Pelosi and waterboarding: How much did she know?

“Nancy Pelosi’s brazenness is a thing to behold,” said the New York Daily News in an editorial. With typical self-righteousness, the House speaker has spent months fiercely criticizing the Bush administration for waterboarding captured al Qaida operatives. But a newly released CIA memo says that as long ago as September 2002, she and other members of the House Intelligence Committee were briefed that the agency was using coercive interrogation techniques, including waterboarding. Far from admitting her hypocrisy, Pelosi has gone “on the attack,” accusing the CIA of lying about briefing her and of generally misleading Congress about its use of torture. She has to lie, said Rich Lowry in National Review, because the Left has painted her into a corner with its promiscuous use of the word “torture.” Torture is a war crime, so anyone complicit in it is a war criminal. This is why Pelosi is now flailing about, insisting that, well, maybe she did know about the waterboarding, but only in 2003, and besides, who would have listened if she’d complained?

Actually, the known facts suggest that Pelosi may be telling the truth, said Sam Stein in Huffingtonpost.com. CIA Director Leon Panetta has admitted that the agency’s claim that it briefed Pelosi in 2002 was based only on the “recollections” of the briefers, put down on paper years later. The CIA, obviously, has ample motive to cover its rear end. Retired Florida Democratic Sen. Bob Graham, renowned for the detailed daily diary he kept, says he was present at another 2002 CIA briefing, and wasn’t told anything “as neon as waterboarding or other torture techniques.” Obviously, Republicans are piling on Pelosi in an attempt to change the subject, said the San Francisco Chronicle. The real issue is that under the leadership of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, the U.S. crossed the line into barbarism.

Pelosi’s tacit acceptance of waterboarding in 2002 isn’t a change of subject, said Charles Krauthammer in The Washington Post. It’s the heart of the matter. At the time, visions of people leaping from the burning World Trade Center were fresh in Americans’ minds. Even well-known liberals like Alan Dershowitz were publicly calling on the government to make captured al Qaida operatives talk, so we would be spared “another 9/11.’’ Republican congressmen who were present at 2002 and 2003 CIA briefings say that their Democratic colleagues actually encouraged the CIA to do everything possible to make America safer. With al Qaida promising more attacks, and the public worrying about anthrax, “dirty” bombs, and even nuclear weapons, congressional Democrats had joined Bush in concluding that waterboarding and other techniques were “on balance a reasonable response to a terrible threat. And they were right.”

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

It wasn’t just Congress that was complicit in this “authoritarian spasm,” said Jacob Weisberg in Newsweek. Beginning in 2002, newspapers were reporting that the CIA was sending “high-value” detainees to be interrogated in Egypt and other rule-free nations; news of waterboarding leaked out in early 2004. By the time President Bush ran for re-election, “if you didn’t understand that the U.S. was inflicting torture upon those deemed enemy combatants, you weren’t paying much attention.” Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry didn’t object, and Bush was re-elected. Torture was “America’s policy,” so blaming Bush and Cheney—or Nancy Pelosi—“won’t absolve the rest of us for what we let them do.”