Are these Democratic Capital Hill folks fools, or do they just think we, the American public, are? Despite her previous denials declassified records show that Nancy Pelosi was briefed 40 times on enhanced interrogation techniques. Meanwhile Sen. Jay Rockefeller has now contradicted his own denial in his own report.

Ms. Pelosi’s denials are also difficult to square with a chronology of 40 CIA briefings to Congressional Members compiled by the CIA and released this week by Director Leon Panetta. For the September 4, 2002 meeting, the CIA’s summary of the discussion reads: “Briefing on EITs including use of EITs on Abu Zubaydah, background on authorities, and a description of the particular EITs that had been employed.” We emphasize the verb tense to underscore the contradiction with Ms. Pelosi’s categorical denials of last month.

Ms. Pelosi was replaced by Jane Harman as the Committee’s ranking member, but the bipartisan briefings continued. On February 4, 2003, Senators Pat Roberts and Jay Rockefeller of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence were given a briefing in which “EITs [were] ‘described in considerable detail,’ including ‘how the water board was used.’ The process by which the techniques were approved by DoJ was also raised.” The document also adds that Mr. Rockefeller, the Committee’s ranking Democrat, was later given an “individual briefing.”

Nor was that the only time Mr. Rockefeller, who chaired the Committee from 2007 to 2009, heard from the CIA. The West Virginian was briefed at least 12 times more about interrogation techniques, legal authorities and other aspects of the program. The last, in June 2008, was offered to 10 members of the Senate Intelligence Committee and covered “discussion of EITs and the OLC [Office of Legal Counsel] opinions. Specific mentions of waterboarding numerous time.”

Yet in October 2008, following a Washington Post report on the existence of the OLC memos, Mr. Rockefeller disclaimed any knowledge of the opinions. “If White House documents exist that set the policy for the use of coercive techniques such as waterboarding, those documents have been kept from the committee,” said Mr. Rockefeller. “That is unacceptable, and represents the latest example of the Bush Administration withholding critical information from Congress and the American people in an attempt to limit our oversight of sensitive intelligence collection activities.”

Amusingly, or almost, Senator Rockefeller’s denial is flatly contradicted by his own report on the subject released last month, which notes that “On May 19, 2008, the Department of Justice and the Central Intelligence Agency provided the Committee with access to all opinions and a number of other documents prepared by the Office of Legal Counsel . . . concerning the legality of the CIA’s detention and interrogation program. Five of these documents provided addressed the use of waterboarding.”

So much for the canard that the Bush Administration didn’t keep Congress informed. But Congressional Democrats are being equally disingenuous when they pretend they could do nothing about what they were hearing from the CIA. Members could, and sometimes did, object to proposed CIA actions and could stop them in their tracks.

More importantly, Congress had the power of the purse. Pete Hoekstra, the House Committee’s current ranking member, tells us there was “pretty bipartisan support for the authorization bills and the funding bills,” at least until the issue blew wide in the pages of the press. Latter-day opponents of the interrogation techniques, he adds, “never used a tool that was available to them if they wanted to stop them.”

We suspect a last line of Democratic defense will be that the Members privately objected to the practices and made their concerns known to the CIA. That seems to be the case with Ms. Harman, who wrote the CIA just days after she was first briefed saying the interrogation practices raised “profound policy questions” and that she was “concerned about whether these have been as rigorously examined as the legal questions.” Ironically, Ms. Harman now finds herself a target on the left for the unrelated AIPAC non-scandal.

Here’s a curious summary from former Lt. Col. Oliver North:

On Thursday, Attorney General Eric Holder revealed to a Senate Appropriations subcommittee that some of the detainees “are going to be released,” others will “be tried,” and “some will be detained on a fairly extended basis,” without disclosing where or how any of that will happen. That got the attention of Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., one of Guantanamo’s harshest critics. She admonished Holder that she “would be very concerned” if she and other lawmakers were not consulted before detainees were brought to the U.S.

In other words, beyond the executive promise to close Guantanamo by such and such a date, to this day, in deeds, not one thing regarding detainees has changed between the Bush and Obama administrations. So once again we see that it’s much more difficult to be president and actually keep Americans safe than it is to run for president and just talk about lofty pipedreams.

Meanwhile the sheer hypocrisy of the Democratic Party is so thick one would need a chainsaw to cut it: to wit, CIA personnel are leaking to the press — and how’s that for irony, a taste of the Dems’ own medicine –  that one of the Bush-era’s most vocal critics on Guantanamo and “enhanced interrogation,” Nancy Pelosi, is lying that she was in the dark.

• CIA Says Pelosi Was Briefed on Use of ‘Enhanced Interrogations’
• Top Pelosi Aide Learned Of Waterboarding in 2003

The hypocrisy and double standard doesn’t end with the liberal politicians, either. Weekly Standard writer John McCormack notes that just a few weeks ago liberal advocates like “John Podesta, the head of the Center for American Progress and Obama’s chief transition adviser, called for the impeachment of federal judge Jay Bybee, who signed off on the [interrogation] memos while at the Justice Department.” If Bybee should be impeached, why not Pelosi?

