Nancy’s Versions

National Review Online
Monday, May 11, 2009

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is almost certainly not telling the truth about her foreknowledge of EITs — what the CIA calls “enhanced interrogation techniques” and critics call “torture.” To answer the inevitable question, we turn to recently released CIA records. What Pelosi knew: “Briefing on EITs, including use of EITs on Abu Zubaydah, background on authorities, and a description of particular EITs that had been employed.” When she knew it: September 2002. Pelosi raised no objection at that time; but now that the Left is demanding an inquisition to study Bush-era interrogation programs, Madame Speaker pleads ignorance.

Fortunately for those with an interest in establishing the facts, Pelosi did not attend that briefing solo. Also in attendance was Porter Goss, at that time a member of Congress, who went on to become director of the CIA. He pronounces himself “slack-jawed” with disbelief that Pelosi today claims not to have known what interrogation techniques were being used. “We understood what the CIA was doing,” he wrote in the Washington Post. “We gave the CIA our bipartisan support. We gave the CIA funding to carry out its activities. . . . I do not recall a single objection from my colleagues.” Note that the memo says Pelosi was given a “description of particular EITs that had been employed” on Abu Zubaydah, a lieutenant to Osama bin Laden. He had been waterboarded repeatedly by that point. If that did not make the list of “particular EITs,” then what did? Perhaps Pelosi would enlighten us?

But first she’ll have to decide on a story, and she’s already floated a couple of competing narratives. In one version, she says she simply was not informed that any waterboarding was under way. In another version, she says she learned about the waterboarding not at the 2002 meeting but in 2003, when one of her staffers attended a briefing for Rep. Jane Harman on the subject. Pelosi says she “concurred” with the letter Harman subsequently sent to the CIA’s legal counsel objecting to the practice — but she apparently didn’t concur strongly enough to sign the letter or to send one of her own. If Pelosi really believed that human-rights violations and war crimes were being perpetrated under her nose, with funds she was appropriating, mightn’t she have bothered to jot down her signature on a letter? But the political mood was different in 2003. It took Pelosi until the run-up to the 2006 elections to discover the courage of her alleged convictions.

More troubling, Pelosi also has suggested that she was lied to by the CIA. Being a canny politician, she is not slinging that mud herself, but her spokesman, Brendan Daly, says, “The briefers described these techniques, said they were legal, but said that waterboarding had not yet been used.” Waterboarding had in fact been used, on the aforementioned Abu Zubaydah, 83 times. There is a significant difference between “I wasn’t told” and “I was lied to.” If Pelosi is accusing her CIA briefers of lying to Congress, that is an extraordinarily serious matter. To disingenuously suggest such a thing for the sake of political expediency would be an extraordinarily serious matter, too. The speaker should clarify herself on this question.

Pelosi’s preferred iteration of this story, the innocence-through-ignorance explanation, in fact does little to exonerate her. The CIA confirms that it briefed Pelosi on the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah and the techniques used, and Pelosi herself confirms that the briefing included a discussion of waterboarding and its legality. It is almost impossible to believe that, in the course of a discussion about the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah and the use of waterboarding, it never occurred to Pelosi to ask whether Abu Zubaydah had been waterboarded. Goss came away from that meeting understanding exactly what CIA interrogators were doing. Goss did not object because he approved; we suspect the same is true of Pelosi. In the wake of 9/11, waterboarding Abu Zubaydah must have seemed to members of Congress like an eminently reasonable thing to be doing; it still seems so to us. But Pelosi’s Democrats relied heavily upon war-crimes allegations to discredit the Bush administration, and now she has a tiger by that torture tale: Having used the myth to achieve power, Pelosi now faces a restive Democratic base that demands investigations and punishment of the alleged torturers, and those complicit in their alleged crimes. This would seem to include Pelosi herself.

The important point of this is not that Nancy Pelosi is a liar or, alternatively, that she proved incapable of understanding her CIA briefings — though her performance in this episode could be taken as evidence for either or both conclusions. The point, rather, is that Nancy Pelosi has shown herself to be an irresponsible and arguably incompetent steward of our national-intelligence mission, one who is prepared to subjugate national security to narrow political interests.

So, what happened, and how complicit is Speaker Pelosi in what she now denounces as criminal torture? And which version of the story will she stick to? Particularly strange is her insistence that she believed waterboarding was not yet being used but was under consideration for the future. As Charles Krauthammer notes, the time to object to something evil is before it happens. If Pelosi believes waterboarding to be torture and to be illegal, and if she knew (as she admits she does) that the Bush administration had determined that the practice is legal, why didn’t she say something? If there is an answer to that question other than political calculation, we’d love to know what it is. But the speaker has had an awful time trying to explain herself of late, so our hopes of a satisfactory accounting are diminished.