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The Wall Street Journal agreed but for different reasons.
Last Monday, the Journal’s editorial page issued a stern warning to Panetta and Blair that they would best be served if they resisted “the left-wing crusade to purge their agencies of anyone who had anything to do with "torture." Moreover, the Journal lectured the intelligence nominees about supporting the formation of a “Truth Commission” to probe the Bush administration’s interrogation policies, saying the initiatives were backed by Democratic leaders.
“Beginning in 2002, Nancy Pelosi and other key Democrats (as well as Republicans) on the House and Senate Intelligence Committees were thoroughly, and repeatedly, briefed on the CIA's covert antiterror interrogation programs,” says the WSJ editorial. “They did nothing to stop such activities, when they weren't fully sanctioning them. If they now decide the tactics they heard about then amount to abuse, then by their own logic they themselves are complicit. Let's review the history the political class would prefer to forget.
“According to our sources and media reports we've corroborated, the classified briefings began in the spring of 2002 and dealt with the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, a high-value al Qaeda operative captured in Pakistan. In succeeding months and years, more than 30 Congressional sessions were specifically devoted to the interrogation program and its methods, including waterboarding and other aggressive techniques designed to squeeze intelligence out of hardened detainees like Zubaydah.”
It’s worth noting that Journal’s editorial page writers are known for reprinting Bush administration talking points on the pages of the newspaper regardless of whether the information is accurate.
In July 2003, at the request of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s Chief of Staff, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz contacted the editorial department at the Wall Street Journal to leak the highly-classified National Intelligence Estimate about Iraq’s alleged attempts to acquire yellowcake uranium from Niger as a way of undermining former Ambassador Joseph Wilson who accused the Bush administration in an op-ed published in the New York Times that month of lying about the uranium issue in order to win support for war in Iraq.
Libby testified in his criminal trial related to the leak of Wilson’s wife, covert CIA operative Valerie Plame, that Cheney approved the leak to the Journal.
"The Vice President thought we should still try and get the [NIE] out. And so he asked me to talk to the Wall Street Journal. I don't have as good a relationship with the Wall Street Journal as Secretary Wolfowitz did, and so we talked to Secretary Wolfowitz about trying to get that point across [to the Journal], and he undertook to do so," Libby told a federal grand jury.
Wolfowitz faxed the Wall Street Journal a set of "talking points" about Wilson that the newspaper's editors could use to discredit Wilson in print, according to Libby's testimony. Wolfowitz also gave the newspaper a portion of the NIE.
The Journal printed Wolfowitz's talking points verbatim in a July 17, 2003, editorial, which misled its readers about the source of the information.
According to the editorial, "Yellowcake Remix," the Journal said the data the newspaper received about Iraq's interest in uranium "does not come from the White House" (although that is where it originated, albeit laundered through Wolfowitz at the Pentagon).
In other words, the Journal’s warnings to Panetta and Blair and Obama for that matter may turn out to be bogus and could have come directly from the White House.
Still, the Journal’s editorial did not scare off lawmakers. The very next day House judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers took a small step in that direction when he proposed legislation to create a blue-ribbon panel of outside experts to probe the “broad range” of policies pursued by the Bush administration “under claims of unreviewable war powers,” including torture of detainees and warrantless wiretaps.
While Cheney and Attorney General Michael Mukasey believes there is no evidence to warrant a criminal investigation or prosecution against administration officials and others who implemented and carried out the White House’s torture policies, a review of public documents released since 2004 certainly suggests that key officials, notably former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, may have acted unlawfully. Moreover, other documents that have received little coverage in the media appear to state that President George W. Bush played a bigger role in the matter than he has let on.
More Than 100,000 Pages of Documents
Much of what the public knows thus far about the Bush administration’s torture policies is due to the American Civil Liberties Union’s Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the government. Since 2004, the organization has obtained more than 100,000 pages of documents that show senior White House officials signed off on and authorized torture against detainees at Guantanamo Bay and at prisons in Iraq.
