The Timing Stinks

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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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yawn

Tapes, NIE, yada yada yada

What does anyone expect this to accomplish? Oh NO! I hope the President’s approval rating doesn’t drop (LOL!/care) Maybe we can impeach Bush and Cheney and put Nancy Pelosi in there-yeah, that’d be a great idea. She’s actually managed to fubar 2 houses of Congress while running only 1, her approval is at best half of the President’s, and all that’d do is completely kill the DNC’s chances in 08 while stalling the entire government and not just The Hill.

Tapes…care. Release em and all it is, is more anti-American fodder to fuel the enemy’s fire (politcal enemies of the nation’s war on terror, and terrorist enemies). Why save em? Who cares?

NIE? BFG. The Bush Admin could say Iran has nukes, here’s the pictures, audio, video, chem traces, and testimony, and it’d be moot. An NIE could come out saying Saddam had moved his WMD and destroyed most of it in the 17-month rush to war, and it’d be moot. Why? Because no one believes the intel community right now unless it’s politically supportive of their beliefs.

All this crap really is, is the msm desperately trying to avoid the realities of the gwot by distracting from real threats, diminishing them rhetorically as was done pre-911 (see also African Embassy bombings, Millenium Plot, USS Cole, pre-Bush claims of AQ ties to Saddam, and more).

It’s also a distraction from Iraq. Anyone notice how as soon as violence dropped, and claims of success there increased, coverage dropped? Troops are withdrawing? The order’s been given for 3 months now, and more are expected to withdraw continuously for the next year? Wow, better talk about ANYTHING other than that! Right?

Cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of the 08 campaign!

The shadow government at work. The next President has to have the cahonies to fire all the leftest in the State Dept. and C.I.A. Joe McCarthy was right, our government is rife with, shall we say, other than loyal Americans.

The Gibson tape is great! I urge folks to give it a listen. He made the woman’s baby cry! Too funny.

And trashing the idiot caller at about the 8 minute mark was choice.

How sad it is that the defeatists, the appeasers, the Ron Paul acolytes and the Bush haters would rather wring their hands over waterboarding Abu Zubaydah.

The bottom line here is that Thousands of lives were saved because we waterboarded Zubaydan.

I’d like the handwringers who think what we did was so awful to visit the Library Tower in L.A. and personally tell the occupants how the United States would be better off if THEY WERE DEAD!

President Bush made it very clear that without waterboarding, we would never have learned about this attack and THOSE AMERICANS WOULD BE DEAD:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/09/20060906-3.html

Within months of September the 11th, 2001, we captured a man known as Abu Zubaydah. We believe that Zubaydah was a senior terrorist leader and a trusted associate of Osama bin Laden. Our intelligence community believes he had run a terrorist camp in Afghanistan where some of the 9/11 hijackers trained, and that he helped smuggle al Qaeda leaders out of Afghanistan after coalition forces arrived to liberate that country. Zubaydah was severely wounded during the firefight that brought him into custody — and he survived only because of the medical care arranged by the CIA.
After he recovered, Zubaydah was defiant and evasive. He declared his hatred of America. During questioning, he at first disclosed what he thought was nominal information — and then stopped all cooperation. Well, in fact, the “nominal” information he gave us turned out to be quite important. For example, Zubaydah disclosed Khalid Sheikh Mohammed — or KSM — was the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks, and used the alias “Muktar.” This was a vital piece of the puzzle that helped our intelligence community pursue KSM. Abu Zubaydah also provided information that helped stop a terrorist attack being planned for inside the United States — an attack about which we had no previous information. Zubaydah told us that al Qaeda operatives were planning to launch an attack in the U.S., and provided physical descriptions of the operatives and information on their general location. Based on the information he provided, the operatives were detained — one while traveling to the United States.
We knew that Zubaydah had more information that could save innocent lives, but he stopped talking. As his questioning proceeded, it became clear that he had received training on how to resist interrogation. And so the CIA used an alternative set of procedures. These procedures were designed to be safe, to comply with our laws, our Constitution, and our treaty obligations. The Department of Justice reviewed the authorized methods extensively and determined them to be lawful. I cannot describe the specific methods used — I think you understand why — if I did, it would help the terrorists learn how to resist questioning, and to keep information from us that we need to prevent new attacks on our country. But I can say the procedures were tough, and they were safe, and lawful, and necessary.
Zubaydah was questioned using these procedures, and soon he began to provide information on key al Qaeda operatives, including information that helped us find and capture more of those responsible for the attacks on September the 11th. For example, Zubaydah identified one of KSM’s accomplices in the 9/11 attacks — a terrorist named Ramzi bin al Shibh. The information Zubaydah provided helped lead to the capture of bin al Shibh. And together these two terrorists provided information that helped in the planning and execution of the operation that captured Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

Before I respond to one more handwringing ninny over whether these tapes should have been destroyed, or whether waterboarding is torture I demand they answer this question: Without using waterboarding in this case thousands of Americans WOULD BE DEAD. Are you prepared to accept responsibility for that?

No, ifs, ands or buts allowed.

wha? The masterminds of the 911 attacks were tortured to reveal and repel future attacks? Cry me a river. In any other country they’d have been Mussolini’d