If the Harsh Interrogation Tactics Were Not Torture, What Difference Does It Make What Pelosi Knew?

Early torture incidents that were undertaken without even the flimsy cover of the bogus legal rationales written by Yoo and Bybee were inarguably illegal.

Jon Ponder
Pensito Review
May. 15, 2009

In all the murkiness around what Karl Rove calls Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s “complicity” in the Bush-Cheney torture crimes, two things, at least, are clear.

The first is that Republicans are trying to have it both ways on Pelosi and the Bush administration’s Harsh Interrogation Tactics program. On one hand, they say that because she was briefed on the HIT program in 2003 but failed to make a big public stink about it — even though she was merely the ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee and despite the fact that the briefing was double-super top secret — she is equally as guilty of war crimes as Dick Cheney and the rest.

But Republicans are conversely equally adamant that HIT was not torture. Because waterboarding and the other tactics were not torture, ergo there was no war crime.

This dichotomy ought to prompt the question: If there was no war crime, what difference does it make if Pelosi knew about it? Instead, Rove et al have their stooges in the “liberal media” parroting the question, “What did Pelosi know and when did she know it?”

(More here.)