Pelosi, Torture and the Year America Lost Its Moorings

Aside from claiming to be a sex addict, it is hard to find a Washington excuse as cynical as that fine old whine: Everybody does it. This bipartisan notion of equality in sin has long been applied to earmarks, friendship with lobbyists, favors for campaign contributors -- and now, winking at torture.

Congressional Republicans recently have been winning the spin wars with the head-spinning charge that Nancy Pelosi was as much in the tank on waterboarding as Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and see-no-evil Justice Department lawyers like John Yoo. As Peter Hoekstra, the senior Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, said to Politico about Pelosi's imagined culpability, "Clearly, she was involved in policy formation (on torture)."

The exaggerated GOP portrayal of the liberal House Speaker as the Democratic version of the Spanish Inquisition's Torquemada is based on the recent release of a CIA memo that indicates Pelosi, who was then the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, was briefed on Sept. 4, 2002, on what were known as EITs, which stands for "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques." (The Orwellian label is grossly overused these days, but even Big Brother would be impressed by the CIA's ability to turn torture into an acronym that sounds like it stands for an obscure business tax credit.)

The CIA document suggests that Pelosi and three other members of Congress were told at the time – and did not offer any objection -- that these cruel and unusual punishments were being used on a purported al-Qaeda leader known as Abu Zubaida. In releasing the memo outlining the 2002 briefing and more than 40 other sessions with Congress, CIA director Leon Panetta raised the possibility that the Bush-era summaries may not be entirely accurate. Pelosi has embraced this escape clause with the enthusiasm of a beleaguered homeowner who discovers a legal error in the foreclosure notice. As Pelosi stressed in a statement last week, "I was briefed on interrogation techniques the Administration was considering using in the future."

It requires tortuous logic (and hours of practice before a mirror keeping a straight face) for Republicans to use this single congressional briefing to argue that, in effect, Pelosi was the Bush administration's enabler on waterboarding. Even if Pelosi had been appalled by the violation of the Geneva Convention and norms of civilized behavior, she would not have been allowed to say a word in public since the briefings were conveniently top secret. All she could theoretically do is to write a stiff letter to the administration, which would not have been such a persuasive tool coming from a Democrat in the minority. Imagine Cheney and Company calling the CIA the moment the 2002 Pelosi letter arrived to announce, "Cool it with Zubaida – the rough stuff is out. Nancy Pelosi just informed me that her constituents in San Francisco will not stand for it."

In truth – and this is the weakest point in her defense -- Pelosi never wrote such a letter. Even if the House speaker's recollection is correct, and tactics such as waterboarding were mentioned only as possible future options, it is hard, with hindsight, to justify her silence. Jane Harman, a California Democrat who replaced Pelosi on the Intelligence Committee, did write a skeptical letter to the CIA general counsel in February 2003, questioning whether the current use of waterboarding on Zubaida is "consistent with the principles and policies of the United States." Pelosi has insisted that she concurred with the Harman letter at the time.

The entire what-did-Pelosi-know flap may be ludicrous, but it does remind us of the fear and paranoia that were the norm in both partisan politics and the nation during that plug-ugly year of 2002. Pelosi's failure to privately object to her briefing on torture (theoretical though it may have been) may well have reflected the us-versus-them, the-old-rules-no-longer-apply consensus that prevailed in the months after the September 11 attacks.

September 4, 2002, the day of Pelosi's briefing, the New York Times ran an article featuring psychiatrists offering grave recommendations about how Americans should approach the first anniversary of 9/11. Children may ask, "Could this happen again?" said a professor at the University of Vermont. "And the unfortunate truth is that we know it could." In the same paper, Rumsfeld predicted in an interview that the nation would probably be "punctuated periodically with additional terrorist attacks." The Washington Post that day noted a new poll that found that 53 percent of all voters approved of Bush's hard-line approach to foreign policy. And on the front page, the Post ran a story that the Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson had sent a plan to the White House for a smallpox vaccination program in case of a bioterrorist attack.

And, in case anyone has forgotten, just a month later, the Senate voted by a lopsided 77-23 margin to authorize war with Iraq. In the House, Pelosi did muster a majority of Democrats (almost all from safe districts) against the war. But this was a period when a moderate was someone who wanted to exhaust diplomatic remedies before America invaded Iraq in quest of the phantom weapons of mass destruction.

More than six years later, with a new president in the White House, the entire post-9/11 period seems almost hallucinogenic. Without minimizing the horrors of the toppling Twin Towers, without ignoring the continued low-level domestic threat from Islamic terrorists, it does feel that 2002 was year in which America lost its moorings. And if perhaps a liberal like Pelosi nodded during a CIA briefing about torture rather than recoiling with horror, it would have been just another small symptom of a larger national psychosis. As America retreated from its cherished values in the face of fear, 2002 was a year when, in a sense, the terrorists did win.