So here’s the question: Do people who believe that harsh interrogations were gravely immoral and violated the law think that Nancy Pelosi retains the moral authority to serve as speaker of the House? Based on the 2007 Washington Post story, Porter Goss‘s testimony, and the latest CIA memo–which reports Pelosi was given a “Briefing on [Enhanced Interrogation Techniques] EITs including use of EITs on Abu Zubaydah, background on authorities, and a description of particular EITs that had been employed”–don’t opponents of ‘EITs’ think it’s time for Pelosi to go?

The excuses trotted out in her defense so far are pretty pathetic. See this anonymously authored Center for American Progress post as a good example. One talking point–that Pelosi wasn’t specifically informed about waterboarding–is particularly laughable. As Goldfarb notes below, Rep. Hoekstra says there are documents showing otherwise, and Allahpundit points out that Pelosi was briefed just a month after Zubaydah was waterboarded repeatedly: “Consider the context of when the briefing was held — one week before 9/11/02, when fears of an anniversary attack were sky high — and ask yourself why the CIA wouldn’t have told Pelosi they had waterboarded Zubaydah.” It certainly looks like Pelosi knew about waterboarding, and if she didn’t she was certainly briefed about other interrogation techniques. Do her apologists think that waterboarding is the only technique that qualifies as torture?

Apparently so. Democrat’s defenders are making a pathetic attempt to frame the argument, add Jules Crittenden: Say the Dems: “It’s “Republican crime,” but it’s “Democratic stupidity.”” Ah. Whatever it takes them to sleep at night, I guess.

More importantly, once more, how weak we must look in the eyes of our enemies. We destroy one another over “walling” with rubber walls, and “simulated” drowning, in a detainee system providing better care then our Federal penitentiary system. The Jihadists, on the other hand, take a sharp sword to our necks, saw back and forth with horrible gurgling terror, and post the video on the Internet.

Here’s another great letter to the Wall Street Journal. It’s an important point that often gets forgotten:

Regarding Bill McGurn’s “Torture and the ‘Truth Commission’ ” and Bret Stephens’s “The Politics of Liberal Amnesia” (both April 28): Let’s take a step back from the sensationalism of the “torture” headlines. Rules of engagement, most often referenced in the Geneva Convention, exist to separate depravity from “civilized” warfare. Extending those rules and protections to those who consistently ignore them or openly flout them (such as terrorists who target civilians or behead journalists on camera) is calculated to show its proponents as principled as well as having high-minded values (such as Sen. John McCain, who experienced torture after being captured as a uniformed member of a state armed force).

Think about this for a moment. If we extend these protections to those who openly and brazenly violate them, are we assuring ourselves that the treatment we desire for our captured military will violate the rules?

If we don’t have consequences for violating these rules, who would adhere to them? We absolutely need to have principles, and to respect the Geneva rules for those who also adhere to them. However, I draw the line at those that descend to barbarism and depravity. The targeting of civilians and those with absolutely no connection to an armed force has to be condemned in no uncertain terms, and a failure to do so only encourages more of this activity.

President Obama believes he is adhering to principle when he releases interrogation memos and suggests prosecution of the former administration. Let’s hope he doesn’t succeed in placing future members of our military in more danger. Terrorists who murder wantonly will not care for principle, and it is the height of foolishness to believe that nice words will deter them from their murderous ways.

John Cox
Chicago

Excellent point by this letter writer to the Wall Street Journal:

The letter writers of April 30 miss a critical point in their critique of the Environmental Protection Agency (and Supreme Court) in the absurdity of rulings defining CO2 (and also methane, nitrous oxide and miscellaneous gases) as a “pollutant” since it “contributes” to global warming (“The EPA Follows the Supreme Court in CO2 Ruling“).

By far, the largest greenhouse gas influence comes from water vapor, at about 95%. Calculations often ignore water vapor so as to inflate contributions from CO2 by making them bigger percentages of only a small piece of the pie. Only about 3.2% of atmospheric CO2 is man-made, divided among transportation, energy production, etc. So total elimination of these portions would leave 96.8% of CO2 remaining.

The bottom line is that after adjusting for relative influence on greenhouse warming, water vapor is responsible for 95%, and CO2 for 3.5% of the greenhouse heat retention. When natural CO2 is subtracted, then the man-generated CO2 contributes just 0.117%. That is 0.117% of the total greenhouse effect, probably too small to detect any change elimination of this might impart.

The recent EPA announcement said it did not include water vapor because “it was not like the other gases” being regulated. “Not like”? Could it be that had the EPA included the dominant contributor, the absurdity of this would become too obvious if they had to begin the regulation of showers, clothes drying, hot tubs and lawn watering?

James W. Benefiel
Dunedin, Fla.

As pointed out by Bjorn Lomborg several years ago, for the cost of combating this straw man “climate change” issue we could instead give every person on the Earth clean drinking water (or cure Swine Flu for that matter).

The Wall Street Journal editors take on Arlen Specter for suggesting that supposed Republican perennial opposition to the National Institute of Health (NIH) contributed to the cancer death of Jack Kemp.

