Strength Rooted In Collaboration

Last week, after Barack Obama visited Gabrielle Giffords' hospital room, three of her colleagues stayed behind, Rebecca Traister writes:

In addition to her husband and parents, three of Giffords’s colleagues stayed in her room after the president left: Pelosi, now the House minority leader; Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida; and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, who has lately edged away from her own pro-gun politics by removing the rifles she once kept under her bed. As Gillibrand told CNN, Giffords was squeezing her hand while she talked about how they wanted to grab pizza and beer together, and Wasserman Schultz was promising a New Hampshire vacation when Giffords first opened her eyes, a moment that Wasserman Schultz compared to the birth of her children. In this tableau are embedded hints of other kinds of mythic female strength, rooted in collaboration, friendship and support.

Nancy Can't Pull The Football Away This Time

Congressional leaders got 40 interrogation briefings over seven years.

No Fun With Dick And Nancy

Andrew Sullivan called for the prosecution of former Vice President Cheney because, he says, Cheney broke the laws against torture. Sullivan now says that if congressional leaders, including Speaker Pelosi, knew about the alleged felonies but did nothing, they too should be held accountable. But he hasn't yet written that Pelosi should be indicted and prosecuted as an accessory to a felony.

I'm not accusing Sullivan of hypocrisy, because I don't think he has partisan motives for dogging the Bush administration so relentlessly over torture. But eventually he'll have to confront the preposterousness of prosecuting government officials. We now know that in the wake of Sept. 11, all three branches of government, including leaders from both parties, acted as though the U.S. was facing an existential threat. We're talking not about a lawless administration but a government-wide state of mind, reflecting the mentality and wishes of voters, in the face of a danger that felt and appeared virtually unprecedented in our national experience.

A truth commission to understand what happened and why in order to guide future Presidents, yes. Locking up a former VP and the woman who is second in line to the Presidency, no.

Pelosi Knew

It's official: The Speaker of the House was briefed in 2002 on what President Obama calls torture.

Relying On Politics, Not Word Games

In his column today, Charles Krauthammer doesn't try to make the case that waterboarding isn't torture. Instead, he rests his argument on two political realities. The first is that if the Bush administration overstepped its bounds, it was in order to protect the people of the United States. The second is that Nancy Pelosi and other top Democrats knew what the administration was doing and didn't object.

A third reality -- rarely noted by his critics -- is that President Bush stopped the waterboarding in 2005 in response to media revelations and political pressure.

For the sake of the public's right to know and guidance for future Presidents, I say yes to full disclosure of what techniques were used, on whom, by whom, and to what effect, but only if it wouldn't endanger national security. To prosecutions of elected or appointed officials, attorneys, judges, or interrogators because of waterboarding and other extreme techniques, no.

Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Speaker In The Dock?

If waterboarding is found to have been illegal torture, if all all those who were complicit in breaking the law are impeached or indicted, and if Rep. John Campbell (R-Newport Beach) is telling the truth about a senior colleague in his April 27 e-mail to constituents, then we may end up short at least one constitutional officer (since the Speaker should've called the D.C. police as soon as she was briefed):

Speaker Pelosi and other Congressional leaders were informed of the decision to use the controversial interrogation method and did not protest at the time.

Let's At Least Avoid The Political Torture

If there's one place where President Obama's political and diplomatic interests coincide, it's keeping the controversy over whether the Bush administration illegally sanctioned torture from descending into a partisan witch hunt. While cultural elites may think that an exhibitionist accountability exercise will ennoble the U.S. in the eyes of the world, it's more likely to provoke opportunism among our enemies and bemusement among our friends. At home, it will make it harder for Obama to command the center and rebuff the GOP in the 2010 midterm elections.

Though Nancy Pelosi and other liberal Democrats, seemingly intent on punishing Republicans, want a special panel on alleged torture, Obama and Senate Democratic leaders don't, and they held the line today -- an improvement on several days' mixed signals from Obama. A bright partisan spark was thrown by one of his lieutenants yesterday when House Republicans, angered because Obama released Bush-era memos authorizing harsh interrogation techniques (which some call torture), pressed Secretary of State Clinton on charges by Dick Cheney that the Obama administration is covering up evidence that the interrogations worked. She pressed back:

It won't surprise you that I don't consider him a particularly reliable source of information.

Ouch! Yet the same day, "Politico" reported:

Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair acknowledged in a memo to the intelligence community that Bush-era interrogation practices yielded had "high-value information,” then omitted that admission from a public version of his assessment.

So Clinton accused Cheney of being a liar even as it was made clear that her colleagues are spinning the torture story, just like he said. If there was ever a subject in need of a no-spin zone, it's this one. And yet the Clinton-Cheney contretemps is a reliable preview of what Pelosi's process would look like. I say full disclosure on the alleged torture as well as all terrorist plots discerned and thwarted since 2001. If it's still too dangerous to talk about the latter, then it's probably premature to investigate the former and impossible to do so fairly and dispassionately.

Christendom Writ Small

The House speaker praises the pope for the Vatican's stance on climate change. The pope scolds her for being pro-abortion.