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Jamie
Weinstein
Read Jamie's bio and previous columns
May 19, 2009
Nancy Pelosi
Must Resign
In response to Speaker
of the House Nancy Pelosi’s allegations that the CIA mislead her in a
briefing about America’s enhanced interrogation program in 2002, House
Minority Leader John Boehner said that the Speaker “ought to present the
evidence or apologize to the CIA.”
The Speaker can stuff
her sorrys in a sack, and there is little need for her to produce
evidence that she most likely does not possess. We know all we need to
know about this situation. And from what we know, the only decent thing
for Nancy Pelosi to do is resign.
Pelosi’s story keeps
changing, but during her first press conference on the matter in April,
Pelosi said that when she was briefed by the CIA in 2002 she was only
told by the CIA that waterboarding could be used, not that it had
been used. As Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer
incisively noted, if Pelosi’s first account is accurate it is even more
morally damning for Pelosi if she truly believes waterboarding is
torture.
“If you are told about
torture that has already occurred,” Krauthammer wrote in his May 1st
column, “you might justify silence on the grounds that what's done
is done and you are simply being used in a post-facto exercise to cover
the CIA's rear end. The time to protest torture, if you really are as
outraged as you now pretend to be, is when the CIA tells you what it is
planning to do ‘in the future.’”
Now, even if you put
aside Pelosi’s first comments on the matter, we know for sure from
Pelosi’s own admission that by 2003 she was fully aware that
waterboarding had been used as an interrogation technique. If she was so
aghast by this technique, one would imagine that Pelosi, then House
Minority Leader, would have taken some type of action. But nothing. Just
silence.
Even more damning to
Pelosi, we know that in 2003 Democratic Rep. Jane Harman, who was the
new senior Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, wrote a formal letter
of protest to the CIA after she learned about waterboarding. Now, I
disagree with Harman on the substance of her complaint, but honest
people can disagree over waterboarding. One must respect Harman for
acting at the time on her convictions and registering her objection to a
practice she disagreed with. Pelosi did nothing of the sort.
While each new day
seems to bring a new tale by Pelosi, the Speaker continues to insist
that she was misled in her initial 2002 briefing, while others say that
it is Pelosi who is not telling the truth. Even current CIA Director
Leon Panetta, an Obama appointee and longtime Democrat activist, has
come on record to say that Pelosi is lying: "It is not our policy or
practice to mislead Congress,” Panetta said in a statement. “CIA
officers briefed truthfully on the interrogation of
Abu Zubaydah,
describing 'the enhanced techniques that had been employed.'"
From Nancy Pelosi’s
squirming, my guess it is the Speaker who is lying. But this debate is
irrelevant. We know that Nancy Pelosi knew about waterboarding at least
by 2003 and we know that she did not raise any objection whatsoever. And
we know now, when the political winds have shifted, Pelosi has decided
to decry waterboarding and throw the CIA under the bus for employing it.
Does it get any more
despicable than that?
The CIA has taken a lot
of flack over the last several years for some of its failures. Much of
the criticism has been justified. But what our secret agents don’t
deserve is to be thrown under the bus by politicians who approve of
something one day and then decide the next day when the political
atmosphere changes that what they had approved is now utterly
despicable. This is what Nancy Pelosi has done. She has cowardly
abandoned the good and decent people who work at the CIA for
interrogation techniques they employed and she tacitly approved of,
techniques which appear to have made each and everyone one of us safer.
The Speaker’s attack on
the CIA is not only shameful, but morally repugnant. Worse, it continues
to weaken our country by weakening the morale at the CIA – morale that
is reportedly already quite low.
The decent thing for
Nancy Pelosi to do now is resign. Have you any sense of decency left in
you, ma’am?
© 2009
North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.
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