Libertarian Leanings

Memo Release - The Likely Effect

From STRATFOR:

'In some ways, the debate over the morality of such interrogation techniques — something we do not take a position on and will not be discussing here — has distracted many observers from examining the impact that the release of these memos is having on the ability of the U.S. government to fulfill its counterterrorism mission. And this impact has little to do with the ability to use torture to interrogate terrorist suspects.

Politics and moral arguments aside, the end effect of the memos’ release is that people who have put their lives on the line in U.S. counterterrorism efforts are now uncertain of whether they should be making that sacrifice. Many of these people are now questioning whether the administration that happens to be in power at any given time will recognize the fact that they were carrying out lawful orders under a previous administration. It is hard to retain officers and attract quality recruits in this kind of environment. It has become safer to work in programs other than counterterrorism.

The memos’ release will not have a catastrophic effect on U.S. counterterrorism efforts. Indeed, most of the information in the memos was leaked to the press years ago and has long been public knowledge. However, when the release of the memos is examined in a wider context, and combined with a few other dynamics, it appears that the U.S. counterterrorism community is quietly slipping back into an atmosphere of risk-aversion and malaise — an atmosphere not dissimilar to that described by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (also known as the 9/11 Commission) as a contributing factor to the intelligence failures that led to the 9/11 attacks.'

Was that the teleprompter fielding questions?

Now there's something you don't see every day, Chauncey.  Reporters are actually fact checking President Obama -- the AP, no less.  Here we have Associated Press reporters dissecting President Obama's press conference statements:

'A look at some of his claims Wednesday:

OBAMA: "Number one, we inherited a $1.3 trillion deficit.... That wasn't me. Number two, there is almost uniform consensus among economists that in the middle of the biggest crisis, financial crisis, since the Great Depression, we had to take extraordinary steps. So you've got a lot of Republican economists who agree that we had to do a stimulus package and we had to do something about the banks. Those are one-time charges, and they're big, and they'll make our deficits go up over the next two years." - in Missouri.

THE FACTS:

Congress controls the purse strings, not the president, and it was under Democratic control for Obama's last two years as Illinois senator. Obama supported the emergency bailout package in President George W. Bush's final months - a package Democratic leaders wanted to make bigger.

To be sure, Obama opposed the Iraq war, a drain on federal coffers for six years before he became president. But with one major exception, he voted in support of Iraq war spending.

The economy has worsened under Obama, though from forces surely in play before he became president, and he can credibly claim to have inherited a grim situation.

Still, his response to the crisis goes well beyond "one-time charges."

He's persuaded Congress to expand children's health insurance, education spending, health information technology and more. He's moving ahead on a variety of big-ticket items on health care, the environment, energy and transportation that, if achieved, will be more enduring than bank bailouts and aid for homeowners.

The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimated his policy proposals would add a net $428 billion to the deficit over four years, even accounting for his spending reduction goals. Now, the deficit is nearly quadrupling to $1.75 trillion.'

I did not watch the entire performance, preferring the Red Sox over the White House and switching to FOX between innings.  It was in the post press conference commentary that I noticed something I thought was odd.

Among the press conference video clips that provided backdrop to the post conference commentary, there were a couple showing the president's audience.  And there in the center of the audience was a large teleprompter with text scrolling up.  At the time, there was no audio with the video clip since we were listening to Bill O'Reilly's critique.  We could have been watching the the delivery of the president's opening remarks.

However, O'Reilly had already made the point that the press conference was well scripted and well timed.  In 55 minutes Obama answered only 13 questions.  And I noticed that, when Obama picked on reporters to ask their questions he quite obviously read their names off of a list.  Now, it wouldn't be the first time a president screened questions that would be permitted at a press conference.  But realizing that Obama had prepared a list of reporters going in, I wouldn't be at all surpised if he had his teleprompter loaded for talking points as well -- all lined up so that he could respond "spontaneously" to each question in the order it appeared on his list. 

Amtrak on a grander scale

A solid majority of people are opposed to this, but it's going forward anyway.  Daniel Howes of the Detroit Free Press calls it a game changer. 

'The week's not half gone and already the U.S. Treasury is in line to control 50 percent of General Motors Corp. with the United Auto Workers set to gain another 39 percent of the automaker. The feds would select GM's directors, effectively giving this White House (and the others to follow) control over GM's strategic direction, top management and even high-level product decisions.

