The CIA Stabbed In The Back By Pelosi

The problem with torture is that someone will tell you whatever you want to hear, even if it isn't true, just to make the pain stop.

It's kind of like a press conference—if you're Nancy Pelosi.

That's the impression I get from Dana Milbank's revealing description of Pelosi's press conference last Thursday in which she claimed that CIA officials lied to her in an attempt to conceal the agency's use of "enhanced interrogation techniques" to coerce information from captured al-Qaeda leaders.

NBC's Mike Viqueira was the first questioner. He asked if she had been "complicit" in the use of techniques such as waterboarding because her aide had been told that such techniques were in use.

"My statement is clear, and let me read it again. Let me read it again," she said. She looked for her statement. "I'm sorry, I have to find the page," she said. She read a few lines, then paused. "I'm sorry, I had the pages out of order." By now she had begun to employ her hands in the conversation, raising an index finger, circling her hands and finally moving both hands as if conducting an orchestra.

ABC's Jonathan Karl wanted to make sure he'd heard right. "You're accusing the CIA of lying to you?"

"Yes, misleading the Congress of the United States," Pelosi repeated. As she answered, she held a fist up, waved her index finger, formed her hand into an O, pushed her hair back, then resumed leading the orchestra. She appeared to have developed a case of dry mouth and was swallowing hard….

As more skeptical questions were shouted, Pelosi opened her eyes wide. She licked her lips. She chopped the air with her hand and moved her arm like a windshield wiper. She swallowed hard. She used both hands to clear her hair from her face as she fired off pleas that "I wasn't briefed," "I wasn't informed," and "They misled us."

"That's it—we're done!" a Pelosi aide said as the reporters continued to shout questions. Finally, in a burst of sideways energy and with the help of her aides, the speaker crab-walked out of the room.

If Pelosi knew about the interrogations—and she did—then her current push for investigations and prosecutions of Bush administration officials is revealed as a dishonest partisan witch hunt. Worse, it intimidates and demoralizes intelligence officials, who are being told, in effect, that if they take risks to ensure America's security, politicians may initially back them up—only to sell them out when the political winds shift.

In short, the Speaker of the House has been caught undermining America's national security for the sake of her own political grandstanding.

This has drawn an unusually clear rebuke from current CIA Director Leon Panetta, who released a memo nominally addressed to CIA employees but actually aimed at Pelosi. Pelosi has stuck a knife in the back of the CIA, and it looks like the CIA is more than happy to return the favor. Panetta writes:

Let me be clear: It is not our policy or practice to mislead Congress. That is against our laws and our values. As the Agency indicated previously in response to Congressional inquiries, our contemporaneous records from September 2002 indicate that CIA officers briefed truthfully on the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, describing "the enhanced techniques that had been employed."

This has even prompted speculation that Pelosi's many political enemies may use this as an opportunity to organize a Democratic rebellion to vote her out of the speaker's office. That ought to happen—but it probably won't.

"Now the Lady Doth Protest Too Much," Debra Saunders, San Francisco Chronicle via RealClearPolitics, May 17

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi argued at a press conference Thursday that Republicans are focusing on how much she knew about CIA enhanced interrogation techniques in 2002 and 2003 as a "diversionary tactic to take the spotlight off those who conceived, developed and implemented these policies, which all of us long opposed."

Yet, Pelosi's failure to protest what she alternately calls "enhanced interrogation methods" and "torture"—depending on whether the controversy threatens to make her look bad or the Bush administration—goes to the very heart of whether or not the "truth commission" she supports is anything more than an exercise in cynical partisan finger-pointing.

If Pelosi believes that the use of these techniques—including waterboarding—was so patently objectionable, why did she not use her political capital to end the practices as soon as she learned of them?...

Former GOP House Intelligence Committee Chairman turned Bush-CIA-chief Porter Goss…wrote a piece for the Washington Post in which he claimed that Pelosi and others "understood what the CIA was doing" and "gave the CIA our bipartisan support."…

Thursday, Pelosi claimed outright that the CIA had misled her about what it was doing in the 2002 briefing—and called for the release of documents to verify her version of events.

Clearly, she painted herself into a corner—and then made matters worse when she was forced to admit that she knew about waterboarding in 2003.

If the CIA's interrogation methods were so outrageous that they now warrant a "truth commission"—a process likely to destroy the careers of Bush administration and CIA officials who supported the policies—why is it that they did not even rate a milquetoast memo when the San Francisco Democrat learned of them?

I have to assume that Pelosi did not see these acts as criminal—that waterboarding did not become "torture" until it was politically expedient for the Democratic leadership to label it so.

