Why Doesn't the Left Call for Pelosi's Resignation?
STANDARD BLOG
By John McCormack
Right after Obama released the interrogation memos, John Podesta, the head of the Center for American Progress and Obama's chief transition adviser, called for the impeachment of federal judge Jay Bybee, who signed off on the memos while at the Justice Department. "Bybee has neither the legal nor moral authority to sit in judgment of others," Podesta wrote in a letter to House judiciary chairman John Conyers.
So here's the question: Do people who believe that harsh interrogations were gravely immoral and violated the law think that Nancy Pelosi retains the moral authority to serve as speaker of the House? Based on the 2007 Washington Post story, Porter Goss's testimony, and the latest CIA memo--which reports Pelosi was given a "Briefing on [Enhanced Interrogation Techniques] EITs including use of EITs on Abu Zubaydah, background on authorities, and a description of particular EITs that had been employed"--don't opponents of 'EITs' think it's time for Pelosi to go?
The excuses trotted out in her defense so far are pretty pathetic. See this anonymously authored Center for American Progress post as a good example. One talking point--that Pelosi wasn't specifically informed about waterboarding--is particularly laughable. As Goldfarb notes below, Rep. Hoekstra says there are documents showing otherwise, and Allahpundit points out that Pelosi was briefed just a month after Zubaydah was waterboarded repeatedly: "Consider the context of when the briefing was held — one week before 9/11/02, when fears of an anniversary attack were sky high — and ask yourself why the CIA wouldn't have told Pelosi they had waterboarded Zubaydah." It certainly looks like Pelosi knew about waterboarding, and if she didn't she was certainly briefed about other interrogation techniques. Do her apologists think that waterboarding is the only technique that qualifies as torture?
Even if you take Pelosi at her (latest) word--that she was briefed on the authorization of harsh techniques but not that they had been used--that's all the more damning, as Charles Krauthammer argued last week:
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."
Some people like Rep. Jerrold Nadler, Glenn Greenwald, and Andrew Sullivan have talked a good game about the need to find out who knew what and when they knew it no matter who is implicated. But don't they already know enough demand Pelosi's resignation? |
