Fun with Dick and Nancy

(National Review Online)  This column was written by Mark Steyn.

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Uh-oh. Nancy Pelosi's performance at her press conference re waterboarding has raised, according to the Washington Post, "troubling new questions about the Speaker's credibility." The dreaded T-word: "troubling."

I doubt it will "trouble" the media for long, or at least not to the extent of bringing the Pelosi speakership to a sudden end - and needless to say I'm all in favor of Nancy remaining the face of congressional Democrats until November 2010. But her inconsistent statements do suggest a useful way of looking at America's tortured "torture" debate:

Question: What does Dick Cheney think of waterboarding?

He's in favor of it. He was in favor of it then, he's in favor of it now. He doesn't think it's torture, and he supports having it on the books as a vital option. On his recent TV appearances, he sometimes gives the impression he would not be entirely averse to performing a demonstration on his interviewers, but generally he believes its use should be a tad more circumscribed. He is entirely consistent.

Question: What does Nancy Pelosi think of waterboarding?

No, I mean really. Away from the cameras, away from the Capitol, in the deepest recesses of her (if she'll forgive my naivete) soul. Sitting on a mountaintop, contemplating the distant horizon, chewing thoughtfully on a cranberry-almond granola bar, what does she truly believe about waterboarding?

Does she support it? Well, according to the CIA, she did way back when, over six years ago.

Does she oppose it? According to Speaker Pelosi, yes. In her varying accounts, she's (a) accused the CIA of consciously "misleading the Congress of the United States" as to what they were doing; (b) admitted to having been briefed that waterboarding was in the playbook but that "we were not - I repeat - were not told that waterboarding or any of these other enhanced interrogation methods were used"; (c) belatedly conceded that she'd known back in February 2003 that waterboarding was being used but had been apprised of the fact by "a member of my staff." As she said on Thursday, instead of doing anything about it, she decided to focus on getting more Democrats elected to the House.

It's worth noting that, by most if not all of her multiple accounts, Nancy Pelosi is as guilty of torture as anybody else. That's not an airy rhetorical flourish but a statement of law. As National Review's Andy McCarthy points out, under Section 2340A(c) of the relevant statute, a person who conspires to torture is subject to the same penalties as the actual torturer. Once Speaker Pelosi was informed that waterboarding was part of the plan and that it was actually being used, she was in on the conspiracy, and as up to her neck in it as whoever it was who was actually sticking it to poor old Abu Zubaydah and the other blameless lads.

That is, if you believe waterboarding is "torture."

I don't believe it's torture. Nor does Dick Cheney. But Nancy Pelosi does. Or so she has said, latterly.

Alarmed by her erratic public performance, the speaker's fellow San Francisco Democrat Dianne Feinstein attempted to put an end to Nancy's self-torture session. "I don't want to make an apology for anybody," said Senator Feinstein, "but in 2002, it wasn't 2006, '07, '08, or '09. It was right after 9/11, and there were in fact discussions about a second wave of attacks."

Indeed. In effect, the senator is saying waterboarding was acceptable in 2002, but not by 2009. The waterboarding didn't change, but the country did. It was no longer America's war but Bush's war. And it was no longer a bipartisan interrogation technique that enjoyed the explicit approval of both parties' leaderships, but a grubby Bush-Cheney-Rummy war crime.

Dianne Feinstein has provided the least worst explanation for her colleague's behavior. The alternative - that Speaker Pelosi is a contemptible opportunist hack playing the cheapest but most destructive kind of politics with key elements of national security - is, of course, unthinkable. Senator Feinstein says airily that no reasonable person would hold dear Nancy to account for what she supported all those years ago. But it's okay to hold Cheney or some no-name Justice Department backroom boy to account?


Well, sure. It's the Miss USA standard of political integrity: Carrie Prejean and Barack Obama have the same publicly stated views on gay marriage. But the politically correct enforcers know that Barack doesn't mean it, so that's okay, whereas Carrie does, so that's a hate crime. In the torture debate, Pelosi is Obama and Dick Cheney is Carrie Prejean. Dick means it, because to him this is an issue of national security. Nancy doesn't, because to her it's about the shifting breezes of political viability.

