The Pelosi Factor

Editorial

Speaker Nancy Pelosi -------------------------------

War Crimes and Miss Demeanor

5/8/09 The Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi (D - San Francisco) is on the hot seat this week for claiming she was not informed in 2002 that waterboarding and other forms of torture were practiced by the CIA during the Bush Administration. As The City Edition reported over a year ago, Pelosi not only condoned the policy but penalized the one member of the House Intelligence Committee who objected to it.

December 15, 2007

House Speaker Pelosi proves again that she's the go-to democrat when it comes to clearing away obstacles for the Bush Administration, so it can continue violating federal and international law.

Hardly mentioned in all the fuss about CIA waterboarding in secret detention facilities outside the United States are intriguing questions about San Francisco Representative Nancy Pelosi’s role in the scheme. According to Pelosi, her objective in Congress has always been to address what she and others have dubbed the “culture of corruption” carried out by the Republican Party in collaboration with the White House.

And now for the facts. McClatchy News Services and a few other press outlets report that the CIA briefed members of the House and Senate intelligence committees as far back as 2002 about so-called enhanced interrogation techniques in order to extract intelligence from alleged al Qaeda operatives. Since the Pentagon and CIA have never turned these prisoners over for trial in the United States, there’s no way of knowing if the torture techniques have yielded results. The Pentagon has repeatedly argued that the evidence would be thrown out by a judge since it was procured through torture. Hence, the circular logic goes, it's better to just let these men rot in Bulgaria, Egypt and elsewhere, even if they happen to be completely innocent.

While we can’t be sure about the quality of any intel gleaned from waterboarding, we do know that bin Laden remains at large six years after 9/11 and al Qaeda is bigger and better-funded than ever before in history. Iraq is now run by Iran. W've also learned through various investigations that most of the men in Guantanamo were kidnapped willy-nilly off the street in Pakistan, not the battlefied. Bounty hunters collected fat fees for the abductions, paid by the U.S. taxpayers. And the Taliban is having a cakewalk re-taking Pakistan from the NATO forces.

Several torture victims who have lived to tell of their ordeals say they continued to be held long after U.S. authorities realized they were not terrorists. In the most publicized case, a Canadian telecommunications engineer named Maher Arar was arrested while changing planes at La Guardia by our agents and renditioned to Syria on special jet chartered fro the occasion. There he was tortured and confined to a tiny cell for more than a year.

Syria? Isn't this one the countries that sponsors terrorism in the first place? If so, how does sending him there further the war on terrorsim and why in tarnations would Syria want to waterboard one of their own? Canada has paid $10 million dollars in damages for its part in the plot, but the Bush Administration continues to identify the man as a terrorist anyway. Evidently, it's the only way to keep him from setting foot in one our own courts to sue for damages.

But getting back to the waterboarding controversy, two congresswomen - House Speaker Pelosi and Rep. Jane Harmon of Southern California - sat on the House Intelligence Committee at the time of the CIA delivered its briefings in 2002. According to her spokesperson, Pelosi never lodged any objection during those meetings, even though all of what she heard apparently qualified as a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions, the international Torture Convention and the U.S. military code.

Harmon, on the other hand, did object, the only congressperson in either the House or Senate who did so. According to records of the meetings and her aides, she spoke up in the meeting and in a letter she sent to the CIA afterwards. Naturally, these briefings were classified, preventing anyone in Congress from taking the matter public. Yet if Pelosi knew grave breaches against the Geneva Conventions were taking place, she should have used her top-dog status in the Democratic Party to put an end to it.

But she didn't. In 2006, when the Democrats captured a majority in the House on a mandate to end the Iraq War, Pelosi became House Speaker, announcing impeachment proceedings against President Bush were "off the table". Jane Harmon, meanwhile, was set to assume the chair of the House Intelligence Committee as the ranking Democrat. Incredibly, in the lead up to that election, activists in Harmon's district suddenly began slamming her on charges that she deferred too much to the pro-Israel lobby in Congress. It was interesting timing. Pelosi dutifully snubbed Harmon by appointing one of the men on the committee as the new chair.

Since almost every Democrat and Republican in Congress takes money from AIPAC (the Israeli lobby) and votes a staunch pro-Israel line, the charges against Harmon were disingenuous from the outset and appear to constitute a deliberate effort to keep her from taking the reigns of a powerful House committee. That Pelosi played a role in the scheme is deplorable. San Franciscans are not generally known for turning a blind eye to torture and human rights abuses, yet here we are with this individual speaking for us in Washington.

Eleanor Smeal and other feminist leaders should crack open a newspaper once in a while, instead of going gaga over the fact that “off the table” Pelosi has been appointed to high office. In the same manner that President Bush heralds democracy while secretly collaborating with Saudi sheiks, Islamic militant groups, and genocidal rulers like the ones in Sudan, Pelosi’s actions likewise run in the opposite direction of her rhetoric. She should not only be called on it, she would be replaced as San Francisco's representative.