That's just the beginning.

With or without bankruptcy, a Government Motors partnered with the UAW would be a whole new model for the global auto industry, a nationalized company whose labor union owners would be bargaining with themselves, their interests in positive cash flow to finance retiree health care obligations colliding with political interests to preserve wages and benefits.'

There are some who favor a government takeover of GM.  Lefties, because they think workers aren't getting their fair share and government will give it to them.  And some on the right who are betting that the inevitable failure with government at the helm will convincingly demonstrate the folly of future intrusions into private enterprise.  I'm not at all optimistic about that outcome.  By itself, the bailout represents an implicit acceptance of failure, and nature of the takeover signals an intention to perpetuate it.

'In this, Obama's Treasury and its auto task force are breaking revolutionary ground.

By subordinating the legitimate claims of investors to those of labor, they're confirming their bias against the Wall Street crowd and, second, what people in this town have known for years: That management's cradle-to-grave commitments to Big Three employees risked outstripping the ability of anyone but the government to pay -- and only then after the company has been nationalized, its bondholders neutered or threatened with bankruptcy and its equity investors wiped out.

For months as GM, Chrysler, the UAW, members of Congress and the Obama administration have careened toward this mind-numbing culmination, I've been asking myself what we're saving by asking the feds to keep big chunks of Detroit Auto on life support.

Already, tens of thousands of jobs have been wiped out. Plants closed. Retirements induced or destroyed. Dealers starved into submission. Suppliers pushed into liquidation. Local and state budgets decimated by the loss of tax revenue. And, now, investors short-changed with a strong arm that would make Tony Soprano proud.

We're saving -- or trying to save -- the political capital of those in power, the outsized obligations of GM and Chrysler to the UAW, and whatever jobs, union and salaried, may be left when this enabled nightmare finally comes to an end.'

The bailout objective is not the economic or financial success of GM, any more than the $3.5 trillion budget can be expected to revive the U.S. economy.  By tripling the deficit in one year and setting up at least a decade of continuing budget deficits,  the Obama administration is setting us on an inflationary course.  Couple that with administration plans to boost marginal tax rates and you have a recipe that combines inflation with sluggish growth .  The White House is not unaware.  But in keeping with Rahm Emanuel's counsel, Obama is making the best of this economic crisis in order to make other fundamental changes. 

GM exemplifies one of those changes.  More federal intrusion into the marketplace.  Rather than putting it back on its feet, the bailout will turn GM into another Amtrak, but on a much grander scale.  Amtrak has been on federal life support since it began in 1971.  According to the Boston Globe, Amtrak's total annual budget is $3.2 billion.  Federal subsidies cover nearly half, at $1.49 billion. 

GM is bigger.  So far GM is into the government for $15.4 billion in aid, but according to Bloomberg the U.S. has no plan to continue subsidizing GM. 

'The role of the U.S. in GM is to develop a plan whereby the automaker can be self-reliant and not need federal aid to survive, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said yesterday.'

We would do well to remember that pronouncements from the Obama administration almost invariably come with an expiration date.  The GM crisis represents yet another opportunity that the administration would be loath to waste.  For the immediate future GM has become a vehicle for laundering taxpayer money through the United Auto Workers union into Democrat campaign coffers. The challenge for Obama is to make permanent that revenue stream.

But the fly in the administration ointment may be Ford Motor Company.  Ford expects to survive without taking any federal bailout money.  If it does the White House will be hard pressed to justify funneling taxpayer money to GM while Ford demonstrates its own viability without it. 

Newsweek Flash: We're Winning the War on Terror!

Let's say I was shocked to hear that news flash from Newsweek editor, Jon Meacham.  Mr. Meacham appeared on The O'Reilly Factor last night in a discussion of the pros and cons of 9/11-like commission to delve into the Bush administration's support for aggressive interrogation tactics against captured terrorists.  Predictably enough, Mr. Meacham believes an independent commission would be a good thing.  His Newsweek column of April 25th lays out his reasoning which he reiterated on The Factor last night.   

'The idea that our only options are to move on completely or to prosecute is a classic false choice. A third way would be a 9/11-style bipartisan commission that would include clear supporters of the Bush administration. Such a panel would meet largely in private, have the power to grant immunity to witnesses and be charged with answering, as clearly as possible, the central question of whether Bush's war on terror in its entirety saved lives. Michael Isikoff touches on these matters in this week's issue, writing about FBI agentAli Soufan, who got intel from key terror suspects—without using torture.

