And now: a letter, a hotel registration book, and a series of photographs, which could add up to divorce, premature retirement, and possible criminal proceedings for a company director in Bromsgrove. He's a freemason, and a conservative M.P., so that's 3,000 pounds please Mr. S... thank you... to stop us from revealing:
- Your name
- The name of the three other people involved,
- The youth organization to which they belonged,
and
- The shop where you bought the equipment!
Blackmail! from Monty Python's Flying Circus
OK, so Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats in the House and Senate allegedly knew about the torture going back to 2002. The CIA's making a point of leaking that information so we know about this. Can I ask a question?
What could Nancy Pelosi or other Democrats have done back when Bush was in charge?
What could they even do at the briefings? If I remember the rules at these secret briefings correctly, they couldn't do much of anything. They were briefed in a special room that's swept for bugs, they were not allowed to take notes, they were told they could not brief their fellow Senators or Congresspeople, their own staffers or even their spouses about the contents of the briefings. They were threatened with PATRIOT Act and treason prosecutions if so much as a peep of these briefings were leaked to the public.
In short, they were "informed", but they were left without effective means to take any sort of action to do something about it. That's because the point of these briefings was not to give Congress the means to perform effective government oversight. The point was to give them just enough information about things like torture that the Bushies knew perfectly well was illegal, so as to make Pelosi and co. complicit.
So here we are today. We have complicit Democrats, but not really through much fault of their own. Not that I let Nancy Pelosi and her fellow Democrats completely off the hook on this. Probably the best thing Nancy Pelosi and fellow Democrats could have done in the face of this monstrosity for their own ethical standing was to resign in protest.
She didn't do that. Maybe she wanted to retain some power. Maybe since she was a high-ranking Democrat, she was hoping that she could retake the House at some point and become Speaker (and she did.) Maybe she felt she could do more inside Congress than from resigning. In any case, she's now complicit.
And that's the point of the briefings. It's a classic organized crime tactic - make the people who might oppose you involved in your plots - make them dirty, so you can drag them down with you if you're being attacked. There you have it. Attack the Bushies, the Bushies drag Pelosi down with them. These are tactics straight out of the Godfather movies.
Of course, the next steps are to extort demands from them by threatening them with exposure. The Pelosi briefing leaks are yet another horse's head in the bed.
We need sunlight. We need everyone involved, Democrats, Republicans, everyone, exposed. We need to know all their stories. Sunlight is the best disinfectant in these cases of corruption. Maybe the Spanish investigations into the Bushie war crimes are the best way to go - they're further removed from the action than the Democrats were, so it's harder for the Bushies to make them complicit and blackmail them.
Once the public knows more of the story, then we'll have a better idea of what actions to take to put a stop to it.