Torturing Pelosi

"If everyone is guilty, then no one is guilty." Time and again, Conservatives have succeeded in implicating Democrats for crimes perpetrated by the Bush administration. John Kerry was supposedly in favor of the Iraq War before he was against it. Democrats saw the same WMD intelligence the Bush White House saw before rubber stamping the Iraq War. And now, Nancy Pelosi supposedly tacitly approved of water boarding before she found it politically expedient to criticize the practice.

Nancy Pelosi has become the proverbial red herring that has been used to bait – hook, line, and sinker – a frenzy of media sharks. "What did Speaker Pelosi know? And when did she know it?" This is a loaded question that has managed to convict the hapless Pelosi, at least in the court of public opinion, of Constitutional crimes conceived and executed by her political adversaries in the Bush administration.

Bush & Cheney proved to be inept when it came to managing our wars, the economy, or Katrina, but they were geniuses when it came to managing public opinion. Put simply, they have a knack for tailoring their arguments to the lowest common denominator. If someone opposed "enhanced interrogation methods," then it must be because they cared about the rights of terrorists more than they cared about the safety of the American people. Such either/or reasoning invariably involved false choices and was deliberately meant to be divisive.

The use of water boarding has proven to be a cataclysmic failure. To begin with, embracing torture decimated America's moral standing, served as a recruiting device for al-Qaeda, and led to false confessions that helped lead us into war with Iraq. Further, U.S. commanders agree that photos of torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo did more to instigate attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq than any single factor. Dick Cheney claims torture saved lives, but the available evidence contradicts his assertions.

The fact that Dick Cheney vouches for torture is not enough to discredit the practice. However, the vast majority of counterterrorism experts insist that abusive interrogation techniques lead to a conundrum: it is exceedingly difficult to disentangle good intelligence from bad. In contrast, more refined interrogation techniques, which use subtle techniques to co-opt terror suspects, have a superior track record according to the most credible experts.

The use of torture must be weighed against the clear downsides the practice entails: unreliable information, the pernicious effects of institutionalizing barbarity, and the obvious fact that the law must be tortured beyond recognition before it is legal to torture individuals.

The problems with Bush & Cheney's policy of using torture are clear. Simply put, the use of torture has put U.S. service men and women at greater risk; rationalizing torture has perverted our legal system; and condoning torture has diminished America's soft power. Additionally, the Bush administration policies have led to the detention, torture, and deaths of innocents.

There is no doubt – none whatsoever – that water boarding prisoners is a war crime under International Law, the Geneva Convention, and U.S. Law. Nancy Pelosi is a sideshow in all of this.

The principles that animate the U.S. constitution are clear – all men are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, which include the right to some form of due process. These rights are not granted by any government. Therefore, they cannot be taken away by any government. But this is exactly what George W. Bush did when he insisted he had the authority to designate any individual an enemy combatant who could then be held indefinitely and without charges in a legal limbo. Bush's power grab was a brazen assault on the most fundamental of Constitutional ideals. The perverse notion that the President was a law unto himself opened the door to an illegal war based on false pretenses and the barbarous and depraved treatment of detainees.

Bush and Cheney have long habit of shirking responsibility and spreading blame for their failures. They also have an army of apologists and propagandists trying to revise history and implicate others in the Bush administration's misdeeds. However, the central fact remains: Bush and Cheney authorized what have traditionally and universally been regarded as war crimes and crimes against humanity. History will hold them accountable and so should we.

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