The revelation that Democratic members of Congress were briefed in 2002 has raised questions about the conduct of those Democrats involved: Hill Briefed on Waterboarding in 2002 by Joby Warrick and Dan Eggen Washington Post 12/09/07.
The torture issue is way bigger than either Party. So I'm generally sympathetic to this line of criticisms of Democrats involved. Their basic point is a very sound one. If Democrats learned from classified briefings that illegal acts were being committed, they both could and should have taken more substantial steps to bring them to a halt. The whole point of having Congressional oversight of intelligence agencies is to help ensure that the agencies are acting within the law.
But I'm also painfully aware of that powerful instinct among Democrats to form circular firing squads. So I'm not quite ready to blast the Dems, Pelosi in particular, quite as much as Digby and Greenwald are.
We don't need to know about those briefings to know that Congress had every good reason even by late 2001 to be worried about what was going on with the Cheney-Bush administration's policies on torture and the application of the Geneva Conventions. There were massacres of prisoners committed in Afghanistan by the Northern Alliance warlords that the US was backing in the early weeks of the Afghanistan War. These were widely reported at the time.
In what's still to me one of the most remarkable moments of this administration, on 12/01/07, Robert Novak asked Rummy on CNN if it bothered him that some of our allied warlords weren't observing Geneva Convention rules. The great Rummy replied:
The fact that they [the Northern Alliance] don't happen to subscribe to some convention that we do or that other countries do is a fact. It is also a fact that we have to stop those terrorists from killing more Americans. And I don't feel even the slightest problem in working with the Northern Alliance to achieve that end. (my emphasis)
That should have been a screaming signal to Democrats and Republicans in Congress that something was going badly wrong in this rogue administration. Yes, even in those immediate post-9/11 months. Actually, especially in those post-9/11 months. And just to be clear on one point, yes, the Northern Alliance was obligated to observe the Geneva Conventions, Afghanistan is a signatory to the Geneva Conventions, the Northern Alliance was recognized by the UN and the United States as the legitimate government of Afghanistan, and the applications of the basic Geneva Conventions and "customary international law" is not dependent on the country having specifically ratified the Geneva Conventions.
Even that much of his answer should have been cause for his immediate dismissal, let along the rest of it, especially his sneering contempt for the laws of war. And if the President didn't fire him, Congress should have impeached and removed him immediately.
We've come a long way since then. It seems downright "quaint" - as this administration considers the laws of war - to even suggest in the abstract that Dick Cheney and George Bush would have entertained the thought of firing Rummy over that for a moment. When typing the previous sentences, I also had to think whether it wasn't totally silly to suggest that Democrats and Republicans should have been concerned about it, in light of how faithfully we've seen the Republicans support the torture policy in the years since. Vapid commentators in those post-9/11 days talked about how America had lost its innocence for the umpteenth time. What we were really losing was our Constitutional government.
And in the conventional wisdom of the punditocracy, it must be that, "Liberals and conservatives are equally guilty." But it's not the case. However remiss Democrats may have been and are now about putting a stop to these criminal activities, it was the Cheney-Bush administration who made torture an official policy of the United States.
Even Glenn Greenwald qualifies his harshing on the Dems by saying, "I'm not pointing any of this out in order to try to persuade anyone that there are no meaningful differences between the parties or that it's irrelevant who wins in 2008." As illustrations, he links to tabulations of the key votes on the Military Commissions Act (Senate votes) and on warrantless eavesdropping (in the House). In both cases, the Republicans overwhelmingly supported them, the Democrats overwhelmingly opposed them.
One other thing from Afghanistan that was in the public record in 2001 was the serious question about how carefully US forces were following the law in the treatment of captured "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh. I've always been convinced that the main reason John Ashcroft's Justice Department was willing to allow Lindh to cop a plea - for a guy that was caught in a foreign army fighting against the United States - is that the administration feared that too much of what Cheney calls "the dark side" of the administration's handling would come to light if they proceeded with the trial.
So Democrats can legitimately be criticized for failing to do more even then to stop the excesses and criminal behavior that were already coming to light. Sure, the Republicans would have called them unpatriotic for doing so. So what else is new? Not doing more hasn't prevented a steady but growing stream of such accusations from the Reps.
But on the specific issue of those classified briefings to members of Congressional intelligence committees, I'm more reserved about jamming the Dems over those, because of the cynical way this administration has used government secrecy. We don't know what was in those briefings. Unless the administration agrees to declassify records of those meetings, or a court or the Congress forces them to, we can't tell how precise the information was. In Ackerman's article, a Pelosi spokesperson claims that the information she got in 2002 about torture techniques was presented as something that might be considered in the future, not as acts being committed at the time.
We don't know what we don't know. But that description in Ackerman's article is at least not implausible on the face of it. Democrats involved were in a tricky spot. Holding the briefings gave the administration a fallback to say, in effect, "The Democrats are to blame, too." That's how the Reps have used the October 2002 war resolution on Iraq to this day. (It's still astounding to me that Democrats aren't making the point constantly that Cheney and Bush violated that resolution when they invaded Iraq. But that's another story ...)
But if the Dems weren't told specifics that indicated laws were being violated, that placed them in an very awkward position. If they pursued specific investigations based on that information, the Reps could have accused them of undermining national defense. Although, again, what else is new? I'm just not clear at this point from what's in the public record, especially in Pelosi's case, that the Dems were quite so remiss in this particular instance as Digby and Greenwald seem to think.
So I don't want to volunteer for the circular firing squad just yet.
But I do want the Democrats to stop making excuses and pursue Congressional investigations into the torture program and other criminal activities that have come partially to light by now.
