Tortured Account

INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Tuesday, May 12
http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=327020790328681

Integrity: Release of the interrogation memos was intended to tarnish the Bush administration's legacy of keeping America safe. Now, that political strategy is collapsing — and with it, Nancy Pelosi's speakership.

The tables have turned on "Memogate." House Speaker Pelosi and other congressional Democratic leaders clearly knew early on, via classified briefings, about President Bush's approval of enhanced interrogation techniques for high-level terrorist detainees. Yet she kept silent. In an adaptation of the famous Watergate catchphrase, people have been asking, "What did the speaker know and when did she know it?" But as Pelosi's tune changes and her credibility crumbles, a new version of Nixon White House counsel John Dean's observation might be more apt: that there is a cancer growing on the speakership, and if the cancer is not removed, the speaker herself may be killed by it.

Here is the latest line of baloney we are being asked to believe: After a Pelosi aide was briefed on Feb. 4, 2003, together with House Intelligence Committee ranking Democrat Jane Harman, D-Calif., about waterboarding Abu Zubaydah, a key al-Qaida operative, Pelosi supposedly expressed support for a private protest letter Harman wrote — but she didn't ask to sign her name to the letter, sent to the CIA's general counsel, nor did she pen her own protest.

The rationale offered anonymously, apparently by a Pelosi associate, to the Politico this week was that she "didn't protest directly out of respect for 'appropriate' legislative channels." That simply doesn't ring true. The clear motivation behind the speaker's inexcusable twists and turns is: That was then and this is now.

When Pelosi and the others were briefed in 2002 and 2003, the 9/11 terrorist attacks were still fresh in the minds of Americans.

The widespread mind-set was that another attack could be just around the corner. And there were as yet no turns for the worse in Iraq for voters to be dissatisfied with.

So there was no political well from which Democrats could draw in complaining about the Bush administration's aggressive approach in fighting the global war on terror. You want to get tough with a few al-Qaida prisoners who know of future attacks? In 2002 and 2003, public sentiment was: Do it. And a politician who raised a stink would be accused of inviting new attacks.

Now, thanks to our short national attention span, a supremely effective weapon against terrorists that saved thousands of lives has turned into a political weapon, used to defame those who deserve credit for our success in fighting terrorism. Except now that very same weapon is going off in the speaker's face.

A speaker of the House seen as torturing the truth will not remain speaker for long.


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MAY 9, 2009
What Congress Knew
Congress got 40 briefings from the CIA on interrogations.

* Article

On September 4, 2002, Porter Goss, then the Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and Nancy Pelosi, the ranking Democratic member, were given a classified briefing by the CIA on what the Agency calls "enhanced interrogation techniques," or, in persistent media parlance, "torture." In particular, the CIA briefed the members on the use of these techniques on Abu Zubaydah, a high-ranking al Qaeda operative captured in Pakistan the previous March.
AP

Abu Zubaydah was a name the future Speaker was already familiar with. That spring, information obtained from the terrorist had the FBI and other government agencies scrambling to prevent possible attacks on the Statue of Liberty and the Brooklyn Bridge. It wasn't clear whether Abu Zubaydah was being truthful. "He is also very skilled at avoiding interrogation," Ms. Pelosi was quoted in Time magazine. "He is an agent of disinformation." It is precisely for such reasons that the CIA resorted to its enhanced techniques later that year, after gaining legal authorization.

These days, Speaker Pelosi insists she heard and saw no evil. "We were not -- I repeat -- were not told that waterboarding or any of these other enhanced interrogation methods were used," she told reporters late last month. "What they did tell us is that they had . . . the Office of Legal Counsel opinions [and] that they could be used, but not that they would."

That doesn't square with the memory of Mr. Goss, who has noted that "we were briefed, and we certainly understood what the CIA was doing," adding that "Not only was there no objection, there was actually concern about whether the agency was doing enough."

Ms. Pelosi's denials are also difficult to square with a chronology of 40 CIA briefings to Congressional Members compiled by the CIA and released this week by Director Leon Panetta. For the September 4, 2002 meeting, the CIA's summary of the discussion reads: "Briefing on EITs including use of EITs on Abu Zubaydah, background on authorities, and a description of the particular EITs that had been employed." We emphasize the verb tense to underscore the contradiction with Ms. Pelosi's categorical denials of last month.

