Dan

Calabrese

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May 21, 2009

Anti-Torture True Believers . . . You’ve Been Had

It’s no longer even interesting to point out that Nancy Pelosi is a liar. Her denials concerning her past knowledge of enhanced interrogations, followed by her sloppy and quickly rebuked attack on the Central Intelligence Agency, leave only the question of whether she will face enough public heat to have to consider resigning as Speaker of the House.

I doubt it. If the media comes at Pelosi as they should over her obvious lies, they will tacitly admit what they don’t want to admit, and what true believers in the anti-torture crusade may now be figuring out themselves: This whole issue has been phony from the beginning.

Those of you rising up and demanding accountability for the Bush Administration’s unspeakable transgressions – you’ve been had.

Democrats, with help of the willing news media, invented an issue the substance of which really did not matter to them. They invented a scandal and demanded an “investigation,” knowing full well what the facts were, and never intending to see any such investigation go forward, simply because the political environment changed and it became advantageous for them to do so.

Remember 2002 and 2003, when their complaint was that the Bush Administration had failed to “connect the dots” prior to 9/11? Back then, the public had terrorism – and the prevention thereof – at the top of its political agenda. So Democrats pretended to be “smarter” about how to stop it. They assailed the Bush team for supposedly having had lots of information, but having failed to put it all together.

Of course, this complaint was similarly phony, and to the extent it was true, it owed in large part to the wall of separation that prevented federal agencies from sharing information with each other – a wall established during the Clinton Administration, since dismantled under Bush.

As years passed and no further terrorist attacks occurred – thanks to the efforts of the Bush Administration, including the “torture” of three suspects who gave up crucial information as a result – the public moved on to other things, like the mortgage meltdown and what would happen on the season finale of Lost. So Democrats decided it was time to attack the Bush team for being too tough on terrorists – by attacking the very techniques that had worked, and that the Democrats themselves had known about for years.

And you bought it. At least until now, when it’s becoming obvious that Democrats understood the necessity of such tactics at the time they were used.

So, news flash, Democrats make dishonest, disingenuous charges that they themselves do not take seriously, strictly for the purpose of generating what-did-he-know-and-when-did-he-know-it headlines, raising questions in the minds of the public, then appearing high-minded by dropping the whole thing.

What they didn’t count on, of course, was how easily their scam would be exposed. Why they didn’t count on that is beyond me. Did Pelosi not realize there were notes from the briefings she attended? Did she not remember that Republicans like Porter Goss and Peter Hoekstra were in those meetings, and would call B.S. on her?

Likewise, when the Obama Administration released the legal memos laying out the case for enhanced interrogation techniques, did they not think any prominent member of the Bush Administration would – as Dick Cheney has – demand the release of other memos, the ones that showed what the techniques accomplished? Or did the Obama crew simply figure that when they refused to release those memos, as they have, the news media would cover for them?

Along the same lines, did Pelosi assume that when someone pointed out she was in those briefings and was well aware of what she now claims not to have known, the news media would ignore the people calling her to account for her lies?

There’s good reason to think they did believe that. After all, when the New York Times decided to help terrorists by revealing the Bush team’s technique of wiretapping their phone calls, the Times and other media largely allowed Democrats to express their outrage and horror without calling them to account for having known about it all along. Why not believe they would cover for them on this phony scandal as well?

So, those of you who bought this story, how does it feel to have been had? There was no secret torture regime. There was no clandestine, rogue operation proceeding with the blessing of the Oval Office. There were a very limited number of occasions when the U.S. used enhanced interrogation techniques to get crucially needed information, and on those occasions we bent over backwards to stay within the confines of the law, and informed Congress – Democrats included – every step of the way.

This whole thing has been nothing but a bunch of B.S. from the very beginning, and you fell for it.

© 2009 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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