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2. Tracinski's Law of Bailouts

Tracinski's Law of Bailouts states that government money drives out private money. That is, every dollar in government funds pumped into the economy during a bailout wipes out at least one dollar in private funds, both through taxes and inflation and through the fear and uncertainty caused by government intervention.

A corollary of Tracinski's Law of Bailouts is that bailouts are for losers. They have so many negative consequences for the companies which accept them that only really unsalvageable firms end up taking government subsidies—while any company that has a chance of surviving on its own is driven to escape from the government dole.

Below is a useful new formulation of that idea, from an unexpected source: one of the Washington Post's conventional, inside-the-beltway liberals. Government bailout funds, he writes, are the newest form of "toxic assets" that the banks are desperate to get off of their books.

"Government Money Is a Toxic Asset," David Ignatius, Washington Post via RealClearPolitics, May 17

Remember those "toxic assets" that were clogging the financial system a few months ago? Well, despite all the billions in government bailout programs, they're mostly still there. And in trying to clean up the system, the Obama administration has actually created a new category of toxic assets that banks desperately want to get off their books—namely the US Treasury's forced infusions of capital….

The Obama administration has struggled to revive the market for asset-backed securities. The problem isn't with securitization, they argue, but with restoring investor confidence. So they have launched a variety of schemes aimed at detoxifying the credit system that developed during the 1990s….

To restart the securitization machine, Treasury and the Federal Reserve have proposed a series of programs with tongue-twister names. They include the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility (known as "TALF") and the Public-Private Investment Program (known as "P-PIP"). But these programs have had limited success, so far….

Private lenders are extremely wary of having the federal government as a partner. And this phobia about government money could actually cripple Geithner's plan for public-private partnerships to buy up toxic mortgage securities. After the public flaying of AIG executives' bonuses, financial CEOs became wary of taking P-PIP loans—fearing that they would be attacked as profiteers or morons, depending on whether they made or lost money. Many analysts predict P-PIP will have few big-name players.

Fear of federal funds has become so acute that leading bankers are competing to see how quickly they can pay back last year's capital infusions from the Treasury. Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of J.P. Morgan Chase and perhaps the industry's most successful banker (a relative term), says he wants to pay the government capital back as soon as possible—and as for P-PIP, forget it.

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3. Freedom Is Indivisible

How bad are things getting? Below is an example: an article gloating over America's descent into Marxism—published in Pravda.

Aside from the curiosity value of this piece—which I have excerpted without making any effort to correct its slightly broken English—note the purpose of the gloating. The author derides our descent into economic servitude—in order to dismiss America's criticism of the Russians for their descent into political servitude.

This is an aspect of the fact that freedom is indivisible. When America turns away from one aspect of freedom, it diminishes both the material resources and the moral credibility that allows us to fight for every other aspect of freedom.

Thus, as we descend into a kind of economic dictatorship under the "czars" Obama is appointing to manage every major industry, that decline encourages all of the world's tyrants.

"American Capitalism Gone with a Whimper," Stanislav Mishin, Pravda, April 27

It must be said, that like the breaking of a great dam, the American decent into Marxism is happening with breath taking speed, against the back drop of a passive, hapless sheeple, excuse me dear reader, I meant people.

True, the situation has been well prepared on and off for the past century, especially the past twenty years. The initial testing grounds was conducted upon our Holy Russia and a bloody test it was. But we Russians would not just roll over and give up our freedoms and our souls, no matter how much money Wall Street poured into the fists of the Marxists.

Those lessons were taken and used to properly prepare the American populace for the surrender of their freedoms and souls, to the whims of their elites and betters.

First, the population was dumbed down through a politicized and substandard education system based on pop culture, rather then the classics. Americans know more about their favorite TV dramas then the drama in DC that directly affects their lives. They care more for their "right" to choke down a McDonalds burger or a BurgerKing burger than for their constitutional rights. Then they turn around and lecture us about our rights and about our "democracy". Pride blind the foolish.

Then their faith in God was destroyed, until their churches, all tens of thousands of different "branches and denominations" were for the most part little more then Sunday circuses and their televangelists and top protestant mega preachers were more then happy to sell out their souls and flocks to be on the "winning" side of one pseudo Marxist politician or another. Their flocks may complain, but when explained that they would be on the "winning" side, their flocks were ever so quick to reject Christ in hopes for earthly power. Even our Holy Orthodox churches are scandalously liberalized in America….

Prime Minister Putin, less then two months ago, warned Obama and UK's Blair, not to follow the path to Marxism, it only leads to disaster. Apparently, even though we suffered 70 years of this Western sponsored horror show, we know nothing, as foolish, drunken Russians, so let our "wise" Anglo-Saxon fools find out the folly of their own pride….

