[Pelosi’s statement.]

Well, I guess now I know why impeachment was “off the table.” Anybody for Barney Frank as the new speaker? Joby Warrick and Dan Eggen in WaPo:

In September 2002, four members of Congress met in secret for a first look at a unique[ly illegal and unconstitutional?] CIA program designed to wring [torture] vital information from reticent terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. For more than an hour, the Bipartisan group, which included future-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA’s overseas detention sites [gulags] and the harsh techniques [torture] interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.

Among the techniques described, said two officials present, was waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill [not to mention the US military**]. But on that day, no objections were raised.

With one known exception, no formal objections were raised by the lawmakers briefed about the harsh methods [torture] during the two years in which waterboarding was employed, from 2002 to 2003, said Democrats and Republicans with direct knowledge of the matter. The lawmakers who held oversight roles during the period included Pelosi and Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) and Sens. Bob Graham (D-Fla.) and John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), as well as Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.) and Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan).

Yeah, the Village is a big sack of pus just waiting to be lanced. Unfortunately, some of that pus is blue.

Nice going, there, Leader Nance.  Read more 

Of course they’ll use spy satellites for domestic politics*. Why would you even think things could be different? The Times:

At issue is a newly disclosed plan that Mike McConnell, director of national intelligence, approved in May in a memorandum to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, which puts some of the nation’s most powerful intelligence-gathering tools at the disposal of domestic security officials as early as this fall.

The uses include enhancing seaport and land-border security, improving planning to mitigate natural disasters, and determining how best to secure major events, like the Super Bowl or national political conventions**.

Maybe we all just need to start wearing rubber Bush masks (burkas for the women) as our normal, daily attire?  Read more 

Lest we forget:

Harman, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, remained silent for over a year after being briefed on the Bush administration’s violation of federal wiretapping law (FISA) and recently told “Meet the Press” that she deplores the New York Times for informing the American people that the Bush Administration ignored the law.

We’re in the midst of a slow-moving, long-running Constitutional crisis, where the authoritarians in the White House and the Republican party have, in large part, freed themselves from the restraints of Constitutional authority, and are governing as despots, in an extra-legal fashion.

Jane Harmon either doesn’t understand that, or is enabling it. Either way, she shouldn’t be chair.  Read more