Not Serious
About national security, that is. Over the last 36 hours, Congressional Democrats have again demonstrated a casual, even frivolous attitude toward their Constitutional duty to assist in keeping Americans safe from attack.
First, the Senate joined the House, on a near-party line 51-45 vote, in restricting the use of harsh interrogation techniques under any circumstances. The vote has often been described as a prohibition of waterboarding, but it is much worse than that: the Democrat-sponsored legislation would limit all American interrogators to the techniques approved in the Army's Field Manual. This makes no sense, as Gen. Michael Hayden, Director of the CIA, patiently explained to the Congressional Dems:
[T]here is a universe out there of lawful interrogation techniques that we should feel, as a nation, that we have a right to use against our enemies. … The Army Field Manual describes a subset of that universe.[T]he Army Field Manual does exactly what … it needs to do for the United States Army. But on the face of it, it would make no … sense to apply the Army's field manual to CIA.
[T]he population of who's doing it is different than the population that would be working for me inside the CIA interrogation program. It meets the needs of America's Army in terms of who's going to do it, which in the case of the Army Field Manual would be a relatively large population of relatively young men and women who've received good training but not exhaustive training in all potential situations.
The population of who they do it to would also be different. In the life of the CIA detention program we have held fewer than a hundred people. And … actually, fewer than a third of those people have had any techniques used against them – enhanced techniques – in the CIA program. America's Army literally today is holding over 20,000 detainees in Iraq alone.
[T]here's a difference in terms of … the circumstances under which you're doing the interrogation. And I know there can be circumstances in military custody that are as protected and isolated and controlled as in our detention facilities, but in many instances that is not the case. These are interrogations against enemy soldiers, who almost always will be lawful combatants, in tactical situations, from whom you expect to get information of transient and tactical value. None of that applies to the detainees we hold, to the interrogators we have, or the information we are attempting to seek.
If it is the judgment of the American political process that the Army Field Manual and the processes of the FBI are adequate to the defense of the republic in all conditions of threat, in all periods in the future, that's what we will do. My view is that would substantially increase the danger to America and that my agency should be allowed to continue the use of techniques which have been judged lawful by the attorney general and briefed to this committee.
Gen. Hayden's comments are obviously sensible, so it's no surprise that the Democrats rejected them. Michelle Malkin has the roll call. The Democrats may have hoped that John McCain would give them political cover by voting with them, but he didn't. President Bush will veto the legislation, so the Democrats' vote was a futile gesture, evidently intended to reassure their base that national security is not a priority for them.
In the House today, the Democratic leadership refused to take up the FISA reform bill, preferring instead to allow the Protect America Act to expire. The Senate has passed a version of the act that includes immunity from lawsuits for telecom companies that have cooperated with the government in intercepting international terrorist communications. It appears that the main sticking point with Nancy Pelosi and her Democratic colleagues is that they want telecoms to be sued for helping the government to identify terrorists. John Cornyn speculates as to the House Democrats' motivation in refusing to follow the Senate's lead on immunity:
[O]ne important part of the Senate legislation was to provide protection for the telecommunications carriers who may have cooperated with the United States government shortly after September 11, 2001, in providing the means to listen in to al Qaeda and other terrorists, foreign terrorists who are plotting and planning attacks against the United States of America and its citizens. It is a terrible message for the House of Representatives to say that they're not going to act in a way that provides protection for those citizens -- whether they be individual citizens or whether they be corporate citizens -- who were asked by their country to come to the aid of the American people and provide the means to protect them from terrorist attacks….What kind of message does that send that we are going to basically leave them out twisting slowly in the wind and being left to the litigation, some 40 different lawsuits that have been filed against the telecommunications industry that may have cooperated with the federal government in protecting the American people.I would say finally…there are substantial news reports that indicate a group of trial lawyers who stand to make considerable amounts of money in terms of legal fees off this litigation are substantial contributors to members of Congress. I hope the evidence does not develop that there are decisions being made in the House of Representatives on the basis of the interests of special interest groups like trial lawyers who stand to gain financially from continuing to block this litigation.
That speculation is reasonable, since the Democrats have been shameless in promoting the interests of the plaintiffs' bar, their biggest source of revenue. Today was a day of infamy in the House of Representatives, one of many since Nancy Pelosi and her accomplices took control of that body.
It is deeply ironic that instead of debating legislation that would protect the physical security of Americans, Pelosi and the Democratic leadership spent their time today voting to approve contempt citations against Harriet Miers and Josh Bolten for failing to cooperate with their absurd "investigation" into whether the Bush administration's appointment of U.S. Attorneys was "politically motivated."
Hmm, let's see: the post of U.S. Attorney is, by definition, a political appointment. U.S. Attorneys are always, or virtually always, members of the President's party. No one has suggested that the U.S. Attorneys appointed by the Bush administration were not fully competent. Some "investigation"!
Now, here is an investigation that would actually be worth pursuing: why did Nancy Pelosi and her House leadership refuse to take up the FISA reform bill? Did they deliberately sacrifice the security of Americans to placate their far-left base? Or was there a corrupt bargain with major Democratic Party contributors, who hope to make millions by suing telecoms? Did Nancy Pelosi politicize our national security by subordinating the security interests of all Americans to the financial interests of the Democratic Party's biggest contributors?
Circumstantially, the answer to the last question would appear to be "Yes." Perhaps that explains why Pelosi and her confederates are so eager to focus newspaper headlines on ridiculous "investigations" of the Bush administration.
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