The Liberal Identity is Defined in Relation to George Bush

I'd like to make an obvious point about what constitutes "torture" in the minds of unserious liberals seeking to gain partisan political advantage on a national security issue even in a time of war. The point is simply this: in the mind of today's leading liberals, "torture" is defined as the harshest interrogation technique approved by the Bush administration. Many draw the torture line at waterboarding, this despite the fact that our own special forces soldiers are deliberately exposed to that very practice as part of their training (which, in my mind, proves that it isn't torture even if it is officially labeled as such). If the Bush administration had not approved of the waterboarding of high-level al Qaeda detainees in the wake of 9/11, they'd have approved of some other, somewhat less harsh interrogation technique. In that case, liberals would be running around having an apoplectic fit over that method of interrogation. As I said, to them, torture equals the harshest interrogation technique approved by George Bush.

As with every issue having to do with national security, liberals adopt a relativistic perspective. That is, they define themselves relative to George Bush. That's partly because the liberal experience requires a villain. Once the villain is identified, a liberal defines himself as not that. I know because I grew up liberal and only entered the post-liberal phase of my life when I awakened to the evidence-free, holier-than-thou attitude of today's liberal icons (including John Kerry, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Ted Kennedy, John Murtha, etc.). I once shared that attitude, but I'm quite sure that I will never be that way again (even if I will always hold onto some views that are uniquely identified with the Democratic party).

With that in mind, this new story is not really news at all:

Hill Briefed on Waterboarding in 2002

In Meetings, Spy Panels' Chiefs Did Not Protest, Officials Say

In September 2002, four members of Congress met in secret for a first look at a unique CIA program designed to wring vital information from reticent terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. For more than an hour, the bipartisan group, which included current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA's overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques 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. But on that day, no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder, two U.S. officials said.
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With one known exception, no formal objections were raised by the lawmakers briefed about the harsh methods 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).

It isn't waterboarding that bothers Democrats who imagine themselves to be especially concerned with "human rights." Instead, it is the fact that George Bush happened to favor that particular harsh interrogation technique. At the time that Democrats were fully briefed on the subject, they did not immediately appreciate the fact that they could exploit this issue to damage the domestic and international standing of their own president in a time of war. The technique itself is merely a harsh method of interrogation, not something that jumps out as a self-defining method of torture. But once they realized that they could shamelessly and hypocritically exploit the issue, they jumped at the opportunity and hystericaly declared George Bush's waterboarding technique to be a self-evident example of "torture."

It was the same way with respect to Saddam's WMDs. The intelligence community was sure that Saddam had them. As such, George Bush and the large majority of Democrats were also sure that he had them. If you have any doubt about that, go watch the video that Glenn Reynolds posted yesterday, which consists of leading Democrats expressing their views about WMDs in Iraq. The Democrats obviously believed what George Bush believed, but when it eventually became clear that the intelligence was wrong, those same Democrats realized that they were just handed a glorious opportunity to savage their own president in a time of war by falsely accusing him of being a liar. So that's what they did.

Democrats know perfectly well that it was intelligence analysts who were convinced of Saddam's WMDs. They know because an excruciatingly detailed bipartisan investigation by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence concluded as much in 2004:

The Intelligence Community (IC) suffered from a collective presumption that Iraq had an active and growing weapons of mass destruction (WMD) program. This "group think" dynamic led Intelligence Community analysts, collectors and managers to both interpret ambiguous evidence as conclusively indicative of a WMD program as well as ignore or minimize evidence that Iraq did not have active and expanding weapons of mass destruction programs. This presumption was so strong that formalized IC mechanisms established to challenge assumptions and group think were not utilized.
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The roots of the IC's bias stretch back to Iraq's pre-1991 efforts to build WMD and its efforts to hide those programs. The fact that Iraq had repeatedly lied about its pre-1991 WMD programs, its continued deceptive behavior, and its failure to fully cooperate with UN inspectors left the IC with a predisposition to believe the Iraqis were continuing to lie about their WMD efforts. This was compounded by the fact that Iraq's pre-1991 progress on its nuclear weapons program had surprised the 1C. The role this knowledge played in analysts' thinking is evident in the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate's (NIE) introduction which said, "revelations after the Gulf War starkly demonstrate the extensive efforts undertaken by Iraq to deny information. The revelations also underscore the extent to which limited information fostered underestimates by the Intelligence Community of Saddam's capabilities at that time." This bias was likely further reinforced by the IC's failure to detect the September 11th terrorist plot and the criticism that the Community had not done all it could to "connect the dots."
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The Committee did not find any evidence that Administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capabilities.
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The Committee found that none of the analysts or other people interviewed by the Committee said that they were pressured to change their conclusions related to Iraq's links to terrorism. After 9/11, however, analysts were under tremendous pressure to make correct assessments, to avoid missing a credible threat, and to avoid an intelligence failure on the scale of 9/11. As a result, the Intelligence Community's assessments were bold and assertive in pointing out potential terrorist links.