Still, it seems likely that the interrogations, among other things, including surveillance, helped us prevent further terrorist attacks. We may never know for sure—you cannot prove a negative—but the public interest would be served by knowing more rather than less about how the war on terror has unfolded.'

Mr. Meacham has a much higher opinion of the 9/11 Commission than I do.  The 9/11 Commission was a dog and pony show in which commissioners tried their very hardest to shield the Clinton administration from any blame for ignoring terrorist threats.  It was stacked with people who promoted the theory that the World Trade Center attacks should have been anticipated, not by the Clinton administration which had been in charge of our national defense for the previous eight years, but by the Bush administration which had been in power for eight months.

Highlights from the 9/11 Commission drama included Clinton administration holdover, Richard C. Clarke, apologizing the government's failure -- taking the blame on behalf of the Bush administration.  What a guy.  Then there was the spectacle of commissioner and former Clinton administration Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick (Why was she a commissioner and not a witness?) pressing Bush administration Attorney General John Ashcroft on why nobody "connected the dots,"  only to have Ashcroft produce the memo that she wrote during her Clinton administration tenure that forbade information sharing between law enforcement and intelligence arms of the federal government. 

Let's not forget Clinton administration National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, who was caught stuffing classified documents from the National Archive into his pants.  He admitted later as part of a plea bargain that he smuggled them out, hid them under a trailer, and later destroyed them. 

But I digress.  The startling news from the Mr. Meacham during his O'Reilly Factor appearance was that we are winning the war on terror.  He said it a couple of times.  NewsBusters has the transcript.  Emphasis in it is mine.

'O'REILLY: Look, I liked your book and I think you did a fair assessment of Jackson and you deserve the prize, in my opinion. But this pinhead stuff that you guys are peddling at Newsweek is ridiculous. Now, let me tell you why. Because, as you said, every president in a time of leadership, particularly in a time of war, and Jackson fought two of them, the Indian War and the War of 1812. There are going to be mistakes made. And you say that Jackson's good over-rode the bad. Well, I don't think we've been attacked since 9/11, you know? I don't think any other Americans are dead. So I don't want any show trial that is going to inevitably embarrass this country and inevitably make people who defended us, make their lives harder. And I'm right and you're wrong. Go ahead.

MEACHAM: Did the -- did the 9/11 Commission embarrass the country?

O'REILLY: Did it do anything? Did the -- did the Iraq commission do -- you know what the Iraq commission came back with?

MEACHAM: No, that's not what I asked you. Did the 9/11-

O'REILLY: No, that was just the same thing as you're calling for. The Iraq commission came back and said 'surrender,' okay? And Bush and Petraeus said 'no, we're not going to do that' and they turned it around. It doesn't do us any good now, Jon. Go ahead.

MEACHAM: That's ahistorical, though, Bill, and I know you don't believe in being ahistorical. What I want to know -- and we were calling it a 9/12 Commission -- I want to look at the whole war on terror. We're winning the war on terror because, as you say, we haven't been hit. How did that happen? What should we be doing going forward to emulate? Was it the attacks -- the unmanned drones? Is it the surveillance? Is it rendition?

O'REILLY: Well, how do you do that?

MEACHAM: Well, I think you do it the way you did the 9/12 -- the 9/11 Commission. And you get people, you immunize them. You don't do it in public, I don't think you have a show trial.

O'REILLY: But it leaks out and you know it will.

MEACHAM: But 9/11 Didn't.

O'REILLY: Yeah it did. There was a whole bunch stuff that came to me and I used some of it?

MEACHAM: No, but we learned -- we learned from that report. Why are you against wanting to know what worked?

O'REILLY: Because it's too soon, that's why. We're in the middle of this thing now. It's too soon. It's politicized. You know it's politicized. You -- if you don't -- look, come on.

MEACHAM: We did Pearl Harbor-

O'REILLY: What did you think of that cartoon with the Statue of Liberty with the whip? Did you like that? Was that good?

MEACHAM: I'm not going to comment on somebody else's editorial decision.

O'REILLY: Why not? Why not?

