of paperwork still out there that can accidentally-on purpose show up when the time is right.

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…he’s been getting briefings from them for decades, with no complaints:

See also here, here, & here.

Ed Morrissey heard laughter in the above: I’m not as sure, but if it is there it’s both understandable and justified. Joe Lieberman’s taken a lot of garbage from Pelosi’s ideological cohorts over the years, and even though he’s easily given better than he’s gotten the thought of a little more payback is clearly not an unwelcome one. In fact, I think that Lieberman’s enjoying this more than the neocons are, and we’re wondering whether Hoyer’s going to try to get Pelosi removed, or just neutralized.

Personally, I’m for a nice grudge war where I can root for injuries.

Moe Lane

Watching the video (H/T: AoSHQ) of the press conference was fascinating, particularly the parts where the Speaker of the House kept harping on weapons of mass destruction as if the subject was relevant. She looked for all the world like a pigeon who had been trained to peck at a button in exchange for birdseed; only, she kept pecking the button, and no birdseed was coming out…

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

Note by Jeff: As bk notes in the comments, you have to really take a few moments and consider this to properly appreciate it. This isn’t just garden-variety “duped by the establishment” gullibility - this is continuous and free admission that the president so many of them dubbed the “dumbest man alive” was so much smarter than them that he not only convinced them an alternate reality was true — he forced them to act on it (supposedly without ever questioning the veracity of that which was presented to them). That’s Guinness Book of World Records-level gullibility, there, and it’s a damned impressive feat — one which should without doubt disqualify Pelosi and her buddies from “leading” this country anywhere for any longer.

Speaker of the House (for now) Nancy Pelosi (Democrat-CA) stepped to the microphone this morning set the record straight once and for all on these pesky interrogation briefings.

Apparently, it’s all the CIA’s fault. They’re too good at hiding the truth from our naive Democratic leaders in Congress.

You see, according to Pelosi, back during the Dark Days of the Bush Administration (may their names be wiped from the record of history forever), the lies were flying so fast and furious at the residents of Capitol Hill that the poor Democratic caucus didn’t know what to do with itself — and the CIA, according to the Speaker, was in on the act.

“The CIA was misleading the Congress and at the same the administration was misleading the Congress on weapons of mass destruction!” Pelosi declared to the press this morning, implementing the Democrats’ Iraq strategy (”poor little us –we were being lied to and didn’t know it!”) in an attempt to shift blame from the person with whom the buck stops when it comes to House affairs — herself — and onto the first third party she could find.

Given this declaration of Pelosi’s, it appears we can, at long last, call off the search for the most gullible people in America. If they are to be believed, Ms. Pelosi and her fellow Congressional Democrats — professional politicians all — were being lied to by the entire establishment (apart, supposedly, from themselves), from the President to the foot soldiers in the intelligence community, for the last eight-plus years, and they were simply too earnest and gullible to realize it.

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Update by Jeff: Former White House Press Secretary Dana Perino explains how asinine Pelosi’s decision to go to war with the CIA really was.

Our favorite California Yankee, Dan Spencer, is all over this one:

Nancy Pelosi continues parsing her denial of never being told about waterboarding and now claims the CIA lied.

Mike Soraghan and Jared Allen report Pelosi now claims that in a September 2002 briefing she was specifically told waterboarding was not being used on detainees:

Those briefings gave me inaccurate and incomplete information.

The question for Pelosi remains: What did she know about the enhanced interrogation techniques, and when did she know it?

The Speaker has precious little credibility left concerning waterboarding. For weeks, Pelosi insisted she wasn’t briefed about waterboarding. Then after a declassified report last week suggested otherwise, Pelosi claimed she pulled a John Kerry-like nuance and claimed she wasn’t told that waterboarding was actually used. Now, after her intelligence aide, Michael Sheehy, confirmed that Pelosi was told in February 2003 that waterboarding was actually used on CIA detainee Abu Zubaydah, she claim[ed in a press conference this morning that] the CIA lied.

Surprise! A politician — a person whose number one goal is to save his or her own skin at any cost, followed closely by the number two goal of simply being reelected ad infinitum — is accusing a de jure (if not de facto) apolitical organization of lying about what they told her in order to salvage her political image nationally and with her radically leftist base.

This isn’t the least bit surprising, especially given Speaker Pelosi’s serpentine maneuvering on this issue ever since word came out that she had been briefed on enhanced interrogation techniques back at the beginning of the American offensive in the War on Terror.

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A pair of stories (HT: Hot Air Headlines, here and here) illustrate the sudden appearance of troubles for the Speaker of the House rather neatly. First, the general:

Democrats: CIA is out to get us

Democrats charged Tuesday that the CIA has released documents about congressional briefings on harsh interrogation techniques in order to deflect attention and blame away from itself.

and now, the specific:

Source: Aide told Pelosi waterboarding had been used

WASHINGTON (CNN) — A source close to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi now confirms that Pelosi was told in February 2003 by her intelligence aide, Michael Sheehy, that waterboarding was actually used on CIA detainee Abu Zubaydah.

This appears to contradict Pelosi’s account that she was never told waterboarding actually happened, only that the administration was considering using it.

Which is a nice way of putting it*.

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Rasmussen finds 58% of Americans believe the Obama administration’s recent release of CIA memos endangers the national security of the United States.

Sizable majorities of Republicans and unaffiliated voters say the release of the CIA memos about the interrogations hurts national security. Democrats are evenly divided on whether the release hurt national security or helped the image of the United States abroad.

Other findings:

• Americans don’t want an investigation of how the Bush administration treated terrorism suspects. Only 28% think the Obama administration should do any further investigating of how the Bush administration treated terrorism suspects, 58% are opposed. Democrats are evenly divided over whether further investigation is necessary. Seventy-seven percent of Republicans and 62% of voters not affiliated with either major party are against more investigating.

• Just 42% of all voters say terrorism suspects were tortured by the United States, unchanged from October 2007. Most Democrats (54%) and a plurality of unaffiliated voters (46%) believe the United States did torture terrorism suspects. Fifty-five percent (55%) of Republican voters do not believe torture was used.

No wonder President Obama is now backing away from investigating the Bush Administration.

The Washington Post reports that Defense Secretary Robert Gates broke with CIA Director Leon Panetta, and four past CIA Directors from Republican and Democratic administrations, to counsel President Barack Obama to release selected CIA memos describing enhanced interrogation techniques used to extract information from captured terrorists. His reason? It must have been a good one.

Robert M. Gates indicates that he supported the release of sensitive memos on detainee interrogation methods last week because he viewed their ultimate release as inevitable.

Reveal secrets before they are leaked? Interesting philosophy. It leaves just one question, though. Why have any secrets at all?

Let’s see everything Mr. Secretary. Troop movements, battle plans, weapons systems, intelligence assets, names of covert agents, all of it. It’s all bound to be disclosed someday anyhow, right? Might as well just get it out there now. No need to actually protect sensitive national security information. America should just dump all of its secrets out in the open and hope that no damage results. After all, in the age of Obama, hope is the policy and our protection.