Ms. Pelosi was replaced by Jane Harman as the Committee's ranking member, but the bipartisan briefings continued. On February 4, 2003, Senators Pat Roberts and Jay Rockefeller of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence were given a briefing in which "EITs [were] 'described in considerable detail,' including 'how the water board was used.' The process by which the techniques were approved by DoJ was also raised." The document also adds that Mr. Rockefeller, the Committee's ranking Democrat, was later given an "individual briefing."

Nor was that the only time Mr. Rockefeller, who chaired the Committee from 2007 to 2009, heard from the CIA. The West Virginian was briefed at least 12 times more about interrogation techniques, legal authorities and other aspects of the program. The last, in June 2008, was offered to 10 members of the Senate Intelligence Committee and covered "discussion of EITs and the OLC [Office of Legal Counsel] opinions. Specific mentions of waterboarding numerous time."

Yet in October 2008, following a Washington Post report on the existence of the OLC memos, Mr. Rockefeller disclaimed any knowledge of the opinions. "If White House documents exist that set the policy for the use of coercive techniques such as waterboarding, those documents have been kept from the committee," said Mr. Rockefeller. "That is unacceptable, and represents the latest example of the Bush Administration withholding critical information from Congress and the American people in an attempt to limit our oversight of sensitive intelligence collection activities."

Amusingly, or almost, Senator Rockefeller's denial is flatly contradicted by his own report on the subject released last month, which notes that "On May 19, 2008, the Department of Justice and the Central Intelligence Agency provided the Committee with access to all opinions and a number of other documents prepared by the Office of Legal Counsel . . . concerning the legality of the CIA's detention and interrogation program. Five of these documents provided addressed the use of waterboarding."

So much for the canard that the Bush Administration didn't keep Congress informed. But Congressional Democrats are being equally disingenuous when they pretend they could do nothing about what they were hearing from the CIA. Members could, and sometimes did, object to proposed CIA actions and could stop them in their tracks.

More importantly, Congress had the power of the purse. Pete Hoekstra, the House Committee's current ranking member, tells us there was "pretty bipartisan support for the authorization bills and the funding bills," at least until the issue blew wide in the pages of the press. Latter-day opponents of the interrogation techniques, he adds, "never used a tool that was available to them if they wanted to stop them."

We suspect a last line of Democratic defense will be that the Members privately objected to the practices and made their concerns known to the CIA. That seems to be the case with Ms. Harman, who wrote the CIA just days after she was first briefed saying the interrogation practices raised "profound policy questions" and that she was "concerned about whether these have been as rigorously examined as the legal questions." Ironically, Ms. Harman now finds herself a target on the left for the unrelated AIPAC non-scandal.

If there were other Members who objected strenuously to the techniques at the time, let's see their letters. Otherwise, perhaps the CIA should release whatever notes they kept of the briefings. Our guess is that's one pile of memos Speaker Pelosi & Co. aren't especially eager to declassify.
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Enhanced Lying

By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Friday, May 08, 2009 4:20 PM PT

Interrogations: Not since Bill Clinton has there been a bigger fib told by a public official. A report from the director of national intelligence confirms Nancy Pelosi knew waterboarding had already been performed.

Lying to Congress is a crime. Lying from Congress is not. Otherwise, House Speaker Pelosi would rightfully belong in the same facility that Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff was sent to for being found guilty of having a faulty memory.

Just as Bill Clinton swore he never had sex with that woman, Pelosi wagged her finger at an April press conference and swore she was advised only on the legality of waterboarding — that it might be used but not that it had.

In December 2007, after the Washington Post reported that she had knowledge of these procedures and did not object, Pelosi admitted she'd been "briefed on interrogation techniques the administration was considering using in the future."

When asked about a September 2002 meeting with intelligence officials and then-House Intelligence Committee Chairman Porter Goss, Pelosi proclaimed: "In that or any other briefing . . . we were not, and I repeat were not, told that waterboarding or any of these other enhanced interrogation techniques were used."

