Digby is Right Again!

This is another episode of “What Digby Says.”

Accomplices

by digby

Yesterday on CNN I heard author Ronald Kessler say:

Inside the CIA are dismayed these tapes were destroyed. But at the same time, these techniques are something that worked and that were approved by congress and that were needed to protect us.

I was aghast because we know torture didn't work, it wasn't (explicitly anyway) approved by congress and it wasn't needed to protect us --- and CNN offered no rebuttal to those claims.

How stunned I was to click over to the Washington Post this morning to learn that people in the CIA say that congress did approve it. Or, at least, members of the leadership knew about it, did nothing, and have then spent the last few years pretending to be shocked and appalled to learn the administration was doing such things.

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.

"The briefer was specifically asked if the methods were tough enough," said a U.S. official who witnessed the exchange.

Congressional leaders from both parties would later seize on waterboarding as a symbol of the worst excesses of the Bush administration's counterterrorism effort. The CIA last week admitted that videotape of an interrogation of one of the waterboarded detainees was destroyed in 2005 against the advice of Justice Department and White House officials, provoking allegations that its actions were illegal and the destruction was a coverup.

And yet:

[snip]

The Speech and Debate clause has been interpreted to extend beyond floor speeches, e.g. to committee statements, but it unquestionably applies to floor statements. Thus, it would have been possible for Rep. Harmon, or Senator Rockefeller, or the others allegedly briefed to go to the floor, either during the times when members may speak on topics of their choice, or under one of the extraordinary mechanism for privileged statements, and denounce the Bush administration’s determinate to torture helpless captives in secret offshore detention facilities.

It's true that this would have been politically painful immediately after 9/11 and there would have been those who called it treasonous. But that was five years ago. After all we know, is there any reason that one of these people couldn't have come forward more recently if they had a problem with it? I don't think there would have been any political fallout for them from 2005 on and probably not before. They could have put the administration on notice very early that they would not go along.

As Digby says: “Accomplices.” And any American who doesn’t stand up and renounce these practices is also an Accomplice and Un-American.