Pelosi on the Torture Bill
I spoke to Nancy Pelosi about a week ago and she seemed to be enjoying the infighting among Republicans on Bush’s torture bill. She also posessed a moral clarity that the bill flew in the face of both the constitution and human decency. From my interview with the House minority leader:
They’re getting their comeuppance from their own party on this.
They did this because they thought they were going to engage us in a fight.’We want to try these people; you don’t.’ But they were flying right in the face of the constitution as well as any sense of decency.
Even if you want to forget about a sense of decency and just say in terms of reciprocity: We don’t want this to happen to our people so were not doing it to anybody else. Separate and apart from the fact that there are international standards for this, and we have a constitution that we want to honor.
And on top of this, and this is the most important part, in terms of having justice be done for 9/11. It’s five years later they have no convictions. They won’t have any convictions that will be upheld by the Supreme Court unless they follow certain principles. And so not one person directly responsible for 9/11 has been convicted and/or punished. Because they have this sense that they can operate outside the law outside of any regime or convention that relates to human dignity.
The question is, now that the president has brought McCain back onto the reservation with only a few cosmetic tweaks, will Pelosi’s moral clarity translate into actual opposition to this still indecent, un-American bill?