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.

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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Nancy Pelosi has had a very bad stretch over the issue of what she knew, and when, about waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques.” She still seems not to have learned that it’s a bad idea to get in a public spat with people who collect secrets for a living. Her ever-shifting explanations of what she was briefed on and when, culminating in yesterday’s press conference (in which a visibly shaken Speaker repeatedly re-read her prepared statement in answer to questions by a suddenly skeptical press corps) have left her credibility in tatters and her story wholly incoherent. The latest blow came today as Leon Panetta, her former House colleague and now Obama’s CIA director, produced a memo today disputing Pelosi’s contention that the CIA lied to her: “CIA officers briefed truthfully on the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, describing ‘the enhanced techniques that had been employed.’”

Just as bad for the Left, her flagrant hypocrisy on this issue has badly undermined their core argument for prosecuting members of the Bush Administration. Recall that the theory behind such prosecutions is that waterboarding is so obviously “torture” that no reasonable person could conclude otherwise - yet here is the leader of their lawmakers in the House declaring that she very reasonably assumed that if Bush Administration lawyers had cleared the practice, it must be legal. (Charles Krauthammer makes this point as to the moral argument). That’s an impossible circle to square, and it means the cries of “war criminal” now have to be seriously muted and nuanced if the most left-wing Speaker in memory is not to be sacrificed to a left-wing crusade.

It’s too soon to tell what sort of lasting damage will be done to Pelosi as Speaker. I’m not generally one to declare a politician dead the minute a bad story breaks. More likely, as happened to Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay, it will take multiple blows to bring down Pelosi, and the impetus will have to come from the rank and file of her own caucus, which seems disinclined to toss her under the bus just yet (even if the heir apparent, her longtime rival Steny Hoyer, has been fairly unsubtly measuring the drapes in the meantime).

That said, there’s a school of thought among Republicans that because Pelosi is a polarizing figure with obvious weaknesses, we should fear pushing too hard because the Democrats will be weaker for having her around their necks next fall than if she’s gone (one hears similar sentiments about Chris Dodd, David Paterson, and Deval Patrick, among others). Let her twist in the wind, these voices say. But even aside from the legitimate interest in exposing dishonesty and hypocrisy on the part of a sitting Congressional leader, the hard calculus of political hardball says otherwise. Of course, in any debate there are arguments that work and those that don’t, and in this particular debate there are punches that may need to be pulled for legitimate national security reasons. But Republicans serious about winning political battles going forward should not ease the pressure on Speaker Pelosi out of some misguided hope that leaving her wounded is better than finishing her off.

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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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Next time the United States captures some hardened, mass-murdering terrorists, the CIA should tell President Obama that we captured some unborn children, and he’ll let them do whatever they want.

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Eric Holder, President Obama’s Attorney General, has shamelessly adopted the tactics of the disgraced prosecutors of Senator Stevens.

Holder has now released 11 formerly classified legal memoranda. These cherry picked legal opinions have been seized upon by left-wing extremists to call for prosecutions of those involved in interrogations of terrorists such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. According to the 9/11 Commission Report, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was “the principal architect of the 9/11 attacks.” The terrorist has also admitted involvement in some 30 other terror plots.

The left’s call for the political retribution of show trials over a disagreement over War On Terror policy was given a green light this week by President Obama.

Like the Stevens’ prosecutors, Holder didn’t bother releasing documents that could be used to defend the War on Terror policies the left, Holder and Obama now find so abhorrent. Former vice president Cheney called for the Obama Administration to release the exculpatory files as well.

Holder, to his great discredit, claims he isn’t aware of memos Cheney says should now be released. Watch the following exchange between Holder and Congressman Frank Wolf:

As Wolf said, Holder has an “obligation to release the rest of the memos.” Holder’s obfuscation that he is “not familiar with those memos,” that he has “not seen them,” and that he doesn’t “know
that they exist,” simply does not cut it.