How is it then that a memo issued by the director of National Intelligence and the Central Intelligence Agency says the Pelosi-Goss briefing covered EITs, an abbreviation for enhanced interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, a technique successfully used on Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheik Mohammed.

The meeting is described in the 10-page memo as a "briefing on EITs, including the use of EITs on Zubaydah, background on authorities and a description of particular EITs that had been employed." "Had been" is past tense. According to the interrogation memos recently released, Zubaydah was waterboarded in August 2002, a month before Pelosi was told about it.

The memo outlines many other briefings with members of Congress, including Rep. Jane Harman, who became the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee when Pelosi became minority leader.

"Among those being briefed, there was a pretty full understanding of what the CIA was doing," recalls Goss, who chaired the committee from 1997 to 2004 before becoming CIA director. "And the reaction in the room was not just approval, but encouragement."

Congress twice had a chance to specifically proscribe waterboarding, but passed on it.

It could have done so in the Detainee Act of 2005 and the Military Commissions Act of 2006. Instead it passed the buck, settling on opposition to vague "cruel, human and degrading" practices. When Democrats, led by Pelosi, seized control of Congress in 2006, they ignored the subject.

Brendan Daly, a Pelosi spokesman, says Pelosi's recollection of the 2002 meeting is different from the way it was described in the report from the DNI's office.

In a Washington Post op-ed, Goss was left "slack jawed" that any member so briefed could "claim to have not understood that the techniques on which they were briefed were to actually be employed."

"It must be hard," Goss wrote, "for most Americans of common sense to imagine how a member of Congress can forget being told about the interrogation of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed. In that case, though, perhaps it is not amnesia but political expedience."

History, it has been said, is a lie agreed upon. Nancy Pelosi is attempting to rewrite history.
From the CIA

* Read the documents provided by the Obama Administration's Director of National Intelligence to Congress on the CIA briefings attended by various Members. _____________________________

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Debate Over What Constitutes 'Torture' Reflects A Dangerous Lack Of Seriousness

By THOMAS SOWELL | Posted Tuesday, May 12, 2009 4:20 PM PT

One of the many signs of the degeneration of our times is how many serious, even life-and-death, issues are approached as talking points in a game of verbal fencing. Nothing illustrates this more than the fatuous, and even childish, controversy about "torturing" captured terrorists.

People's actions often make far more sense than their words. Most of the people who are talking lofty talk about how we mustn't descend to the level of our enemies would themselves behave very differently if presented with a comparable situation, instead of being presented with an opportunity to be morally one up with rhetoric.

What if it was your mother or your child who was tied up somewhere beside a ticking time bomb, and you had captured a terrorist who knew where that was? Face it: What you would do to that terrorist to make him talk would make waterboarding look like a picnic.

You wouldn't care what the New York Times would say or what "world opinion" in the U.N. would say. You would save your loved one's life and tell those other people what they could do. But if the U.S. behaves that way it is called "arrogance" — even by American citizens. Indeed, even by the American president.

There is a big difference between being ponderous and being serious. It is scary when the president of the United States is not being serious about matters of life and death, saying that there are "other ways" of getting information from terrorists.

Maybe this is a step up from the previous talking point that "torture" had not gotten any important information out of terrorists. Only after this had been shown to be a flat-out lie did Barack Obama shift his rhetoric to the lame assertion that unspecified "other ways" could have been used.

For a man whose whole life has been based on style rather than substance, on rhetoric rather than reality, perhaps nothing better could have been expected. But that the media and the public would have become so mesmerized by the Obama cult that they could not see through this to think of their own survival, or that of this nation, is truly a chilling thought.

When we look back at history, it is amazing what foolish and even childish things people said and did on the eve of a catastrophe about to consume them.

In 1938, with Hitler preparing to unleash a war in which tens of millions of men, women and children would be slaughtered, the play that was the biggest hit on the Paris stage was a play about French and German reconciliation, and a French pacifist that year dedicated his book to Adolf Hitler.

