I feel sorry for the folks on the leftward fringes in this country. They keep thinking they have a smoking gun conspiracy to finally take out Bush and it always fizzles out. The latest one, torture by the CIA, is just not going to fly. First off, making someone scared or uncomfortable is not what many people think of as torture. Go watch the latest James Bond movie for an idea of torture. We don’t snip off fingers, apply car batteries to parts of the body, hang people on hooks – you know, the things Saddam Hussein did. We cause panic so people will tell us what we need to know before they can kill lots of innocent people.

The first blow struck to this latest attempt to make a conspiracy out of thin air was the fact Dems in Congress had been briefed on this many years ago – and some wondered if the waterboarding was sufficiently harsh! Now we find out that the tapes of these interrogation efforts (which actually proves there was nothing trying to be hidden – if so why tape it?) were destroyed – with concurrence from CIA lawyers.

Lawyers within the clandestine branch of the Central Intelligence Agency gave written approval in advance to the destruction in 2005 of hundreds of hours of videotapes documenting interrogations of two lieutenants from Al Qaeda, according to a former senior intelligence official with direct knowledge of the episode.

The involvement of agency lawyers in the decision making would widen the scope of the inquiries into the matter that have now begun in Congress and within the Justice Department. Any written documents are certain to be a focus of government investigators as they try to reconstruct the events leading up to the tapes’ destruction.

Actually, by following procedure and getting legal concurrence there is no crime to be found. Even worse for the conspiracy nuts is the White House (Bush/Cheney/Libby) and the Justice Department (Aschroft-Gonzales) actually lobbied against destroying the tapes:

The former intelligence official acknowledged that there had been nearly two years of debate among government agencies about what to do with the tapes, and that lawyers within the White House and the Justice Department had in 2003 advised against a plan to destroy them. But the official said that C.I.A. officials had continued to press the White House for a firm decision, and that the C.I.A. was never given a direct order not to destroy the tapes.

Oh too bad there lefties! Seems Bush did not order the destruction – just the opposite. Another conspiracy bites the dust. Wouldn’t it be wild if the lawyers in question included Mary McCarthy, the source for many of the stories about CIA prisons and torture? It is possible, she was in the Inspector Generals office at the time and it should have been involved in the decisions. Now wouldn’t that be a hoot! The whistleblower who also sanctioned the destruction of tapes.

The Dems are obsessed with trying to tarnish Bush – some weird pay back for the Clinton years it seems. This obsession has overshadowed everything else, from funding the government to protecting this nation from attack. And it is wearing thin on the American people. You can only cry “wolf” so many times without credibility before people just dismiss everything you say – and it is getting to that point with the far left. I am not sure anyone is even listening to them anymore.

Update: The normal lucid Christopher Hitchens is having wild flashbacks to his overly emotional days as a hyper liberal – he is calling the tape destruction treason! Too funny. So lawyers are now taking over the country by debating for 3 years the destruction of interrogation tapes? I guess that is one way to go about the overthrow of America.