(Via Hot Air Headlines) Explicitly, and as part of the pushback to the Cheney interview where the former Vice President weighed the current President in the balance, and found him wanting.

Democrats hit back just minutes after Cheney’s interview aired. The Democratic National Committee fired off an e-mail to reporters disputing Cheney’s argument that the CIA records released last week showed the enhanced interrogation techniques under the Bush administration were effective in gathering intelligence about Al Qaeda. The e-mail, which cited various news reports, also accused the former vice president of being a “strong and vocal proponent of torture,” and pointed to polls that show “American’s don’t agree with Cheney on national security.”

Leaving aside for the moment the wanton cruelty done to the English language with that rogue apostrophe - grammar-boarding, perhaps? - I have to ask: will this official accusation by the Democratic National Committee be acted upon, or even officially noticed, by the President of the United States?  And if not: well, why not?  After all, I assume that he agrees with the accusation - no competent party leader would let his organization go so off-message like this - so you’d think that he’d want to do something about it.

You’d think.

Moe Lane.

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

(Via Instapundit) My first reaction to this piece of news:

Administration officials have stated that they do not plan to suspend the policy of extraordinary rendition but that they will instead introduce stricter measures to prevent torture and will no longer send prisoners to countries with histories of abuse.

Bolding mine, and let me translate: the Obama administration has decided to institute a policy of extraordinary rendition, and it will be more than happy to take advantage of the current fever swamp of speculation, innuendo, and conspiracy theorizing on the topic (ironically, and epically, demonstrated here) to set up via (probably) the Clinton-era rules once more and call it an ‘improvement.’ We - and by ‘we’ I mean ‘career bureaucrats’ - will thus hand off suspects to countries that will be happy to deniably hand them off to countries without our sensibilities, human ‘rights’ groups will pretend that they don’t know this is happening, and the system will quietly reset to the 1990s.  Which is not good.

And, of course, the usual suspects on the pro-torture Left will blame everybody for this state of affairs except themselves.  They do that.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

I’m sorry to have to tell you folks at The Gawker this, but it’s over.  You’ve been tagged by the guy from the cow college as Outside the Pale, and you’re not coming back from that.

It’s like this: you were fine with this post, for a given value of fine: you took precisely the line that was expected of you with the Mancow narrative.  Right-wing shock-jock gets waterboarded, now thinks it’s torture, yadda yadda and the Online Left cheers while it reaches for the tis… well, I’ll be polite.  If you had left it there, nothing further would have gone on.  But then you made the mistake of actually deciding that the evidence that this was a publicity stunt was actually worth publicizing.  So you got yelled at for it, a little; but you just kept pushing. So now you got yelled at, for real - and it doesn’t matter in the slightest that it’s by a rampaging buffoon who believes that Cheney had secret death squads.  Or that you actually agree with him that waterboarding really is torture.  Or anything else, at this point.

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Encouraged by the green light President Obama recently gave to his Attorney General, Eric Holder, left-wing liberal/progressive extremists are seeking disbarment of a dozen Bush administration lawyers linked to legal opinions concerning the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques.

The extremists are seeking retribution by persecution because these lawyers concluded, after a legal review, the enhanced interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, did not violate the legal prohibition of torture.

Any discussion of the enhanced interrogation techniques must specify how Congress defined torture. According to Victoria Toensing, once chief counsel for the Senate Intelligence Committee and deputy assistant attorney general in the Reagan administration, Congress defined torture in a 1994 criminal statute:

The 1994 law was passed pursuant to an international treaty, the United
Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment. The law’s definition of torture is circular. Torture under that law means “severe physical or mental pain or suffering,” which in turn means “prolonged mental harm,” which must be
caused by one of four prohibited acts. The only relevant one to the CIA inquiry was threatening or inflicting “severe physical pain or suffering.” What is “prolonged mental suffering”? The term appears nowhere else in the U.S. Code.

Congress required, in order for there to be a violation of the law, that an interrogator specifically intend that the detainee suffer prolonged physical or mental suffering
as a result of the prohibited conduct. Just knowing a person could be injured from the interrogation method is not a violation under Supreme Court rulings interpreting “specific intent” in other criminal statutes.

Toensin also notes “the Senate rejected a bill in 2006 to make waterboarding illegal,” a fact which “negates criminalization” of the interrogation method. Congress did not prohibit use of waterboarding until 2008.