MEACHAM: I'm just not going to comment on that.

O'REILLY: Why?

MEACHAM: Because they make-

O'REILLY: You're an American. Forget you're editor of Newsweek, you're an American. You see this thing, what do you think? You think this is fair?

MEACHAM: You don't often see those two things together.

O'REILLY: Yeah, do you think this is fair? Do you think that's good for the country? Are you looking forward to putting those pictures coming out next week in Newsweek magazine, of abusing the prisoners, you looking forward to doing that?

MEACHAM: What I'm looking forward to is trying to get, what I think would be, a useful commission to look at how we're winning, winning, the war on terror. And I don't think that's-

O'REILLY: I don't think it's possible. I don't think it's possible in this day and age, as polarized as this country is, to do something like that. If I thought it were possible I would be on your train but it isn't. And it's too soon. You know, I'm not, see I'm -- look, you're a Pulitzer Prize winner now, you're the editor of a big magazine, you know? And you won't comment on that -- on that Statue of Liberty with a whip? Come on, you're an American, too. You know, I'm fighting the battle here alone. It's me and the Wall Street Journal, and couple of other guys on Fox, against a juggernaut of media apathy that you're a part of at Newsweek magazine, with all due respect.

MEACHAM: Well I -- obviously I disagree with that.

O'REILLY: What, you're a not a left-wing magazine?

MEACHAM: We -- we've had this conversation.

O'REILLY: And, yeah?

MEACHAM: No, I don't -- We're not a partisan magazine. We're just not.

O'REILLY: Come on.'

It's as if Mr. Meacham is acting in a play.  He's in the role of the "objective journalist."  Unfortunately, his role doesn't fit the story line.  A real journalist, one who was truly objective, would have been on the story long before this.  A real journalist, one who was truly objective, would already have done some digging on his own. 

Newsweek editor Jon Meacham, though, was caught completely by surprise.  He may have been a crack reporter in his day, rising to the position of editor as he did, but sadly it's no longer his day.  The baffled Mr. Meacham looks to a commission to explain the mysteries for him. 

It must be an odd style of investigative reporting that they do at Newsweek.  Step One: See what you can find in the pages of the Washington Post.  If you really have to pull out all the stops, look at the New York Times.  If it's not there it didn't happen.  Move on.

But then a strange thing happened.  Newsweek editor Jon Meacham looked around an realized, the U.S. hasn't been attacked by terrorists since September 11, 2001.  Why, what a stunning discovery -- a mystery to be solved.  I don't suppose he would figure out that the Bush administration strategy of fighting the terrorists in their backyard, instead waiting for them to come to ours, might have had something to do with that.

As Bill O'Reilly pointed out, it's much to soon to install a commission.  The commission of today's popular fantasies would have the sole purpose of indicting Bush administration officials for speaking harshly to people whose only offense was that they were trying desperately to kill Americans.  Actually, they had already succeeded once.  In spite of that, it will be several years before the Meachams of the world will have the honesty and moral courage to admit that our troops fought terrorists in Iraq and whipped them badly.  That's why the terrorists didn't come here, and that's why we're winning the war on terror.  You might think a journalist of Jon Meacham's stature would have figured that out by now.  But no.  He needs a commission.

Shaping the News

According to Howard Kurtz secret, quiet, off-the-record, dinners for the media elite and selected influential guests have been held in Washington, DC for more than a year. 

'Among those in regular attendance are David Brooks and Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, Gene Robinson and Ruth Marcus of The Washington Post, NBC's David Gregory, ABC's George Stephanopoulos, PBS's Gwen Ifill, the New Yorker's Jane Mayer, Vanity Fair's Todd Purdum, former Time managing editor Walter Isaacson and staffers from Bradley's Atlantic and National Journal, including Ron Brownstein, Andrew Sullivan and Jonathan Rauch.

Atlantic Editor James Bennet, along with Goldberg, pitched the idea to Bradley as a way of raising the company's profile. "David, being almost ridiculously generous, said: 'Why don't we invite some of your colleagues?' " Goldberg recalls.

Bradley, a native Washingtonian, had long been intrigued by the Sperling breakfasts, the 35-year ritual conducted by the Christian Science Monitor's Godfrey Sperling until his retirement. But those were on-the-record affairs open to any hungry journalist, while Bradley's dinners are both uber-exclusive and decidedly discreet.'

