Congressional approval to continue funding of the ongoing war in Iraq, a major segment of the $90 billion supplemental appropriate package, passed on Tuesday thanks to heavy-handed pressure by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., against anti-war Democrats.
This has led to great consternation here in her home district in San Francisco, where anti-war sentiment remains stronger than ever.
The White House and the Democratic Congressional Leadership are
playing a very dirty game in their effort to ram through supplemental
funding for the escalating US war in Afghanistan and continued
occupation of Iraq. In the crosshairs of the big guns at the White
House and on Capitol Hill are anti-war freshmen legislators and the
movement to hold those responsible for torture accountable.
If you've been reading the
Washington DC-based press of late, you might have the impression that
the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, is the
mastermind of the US's torture regime.
The debate over Bush-era torture
tactics like waterboarding has morphed into a full-blown Washington
scandal. But the target isn't the Bush administration officials who
ordered the torture; instead, the corporate media's focus is on House
Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who claims that she was not fully briefed by the
CIA on the use of waterboarding in late 2002. The prevailing assumption
in much of the coverage is that the CIA couldn't possibly have misled
members of Congress--despite the fact that this has happened
repeatedly.
I am not a violent woman. But if I see House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on
TV one more time I could get violently ill. Of all the whining,
sniveling carrying on - and I'm paraphrasing her excuses - she was lied
to, she didn't know or when they briefed her they left the torture
stuff out. And my favorite, she must not have been listening when they
mentioned torture.
Beltway journalists seem finally to have a found a torture story
they like. Mind you, not the one about the Bush/Cheney White House
possibly okaying drowning to extract "information" to justify an Iraq
attack -- not that story. The story the Beltway bulldogs have decided to get stuck into is a story about Democrats.
It is apparent that regardless of who is in power, conservative ideals
are firmly entrenched not simply in the American psyche, but are an
integral part of U.S. policies. One could blame liberals for not
having a backbone when combating conservatives, but chances are that
the real reason may be even more onerous; one likely explanation is
governmental psychological warfare.
Nancy Pelosi is no Dick Cheney, nor a
George W. Bush. She was neither the author of a systematic policy of
torture nor has she been, like Cheney and most top Republicans in
Congress, an enduring apologist for its practice. It is a nonsensical
distraction to place her failure to speak out courageously as a critic
of the Bush policies on the same level as those who engineered one of
the most shameful debacles in U.S. history.
