ABC News is leading their newspage with the headline “Harriet Miers Knew of Destruction of Interrogation Tapes.” Wow, OMG! The left will scream “the White House knew about it and did nothing?” Ahem:
Three officials told ABC News Miers urged the CIA not to destroy the tapes.
But they did anyways.
As for myself, I could care less. KSM and his buddy deserved nothing less then waterboarding, and I think that technique let them off the hook too easy to be frank.
But the left and the right is starting to pile on and they do make some valid points. Like the timing of this news:
The news just happens to be perfectly timed as the Supreme Court hears a Gitmo case and, as the WaPo,
notes, on the same day “House and Senate negotiators reached an
agreement on legislation that would prohibit the use of waterboarding
and other harsh interrogation tactics by the CIA and bring intelligence
agencies in line with rules followed by the U.S. military.”
Oh no, the MSM would never hold on to this kinda news just to influence legislation would they?
Hoekstra and Reyes are coming out swinging:
The CIA did not tell Congress about the destruction in 2005 of
videotapes recording aggressive CIA interrogations of two Al Qaeda suspects
until this year, the top two members of the House Intelligence Committee said in
an angry letter Friday to CIA Director Michael V. Hayden.Anticipating an upcoming New York Times article revealing the destruction,
Hayden said in a memo to employees on Thursday that congressional oversight
committees had been notified about the existence of the tapes and plans to get
rid of them.“Based upon available records and our best recollection, this simply is not
true,” said a joint letter from House Intelligence Committee Chairman Silvestre
Reyes (D-Texas) and the committee’s ranking member and former chairman, Rep.
Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.).
Oh come on. They told Congress about the tapes existence and their plans to destroy them. No stink was raised, no investigations, no hoopla. Jane Harmon has already gone on record stating she was told about them.
Rep. Jane Harman of California, then the senior Democrat
on the House Intelligence Committee, was one of only four members of
Congress in 2003 informed of the tapes’ existence and the CIA’s
intention to ultimately destroy them.“I told the CIA that destroying videotapes of interrogations was a
bad idea and urged them in writing not to do it,” Harman said. While
key lawmakers were briefed on the CIA’s intention to destroy the tapes,
they were not notified two years later when the spy agency actually
carried out the plan. Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Jay
Rockefeller, D-W.Va., said the committee only learned of the tapes’
destruction in November 2006.
So you have the White House counsel and the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee telling the CIA it wasn’t a good idea to destroy the tapes. But they did anyway and now you have the Democrats yelling and screaming with selective outrage, as Marty Lederman describes:
Jay Rockefeller is constantly learning of
legally dubious (at best) CIA intelligence activities, and then saying
nothing about them publicly until they are leaked to the press, at
which point he expresses outrage and incredulity — but reveals nothing.…Jane Harman also knew of the intention to destroy
the tapes, and she at least “urged” the CIA in writing not to do it.
(Where were her colleagues?) But when she found out the CIA had
destroyed the tapes, where was Harman’s press conference? Where were
the congressional hearings?
But now its outrageous.
Just like the Plame episode prior to the election the timing of this whole thing stinks.
But beside all that my question is why would they videotape the damn things anyways?
Waterboard them, I don’t care. Those scum deserved much worse. But to
videotape it?
UPDATE
You just have to listen to John Gibson today….he was on fire: (18 minutes long)
UPDATE II
Check out Kevin Drum crying for al-Qaeda:
So here’s what the tapes would have shown: not just that we had
brutally tortured an al-Qaeda operative, but that we had brutally
tortured an al-Qaeda operative who was (a) unimportant and low-ranking,
(b) mentally unstable, (c) had no useful information, and (d)
eventually spewed out an endless series of worthless, fantastical
“confessions” under duress.
Idiots.
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