…and the Law of Unintended Consequences: “Former President George W. Bush has declined an invitation to join President Barack Obama at a New York City ceremony later this week marking the death of al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden, NBC News reported on Tuesday.” The – ‘ostensible’ is too strong a word; ‘primary’ probably works better – reason is that former President Bush chooses to not | Read More »
Thanks to CPAC, I completely missed covering this (Glenn Reynolds reminded me of the story this morning): Authors of waterboarding memos won’t be disciplined Bush administration lawyers who wrote memos that paved the way for waterboarding of terrorism suspects and other harsh interrogation tactics “exercised poor judgment” but will not face discipline for their actions, according to long-awaited Justice Department documents released Friday. I would | Read More »
I think that Allahpundit is over-analyzing the reasons why support for ‘torture’ is currently polling at 54/41 in favor (God help us all). It looks fairly simple to me: the antiwar movement has spent the last five or six years attempting to equate waterboarding to torture. They even more or less succeeded – but then they made a classic mistake: they assumed that stigmatization would | Read More »
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. | Read More »
…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 | Read More »
…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 | Read More »
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: | Read More »
The Speaker of the House has come up with yet another reason for why she didn’t say anything about waterboarding at the time: Pelosi defense: couldn’t object in ’03 House Speaker Nancy Pelosi learned in early 2003 that the Bush administration was waterboarding terror detainees but didn’t protest directly out of respect for “appropriate” legislative channels, a person familiar with the situation said Monday. The Pelosi | Read More »
[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 | Read More »
‘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, | Read More »
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