When historians of the future look back on our era, what will they think of our time? Our media too squeamish to call murderous and sadistic terrorists anything worse than "militants" or "insurgents"? Our president going abroad to denigrate the country that elected him, pandering to feckless allies and outright enemies, and literally bowing to a foreign tyrant ruling a country from which most of the 9/11 terrorists came?

It is easy to make talking points about how Churchill did not torture German prisoners, even while London was being bombed. There was a very good reason for that: They were ordinary prisoners of war who were covered by the Geneva Convention and who didn't know anything that would keep London from being bombed.

Whatever the verbal fencing over the meaning of the word "torture," there is a fundamental difference between simply inflicting pain on innocent people for the sheer pleasure of it — which is what our terrorist enemies do — and getting life-saving information out of the terrorists by whatever means are necessary.

The left has long confused physical parallels with moral parallels. But when a criminal shoots at a policeman and the policeman shoots back, physical equivalence is not moral equivalence. And what American intelligence agents have done to captured terrorists is not even physical equivalence.

If we have reached the point where we cannot be bothered to think beyond rhetoric or to make moral distinctions, then we have reached the point where our own survival in an increasingly dangerous world of nuclear proliferation can no longer be taken for granted.

Copyright 2008 Creators Syndicate, Inc

______________________

Obama and the 9/11 Families
The president isn't sincere about 'swift and certain' justice for terrorists.

By DEBRA BURLINGAME
Wall Street Journal
May 8, 2009

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124174154190098941.html
In February I was among a group of USS Cole and 9/11 victims' families who met with the president at the White House to discuss his policies regarding Guantanamo detainees. Although many of us strongly opposed Barack Obama's decision to close the detention center and suspend all military commissions, the families of the 17 sailors killed in the 2000 attack in Yemen were particularly outraged.
Over the years, the Cole families have seen justice abandoned by the Clinton administration and overshadowed by the need of the Bush administration to gather intelligence after 9/11. They have watched in frustration as the president of Yemen refused extradition for the Cole bombers.
Now, after more than eight years of waiting, Mr. Obama was stopping the trial of Abu Rahim al-Nashiri, the only individual to be held accountable for the bombing in a U.S. court. Patience finally gave out. The families were giving angry interviews, slamming the new president just days after he was sworn in.

The Obama team quickly put together a meeting at the White House to get the situation under control. Individuals representing "a diversity of views" were invited to attend and express their concerns.
On Feb. 6, the president arrived in the Roosevelt Room to a standing though subdued ovation from some 40 family members. With a White House photographer in his wake, Mr. Obama greeted family members one at a time and offered brief remarks that were full of platitudes ("you are the conscience of the country," "my highest duty as president is to protect the American people," "we will seek swift and certain justice"). Glossing over the legal complexities, he gave a vague summary of the detainee cases and why he chose to suspend them, focusing mostly on the need for speed and finality.

Many family members pressed for Guantanamo to remain open and for the military commissions to go forward. Mr. Obama allowed that the detention center had been unfairly confused with Abu Ghraib, but when asked why he wouldn't rehabilitate its image rather than shut it down, he silently shrugged. Next question.

Mr. Obama was urged to consult with prosecutors who have actually tried terrorism cases and warned that bringing unlawful combatants into the federal courts would mean giving our enemies classified intelligence -- as occurred in the cases of the al Qaeda cell that carried out the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and conspired to bomb New York City landmarks with ringleader Omar Abdel Rahman, the "Blind Sheikh." In the Rahman case, a list of 200 unindicted co-conspirators given to the defense -- they were entitled to information material to their defense -- was in Osama bin Laden's hands within hours. It told al Qaeda who among them was known to us, and who wasn't.

Mr. Obama responded flatly, "I'm the one who sees that intelligence. I don't want them to have it, either. We don't have to give it to them."

How could anyone be unhappy with such an answer? Or so churlish as to ask follow-up questions in such a forum? I and others were reassured, if cautiously so.

