Seeped in the Doctrine

One the more vacuous editorials I've read in quite some time recently appeared in our local paper, The Nashua Telegraph.  It was guest commentary, courtesy of The Keene Sentinel, and could only have been written by someone trapped in a liberal echo chamber.  We begin:

'The American news media, seeped in the doctrine of impartiality, don’t often use the word “torture.” We are more likely to read and hear about “enhanced interrogation techniques,” or “unconventional tactics” or “practices some people refer to as torture.”'

Seeped?  Let me give Keene Sentinel editorial writers the benefit of the doubt and suggest that they are victims of spell check imperfections.  Both words, "seeped" and "steeped," pass with flying colors.  However, while it is meaningless, or at best nonsensical, to say that the American news media are "seeped in the doctrine of impartiality," it is utter BS to suggest the media are "steeped" in any such doctrine.  And then to go on in support of that BS by saying that the media don't often use the word "torture" is absurd.  A Google search for the word "torture" under News yielded, 

'Results 1 – 10 of about 46,862 for torture. (0.35 seconds)'

As anybody who hasn't been living in a cave these last eight years is fully aware, our objective and impartial media are not at all reluctant to mention the word "torture".  Their only reluctance is to mention the word in connection with congressional Democrats.  Sentinel editorial writers bear this out, calling for investigations and possibly even prosecutions -- of Bush administration officials.

'The president and the Justice Department now say they will not prosecute the CIA agents who committed acts of torture. But what about the rest of the bunch? What about the low-level military personnel who have already served, or are serving, prison terms for the crimes committed at Abu Ghraib? Shouldn’t they be released? Weren’t they just following orders?

What about the Justice Department officials who wrote the legal opinions designed to authorize torture – people who are now comfortably ensconced in universities, think tanks and, in one case, the federal appellate bench? Obama has been ambiguous about what their fate should be.

And what of the very top officials of the Bush administration, who are now traveling about, heads held high, giving speeches, acting as pundits on TV and writing books?

In a newspaper interview, U.S. Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., says he doesn’t see how we can just turn away from all this:

“I understand that the president believes that the people who actually administered these tactics should be immune. I’m not sure about that. I understand that they have a greater argument than those who created the policies.

“But those who created these legal theories, knowing full well that there was not a reasonable argument, I’m not so sure they shouldn’t be accountable. I don’t see how we as a country say, ‘Oh, fine, we knew this was against international law, we knew it was against our own laws,’ and these people can come up with any phony legal opinion they want. I’ve read these opinions because I’m on the intelligence committee and had access to them much earlier than the public. These arguments are bogus.”

Feingold makes an excellent point. Won’t the pre-emptive vindication of this bunch set a precedent for future leaders who might also be tempted to ignore the law?'

So absorbed in their own moral preening, editorial writers overlooked the distinction between the criminal acts committed at Abu Ghraib, for which military personnel were court martialled, and Bush administration wrestling with the legal and moral issues in their efforts to prevent another attack on America. An attack that virtually everyone believed was imminent.  

The editorialists also failed to mention the complicity of congressional Democrats.  Some of those same congressional Democrats who now call for investigations and prosecutions were among those briefed on enhanced interrogation methods. 

'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.

The Congressional briefings touched the political base, and a Justice Department memo at that time deemed the interrogation methods legal. Most crucially, bear in mind that when pressed about all this at his confirmation hearings, Attorney General Michael Mukasey pointedly said he would not make a post-facto condemnation of the techniques, thereby putting the "freedom" of the interrogators at risk, "simply because I want to be congenial."'

But now we have to put up with the false outrage of partisan journalists over interrogations techniques that are part of the survival training for our military, interrogations that we know saved American lives.  This is not a new story.  The interrogation story has been around for seven years, the partisan journalists much longer than that.  Concerning those congressional Democrats Porter Goss recently wrote in the Washington Post:

'A disturbing epidemic of amnesia seems to be plaguing my former colleagues on Capitol Hill. After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, members of the committees charged with overseeing our nation's intelligence services had no higher priority than stopping al-Qaeda. In the fall of 2002, while I was chairman of the House intelligence committee, senior members of Congress were briefed on the CIA's "High Value Terrorist Program," including the development of "enhanced interrogation techniques" and what those techniques were. This was not a one-time briefing but an ongoing subject with lots of back and forth between those members and the briefers.

Today, I am slack-jawed to read that members claim to have not understood that the techniques on which they were briefed were to actually be employed; or that specific techniques such as "waterboarding" were never mentioned. It must be hard for most Americans of common sense to imagine how a member of Congress can forget being told about the interrogations of Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed. In that case, though, perhaps it is not amnesia but political expedience.

Let me be clear. It is my recollection that:

-- The chairs and the ranking minority members of the House and Senate intelligence committees, known as the Gang of Four, were briefed that the CIA was holding and interrogating high-value terrorists.

-- We understood what the CIA was doing.

-- We gave the CIA our bipartisan support.

-- We gave the CIA funding to carry out its activities.

-- On a bipartisan basis, we asked if the CIA needed more support from Congress to carry out its mission against al-Qaeda.'

Charles Krauthammer calls those congressional Democrats contemptible.  

Today Pelosi protests "we were not -- I repeat -- were not told that waterboarding or any other of these other enhanced interrogation methods were used." She imagines that this distinction between past and present, Clintonian in its parsing, is exonerating.

On the contrary. It is self-indicting. If you are told about torture that has already occurred, 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."

But Pelosi did nothing. No protest. No move to cut off funding. No letter to the president or the CIA chief or anyone else saying "Don't do it."

On the contrary, notes Porter Goss, then chairman of the House intelligence committee: The members briefed on these techniques did not just refrain from objecting, "on a bipartisan basis, we asked if the CIA needed more support from Congress to carry out its mission against al-Qaeda."

More support, mind you. Which makes the current spectacle of self-righteous condemnation not just cowardly but hollow. It is one thing to have disagreed at the time and said so. It is utterly contemptible, however, to have been silent then and to rise now "on a bright, sunny, safe day in April 2009" (the words are Blair's) to excoriate those who kept us safe these harrowing last eight years.'

The journalists who wrap themselves in a mantle of morality as they revel in this partisan witch hunt are just as contemptible.