Posted by
Patrick Henry on Saturday, May 16, 2009 10:42:18 PM
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi says the CIA lied. Republicans say that Pelosi
lied. The CIA said, "Here's our record of who said what to whom and when, so
you decide who's lying?" What's this all about and where is it going? Who stands
to gain, who stands to lose and what are the stakes?
By becoming the Democrats point attack dog on the torture issue, Pelosi positioned
herself as an ignorant bystander while poor, innocent detainees were being brutally
treated. The bubble burst with a bang when CIA documents revealed that she was
briefed on ALL methods in use to extract truth from captured terrorists as early as
2002. Outraged, she called a press conference and accused the CIA of lying about
the matter. As the "deny and attack" strategy unravels, she finds herself facing a
rebellion from members of her own party, public humiliation and possibly even
a congressional investigation. No one believes her. With her credibility in tatters
she contemplates the dubious honor of being dubbed the premier prevaricatress
in a city chock full of world class liars.
The obvious question is why rsk a confrontation she cannot win over something
the whole world pretty much knows about, the administration has already promised
no one will be prosecuted for and that isn't even happening anymore? The equally
obvious answer is that the only end in view is to further discredit the Bush-Cheney
administration and Republicans. It's vicious partisan politics in its nastiest form.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the lynching, and as in so many misguided
ventures the Speaker has chased the Devil until he caught up with her. With the
documentation working against her, she can never prove her claim that "the CIA
intentionally misled" congressional overseers, or that she didn't know full well
what was going on. Clearly, she knew. That strips her of the cloak of self-
righteousness under which she sought to hide, weakens her leadership and drives
even her supporters to cover. And it begs the question of which is worse, those
who openly advocate for doing whatever has to be done to protect American lives
or those who quietly go along with it and then claim they didn't?
Complicating the issue are the bumbling pratfalls of the Obama administration
that released the terror memos, then realizing it was a mistake that put even more
American lives at risk decided not to release the pictures of the so-called "tortured
detainees." Like the precipitous decision to close down Guantanamo Bay without
a concrete plan for how to dispose of the dangerous terrorists there, this latest
series of clumsy attempts at "transparency" seems doomed to backfire and to weaken
the nation's credibility around the world and leave our first-line-of-defense
intelligence agency in total disarray.
Meanwhile, over at Langley, career bureaucrat Leon Panetta is telling his dismayed
troops, "Don't worry, be happy, stay focused on the mission." CIA insiders say that
morale there is the lowest in agency memory. That tends to occur when the person
third in line to succeed to the presidency publicly calls you a group of malicious
liars. Now Panetta, a man with zero backgournd in intelligence, is charged with
resurrecting his once-proud agency like some Phoenix rising from the ashes of
venomous political warfare. The task is akin to contemplating a hike up Mount
Everest with a Democrat manufactured millstone draped firmly around his neck.
Sadly, the point of this woeful tale is that the Democrats just don't get it when
it comes to keeping America safe. Discredit the intelligence community, deprive
the military, destroy morale and de-value the threats. That's the Democratic
strategy, and it backfires every single time. The Dems are good at bailouts. handouts
and buy-outs. Unfortunately they're best at wimp-outs. With a Secretary of Homeland
Security who is more afraid of our returning veterans than Ayman Alzawahiri, a
Speaker of the House who is hell bent on discrediting the men and women who stand
between America and disaster and a President who is more concerned with union
card check, national socialized medicine and tax rebates for people who never paid any
than Iran's and North Korea's headlong plunge toward the means to wreak nuclear
holocaust, nobody wins and, ultimately America is sure to lose. The clock is ticking
and the witching hour for ending the incompetent bumbling, politically motivated
mischief and self-serving dishonesty in Washington is upon us. The prospect of what
it may take to wake up the people in charge is beyond terrifying.