“Cherchez la Femme”

Torture may not seem a HealthBeat topic. But I’m willing to declare torture a medical problem. (Whether the victim or the torturer suffers from the greater problem is open to debate).

As regular readers know, I could go on at length. But let me just say this. Why has the media focused on Nancy Pelosi? Was she the Secretary of Defense at the time? Was she the director of the CIA? Was she the president? Could she possibly have been responsible for authorizing the torture?

No.

Did she receive information from those responsible that should have told her that the U.S was engaging in inhumane behavior? I don’t know. But Pelosi is just one of many members of Congress who may well have known what was going on, and given the Bush administration’s stubborn refusal to share power with Congress I doubt any of them could have stopped it.

More importantly, as Washington Post's Greg Sargent pointed out yesterday, “Nancy Pelosi's claims about what she was told and when about torture are getting far more intense media scrutiny than the CIA's claims are. Simple fairness demands that both side’s claims get treated with a similar level of skepticism,” Sargent continues. “And they’re not. Sargent also notes that most news reports omit the fact that two other senior Democrats--Bob Graham and Jay Rockefeller--have publicly claimed that the CIA didn’t brief them about the use of torture in the manner the agency has claimed.

http://www.healthbeatblog.com/2009/05/torture-cherchez-la-femme.html

.
.
.

sucks to be a politician under the PNAC cloud . . .

But that is no reason why we have to have her taking up valuable real estate and blocking everything, either, now that the tide has changed.