Phony attack on Speaker Pelosi should be confronted

There are times when attacks by the Republican attack machine have their basis in reality, when some Democrat did something (s)he should not have done and the attack dogs sense blood in the water and go after it like ravenous sharks. Well, I guess I can't complain too much when that happens because I've been urging Democrats for years to play hardball politics the same way, and lately we've been a lot better at it. When that happens then you can blame the attack dogs, but you also have to blame the idiot that got caught with his or her pants down (whether figuratively or literally).

But there are also times when the attacks have no basis in reality, and are contrived and patched together as an attempt to invent a scandal and go after someone just so they can paint something on that person no matter how phony the attack is.

And so it is today that I am posting in defense of Speaker Pelosi. I might add that I've known who Nancy Pelosi was and known the Speaker to be a defender of human rights for many years before others even heard of her. Many years ago I signed an online petition on behalf of a Chinese dissident. About a year or two after that I and about fifty or a hundred other people who did not know each other received a series of mysterious emails from someone named, 'runner' tied to the approaching tenth anniversary of Tianenmen Square. Pelosi was one of those, as her congressional email address stuck out like a sore thumb in the list of apparently unrelated emails. Someone finally figured out that what drew us together was that we had all signed the same petition. Needless to say since then I've known who Nancy Pelosi is and I'm proud to stand with her in support of human rights.

The right is jumping all over a story that says that the Speaker (then minority leader) was briefed on waterboarding in 2002 and again in 2003 and did not object to it.

That is false however.

To begin with, at the time of the 2002 briefing on interrogation tactics waterboarding had been used on one Al-Qaeda prisoner and Pelosi and others were told specifically that it HAD NOT AND WOULD NOT be used. That's not just Pelosi's recollection , as she pointed out in remarks made yesterday but also the recollection of former Florida Senator Bob Graham who was also at the meeting. As for the 2003 briefing Pelosi pointed out that she was not present to raise an objection when others were told that it had been used as a tactic. The record bears that out:

Despite Boehner's comments, CIA records show Pelosi attended only one briefing — the one in the fall of 2002 where she says she was told that waterboarding had not been used. A chart released by the CIA detailing its briefings for lawmakers is vague on what transpired at that session. It says Pelosi and the top Intelligence Committee Republican, then-Rep. Porter J. Goss of Florida, were given a "description of the particular (enhanced interrogation techniques) that had been employed," without further details.

Remember that she claims (as does at least one other person who was present at the briefing) that she was told that waterboarding was not used at all in 2002. If the Speaker can be faulted at all it might be for not attending every single briefing but the truth is that Congress is a very busy place (especially for its leaders) so missing a briefing is hardly unusual.

More to the point though is the implication that because the Speaker never raised an objection (even if she had been there to raise one) that means she supported or at least condoned the tactic. Nothing could be further from the truth. Nancy Pelosi has consistently demanded that our intelligence officers comply with universally accepted (and agreed to by treaty) standards on the treatment of prisoners. She has never, repeat never accepted, condoned or failed to speak out against waterboarding or any other form of torture when she was given an opportunity to do so.

The purpose of this attack on the Speaker is to try and create, after the fact, some kind of defense for the indefensible. Now that it is time to really find out who authorized what and who told who what and when, the guilty parties are trying to smear their guilt around and all over those who have always been outspoken against what they are doing. Bending and twisting the facts or creating new ones are a desperate play by the right and it is important for those of us who want to see Congress get to the bottom of this to stand up now and defend the Speaker against these scurrilous attacks.

As I said at the outset, there are the attacks that seed themselves, by someone leaving a door open for the wolves. And then there are the attacks that are purely manufactured and this is one of those.

Fumbling, Bumbling, Stumbling

In my last post I pointed out how the Bush administration took what had been a successful program of sex education that had reduced the incidence of teen pregnancies and STD's and replaced it with abstinence-only education which has in turn resulted in the first actual increase in teen pregnancies in years.

Now we find out in regard to the CIA interrogation tapes which were destroyed that this happened directly contrary to the direct orders of White House Deputy counsel Harriet Miers. So in other words the CIA is now (and in 2005 was) running its own show, ignoring direct orders from White House officials.

We've also seen such extreme incompetence and ineptitude as our stumbling into the Iraq war without any planning for what to do after the fall of Baghdad, the botched response (and continuing failure to fully respond) to Katrina, and turning a record surplus into an enormous deficit. Nothing has been done about heatlhcare for eight years except for the prescription drug giveaway to the pharmaceutical companies, with the effect that we now have the most expensive health care system in the world and it still isn't working. The housing crisis is likely to drag down the economy for at least the foreseeable future.

Our reputation internationally is as bad as its ever been, the myth of American military invincibility has been thrown to the wind, and with our army being stuck in the quicksand of Iraq, North Korea has been free to develop and build nuclear weapons and even if you believe the CIA report last week (which I am personally very skeptical of) there is no question that the real winners of the Iraq war have been the Iranians, who have gone from at best an annoying irritant in the middle east to a regional power that threatens to dominate the region.

We've seen how after crime went way down nationally during the 1990's that it is now going back up again, and how after a decade in which SAT scores and the performance of American students against international competition was improving, it is now declining again. The dollar has declined from $.66 to a euro to over $1.20 for one euro. Prices for gasoline have more than doubled, and by next summer may hit $4.00 per gallon, which will represent a tripling of the price in just seven years.

In short, pretty much everything that the Bush administration has touched, has turned to garbage.

Whatever else will be written about this adminstration, it is clear that it will be considered the most incompetent Presidency since at least Jimmy Carter's.