Decidedly discreet.  Interesting.  Whether by accident or design, the next section of Kurtz' blog Media Notes sums up a significant result from more than a year of those meetings, with the last sentence of one section leading perfectly into the next.

'The veil of secrecy has prevented the Atlantic from garnering any credit, at least until now. "I launched it for the romance of it," Bradley says. "It's more book club than it is clubhouse."

Boosting Obama

The networks have given President Obama more coverage than George W. Bush and Bill Clinton combined in their first months -- and more positive assessments to boot.

In a study to be released today, the Center for Media and Public Affairs and Chapman University found the nightly newscasts devoting nearly 28 hours to Obama's presidency in the first 50 days. (Bush, by contrast, got nearly eight hours.) Fifty-eight percent of the evaluations of Obama were positive on the ABC, CBS and NBC broadcasts, compared with 33 percent positive in the comparable period of Bush's tenure and 44 percent positive for Clinton. (Evaluations by officials from the administration or either political party were not counted.)

On Fox News, by contrast, only 13 percent of the assessments of Obama were positive on the first half of Bret Baier's "Special Report," which most resembles a newscast. The president got far better treatment in the New York Times, where 73 percent of the assessments in front-page pieces were positive.'

Nice that our media luminaries were able to get together and agree on the news.

Bring on the Truth Commission

Noemie Emery of the Weekly Standard would like the hearings to begin.

'And talk about troubled, let's tell the truth about a common assumption of America's leaders, till now. In war, they tried to minimize casualties, but they put the survival of their people and allies above the comfort and ease of aggressors and enemies. Truman dropped the bomb because it was his duty to save the Allied and American servicemen who would have died or been wounded in the fight for the Japanese homeland. Perhaps if another September 11 occurs because "harsh" methods are dropped from the repertoire, Senator Patrick Leahy might want to visit the victims' survivors and explain that their relatives are no longer with us because of his passion for the good opinion of the rest of mankind.

Barack Obama promised to be a nontraditional leader, and in some ways he is. He is the first president to have gone abroad and apologized so much for his country's supposed sins, the first to sit calmly by while his country was savaged by the likes of Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega without making a protest, the first to try to persecute a past administration for its political judgments, and the first to investigate a predecessor and his administration for having been a success.

The first job of a president is to safeguard his country and fellow citizens, which Bush did, to the apparent dismay of the opposition.'

Torture Memo misconceptions

William M. McSwain is an attorney in private practice in Philadelphia, but he has also been a Marine platoon commander, an assistant U.S. attorney, and also executive editor of the 2005 Review of Department of Defense Detention Operations and Detainee Interrogation Techniques (The Church Report).  His Wall Street Journal column on the subject of the interrogation memos comes from the CIA/military perspective.

'The aggressive techniques in the CIA memos are also undeniably safe, having been adopted from Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (SERE) training used with our own troops.

I have personally been waterboarded, put into stress positions, sleep deprived, slapped in the face. While none of this was enjoyable, I am none the worse for wear.

While such techniques are used in U.S. military training, some apparently consider them too brutal, too abusive, too inhumane -- in short, too much like "torture" -- to be used on fanatics like KSM who are bent on the mass murder of innocent American civilians. And if legal advisers such as Steven G. Bradbury, Jay S. Bybee and John Yoo are to be prosecuted for having sanctioned their use under careful controls, who's next? Every commander who ever implemented a SERE course?

Many critics also play the Abu Ghraib "trump card": The abuses of prisoners at that facility in Iraq allegedly "prove" the Bush administration's supposed policy of abuse, first codified in its legal memos. This ignores all relevant evidence.

As the Church Report concluded, after a thorough review of all Defense Department interrogation policies, the pictured abuses at Abu Ghraib bore no resemblance to approved policies at any level, in any theater. The 2004 Independent Panel to Review Department of Defense Detention Operations -- whose four members included two former secretaries of defense under President Jimmy Carter -- also stated that "no approved procedures called for or allowed the kinds of abuse that in fact occurred. There is no evidence of a policy of abuse promulgated by senior officials or military authorities."

[...]

As a former federal prosecutor, I know a good case from a bad one. I know a case based on solid evidence and even-handed application of the law versus one based on scoring political points. Mr. Obama and his attorney general, Eric Holder, have professed their desire to take politics out of the Justice Department, to restore integrity to a department that they believe had gone astray under Mr. Bush. Their recent actions, however, speak otherwise.

