There is nothing surprising in the fact that the CIA informed Members of Congress about what they were doing to get information from high value al-Qaeda prisoners. Nor is it surprising that Democrats who were briefed would have kept that information from their colleagues as they were bound to do by law.

Some Republicans are trying to explore the hypocrisy angle by trying to point out that Democrats are hardly in a position to come down on Republicans for torture when their own leadership was privy to the “severe interrogation techniques” being used. I have yet to see any quotes from those who we know were briefed that they then objected to the torture later and used it in a political context to bash their opponents.

In the absence of proof that Pelosi, Reid, Rockefeller, Harman, et al criticized the Administration for their torture policies, it is hard to make the hypocrisy charge stick.

However, they can be and should be excoriated for meekly going along with these policies and not registering their objections in the strongest possible terms. Alone among the Democrats, former ranking minority member of the House Intel Committee Jane Harman says she sent a letter of protest to the CIA questioning their methods to extract information. The letter fell on deaf ears.

Some of the netnuts are twisting themselves into knots to posit the notion that the whole purpose of the briefings was to embarrass the Democrats:

It’s pretty clear that either one of the Republican members of Congress at the meeting, or the CIA, decided to leak what happened at a super-classified post-9/11 briefing in order to embarrass Pelosi and the Democrats. And I don’t doubt for a minute that Bush approved the leak, as he always does.

It’s also clear that had Pelosi raised any private objections during the meeting – remember, it took place in the first year after September 11 – Bush and the Republicans would have leaked that fact to the public (like they just did) and destroyed her career and marked her publicly as a traitor. No member of Congress, no American, could have spoken up about anything in the months after September 11 and survived. It’s patently unfair to suggest that somehow because Pelosi didn’t object then that she doesn’t have the right to object now.

One final point. I hope this teaches Pelosi and Reid and all the Democrats that no matter what you do, this administration will mark you as a traitor and try to do destroy you. You might as well fight back and try to win, because if you don’t, you’ll sit back and lose.

Note that not only did some nefarious Republican leak from a “super classified” briefing – as if Avarosis ever gave a crap about leaking from other classified briefings as long as they reflected badly on Republicans – in order to make Pelosi look bad today, they would have leaked back in 2002 if Pelosi had objected to make her look bad today.

Of course, Johnny has no evidence whatsoever that a Republican leaked the story to the Post nor does he have a scintilla of evidence that Bush was behind it. He’s just throwing crap against a wall to see what sticks – a pastime he enjoys immensely when outing gay Republicans who would choose otherwise.

One other major meme that is emerging from the netroots is that since Bush had this meeting hanging over their heads, the Democratic leadership refused to begin impeachment hearings. With that kind of logic, we can expect an immediate effort by Pelosi to start the impeachment bandwagon moving next week now that everything is out in the open.

Fortunately for the republic, Pelosi is a little smarter than the rabid, frothing at the mouth bloggers who would push the Democratic party over the impeachment abyss.

Finally, just for levity’s sake, we now have to 9/11 truthers hot on the trail of the destroyed DVD’s that opened this whole can of worms in the first place. Here’s a comment left on my post on the subject:

The tapes destroyed primarily not because torture but because of what the tapes reveal. Possibly revealing the conspiracies behind 9/11 attack. This is another set of evidence revealing that the 9/11 was an inside job. The secret societies are directly responsible for this. Especially Bush family’s Skull & Bones. 2006 movie “the good shepherd”, directed by Robert De Nero, shows how the CIA was formed and the Skull & Bones influence over the intelligence community plus CIA’s torture…

I am not one who believes the republic has been permanently destroyed as a result of the torture authorized by the Administration. Good grief what a shallow and ignorant view of history one must have to believe that nonsense. We survived four score and seven plus years of allowing slavery in this country – even to the point that the government was in cahoots with slave owners in that they went after escaped slaves in the north and depended on revenue gleaned from cotton exports to survive.

There are plenty of sins committed by the United States government – some of which make torturing murderous jihadis look like a walk in the park. The innocents who have been victims of the government down through the years are a much blacker stain than the “severe interrogation techniques” used by the CIA and Army on, by all reports, was an extremely limited number of murderous, cold eyed killers.

Torture is wrong in all cases at all times. But to get hysterical about its implications for the republic, as most on the left seem determined to do, is absurd. Those nations overseas who are saying “American has lost its moral standing” didn’t recognize that standing in the first place. And even if some actually feel that way, I can guarantee that the next time we selflessly give of ourselves to save the victims of some natural disaster or pull some tiny country’s chestnuts out of the fire when it is being bullied by a larger neighbor, talk about America losing “the moral high ground” will disappear fairly quickly.

Let us treat this with the seriousness it deserves without either exaggerating its impact on our history or using it as a political club in a cynical attempt to demonize your political opponents. Torture has been used to our great shame and calumny. But it hardly merits the “end of the republic” rhetoric being bandied about so cavalierly by those whose outrage is nurtured and husbanded against their own government rather than directed equally toward an enemy that seeks to kill us all.