But it does make you wonder whether a superpower with this kind of leadership class should really be going to war at all. Over at the New York Times, the elderly schoolgirl Maureen Dowd riffed off Cheney's defense of waterboarding and argued that, no matter when the next terrorist attack comes, the former vice president would be the one primarily responsible. He is, she said, "a force multiplier for Muslims who hate America."

Really? Last week, while Speaker Pelosi was preoccupied with her what-did-I-know-and-when-did-I-know-that-I-knew-it routine, the Daily Telegraph in London reported what is believed to be the second mass poisoning of Afghan schoolgirls, this time at Ura Jalili High School for Girls in Charikar. Fifty students had to be hospitalized after a mysterious "poison gas" infected the classrooms. As you may recall, under the Taliban it was illegal for girls to attend school, and Afghan insurgents have made a sustained effort to make the price of female education too high. So, in an effort to identify the poison, blood samples have been taken to Bagram air base to be analyzed by the U.S. military, taking time off its hectic schedule of mass torture.

Does waterboarding so outrage the Muslim world that it drives millions of young men into the dark embrace of al-Qaeda? No. But the media fetishization of U.S. "torture" is certainly "a force multiplier" for Muslims who don't so much "hate" as despise America, not least for its self-loathing.

One of the few U.S. commentators to pick up on the Afghan schoolgirls story was Phyllis Chesler, who wrote about it under the headline "The High Cost Of Western Idealism." America and its few real allies fight under the most constrained and self-imposed rules of engagement ever devised, and against an enemy that rejects every basic element of the Geneva Conventions. Perhaps we are so rich, so smart, so advanced that we can fight with one arm and both legs tied behind our back and still win - eventually. Along the way many innocents will suffer. But better that than that a Gitmo detainee with a fear of insects should have a caterpillar put in his cell.

Watching the Democrats champing at the bit last week, I thought perhaps we could cut to the chase and handcuff Cheney and Pelosi to a radiator in the basement of a CIA safe house somewhere. But on reflection this would be an unacceptable level of torture. It would be ungallant to say for whom.

Mark Steyn is a National Review columnist.
By Mark Steyn
Reprinted with permission from National Review Online.

[noloyalisti]

Yes, there was lots of pressure for the Bushoccio Crime Family, especially when they messed up so badly and let the attacks happen on their watch. Don't ever forget who let them in, the anti-government Republi CONS. Quit apologizing for these slimewad losers.

[Tiger-O-Lily]

Couldn't agree with you more Mr. Steyn. People have no idea of what pressure and decisions had to be made after 9/11 unless you were a part of the response. Thank you President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Governor Ridge and down the line.

[trohunt00]

I guess I'll just add to all the posts that state what was obvious. It doesn't matter if the column writer thinks waterboarding is torture. We didn't come to him for a determination. You may not think smoking weed is illegal either, but since the law on the books says it is, I guess you gotta go with the law right? So regardless of what pelosi knew...regardless of what Cheney thinks,.regardless of what information we may or may not have gotten (and actually, if we tortured the guy 83 times, then it doesn't seem to have gotten us anything), waterboarding is still torture, and the US has laws that says we do not torture. Why can't Republicans grasp that? It can't be hard to understand. Especially with thim being all "strict constructionists" of law and stuff. Case closed. Spend no time on Pelosi because whether she knew or not doesn't change the fact that waterboarding is torture, and torture is against our laws.

[DE58]

Any enhanced techniques for gaining information can provide suspect results and can be too time and manpower intensive. Perhaps we should place terrorists in a room with the victims' families to allow a direct appeal to the perpetrator's decency or some improvised approach......oh wait, this is America where victims have few rights so ACLU would consider my approach as torture....

[JackieOlson]

What is disturbing to me is that this is a profound example of how all our social institutions are failing, and failing so rapidly that the decline of the United States of America is well underway.
We are becoming what we hate: abusive, secretive agencies are working to undermine everything we believe in.
Education cannot provide enlightened children. Religion only gives us more ideology and not spiritual insight. Families are worried they will become homeless.
Government cannot bring justice to bear.

[mtcolquitt]

I think both dick and nancy need waterboarding TODAY!

[wogerwabbit]

Posted by ---One--American--- at 12:17 PM : May 18, 2009


In 1983, Texas Sheriff James Parker was charged, along with three of his deputies, for handcuffing prisoners to chairs, placing towels over their faces, and pouring water on the cloth until they gave what the officers considered to be confessions. The sheriff and his deputies were all convicted and sentenced to four years in prison.