Attorney General Holder has already made his mind up about the left’s assertions that the legal authority justifying the CIA interrogation methods was more than wrong. Holder’s prejudgment of this issue creates an appearance of a conflict of interest, which ought to cause Holder to recuse himself, as Attorney General John Ashcroft did in the Plame investigation.

…because now they have an acceptable devil figure to blame it all on. Via @vermontaigne (and Protein Wisdom):

Cheney’s torture trap for Democrats

[Note: Salon defines 'waterboarding' as 'torture' throughout this article. Please calibrate your semantic filters accordingly. - ML]

You might have thought getting torture back in the news would be a bad move for any Republican; after all, it was the Bush administration that authorized the torturing. But the last few days have shown Dick Cheney knew exactly what he was doing when he went on TV last week and started talking about “enhanced interrogation”: It was a masterstroke of bureaucratic warfare.

[snip multiple paragraphs that dance around the fact that Pelosi Knew All Along.]

Cheney, safely ensconced in his McLean, Va., mansion, must be chortling all the way to his cave every night. After three decades in the top levels of U.S. government, he knows better than most how to set his opponents against themselves.

You have to understand that this sort of thing is the product of a certain kind of mindset. Let’s say that you’re a person who has adopted a particular set of beliefs - for whatever reason - that you have come to depend on as being an integral part of why you consider yourself to be a good person. And let’s say that these beliefs have been reinforced and validated by certain outside individuals, through a series of deliberately provocative statements and actions. And let’s finally say that it becomes clear that those people have been lying to you with those statements and actions - and without them, the set of beliefs that you’re relying on now come into serious question. You have two options at this point. The first is to critically examine your beliefs, and be prepared to change them; the second is to find something else that would validate them.

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What can you say about a video that speaks so clearly for itself? If you don’t believe Pelosi is lying through her teeth at this point, you never will. Her story has changed repeatedly, and the one she’s telling now makes no sense. You get the feeling that about halfway through her appearance, she suddenly realizes that the press isn’t going to simply reprint her statement; they’re going to evaluate it against the facts. And then she’s lost.

At this point, the best parallels I can conjure are Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens. Are there any better examples of unrepentant liars who ask you to believe their words, rather than everyone else, and your own good sense?

How does she extricate herself from this?

Speaker Pelosi claims that the CIA lied to her about its handling of terrorist detainees held by the United States. She claims not to have been informed about the methods being used to get information from prisoners. Obviously, this is almost certainly false. Why would the CIA have informed other lawmakers about interrogation methods, but not Pelosi?

But even if we take her at her word, another problem arises. Pelosi does not dispute that she learned about waterboarding no later than early 2003, when her intelligence staff attended a CIA briefing where it was discussed. Since she learned about waterboarding no less than 6 years ago, she had ample opportunity to register objections without disclosing any secrets to the public. That’s because the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence - on which Pelosi served as the senior Democrat in 2002 - conducts closed hearings on sensitive topics, to hear testimony from intelligence community officials. Further, House rules specify a procedure by which Representatives can force a debate on sensitive intelligence matters in a closed session. The most recent such session was in 2008; if Pelosi was so concerned about ‘torture,’ why did she not attempt to force a closed session to discuss it? And why did she not raise it during closed hearings of the Intelligence Committee with CIA officials? (Check out the House rules governing the Intelligence Committee here, starting on page 14.)

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It seems that good Lindsey Grahama has locked the bearded, alternate universe Lindsey Graham in a closet, and showed up at the first session of the Democrats’ terrorist interrogation show trial:

“I don’t want to retry Nancy Pelosi, that’s not my goal but if you’re going to accuse these people in the Bush administration of being evil and committing a crime, then if she was told about [interrogation tactics] I want to know what she was told,” Graham said during a break in a hearing on Bush-era interrogation practices.

Graham spoke to reporters during a Judiciary subcommittee hearing entitled “What Went Wrong: Torture and the Office of Legal Counsel in the Bush Administration.” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), the chairman of the Judiciary subcommittee on Administrative Oversight and the Courts, convened the hearing…

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Nancy Pelosi made a surprise trip to Baghdad yesterday. And according to Alsumaria, she tried to rewrite the history of the debate over the U.S. role in Iraq:

“The SOFA agreement is one that agreed between our two countries and as many of you know, I’m very opposed to the initiation of hostilities in Iraq and to this war in general. But when … once we came here, it was clear that our departure would have to be something mutually agreed upon between the Iraqi government and the government of the US. So, I can’t speak what is the attitude in Iraq, I do not know that this is the plan that has been agreed upon and we want to know that”, Pelosi said.

