Democrats again reveal their complicity in BushCo misdeeds
Bay Area congressional Democrats Tom Lantos and Nancy Pelosi: fighting imperial excesses, one capitulation at a time.
So congressional Democrats are angry about the New York Times revelation that the CIA destroyed videotapes of their agents harshly interrogating (ne torturing) al Qaeda suspects. And they should be, both because its appears the tapes had been illegally withheld from congressional and 9/11 Commission inquiries, and because they might show evidence of torture authorized and/or condoned at the highest levels of government. But there's some subtext to this story that once again casts congressional Democrats in a very disturbing light. It shows them to be complicit in and enablers of the very worst of the Bush Administration atrocities: torture, illegal spying on Americans, and telling lies designed to start an illegal war under false pretenses.
Rep. Jane Harman, then the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told the Times today "that in early 2003 she received 'a highly classified briefing' on C.I.A. interrogation practices from the agency’s general counsel, and that she had expressed “serious concerns” in a letter to the lawyer afterward. “I call for my letter of February 2003, which was never responded to and has been in the C.I.A.’s files ever since, to be declassified,” the Congresswoman said."
Keep in mind, this is about a year before the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, when the world learned about how American government officials torture prisoners in their custody. So Harman is essentially saying she knew what kinds of tactics that the CIA was using during interrogations and all she did was write a strongly worded letter that was ignored, rather than taking the information to journalists or someone who might blow the whistle.
Harman's comment was eerily reminiscent of one made almost two years ago by our own Rep. Nancy Pelosi, who was also a member of the House Intelligence Committee during this same period of growing imperial excesses by the U.S., when she used the New York Times revelations of Bush's warrantless wiretapping program to also say that she'd known about it for years but wrote a strongly worded letter with her objections.
This is not only outrageous, but against the oaths of office that Pelosi and Harman took to faithfully uphold the law and the Constitution. Torture, warrantless wiretapping, obstruction of justice -- these are all serious crimes. They are impeachable offenses. They are things that our elected leaders shouldn't be working to cover up.
Yet Pelosi, Harman, Hillary Clinton (who also helped vote us into the mess), and the rest of the congressional Democrats would have us believe that they're shocked, SHOCKED!, and that they're finally going to do something about it. Well, we saw what they finally did about Bush's illegal wiretapping: they legalized it.
Somehow, I'm not hopeful that they're going to do anything more about torture than fume for the cameras before heading out to more fundraisers -- unless, of course, they decide to legalize torture too.
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Comments (1)
Ummm...you are now trying to skewer the Dems because they appropriately wrote letters of concern to the CIA, but didn't release their classified knowledge to the press.
Interesting, so if Pelosi or Harman had held a press conference as you suggest, and told us all, "Here's some classified information we have about torture techniques and woretapping. It's illegal for us to talk about this given our security clearances, but we think you should know" you'd be praising them right?
Pretty convenient to be the Monday morning QB - hate them for writing a letter, but you certainly would have shrieked that they weren't patirots if they had held a news conference as you suggest.
Posted by Boomxtwo | December 10, 2007 08:54 AM