[noloyalisti]

Don't now try to blame Pelosi or Democrats for the Bush Crime Family crimes against humanity. It just makes the stupid, ignorant Republicans look that much more stupid and ignorant as well as desperate. Get rid of the Republi CONS party, they are extremist and obsolete. We have enough wacked out extremist corporation lovers in the Dems party.

[wogerwabbit]

The United States has in the past imprisoned and even executed people for waterboarding. But the republicans would have us believe that because it was Bush/Cheney that instigated it this time instead of Hitler or Stalin, it's perfectly okay now. I don't understand this logic. Please explain.

[allen_osuno-19315235572502123818007317584585]

Oh good for the Republicans: They demand ?substance? from Nancy Pelosi. Well, where's their substance?

Why do the ?nopers? act as if it were already fact that Pelosi is lying. It is difficult to understand how they think they are owed proof of Speaker Pelosi's truthfulness. How do they know whether the CIA is telling the truth? They don't. So whatever the truth is, either way, will come out in time.

Even in the unlikely circumstance that Pelosi was given a thorough, complete briefing and that she embraced and signed off on it, even in that case, then OK, she could worst case be characterized as a politician like many Republican politicians, who lied her way out of political difficulties, that is, assuming she did lie, which nobody knows to be the case.

Many progressives have little deep devotion to Nancy Pelosi anyway after she took impeachment off the table andrefused to take a strong enough stand on moving to cut off off funding to George W. Bush after the 2006 election Democratic surge in the House of Representatives when she and Democrats could have refused to vote for further funding for the Iraq War, probably in order not to be perceived as 'unpatriotic' during the era of Cheney-GOP patriot baiting. A lot of Democrats, eager not to appear unpatriotic during the patriot-baiting era probably didn't say enough; however, maybe their actions could at least have some extenuating circumstances given the political atmosphere of fear and intimidation.

No, the real issue why the Republicans can?t focus on something important for our country is that the Republicans serve corporate and oligarchic interests and they don't care about our national wellbeing. Their political opportunism is at the service of their love of hard-right ideology and their sore loser mentality, which means more to they than America's survival.

So onward hypocrite soldiers. Marching to the drumbeat of partisanship and political sniping against Pelosi but ignoring the crimes of Cheney et al


Unless we all have an obsession with the current Speaker of the House, who cares? In 2003 Pelosi was a member of the MINORITY party, relatively powerless in the shadow of the Bush administration's bullying of anyone who criticized the war following 9/11. She was not even the ranking member of the House Intelligence committee, and, like other politicians who are briefed on matters of national security, she agreed obligatorily to stringent restraints of confidentiality. Does anyone think that in that political environment any objections she raised to the policy would have changed anything anyway?

In the final analysis, the Hypocrite Party makes a pointless argument. The most that the worst case scenario that they can hope to conjure up is to paint Nancy Pelosi as doing what Republicans are so good at: avoiding accountability. Republicans just love ruining someone?s reputation. The GOP uses as a prime tool its practice of besmirching others while ignoring their own glass house .

The Republicans always find some distraction to push as a "cause celebre" when they need to change the subject from a discussion of the criminality of the Bush administration to an irrelevant sideshow of Nancy Pelosi. The Republicans show their political opportunism, their hypocrisy and their pettiness in making an issue of Nancy Pelosi. This as they see it is their best chance to take a shot at Barack Obama?s reform agenda. Getting Nancy Pelosi to step down would be a setback for the Democrats and THAT is why the ?nopers? are pushing it. As I see it Republicans are politically vicious cultists who object whenever they feel the need to be sore losers that were turned out of power and rightly so by the American people.


The decision to use torture was not Nancy Pelosi's, and the sooner we ask what George Bush, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, et al, knew and when they knew it and why they lied to the American people about WMD?s to get into the war, the sooner we'll get answers that REALLY MATTER as to why our country is sinking into the mess it is in and who is responsible for it.


Republicans and neocons hunt like a dog pack, howling and baying when they think they smell blood. They don?t care about America or helping us all out of this terrible time of crisis. They only care about political ?gotcha?. I hope and believe the public sees this latest GOP tempest as the political cynicism that it is. But Obamas win of the White House and the Congress getting almost a filibuster-proof majority has made the GOP mad. And the dog that snarls loudest is the one the rock hit.