Holder, having released the documents he and the left find so damning, must find and release the documents which Cheney says will detail the valuable intelligence gained from the use of the now objectionable policies. Holder’s failure to do so would be no different than what was done by the prosecutors, or is that persecutors, of Senator Stevens.

One of the occupational hazards of partisan politics is attacking the other side for something people on your own side knew about or participated in. Of course, that’s politics; but it becomes a serious problem when you raise the rhetorical temperature to the point of calling your political opponents war criminals … and it turns out your own people knew about the “war crimes” and didn’t see anything wrong with them at the time, or at least didn’t act as if they did. It’s a pretty clear sign that they don’t believe it now, either - but try telling that to the people who have bought the “war criminal” bill of goods and now find out that you did what they consider the equivalent of sitting in camp construction meetings with Himmler and not making a peep.

So we find that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, despite her angry denials, has to face up to having been briefed back in 2002 on the CIA’s ‘enhanced’ coercive interrogation techniques:

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‘Truth’ is precisely what the Democrats don’t want right now.

Senate Democratic leaders oppose the immediate establishment of a “Truth Commission” to probe harsh interrogation tactics as they face pressure to reveal what they knew of practices the Obama administration has since labeled “torture.”

While nearly all Democrats this week backed the creation of a special commission to probe the causes of the financial crisis, and while the party previously supported the independent 9/11 Commission, its leaders on Thursday balked at the idea of taking a similar approach to unearthing answers about the controversial interrogation methods approved by the Bush administration.

There’s actually a fairly significant difference between investigating ‘the causes of the financial crisis’ and investigating ‘controversial interrogation methods’: no, not the fact that Democrats were only up to their eyeballs in one or the other. They were, of course, heavily involved in both. No, the difference is that in the case of the financial crisis there is actually a national consensus that the end result was bad. The same consensus does not agree on the interrogation methods*.

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The GOP has been in a defensive crouch for too long on the war on terror. But one of the Republicans who hasn’t been afraid to lay the stakes of the current debate about interrogation procedures is Long Island Congressman and possible Senate candidate Peter King. King argues that if the Democrats try to prosecute Bush Administration officials for approving coercive interrogation techniques against 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other high-value Al Qaeda detainees, the GOP should pursue a “scorched earth” policy of shutting down Congress - and make the Democrats take full and complete responsibility for the consequences of pulling punches in the battle against terrorists:

“If we have another 2,000 people killed, I want Nancy Pelosi and [liberal philanthropist] George Soros, John Conyers and Pat Leahy to go to the funeral and say your son was vaporized because we didn’t want to dump some guys head under water for 30 seconds.”

If they aren’t willing to do that…well, maybe they should rethink their position before we get to that point, shouldn’t they?

Dan Balz looks at the White House’s clumsy handling of the debate over terrorist interrogation. Interestingly, there’s no hint - either from Balz’s piece or from other administration officials - that the President’s change of position was intentional. Read the piece and judge for yourself:

The legacy of George W. Bush continued to dog President Obama and his administration yesterday, as Congress divided over creating a panel to investigate the harsh interrogation techniques employed under Bush’s authorization and the White House tried to contain the controversy over the president’s decision to release Justice Department memos justifying and outlining those procedures.

Obama had hoped to put the whole matter behind him, first by banning those interrogation methods early in his presidency and then by releasing the memos last week with the proviso that no CIA official who carried out interrogations should be prosecuted.

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Now that Barack Obama has opened the door to a ‘Truth Commission’ designed to embarrass Bush Administration appointees and score political points, Nancy Pelosi is trying to throw the door wide open:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi pressed the case for creation of a special “truth commission” to investigate the interrogation of terror suspects during the Bush administration.

The California Democrat said several House committees already are examining the issue amid concerns that brutal tactics were used. But in a roundtable meeting Wednesday with reporters, she suggested “it might be further useful to have such a commission so that it removes all doubt that how we protect the American people is in a values-based way.”

