December 15, 2007
House Speaker Pelosi proves again that she's the go-to democrat when it comes to clearing away legal obstacles for the Bush-Cheney crime spree.
Hardly mentioned in all the recent fuss about CIA waterboarding and its use in covert facilities are intriguing questions about San Francisco Representative Nancy Pelosi’s role in shielding the Bush Administration from any fallout four years ago.
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 G.O.P. in collaboration with the White House.
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 the use of secret prisons and waterboarding 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 masked ones claim the evidence would be thrown out by a judge because it was procured through torture. Hence, the circular logig goes, it's bettet to just let these men rot in Bulgaria and other countries even if they happen to be completely innocent.
While we can’t be sure about the quality of the intel gleaned from all this waterboarding, we do know that bin Laden remains at large, al Qaeda is bigger and better funded than ever before in history, that Iraq is now run by Iran and that most of the men in Guantanamo were kidnapped willy-nilly off the street, not the battlefied. Those bounty hunters in Pakistan who collected fat fees for the abductions, courtesy of your payroll taxes, are the same guys helping the Taliban re-take Pakistan from the NATO forces. And how reassuring is that?
Several torture victims who've lived to see the light of the television cameras have described ordeals in which they were repeatedly tortured and locked up even when U.S. authorities realized they were not terrorists. In the most publicized case, a Canadian citizen 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 scheme, but the Bush Administration continues to identify the man as a terrorist anyway, no doubt to keep him from setting foot in one our own courts.
But getting back to the waterboarding controversy, it seems 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 constituted a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions, the Torture Convention and the U.S. military code.
Harmon, on the other hand, did object, the only congressperson in either committee who did so. She spoke up in the meeting and in a letter to the CIA afterwards. Naturally, these briefings were classified, preventing anyone from taking the matter public. Yet if Pelosi knew grave breaches against the Geneva Conventions were taking place, she should have used her promotion four years a later to bring it to an end.
In 2006, when the democrats captured a majority in the House on a mandate to end the Iraq War, Pelosi became House Speaker. Jane Harmon, meanwhile, was set to assume the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, since she was the ranking democrat. Incredibly, in the lead up to that election, activists in Harmon's district began slamming Harmon on charges that she deferred too much to the pro-Israel lobby in Congress. Interesting timing to say the least.
Then Pelosi dutifully snubs Harmon and appoints one of the men on the committee as the new chair.
This turn of events makes about as much sense as the CIA deporting a terror suspect to Syria. Since almost every Democrat and Republican in Congress takes money from AIPAC (the Israeli lobby) and votes a staunch pro-Israel line, the charges were disingenuous from the outset. That the pro-Geneva Conventions Harmon was kept from assuming such a key post in the post-911 world wouldn't be such a surprise were not for the fact the representative of one of the most liberal cities on earth was responsible . As we explained in our article about Speaker Pelosi last year, AIPAC repeatedly targeted progressive Rep. Cynthia McKinney of Georgia every time she came up for election six years in a row, and the House Speaker never lifted a finger to intervene on that occasion. (Here's a link to the story. Note: It's a PDF file.)
Eleanor Smeal and other feminist leaders should crack open a newspaper once in a while, instead of going gaga over the fact that a woman like Nancy 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.
In 2006, Rep. Pelosi also became the one person in the United States with the power convene impeachment proceedings against two gentlemen she well knew were breaking the law. Yet with public disaffection at its peak, she announced impeachment was “off the table”.
Why let a little thing like the constitution get in the way of your upward mobility?
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