If Pelosi truly said what is described here, I only hope I can find the reaction from her Iraqi counterparts. It would be nothing more than a breathtaking lie for her to claim that it was ever her priority to ensure that Iraq and the U.S. were on the same page with regard to a withdrawal from Iraq. Rather, Pelosi’s one overriding priority has been to milk the conflict for all it’s worth, politically.

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There are classic lies. There’s “Mom, my invisible friend broke the window, not me.” Of course, we all have heard, “I didn’t see any cookies.” Then there’s that ever favorite, “No, officer, I didn’t know I was speeding.” And who can forget that time worn, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Monica.”

But these days the American left has puffed itself up as the keeper of truths, the sacred protectors of America’s soul. And, since we all know the fable of rocks and glass houses, we must then realize that all leftists imagine that they simply don’t violate truth. They are paragons of it, to be sure. Not a lie should cross our lips, they contend, for it if does the presence of that lie is enough to abrogate our very Americanness.

The truth, you see, is of acclaimed importance to the self-anointed high priests of truth on the left these days. And they have their Messiah as a shining example of that sitting today in the White House. He is the one we’ve been waiting for. The light. The truth. The way.

At least, this is their delusional self-assessment, anyway.

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[UPDATE] You’d think that they thought that none of this would ever come out.

—–

(See also Aaron Gardner’s RedHot on this topic.)

Pelosi knew about the waterboarding.

She knew all along.

According to the memo the very first briefing listed is 9/4/02 with then Rep. Porter Goss & Pelosi. The summary of the briefing says:

“Briefing on EITs including use of EITs on Abu Zubaydah, background on authorities, and a description of the particular EITs that had been employed.”

This directly contradicts Pelosi’s story, that “we were not told that waterboarding or any of these other enhanced interrogation methods were used.“

And here’s the important thing: we knew this already, and so did you. You’ve been lying to the American people about this for six or so years solely because that way you could maybe stop the screaming that was going on in your own head. It didn’t work, but then, it never was going to: you really shouldn’t have tried it in the first place.

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And objectively speaking, the refs should have stopped the fight about halfway through. Not that either I or Brutally Honest would have thanked them for that: this was just too choice for words.

If you’re wondering who won this exchange, either you haven’t watched it yet or you’re not willing to admit the answer. When the room shuts up to listen to one person over another; when that person demonstrates on two separate occasions that she’s infinitely more knowledgeable on the subject than the person she’s ‘debating;’ and when that person brushes off her aide in order to rip a few more strips of flesh… well. Don’t go up against the varsity team if you’re not ready to play.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

The newest false meme invented by the Old Media is this claim that ex-presidents and ex-vice presidents have some sort of “tradition of silence” where it concerns commenting on those that take residence in the White House after they leave. The reason the Old Media is pushing this false claim is because Dick Cheney has been commenting on Obama’s security mistakes and the Old Media wants to scold Cheney for his efforts to get the truth to the people.

Certainly it is true that some ex-chief executives have maintained silence after they left office. Still, it isn’t really true that there has been any long tradition of staying silent out of some sort of respect for the new president. But, no matter how many past presidents/vice presidents have remained quiet, the one glaring exception to that so-called tradition is the vp just before Cheney: Al Gore. And this man has been absent in the Media’s attack on Cheney.

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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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Rep Peter Hoekstra of Michigan would like to remind people in general - and the White House in particular - that the events of the last eight years didn’t actually occur in a vacuum:

Congress Knew About the Interrogations

Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair got it right last week when he noted how easy it is to condemn the enhanced interrogation program “on a bright sunny day in April 2009.” Reactions to this former CIA program, which was used against senior al Qaeda suspects in 2002 and 2003, are demonstrating how little President Barack Obama and some Democratic members of Congress understand the dire threats to our nation.

[snip]

It was not necessary to release details of the enhanced interrogation techniques, because members of Congress from both parties have been fully aware of them since the program began in 2002. We believed it was something that had to be done in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks to keep our nation safe. After many long and contentious debates, Congress repeatedly approved and funded this program on a bipartisan basis in both Republican and Democratic Congresses.

