Bipartisan Brutality: Senior Dems Also Got Sneak Peak at Waterbording in 2002

Posted by Melissa McEwan, Shakesville at 7:29 AM on December 10, 2007.

This post, written by Melissa McEwan, originally appeared on Shakesville

It's bad enough when an opposition party merely fails to effectively oppose, or when they are give tacit approval to a criminally corrupt majority party's radical policies with passive indifference, but when they are active supporters of extremist departures from the nation's most basic principles, they make themselves complicit in the coup by a thousand cuts. Per Lambert, no wonder Pelosi took impeachment off the table:

In September 2002, four members of Congress met in secret for a first look at a unique CIA program designed to wring vital information from reticent terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. For more than an hour, the bipartisan group, which included current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA's overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.

Among the techniques described, said two officials present, was waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill. But on that day, no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder, two U.S. officials said.

...[L]ong before "waterboarding" entered the public discourse, the CIA gave key legislative overseers about 30 private briefings, some of which included descriptions of that technique and other harsh interrogation methods, according to interviews with multiple U.S. officials with firsthand knowledge.

With one known exception, no formal objections were raised by the lawmakers briefed about the harsh methods during the two years in which waterboarding was employed, from 2002 to 2003, said Democrats and Republicans with direct knowledge of the matter.

As Glenn Greenwald explains, the Democrats have also been engaging in quite the charade with their supposed outrage about the Bush administration's torture policy, given that they have retained in the leadership roles tasked with investigating Bush's intelligence abuses the very people who signed off on those abuses.

Jay Rockefeller was one of the key Democrats briefed on the torture methods who never objected. But it's far worse than that. In September, 2006, Rockefeller was one of 12 Senate Democrats to vote in favor of the Military Commissions Act, one of the principal purposes of which was to explicitly authorize the CIA's "enhanced interrogation program" to proceed (even though it continues to be illegal under the Geneva Conventions). Thus, not only did Rockefeller remain silent when continuously briefed on illegal torture methods by the CIA, he then voted to legalize those methods by voting in favor of one of the most Draconian laws in modern American history. That law also retroactively immunized government officials from any liability for past lawbreaking.

Rockefeller is not just any Democrat. He is the individual whom the Democratic Senate caucus thereafter elected -- and still chooses -- to lead them on all matters relating to intelligence. Just consider how compromised he is and they are when it comes to investigating abuses by the intelligence community over the last six years. Rockefeller was complicit in all of those abuses, and the Democrats voted for him -- and still support him -- as their Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. How can Rockefeller possibly preside over meaningful investigations into conduct and policies -- including the destruction of the videotapes and the conduct which those videotapes would reveal -- of which he approved? And how can Senate Democrats pretend to be outraged at such policies when the leader they chose supports them?

Rockefeller's counterpart in the House, Rep. Jane Harman, "disclosed Friday that she filed a classified letter to the CIA in February of that year as an official protest about the interrogation program," but did not publicly air her apprehensions because she was held by the Intelligence Committee's oath of secrecy and therefore not able to disclose the information underlying her concern.

Via the relevant point in response:

A member who believes he or she is in possession of evidence of crimes being committed and covered-up through illegitmate [sic] classification ought to seriously consider civil disobedience: calling a press conference, stating the facts, and accepting responsibility for the consequences. The White House could, of course, then turn around and seek to prosecute a member for violating classification laws, and the member could argue justification and we'd have it out. That's a tough call to make, clearly. But our political leaders have responsibilities to the country and to the constitution and I've never seen a candidate for office say something like "I'm the one who likes to abdicate responsibility, decline to make the tough calls, and then when someone else gets to the bottom of things try to make sure that my ass was covered.

Yglesias is frankly more forgiving than I am. Her oath to protect the Constitution obligated her to do that very thing. She should not have considered civil disobedience an option, but her only option, once aware that the administration had intent to violate the Geneva Conventions and deceive the populous about that decision.

All along the way down this dark road we've traveled the past six years, there have been people in positions to say something, to do something, to take a stand and say no, enough, stop. And if any one of them had publicly done so, had taken that risk in service to the country we're supposed to be, we might still be that country.

If all of them had, we surely would.

Tagged as: torture, harman, rockefeller, democrats, waterboarding

Melissa McEwan writes and edits the blog Shakespeare's Sister.