The bottom line is that any attempt to prosecute or sanction lawyers such as Messrs. Bradbury, Bybee or Yoo would be a fool's errand. And whatever our new president and his attorney general are, they aren't fools. Or at least I don't think they are. For the good of the country, I hope they don't prove me wrong.'

Better fools than knaves, I suppose.  If Obama and Holder prove Mr. McSwain wrong and turn out to be fools, there is the chance, slim though it may be, that they will come the their senses.

Media Advocate

Chief Washington News Reader for MSNBC is Norah O'Donnell. Watch her in the interview below, in which Liz Cheney explains the Bush administration position on aggressive interrogations. O'Donnell goes well beyond the role of devil's advocate in her conduct of the interview.  I guess you could say she's your basic plain vanilla advocate, advocating prosecution of Bush administration officials.  However, Liz Cheney came prepared. 

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

O'Donnell's chief complaint seems to be that America's image has been damaged, an assertion that is unprovable for one thing.  There's always somebody complaining about America.  For another, America's image is in a small degree dependent upon the presentation of it by the media -- by people like O'Donnell. 

Wait while I suspend my disbelief...

What a remarkable surprise, and what a difference it makes when your side owns the White House and congress.  Hillary Clinton now says Iraq is on the right track, and she says it in the wake of its worst violence in more than a year.

'BAGHDAD -- U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said on Saturday that this week's deadly suicide bombings in Iraq are a sign that extremists are afraid the Iraqi government is succeeding.

Making her first trip to Iraq as America's top diplomat, Ms. Clinton said the country has made great strides despite the recent violence that killed at least 148 people in Baghdad and outside on Thursday and Friday.

"I think that these suicide bombings .. are unfortunately, in a tragic way, a signal that the rejectionists fear that Iraq is going in the right direction," Ms. Clinton told reporters traveling aboard her plane ahead of her unannounced visit to Baghdad.

"I think in Iraq there will always be political conflicts, there will always be, as in any society, sides drawn between different factions, but I really believe Iraq as a whole is on the right track," she said, citing "overwhelming evidence" of "really impressive" progress.'

Over and over again, Democrats demonstrate an amazing ability jump from one position to its exact opposite without batting an eye.  Are we to suspend our disbelief at her new outlook for Iraq?  In fact, the Democrats own Iraq now, and now that they do I expect we're in for an entertaining balancing act.  How long will Democrats continue to spout nonsense about the rise of democracy in Iraq being the worst foreign policy disaster in American history, while declaring their undying support for its success? 

I know nothing!

Like Sergeant Schultz of Hogan's Heroes fame, Nancy Pelosi knew nothing.

'"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. What they did tell us is that they had some legislative counsel ... opinions that they could be used," she told reporters today.'

That's not what Porter Goss said about the briefings.

'After three days of screaming headlines about the CIA destroying videotapes in 2005 of the "harsh" interrogation of two terrorists, it now comes to light that in 2002 key members of Congress were fully briefed by the CIA about those interrogation techniques, including waterboarding. One member of that Congressional delegation was the future House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi.

The Washington Post on Sunday reported these series of briefings. While it is not our habit to promote the competition, readers should visit the Post's Web site and absorb this astonishing detail for themselves as reported by Joby Warrick and Dan Eggen in "Hill Briefed on Waterboarding in 2002: In meetings, spy panels' chiefs did not protest, officials say."

Porter Goss, the former chair of the House Intelligence Committee who later served as CIA director from 2004 to 2006 is explicit about what happened in these meetings: "Among those being briefed, there was a pretty full understanding of what the CIA was doing. And the reaction in the room was not just approval, but encouragement."

In all, the CIA provided Congress with some 30 briefings on waterboarding before it became a public issue.

Why would the CIA want to tell the most senior members of Congress about anything so sensitive? No doubt in part because senior officials at the CIA, not to mention the interrogators themselves, assuredly did not want to begin any such policy absent closing the political and legal loop on it'

Of course, there will now be a new truth out there for the struggling mainstream press and the leftosphere to promote:  Liberal Democrats could not possibly have known!  Why the very idea is unthinkable!  Their sanctimonious posturing is more than a little bit tiresome.