Posted by
Defend America on Thursday, February 25, 2010 1:51:54 PM
Andrew McCarthy explains what the Democrats are doing when nobody is watching and how they consistently endanger Americans and the CIA:
While You Are Distracted by the Summit, Obama Democrats Are Targeting the CIA [Andy McCarthy]
The Obama Democrats have outdone themselves.
While the country and
the Congress have their eyes on today’s dog-and-pony show on socialized
medicine, House Democrats last night stashed a new provision in the
intelligence bill which is to be voted on today. It is an attack on the CIA: the enactment of a criminal statute that would ban “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.” (See here, scoll to p. 32.)
The provision is
impossibly vague — who knows what “degrading” means? Proponents will
say that they have itemized conduct that would trigger the statute
(I’ll get to that in a second), but it is not true. The proposal says the conduct reached by the statute “includes but is not limited to”
the itemized conduct. (My italics.) That means any interrogation tactic
that a prosecutor subjectively believes is “degrading” (e.g.,
subjecting a Muslim detainee to interrogation by a female CIA officer)
could be the basis for indicting a CIA interrogator.
The act goes on to
make it a crime to use tactics that have been shown to be effective in
obtaining life saving information and that are far removed from torture.
“Waterboarding” is
specified. In one sense, I’m glad they’ve done this because it proves a
point I’ve been making all along. Waterboarding, as it was practiced by
the CIA, is not torture and was never illegal under U.S. law. The reason the Democrats are reduced to doing this is: what they’ve been saying is not true — waterboarding
was not a crime and it was fully supported by congressional leaders of
both parties, who were told about it while it was being done. On that
score, it is interesting to note that while Democrats secretly tucked
this provision into an important bill, hoping no one would notice until
it was too late, they failed to include in the bill a proposed
Republican amendment that would have required full and complete
disclosure of records describing the briefings members of Congress
received about the Bush CIA’s enhanced interrogation program. Those
briefings, of course, would establish that Speaker Pelosi and others
knew all about the program and lodged no objections. Naturally, members
of Congress are not targeted by this criminal statute — only the CIA.
More to the point, this shows how politicized law-enforcement has become under the Obama Democrats. They could have criminalized waterboarding at any time since Jan. 20, 2009. But they waited until now. Why? Because
if they had tried to do it before now, it would have been a tacit
admission that waterboarding was not illegal when the Bush CIA was
using it. That would have harmed the politicized
witch-hunt against John Yoo and Jay Bybee, a key component of which was
the assumption that waterboarding and the other tactics they
authorizied were illegal. Only now, when that witch-hunt has collapsed,
have the Democrats moved to criminalize these tactics. It is
transparently partisan.
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NDVhNWUzMjJkMjY1OWMyYmExMjRkMDc0NTJjMDk3Zjg=