Rep Hoesktra goes on with this shot across the administration’s bow: “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.” That being, of course, the thing that the White House probably doesn’t want publicized. It also doesn’t want it publicized that it doesn’t want it publicized, but that’s normal for administrations in the middle of an embarrassment.

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Fred Thompson takes Obama to task over the President’s latest amateurish flip flop — the green light that begins the process to provide the left its long-sought show trials of Bush Administration officials.

Listen to the following YouTube audio clip:

Fred really nails it.

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?

Promoted from Diaries - Moe Lane.

This is priceless:

WASHINGTON – President Obama’s national intelligence director told colleagues in a private memo last week that the harsh interrogation techniques banned by the White House did produce significant information that helped the nation in its struggle with terrorists.

“High value information came from interrogations in which those methods were used and provided a deeper understanding of the al Qa’ida organization that was attacking this country,” Adm. Dennis C. Blair, the intelligence director, wrote in a memo to his staff last Thursday.

Admiral Blair sent his memo on the same day the administration publicly released secret Bush administration legal memos authorizing the use of interrogation methods that the Obama White House has deemed to be illegal torture. Among other things, the Bush administration memos revealed that two captured Qaeda operatives were subjected to a form of near-drowning known as waterboarding a total of 266 times.

Admiral Blair’s assessment that the interrogation methods did produce important information was deleted from a condensed version of his memo released to the media last Thursday. Also deleted was a line in which he empathized with his predecessors who originally approved some of the harsh tactics after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

“I like to think I would not have approved those methods in the past,” he wrote, “but I do not fault those who made the decisions at that time, and I will absolutely defend those who carried out the interrogations within the orders they were given.”

A spokeswoman for Admiral Blair said the lines were cut in the normal editing process of shortening an internal memo into a media statement emphasizing his concern that the public understand the context of the decisions made in the past and the fact that they followed legal orders….

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/22/us/politics/22blair.html?hp

Where to start? A little schadenfeude always is a great place to start.

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Let me say this without reservation, despite the left-wing assault when I twittered it: I do not doubt that more Americans will die at the hands of terrorists under the watch of Barack Obama than under the watch of George W. Bush.

Back on January 8th, I wrote

General Michael Hayden and John O. Brennan are career guys. They are not partisans. I could not tell you if either one was a Republican or Democrat or even if they voted.

They are professionals. But because they are connected to the Bush administration and the War on Terror, Obama is throwing them out.

These are the men who have kept us safe and alive for eight years. It was not Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld forcing policy positions on the intelligence community. It was the intelligence community making recommendations that were embraced by Cheney, Rumsfeld, and ultimately the President.

In Barack Obama’s rush to release memos outlining the enhanced interrogation techniques used by the Bush administration upon recommendation by the intelligence community and approval by the Department of Justice on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and others, the Obama administration has curiously refused to release two key details: (1) that the enhanced interrogation techniques were highly effective at revealing crucial, life-saving intelligence and (2) that the techniques were only approved after the events of September 11, 2001.

They want us to know that the Bush administration implemented interrogation techniques Barack Obama disapproves of, the people who allowed those techniques might be subject to prosecution, but will not reveal what data was gathered or the justification for the techniques.

Why? Because the American people might realize just how effective and the enhanced interrogation techniques were. For example, water boarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed revealed enough data to prevent a second wave attack against Los Angeles, California.

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Show trial: a trial (as of political opponents) in which the verdict is rigged and a public confession is often extracted — Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary

President Obama was presented with another opportunity to rule out political retribution dressed up as investigations of the looney left-wing’s fanciful allegations of Bush administration war-crimes.

Instead of standing by his previous obfuscation that “we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards,” Obama gave a green light to Attorney General Holder to start the show trials — a political theater relic of Joseph Stalin’s Great Purge of political opponents from the former Soviet Union.

Watch the following CBS video report:

Obama has been planning this for a long time. In a December 2007 KJFK radio interview with Christiane Brown, Obama promised that one of his first acts as president would be to call on his new Attorney General to investigate the Bush administration.

Nothing is left to chance by Obama leaving the decision up to Holder. Obama’s attorney general has already made his mind up about the left’s assertions that the legal authority justifying the CIA interrogation methods was more than wrong. Holder is on record with strong opinions about not only allegations of torture, but also the Guantanamo terrorist detention facility, extraordinary rendition, indefinite detentions of non-U.S. citizen terror suspects and the NSA’s terrorist surveillance program.