WSJ: What Did the Dems Know and When Did They Know it?

Remember all the wailing and gnashing of teeth from the Left over interrogation methods used against terrorists at GITMO?

The Wall Street Journal editors bring up some interesting points.

……Beginning in 2002, Nancy Pelosi and other key Democrats (as well as Republicans) on the House and Senate Intelligence Committees were thoroughly, and repeatedly, briefed on the CIA’s covert antiterror interrogation programs. They did nothing to stop such activities, when they weren’t fully sanctioning them. If they now decide the tactics they heard about then amount to abuse, then by their own logic they themselves are complicit. Let’s review the history the political class would prefer to forget.

……the classified briefings began in the spring of 2002 and dealt with the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, a high-value al Qaeda operative captured in Pakistan. In succeeding months and years, more than 30 Congressional sessions were specifically devoted to the interrogation program and its methods, including waterboarding and other aggressive techniques designed to squeeze intelligence out of hardened detainees like Zubaydah.

The briefings were first available to the Chairmen and ranking Members of the Intelligence Committees. From 2003 through 2006, that gang of four included Democrats Bob Graham and John D. Rockefeller in the Senate and Jane Harman in the House, as well as Republicans Porter Goss, Peter Hoekstra, Richard Shelby and Pat Roberts. Senior staffers were sometimes present. After September 2006, when President Bush publicly acknowledged the program, the interrogation briefings were opened to the full committees.

If Congress wanted to kill this program, all it had to do was withhold funding. And if Democrats thought it was illegal or really found the CIA’s activities so heinous, one of them could have made a whistle-blowing floor statement under the protection of the Constitution’s speech and debate clause. They’d have broken their secrecy oaths and jeopardized national security, sure. But if they believed that Bush policies were truly criminal, didn’t they have a moral obligation to do so? In any case, the inevitable media rapture over their anti-Bush defiance would have more than compensated.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123120464870255997.html

Think about that. The same Democratic party who spawns assholes like Dick Durbin, who called the Soldiers at GITMO “Nazis”, were privvy to and basically went along with, what it takes to extract information that will save American lives.

They’re either closet patriots or just putting on a front for all their leftie constituents because it usually gets good reviews.

I think it’s the latter.

Speaking of which, the reaction on batshit crazy sites like the Democratic Underground range from “the Bush junta lied to Democrats”—which imples that that GW somehow pulled one over on gullible Democratic politicians, who had no idea that we were using tough interrogation methods—to “the democratic party is fully complicit in the neocon agenda“. Link:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389×2447115#2447208

Hell, if that were only the case. Then we’d all be on the same page when it comes to anti-terrorism.

One DU poster laments:

More like pretending to be the oppostion to get elected, then playing co-conspirator the rest of the time. Or maybe they are being “blackmailed” or maybe they are just worthless weasels. Must be one or the other.

Or maybe you’re just as much a dumbass as the rest of the Dem/leftwing electorate.

Buyer’s remorse is a bitch.