The thing that has given (4.00 / 3)

this story legs is that Pelosi herself did indeed lie, or at bare minimum, grossly dissemble, about what she knew when.

Her original claim was that the CIA told her nothing about the use of waterboarding, except, in effect, as a pure hypothetical, something they were at most considering. (See this from Jonathan Turley for a partial account of Pelosi's shifting views, though not including her very latest admissions). In fact, she herself now admits that she did indeed know as of Feb 2003 that the CIA had used waterboarding, because her aide, who attended a CIA briefing at that date, had been so instructed, and informed her.

She didn't say a word in protest when she heard this news. She has since claimed that her obligation to object to the perpetration of a war crime was covered by Jane Harman's letter on the matter, though Pelosi's own name was not attached to that letter, and was not even mentioned in that letter. And, if one looks at the letter, it was already weak in the extreme as any kind of "protest" against the use of torture.

Of course neither Pelosi nor Harman are responsible in anything like the same way for the use of torture as those who actually ordered it and performed it. But one can't escape their own complicity in the act by their refusal to act in any meaningful way to try to put an end to it, or simply to register their strongest possible protest and anger.

What Pelosi's and Harman's actions demonstrate is what many of us have long ago concluded: that the problems we have in our governance are systemic; that they involve both Democrats and Republicans; that we can't get past the corruption of our system unless we stop thinking about parties and start thinking about principles.

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by: frankly0 @ Sat May 16, 2009 at 11:05:09 AM CDT

Great comment! (0.00 / 0)

Pelosi has lied about "what she knew and when she know it."  She tried to cover her own complicit involvement of the US torturing people.  Now her story is shifting, as it must.

Hopefully, this whole episode will highlight the need for an open and honest evaluation of how we as a nation came to accept torture as a viable option under any circumstances.  Maybe the publicity of the fact that our highest members of government have been lying about their knowledge of torturing will drive the process of instilling something like the Truth Commission Pelosi is calling for.

And Cheney out there making an ass of himself can't hurt.

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by: alffy @ Sat May 16, 2009 at 11:20:56 AM CDT

[ Parent ]

Shallow Capture (0.00 / 0)

One of the commentators on one of the MSNBC shows yesterday mentioned in passing what's really a key point here--the issue of "oversight capture", a variant on "regulatory capture", the process by which a supervisory/reguilatory body gets taken over by those its supposed to oversee.

Harvard Law professor David Hanson, who I wrote about some last weekend, has extended this critique considerably, referring to this sort of thing as "shallow capture", in contrast to what he calls "deep capture," a topic I'll be writing about later today or tomorrow.

The important starting point here is to realize that even shallow capture is very difficult to fight against, and it's very difficult to misjudge people from outside a situation because of the power of the forces involved.  It's precisely the matrix of such forces inside the situation that composes the problem of capture, and those forces are very difficult to apprehend, either inside or outside, though for different reasons.

True reform has to be radical, has to dig beneath the structures involved.  And this, of course, is the one thing that Obama is adamantly opposed to.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

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by: Paul Rosenberg @ Sat May 16, 2009 at 11:48:42 AM CDT

[ Parent ]