The proud American will go down into his slavery with out a fight, beating his chest and proclaiming to the world, how free he really is. The world will only snicker.

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4. The Carbon Empire

Paul Krugman recently called China the "Carbon Empire" because, as he correctly points out, the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by its enormous low-tech industrial economy is greater than the emissions produced by the American economy. Of course, in the parlance of today's left, "Carbon Empire" is their version of "Evil Empire," so Krugman's column ends up being a rationalization for green protectionism in the form of a "carbon tariff" levied on Chinese and Indian products.

But the article below argues that there is a different form of carbon imperialism at work. Mitch Daniels, the governor of Indiana, does not challenge the global-warming pseudo-science. Instead, he looks at cap-and-trade legislation from the perspective of political science—and he sees it as a plan for the looting of Midwestern industrial states like Indiana by populous coastal states like California, New York, and Massachusetts.

This is one of the key fault lines that can be used to block cap-and-trade: the fact that it has some states feeling as if they are the exploited colonies of other states. It is precisely to prevent this kind of exploitation that we have a Senate—where cap-and-trade legislation will hopefully go to die.

"Indian Says 'No Thanks' to Cap-and-Trade," Mitch Daniels, Wall Street Journal, May 15

The largest scientific and economic questions are being addressed by others, so I will confine myself to reporting about how all this looks from the receiving end of the taxes, restrictions, and mandates Congress is now proposing.

Quite simply, it looks like imperialism. This bill would impose enormous taxes and restrictions on free commerce by wealthy but faltering powers—California, Massachusetts, and New York—seeking to exploit politically weaker colonies in order to prop up their own decaying economies. Because proceeds from their new taxes, levied mostly on us, will be spent on their social programs while negatively impacting our economy, we Hoosiers decline to submit meekly….

And for what? No honest estimate pretends to suggest that a US cap-and-trade regime will move the world's thermometer by so much as a tenth of a degree a half century from now. My fellow citizens are being ordered to accept impoverishment for a policy that won't save a single polar bear.

We are told that although China, India and others show no signs of joining in this dismal process, we will eventually induce their participation by "setting an example." Watching the impending indigence of the Midwest, and the flow of jobs from our shores to theirs, our friends in Asia and the Third World are far more likely to choose any other path but ours.

Our president has commendably committed himself to "government that works." But his imperial climate-change policy is government that cannot work, and we humble colonials out here in the provinces have no choice but to petition for relief from the Crown's impositions.

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5. The One-State Solution

It looks as if one of President Obama's top foreign-policy priorities will be to foist a "two-state solution" onto Israel—that is, to force Israel to accept a terrorist state that breaches its post-1967 borders, making Israel even more difficult to defend. Israel's justified fear is that the two-state solution is actually a one-state solution: a new Palestinian terror state built on Israel's corpse.

Just ask the Palestinian Ambassador to Lebanon, who declared in a recent interview:

"With the two-state solution, in my opinion, Israel will collapse, because if they get out of Jerusalem, what will become of all the talk about the Promised Land and the Chosen People? What will become of all the sacrifices they made - just to be told to leave? They consider Jerusalem to have a spiritual status. The Jews consider Judea and Samaria to be their historic dream. If the Jews leave those places, the Zionist idea will begin to collapse. It will regress of its own accord. Then we will move forward."

He goes on to explain how Palestinian statehood is just a first stage toward the destruction of Israel.

The article below, an analysis in the New York Times, echoes the same idea, giving a sympathetic description of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's fear that "Iran could bring about the eventual end of Israel simply by possessing" nuclear weapons.

"Israel's Fear, Amalek's Arsenal," Jeffrey Goldberg, New York Times, May 16

[T]he prime minister’s preoccupation with the Iranian nuclear program seems sincere and deeply felt. I recently asked one of his advisers to gauge for me the depth of Mr. Netanyahu’s anxiety about Iran. His answer: “Think Amalek.”

“Amalek,” in essence, is Hebrew for “existential threat.” Tradition holds that the Amalekites are the undying enemy of the Jews. They appear in Deuteronomy, attacking the rear columns of the Israelites on their escape from Egypt. The rabbis teach that successive generations of Jews have been forced to confront the Amalekites: Nebuchadnezzar, the Crusaders, Torquemada, Hitler and Stalin are all manifestations of Amalek’s malevolent spirit.

If Iran’s nuclear program is, metaphorically, Amalek’s arsenal, then an Israeli prime minister is bound by Jewish history to seek its destruction, regardless of what his allies think. In our recent conversation, Mr. Netanyahu avoided metaphysics and biblical exegesis, but said that Iran’s desire for nuclear weapons represented a “hinge of history.”…

Mr. Netanyahu doesn’t believe that Iran would necessarily launch a nuclear-tipped missile at Tel Aviv. He argues instead that Iran could bring about the eventual end of Israel simply by possessing such weaponry. “Iran’s militant proxies would be able to fire rockets and engage in other terror activities while enjoying a nuclear umbrella,” he said. This could lead to the depopulation of the Negev and the Galilee, both of which have already endured sustained rocket attacks by Hamas and Hezbollah.

