Off the Hook

By lex, on January 29th, 2010

Nancy Pelosi was shocked – shocked, do you hear! – to learn that three terrorists had undergone waterboarding shortly after 9/11, just as countless US naval aviators had before them.

She was then shocked to learn that she’d known about the program pretty much from the beginning, but hadn’t objected. Being powerless, and that. Out of the majority.

Fair enough, the Washington media said, and let the story drop since, in any case, Ms. Pelosi refused to expound upon it further, powerfully declaring the discussion over.

Now we learn via Marc Thiessen that powerless Pelosi was so enraged at a CIA plan to offset the influence of Iranian-funded radicals in the 2005 Iraqi election by financially supporting their more moderate rivals that she gave then-National Security Adviser Condaleeza Rice a pranging over the phone.

Ooh, such a pranging!

All it took for poor, powerless Pelosi to change the fate of nations was one phone call.

The finding was canceled, the Iranian backed elements won significant power in the January 2005 elections, the Sunni minority were counter-radicalized by the domination of “Iranians” – their multi-generational enemies – in government and the country descended into a chaos from which it is only recently emerging, barely, at untold costs in blood and treasure.

This is not to suggest that Ms. Pelosi intentionally tanked the election in Iraq, hoping to engender the kind of politically damaging conflagration that would return her party to domination in the House, and ultimately in the Senate and White House. She’s not that clever, nor am I equipped to delve quite so deeply into the conspiratorial fever swamps.

Nor do I aver that she was wrong on the policy; perhaps it was better to let our good friends the Iranians sway the election in their favor and keep our own hands prissily clean.

Nor is it to suggest that she had not evolved from those early days after 9/11, regretted not being more forcefully opposed to the waterboarding treatment once she’d heard about it, and found it politically untenable to admit her passivity in the harsh light of the media circus surrounding the exposure of this Grave Threat to Our National Values.

It does, however, suggest that person now occupying the position of Speaker of the House – third in line to succeed to the presidency – repeatedly and brazenly lied to the American people and the media let her off the hook for it. Why do you suppose they did that?

I wonder whether, in the late hours of the night when the mask has slipped, which Ms. Pelosi regrets more: Not objecting more immediately and passionately to the treatment of Khalid Sheik Mohammed and his murderous confrères? Or making that phone call?

In fact, I wonder if she even thinks of it at all.

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