Intelligence and Lies

You wrote: "she has insisted that she did not know that the Bush Administration had authorized waterboarding as an interrogation technique. In response, the Politico unearthed a 2002 Washington Post piece stating that Speaker Pelosi was briefed in great detail about proposed interrogation techniques, including waterboarding."


Two words stand out in that paragraph "proposed" and "authorized."

Webster defines PROPOSED as "to form or put forward a plan or intention" or "to set before the mind (as for discussion, imitation, or action) (propose a plan for settling the dispute).

Websters defines AUTHORIZED as "to establish by or as if by authority : sanction" and " to invest especially with legal authority : empower"

I know you will never admit it, but those are two totally different things. One is a plan, something that might happen, the other is giving approval for it to happen.

Lots of things are proposed, but but not everything that is proposed is authorized.

You may PROPOSE that your boss double your salary, but nothing will happen until he AUTHORIZES the raise.

True; however, a minute point of contention does not change the reality that she, as Speaker of the House and Minority Leader, almost certainly knew what was occuring. Nor does it change the fact that our interrogation methods are far from what I would consider torture--or what has been considered torture historically.

When I was deployed we had a joke that we "tortured" our detainees with such "horrible measures as direct questioning." A colleague of mine was formally reprimanded for tossing water from the mouth of a bottle at a detainee. All of this is nonsense.

To point out a minor vocabulary tiff on my part does not change anything. Nancy Pelosi knew what was occuring, did not complain about it at the time, and does so now in order to make her--and apparently your--party look righteous. There is such a climate of fear amongst even the lowest level of interrogators that our ability to collect human intelligence is greatly hindered. Thank you for reading and commenting, and please continue to do so, but your contention does not refute my point, at all. Webster is a good source for precision, but to pretend that the Speaker/Minority Leader has scant knowledge of what is happening at Gitmo is simply not believable.

If the PROPOSED methods were so objectionable, why wasn't a bigger fuss made at the time; and why doesn't Pelosi claim that she sternly objected?