Between 1994 and 2006, when Republicans controlled Congress or the White House or both, NIH biomedical R&D spending more than doubled in real terms, jumping to $25 billion in 2003 from about $10 billion in the early 1990s. During the Bush years, it fell slightly after that, though holding relatively constant as a share of discretionary spending.

Criticizing the modest budget reduction to $23 billion in 2007 (in constant dollars) is thus a little like condemning K2 for not being Mount Everest. Still, Mr. Specter is right to note his consonance with the “Democrats’ approach,” which equates federal funding alone with medical innovation. NIH projects are valuable, but they are far from the only or even main reason that the U.S. is the world leader in new and better treatments for killers like cancer.

Most of the advances in biotechnology and pharmacogenomics that are revolutionizing the diagnosis and treatment of disease are occurring in America. One reason is a research environment that is less centralized, more competitive, tolerant of risk and richer in cash — public, yes, but especially private. Between the 1990s and mid-2000s, more than four times as much medical venture capital was invested in the U.S. than in the European Union.

Another explanation is that the profits available in U.S. markets allow companies to cover the costs of converting the ideas gleaned from basic research into workable commercial medicines. To a large extent, patients in Western Europe, Canada and Japan — which set strict caps on spending for medical technology — are free-riding off the more open U.S. health-care system.

Democrats are now hoping to import those same models state-side. Nationalized health care inevitably results in large government bureaucracies that try to contain costs by restricting access to new therapies by limiting or denying payment or even restricting what doctors are allowed to prescribe. Yet the freedom, innovation and quality of health systems are all closely meshed, and the tragedy of “universal” health care will be the medicines that are never developed at all.

Mr. Specter will probably end up voting for all that. And since he joined his new party purely out of political self-interest, the least he can do in the meantime is to leave cancer patients out of it.

“A political party cannot be all things to all people. It cannot compromise its fundamental beliefs for political expediency, or simply to swell its numbers. It is not a social club or fraternity engaged in intramural contests to accumulate trophies on the mantel over the fireplace…No one can quarrel with the idea that a political party hopes it can attract a wide following, but does it do this by forsaking its basic beliefs? By blurring its own image so as to be indistinguishable from the opposition party?”

– Ronald Reagan, 1976.

There’s been a lot of talk in the wake of the defection of Arlen Specter about how Republicans have lost influence because they have been intolerant of moderate Republicans. What’s generally missing is context: Specter wasn’t a moderate Republican, like a John McCain, but a perpetual thorn in the side of the Republican party, voting against his own party on a myriad of issues from property rights to national security. (For example, in the annual American Conservative Union rating, Specter has a miserable 44% lifetime rating to McCain’s 88% lifetime rating.)

What’s in a name? Specter was already voting with Democrats, and would have given them the 60th vote whether an “R”, “D” or “I” was beside his name. The Democrats had that 60th vote the day Norm Coleman’s campaign self-imploded.

Which brings us to our more important point and Reagan’s quote above: Take a page from the Democrat’s playbook. The Democrats expanded their party membership and seized or solidified power in all three branches of government by not moving to the middle. Barack Obama and Democrats in both House and Senate races ran on platforms championed by the hard Left. So how is it that Republicans — we are misguidedly told — will only regain power by embracing those persons like Arlen Specter who are, at best, moderates that vote against their party literally half the time? They won’t.

Gosh, I guess even Comedy Central realized that calling President Truman a “war criminal” is beyond the pale. Stewart issued an apology, kind of. I’ll agree with Michael Goldfarb — his accusation against Truman wasn’t exactly spontaneous. However, Stewart was accurate that day in that emotional people say stupid things because their ego won’t let them concede a point made by an opponent.

To his credit, Jon Stewart acknowledges how “stupid” and “dumb” it was to accuse Harry Truman of war crimes his decision to use nuclear weapons against Japan. As we noted yesterday, the charge came in the middle of an interview with Cliff May, head of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, who appeared on the show Wednesday night. Contrary to Stewart’s apology, the comment didn’t just slip out. He seemed to think long and hard before making and then repeating it later in the show. As for the apology itself, I’ll let Allapundit do the dissection:

The closest we get to an explanation is that the decision to drop the bomb was “complicated,” but of course that’s why Cliff May brought it up — to draw a parallel with the decision to waterboard terrorists. The moral calculus about how far to go in roughing up jihadis to save how many lives is difficult, as was the calculus about how many lives would be saved in the long run by incinerating Japanese kids in Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end the war. The fact that Stewart is a hard no on the former yet considers the latter iffy suggests a mentality I simply can’t fathom. Is it just a matter of Truman having been a Democrat, whose motives were therefore pure, as opposed to Bush supposedly getting his Republican rocks off by torturing terrorists? Or is it that Truman’s already been vindicated by history and isn’t safe to criticize the way Bush still is?

At least, and for whatever reason, Stewart felt compelled to retract the statement upon further reflection, which is more than one can say for the lemmings who eagerly followed him off the cliff. How would history have judged a man who could have saved thousands of American lives but chose instead to adhere to some misplaced and misguided sense of idealism? We may yet find out.