� Harvard, Columbia Law Students Demand Postponements of Winter Exams, Citing Heart-Ache Over Michael Brown and Eric Garner Decisions | Main | Overnight Open Thread (12-9-2014) � Senate Democrat Report on Torture Is Firm On Key Finding That Senate Democrats Never Heard Anything About This "Torture" Business Consider the source. The Democrats are, get this, lying about what they knew, and what they authorized, in the aftermath of 9/11. I lived through that -- as did all of you -- and I remember that the nation was divided into two camps on using very harsh measures to make sure this didn't happen again: Those who vocally approved of such harsh measures, and those who silently approved. But Democrats pretend to be Tough on National Security only for a cycle or two, the 2-4 years necessary to ride out the nation's turn towards a more muscular foreign policy; then they begin lying about their previous lies (when they claimed they were totes in favor of hounding Al Qaeda to the Gates of Hell) and were always for "smart power" or whatever other euphemism they wish to employ for national weakness and submission to totalitarian Islamism. And so it goes. The Senate Democrat report actually lets the Bush Administration off the hook, which isn't all that weird, when you consider that if they squealed on the rightward part of the Political Class, that part of the Political Class would squeal on the leftward part, and that of course is what the Senate Democrats want to avoid at all costs. It's okay to have another 9/11, maybe, but they will avoid responsibility at all costs. "So many people knew what was going on. This wasn't a program that was over one or two weeks in a couple of dark sites," Engel told MSNBC's Ronan Farrow. "Everybody knew about it." Engel said that some of those implicated told him that they were being used as scapegoats by the Senate Intelligence Committee, led by outgoing Chairwoman Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.). "The CIA was asked to do this; was given authorizations to do this. And now many people involved are saying to me privately, 'Now we're being held out to dry. You asked us to do this, and now the world is coming down on top of it," Engel said. ... "When you look back, how are you going to remember this? Is it going to be remembered as the period in which the CIA, in secret while lying to the political leadership, beat some people to death and did horrible things and didn't get any results, which is what today's report is suggesting, or was it a period when the country was very nervous, the CIA was asked to do these horrible things, the practice stopped, and then you have the political leadership pretending that it didn�t know anything and trying to wash its hands of the problem." Jose Rodrigues, a top official leading the nation's post-9/11 interrogation regime, calls the Democrats liars. The men and women of my former organization, the CIA, are accustomed to frequent and sudden reversals of direction from their political leaders. But the latest twists and turns are especially dramatic. ... The leaders of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees and of both parties in Congress were briefed on the program more than 40 times between 2002 and 2009. But Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) tried to deny that she was told in 2002 that detainees had been waterboarded. That is simply not true. I was among those who briefed her. There�s great hypocrisy in politicians' criticism of the CIAs interrogation program. In the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, lawmakers urged us to do everything possible to prevent another attack on our soil. Members of Congress and the administration were nearly unanimous in their desire that the CIA do all that it could to debilitate and destroy al-Qaeda. The CIA got the necessary approvals to do so and kept Congress briefed throughout. But as our successes grew, some lawmakers' recollections shrank in regard to the support they once offered. Here are a couple of reminders. On May 26, 2002, Feinstein was quoted in the New York Times saying that the attacks of 9/11 were a real awakening and that it would no longer be "business as usual." The attacks, she said, let us know "that the threat is profound" and "that we have to do some things that historically we have not wanted to do to protect ourselves." ... If Feinstein, Rockefeller and other politicians were saying such things in print and on national TV, imagine what they were saying to us in private. We did what we were asked to do, we did what we were assured was legal, and we know our actions were effective. Our reward, a decade later, is to hear some of these same politicians expressing outrage for what was done and, even worse, mischaracterizing the actions taken and understating the successes achieved.



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