Both the media and Republicans, who love to make something out of nothing ( except when Republicans govern and then turn something into nothing) seem to want to make a big issue out of what Nancy Pelosi knew about water boarding and torture and when she knew it . In yesterday's press conference the big question was who told her what when. The problem is it doesn't matter..Pelosi was not making policy, Pelosi had no say in what Bush policy was going to be, and whether or not she was informed about water boarding in 2002 or whether or not she protested means absolutely nothing.
The only issues that matter regarding torture relates to the Bush White House and whether what they did was legal and did Bush Administration lawyers contrive a pseudo legal framework to justify torture. And if they did , the next question is, should they and other members of the Bush Administration who ordered the illegal torture be prosecuted.
Last night the breathless Lou Dobbs as well as other members of the press seemed to think that what Pelosi knew was somehow important.
It wouldn't matter if Pelosi lied through her teeth about everything she knew regarding torture. She didn't create the policy, didn't implement it and had no say or veto power over whether it was used or not. And as far as what we know so far, both Bob Graham, the former chairman of the Intelligence Committee and Jay Rockefeller who was also on the Intelligence Committee say they were never informed by the CIA though the CIA now claims both were briefed.
If nothing else this tends to corrorborate Pelosi's version of events.
After hearing Pelosi's admittedly stammering press conference, in the end she made it clear (even if Dobbs and other journalists couldnt grasp it through the stammering,) that she was NOT told by the CIA in any briefing that water boarding was being used. Whether or not this is true, I have no idea. But what the breathless Lou Dobbs didn't seem to grasp was that she was not admitting anything she hadn't said before even though she was clearly flustered in the way she was trying to say it. And now she is saying that the CIA misled her.
What the resolution of all this back and forth will be no one knows. But underneath all this chaos over torture, torture memos and reversal of policies regarding abuse photos is the Undecider himself, Barrack Obama who seems like he never had a thought he didn't want to change and whose constant reversals have been torturing the country over torture as I pointed out weeks ago.
Obama has reversed himself on so many decisions related to Bush era torture that its clear he has no moral position himself, no legal position himself, and maybe no clue himself as to what it all means, and we are seeing very clearly the admonitions we heard during the Democratic primaries that Obama was the least qualified of all the candidates to be President and its starting to show.
Given that the Republicans cant be trusted to do anything right, and Obama seems to have no idea about what is right regarding the whole issue of torture, its going to be left to Congress to have to straighten it all out.
For now Obama has a public mess on his hands of his own making mostly for not being consistent and not having any personal convictions regarding the entire issue of torture in the first place.
If the Republicans and the press want to make an issue of what Pelosi knew that's fine. Let the Congress and Pelosi use that as a good reason to have hearings and get to the bottom of everything. This is actually an opportunity for Pelosi and those Democrats who want hearings into Bush Administration torture to use Republican allegations against her to get them to support the idea of hearings. Which will not only get to the bottom of everything, it will take it out of Obama's hands which somebody needs to do.
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