More broadly, he said, a nuclear Iran “would embolden Islamic militants far and wide, on many continents, who would believe that this is a providential sign, that this fanaticism is on the ultimate road to triumph.”

Mr. Netanyahu may be able to convince Mr. Obama that Iran poses an Amalek-sized threat to Israel, but he will have a much more difficult time convincing him that Iran poses an existential threat to America. It is certainly true that a nuclear Iran is not in the best interests of the United States. It would mean, among other things, the probable beginning of a nuclear arms race in the world’s most volatile region, and it would mean that the 30-year-struggle between America and Iran for domination of the Persian Gulf will be over, with Persia the victor. But the short-term costs, in particular, for an American strike—or an American-approved Israeli strike—could be appallingly high.

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6. Pakistan's Phony War

Speaking of nuclear-armed Muslim states, the central front in the War on Terrorism is currently "Af-Pak," the Islamist insurgency that straddles the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, and which has been reaching farther into Pakistan.

Unfortunately, neither the Pakistani government nor the Obama administration seems to have a serious plan for confronting this insurgency. Military strategist David Kilcullen, who helped craft the successful counter-insurgency strategy in Iraq, argues that Obama's main strategy for dealing with Pakistan—an increase in air strikes by unmanned drones—is counterproductive.

Press reports suggest that over the last three years drone strikes have killed about 14 terrorist leaders. But, according to Pakistani sources, they have also killed some 700 civilians. This is 50 civilians for every militant killed, a hit rate of 2 percent—hardly “precision.” American officials vehemently dispute these figures, and it is likely that more militants and fewer civilians have been killed than is reported by the press in Pakistan. Nevertheless,…the use of drones displays every characteristic of a tactic—or, more accurately, a piece of technology—substituting for a strategy. These attacks are now being carried out without a concerted information campaign directed at the Pakistani public or a real effort to understand the tribal dynamics of the local population, efforts that might make such attacks more effective.

In other words, these strikes are just feel-good measures to show that we're "doing something"—but without a comprehensive counter-insurgency strategy that would actually move us closer to victory.

Unfortunately, we can't count on Pakistan, either. Below, military blogger Bill Roggio provides an overview of Pakistan's recent assault supposedly aimed at re-taking areas of Pakistan controlled by the Taliban. He concludes that Pakistan is sending far too few troops to get the job done. Instead, it is still directing the bulk of its military resources to prepare for war against our ally, India.

"Pakistani Military Paints Rosy Picture of Swat Fighting," Bill Roggio, The Long War Journal, May 13

As journalists have been barred from the combat zone, the military's claims cannot be verified. But past attempts to take Peochar, along with the recent operation in Buner, make the military's claims suspect….

The Taliban also remain in firm control of Mingora, the main town in Swat, despite military claims to have surrounded that city. The same is true of Madain in Dir and a host of towns in Swat….

The claims of success are curious in light of reports of the deployment of six brigades, or two divisions, of Pakistani troops. According to The Nation, "one purpose of the move could be to contain the militants militarily in such a manner to make them unable to move to other adjoining areas, and to preempt efforts of Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan to reinforce militants in Swat and Malakand." This means the military did not launch its offensive in an organized matter; the offensive was launched with insufficient forces and no plan to block the Taliban movement from neighboring districts and tribal agencies.

The deployment of six additional brigades to the fight still puts the Pakistani military well below the number of brigades in the region prior to the military's pullback after the Mumbai attack and subsequent tensions with India, Ravi Rikhye, the editor of Orbat.com said.

Last December the Pakistani Army withdrew an estimated 30,000 troops from the Northwest Frontier Province and the tribal areas to counter a perceived threat from India after Lashkar-e-Taiba launched a deadly military assault on Mumbai.

"When Pakistan maintained the equivalent of 20 brigades in the NWFP [Northwest Frontier Province]- till the Bombay crisis 2008, the Pakistan Army was getting badly beaten in each and every campaign," Rikhye wrote. "Now the Pakistan Army appears to have ten brigades with perhaps six more on their way."

The deployment of the six additional brigades likely is not enough, Rikhye wrote, as the Taliban is better organized and in control of more territory. "But the battle area is much wider this time because Shangla, Mardan, Buner, and Swabi Districts are involved," Rikhye said. "Will sixteen brigades suffice where 20 did not, for a smaller area?"