If Democrats really want to kick up this anthill, they might want to remind themselves what happened the last time they convened a series of show trials designed to embarrass a Republican president over foreign policy questions. (Sorry this is purely audio; if someone has an equally good video clip, I’ll trade this one out):

Do Democrats really believe that the American people will become angry at the way the Bush administration handled detainees in the War on Terror? It’s more likely that such an investigation will anger the political center of this country, and convince them both that America has not treated detainees badly, and that Obama is going too far in rolling back Bush’s policies.

Are Democrats so eager to overplay their hand that they’re willing to risk turning an obscure DoJ lawyer into the next Oliver North?

Barack Obama today offered what might be the single most mealy-mouthed, non-committal, responsibility-dodging answer in presidential history, when asked his views on prosecution of those who oversaw terrorist interrogation under the Bush administration:

While the Bush-era memos providing legal justifications for enhanced interrogation methods “reflected us losing our moral bearings,” the president said, he also that he did not think it was “appropriate” to prosecute those CIA officers who “carried out some of these operations within the four corners of the legal opinions or guidance that had been provided by the White House.”

But in clear change from language he and members of his administration have used in the past, the president said that “with respect to those who formulated those legal decisions, I would say that is going to be more of a decision for the Attorney General within the parameters of various laws and I don’t want to prejudge that. I think that there are a host of very complicated issues involved there…”

Mr. Obama also today said that if there is any sort of commission or investigation into the approval and use of these interrogation methods, he would prefer that it be an independent bipartisan commission and not a congressional hearing, though he was clear to state that he was not expressing an opinion on whether should there be hearings.

“If and when there needs to be a further accounting of what took place during this period,” the president said, “I think for Congress to examine ways in which it can be done in a bipartisan fashion –outside of the typical hearing progress that can sometimes break down and break entirely along party lines, to accept that there are independent participants who are above reproach and have credibility — I think that would be a more sensible approach.”

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President Obama visited the CIA yesterday and gave a pep talk to the employees demoralized by Obama’s  decision to release formerly classified legal memoranda detailing the legal limits of interrogation techniques.

Obama’s pep talk was too little too late.

Obama was given a bipartisan warning not to release these documents. Four former heads of the CIA, two Appointed by President Clinton and two appointed by President Bush, all said that Obama’s release would risk national security. Former CIA Director Michael Hayden says even Leon Panetta, Obama’s head of the CIA, agreed with the bipartisan group.

Hayden talked about the Obama release on Fox News Sunday:

Hayden made many important points during the interview. The two points I found most poignant were what we have provided the enemy and the effect on our CIA officers:

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The faux outrage over “torture” during the Bush War on Terror (I refer to it as the “Bush” war because, under Obama, we’re apparently replacing the “Global War on Terror” with the “Multiple-Day Standoff on Man-Caused Disasters”) is no more becoming of the left now than it was two, three, or four years ago.

Co-opting the word “torture” to include methods far less offensive than the majority of interrogation techniques I underwent in military SERE training isn’t a victory for moralists and humanitarians in any form; rather, it’s an Orwellian perversion of a word that once had meaning by those who have spent the last eight years on constant lookout for some greviance to hold against a president whose mere existence they resented.

The sad fact is, by co-opting the word “torture” and using it to describe activities going on at Gitmo, Bagram, and elsewhere, these faux-humanitarians have left us with no word to use to describe those activities which used to be classified as torture, like beheading captives on video, hanging people from meat hooks, drilling out eyeballs, using electric current to cause severe pain and physical damage, and cutting off limbs.

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Link:

President Obama’s nominee to head the CIA, Leon E. Panetta, said Friday that he intended to test the claims by current agency officials that coercive interrogation methods were effective in getting terrorism suspects to talk.

Panetta’s comments were the latest indication that the Obama administration may restore some of the CIA’s authority to use interrogation techniques that go beyond those allowed for the U.S. military.

But Panetta emphasized that he would also examine the downside of using coercive methods, and that the agency would operate within the law.

Yup. Pretty equivocal indeed. Hope and Change may have just taken another hit.