This unbelievably thorough report was unanimously approved by a committee that included John Rockefeller, Chuck Hagel, Diane Feinstein, Richard Durbin, and John Edwards. Obviously, the intelligence community was the source of the error about Saddam's WMDs, and no one from the administration pressured them to reach their faulty conclusions (conclusions that were also in effect during the Clinton administration). Ask yourself: why don't you already know all of this? You don't know it because we have a media that hysterically devotes saturation coverage to stories like the abuses at Abu Ghraib while devoting minimal attention to the historically more important information I quoted above. If the saturation coverage had been the other way around, the world would not believe that George Bush misled this nation into war. Can't have that.

And speaking of John Edwards, remember what he had to say back before the Democrats morphed into the shameless con artists they are today:

I mean, we have three different countries that, while they all present serious problems for the United States -- they're dictatorships, they're involved in the development and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction -- you know, the most imminent, clear and present threat to our country is not the same from those three countries. I think Iraq is the most serious and imminent threat to our country.
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And they do, in my judgment, present different threats. And I think Iraq and Saddam Hussein present the most serious and most imminent threat.

Was he, like that villain George Bush, misleading this nation by declaring Iraq to be an imminent threat? Of course not. He was expressing the consensus view of the intelligence community. But maybe he was misled by the Bush administration. Could that be? No:

MATTHEWS: Let me ask you about-Since you did support the resolution and you did support that ultimate solution to go into combat and to take over that government and occupy that country. Do you think that you, as a United States Senator, got the straight story from the Bush administration on this war? On the need for the war? Did you get the straight story?

EDWARDS: Well, the first thing I should say is I take responsibility for my vote. Period. And I did what I did based upon a belief, Chris, that Saddam Hussein’s potential for getting nuclear capability was what created the threat. That was always the focus of my concern. Still is the focus of my concern.

So did I get misled? No. I didn’t get misled.

Whether it is torture or Saddam's WMDs, the truth is of secondary importance. All that matters to today's liberal icons is savaging their own president in a time of war even if a little truth needs to be tossed aside along the way. And because of the media we have, they can get away with it. I was once utterly amazed by this incredible phenomenon, but now I realize that it is simply par for the course. That's why this new discovery that leading Democrats were perfectly OK with waterboarding is not (and will not become) a major story. Neither the Democrats nor the media really care. Don't get me wrong: I applaud these reporters for bringing this already obvious news to the brief attention of the world. That's better than nothing. But now that the information has been dutifully reported, it will not be revisited (and will therefore have no impact). That's because there is some other story out there that places the Bush administration in a negative light, such as our supposedly failing economy. A story like that will obviously require saturation coverage.

Perhaps Republicans will be equally pathetic if a Democrat is returned to White House, but I suspect not. The reason is that, so far as I can tell, conservatives do not define themselves in relation to liberals. Still, I don't rule it out. The Republicans did not behave in impressive fashion when they impeached Bill Clinton even though the technical legal case to do so was there. It wasn't impressive, but they didn't just toss reality to the winds (with a willing assist from the mainstream media) when they did that. We'll see how they behave if Hillary Clinton wins the presidency. My hope is that Bush Derangement Syndrome is not immediately replaced by Clinton Derangement Syndrome, but I worry that it will be.