News reports described the meeting as a touching and powerful coming together of the president and these long-suffering families. Mr. Obama had won over even those who opposed his decision to close Gitmo by assuaging their fears that the review of some 245 current detainees would result in dangerous jihadists being set free. "I did not vote for the man, but the way he talks to you, you can't help but believe in him," said John Clodfelter to the New York Times. His son, Kenneth, was killed in the Cole bombing. "[Mr. Obama] left me with a very positive feeling that he's going to get this done right."

"This isn't goodbye," said the president, signing autographs and posing for pictures before leaving for his next appointment, "this is hello." His national security staff would have an open-door policy.

Believe . . . feel . . . hope.

We'd been had.

Binyam Mohamed -- the al Qaeda operative selected by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) for a catastrophic post-9/11 attack with co-conspirator Jose Padilla -- was released 17 days later. In a follow-up conference call, the White House liaison to 9/11 and Cole families refused to answer questions about the circumstances surrounding the decision to repatriate Mohamed, including whether he would be freed in Great Britain.

The phrase "swift and certain justice" had been used by top presidential adviser David Axelrod in an interview prior to our meeting with the president. "Swift and certain justice" figured prominently in the White House press release issued before we had time to surrender our White House security passes. "At best, he manipulated the families," Kirk Lippold, commanding officer of the USS Cole at the time of the attack and the leader of the Cole families group, told me recently. "At worst, he misrepresented his true intentions."

Last week, Attorney General Eric Holder told German reporters that 30 detainees had been cleared for release. This includes 17 Chinese fundamentalist Muslims, the Uighurs, some of whom admit to having been trained in al Qaeda and Taliban camps and being associated with the East Turkistan Islamic Party. This party is led by Abdul Haq, who threatened attacks on the 2008 Olympics Games in Beijing and was recently added to the Treasury Department's terrorist list. The Obama administration is considering releasing the Uighurs on U.S. soil, and it has suggested that taxpayers may have to provide them with welfare support. In a Senate hearing yesterday, Mr. Holder sidestepped lawmakers' questions about releasing detainees into the U.S. who have received terrorist training.

What about the terrorists who may actually be tried? The Justice Department's recent plea agreement with Ali Saleh al-Marri should be of grave concern to those who believe the Obama administration will vigorously prosecute terrorists in the federal court system.

Al-Marri was sent to the U.S. on Sept. 10, 2001, by KSM to carry out cyanide bomb attacks. He pled guilty to one count of "material support," a charge reserved for facilitators rather than hard-core terrorists. He faces up to a 15-year sentence, but will be allowed to argue that the sentence should be satisfied by the seven years he has been in custody. This is the kind of thin "rule of law" victory that will invigorate rather than deter our enemies.

Given all the developments since our meeting with the president, it is now evident that his words to us bore no relation to his intended actions on national security policy and detainee issues. But the narrative about Mr. Obama's successful meeting with 9/11 and Cole families has been written, and the press has moved on.

The Obama team has established a pattern that should be plain for all to see. When controversy erupts or legitimate policy differences are presented by well-meaning people, send out the celebrity president to flatter and charm.

Most recently, Mr. Obama appeared at the CIA after demoralizing the agency with the declassification and release of memos containing sensitive information on CIA interrogations. He appealed to moral vanity by saying that fighting a war against fanatic barbarians "with one hand tied behind your back" is being on "the better side of history," even though innocent lives are put at risk. He promised the assembled staff and analysts that if they keep applying themselves, they won't be personally marked for career-destroying sanctions or criminal prosecutions, even as disbelieving counterterrorism professionals -- the field operatives and their foreign partners -- shut down critical operations for fear of public disclosure and political retribution in the never-ending Beltway soap opera called Capitol Hill.

It worked: On television, his speech looked like a campaign rally, with people jumping up and down, cheering. Meanwhile, the media have moved on, even as they continue to recklessly and irresponsibly use the word "torture" in their stories.

I asked Cmdr. Kirk Lippold why some of the Cole families declined the invitation to meet with Barack Obama at the White House.

"They saw it for what it was."

Ms. Burlingame, a former attorney and a director of the National September 11 Memorial Foundation, is the sister of Charles F. "Chic" Burlingame III, the pilot of American Airlines flight 77, which was crashed into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.