If there are any more revelations about what Nancy Pelosi knew of interrogating terrorists, she may have to up the ante from a truth commission to an inquisition.
Because if she again gets called out for knowing more than she let on, Pelosi would have to get Dick Cheney in leg irons to prevent a revolt on the Left.
The speaker is already having a tough time keeping liberals off her back since former CIA boss Porter Goss and others shed light on the 2002 briefings Pelosi received.
Pelosi’s position is that she knew waterboarding was an approved practice, but not that it had been employed.
Some feel certain she knew more. And among those who take Pelosi at her word, liberals believe she should have protested even the possibility of simulated drowning for terrorists.
On the Left, the issue of investigating the Bush administration’s anti-terror policies has become the dominant one. And it’s not just because liberals are morally outraged over what was done in the name of preventing another attack.
Pragmatic President Barack Obama and other Democratic leaders are going slow on demands for a terror probe in hopes that a bruising round of recriminations can be avoided. But Obama’s strongest, earliest supporters were those who believe that President George W. Bush and Vice President Cheney committed crimes — including torture — in the effort to push the U.S. into war with Iraq in 2003.
Obama has so far proved to be a disappointment to liberals on foreign policy and defense.
Both of Bush’s wars are still raging, and Obama has doubled down on Afghanistan. Foreign fighters will still be subjected to military tribunals, and the government has reserved the right to ship terror suspects to allies less squeamish about torture.
Obama’s frequent lamentations of America’s past have pleased many in his doveish base. And taking some of the starch out of American exceptionalism has helped too.
But the president’s resistance to investigating his predecessor has them worried that Obama is trying to preserve too much of the Bush anti-terror apparatus. Unless Obama is willing to let the sun shine on the covert side of what was once the Global War on Terrorism, his original supporters can’t be sure he hasn’t betrayed them.
Pelosi, along with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, had been helping keep the heat off. But now that Pelosi has been caught using doublespeak on interrogations, she will cease to be much help to Obama and may start becoming a real hindrance.
To this point, moves by liberal, conspiratorially minded members like Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., could be marginalized. But now Pelosi is joining calls for a truth commission to scour the Bush record and may have to go further still in an effort to clear her own name or at least distract the Left.
Obama’s Justice Department is expected to issue a report as soon as this week that is said to call for professional, not criminal, sanctions against Bush-era lawyers who crafted the memos approving the rough stuff for Jihadis. Attorney General Eric Holder has already said he doesn’t see cause for an independent counsel.
Just as the release of the interrogation memos themselves did, the report will only tantalize the Left and may push Congress into distracting, damaging hearings featuring top Bush officials, perhaps even Cheney.
Aside from derailing Obama’s agenda, such hearings would reinforce the notion that Democrats aren’t serious about stopping terrorists.
Before his recent death, a Marine veteran of World War II who survived the hellish fighting on Guadalcanal spoke of seeing a pair of Australian soldiers toss a Japanese prisoner off a transport plane.
It still haunted the man 60 years later that he couldn’t stop the Aussies, soul-sick from seeing Japanese atrocities, from taking their revenge against a POW.
The old Marine regretted not being able to save the man’s life. But he didn’t regret continuing to fight the war instead of trying to get the Aussies court-martialed.
Defeating America’s enemies had to take precedence over punishing the misdeeds of America’s friends. Plus, the Australians made it perfectly plain that they would insist that the prisoner had jumped. There would have been no point.
That way of thinking isn’t dying with the World War II generation.
If Democrats start punishing the people who tried to protect the country in a time of war, the party will surrender its greatest moment of opportunity in a generation.
