Mr Obama has “left the door open” for investigations into those persons in the Bush Administration who crafted legal opinions believing that waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation” practices were lawful and did not rise to the level of torture.

The president has publicly opposed prosecuting the CIA officers who carried them out, but now he’s also saying that it’s up to Attorney General Eric Holder to decide whether to prosecute the lawyers that wrote the many legal memos authorizing and justifying them.

This predicated, of course, upon the truth that the Demorats were completely unaware that the Bush Administration was leaning in this direction and also upon the fact that no one with a (D) after their name was privy to or had signed off on these techniques.

The problem with that assumption is that it is patently false.

From the Washington Times:

The CIA briefed top Democrats and Republicans on the congressional intelligence committees more than 30 times about enhanced interrogation techniques, according to intelligence sources who said the lawmakers tacitly approved the techniques that some Democrats in Congress now say should land Bush administration officials in jail.

Between 2002 and 2006, the top Republicans and Democrats on the House and Senate intelligence committees “each got complete, benchmark briefings on the program,” said one of the intelligence sources who is familiar with the briefings.

“If Congress wanted to kill this program, all it had to do was withhold funding,” said the source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk about the closed-door briefings.

Continuing, please hone in on one particular name in this paragraph:

Those who were briefed included current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia and Rep. Jane Harman of California, all Democrats, and Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas, Sen. Richard C. Shelby of Alabama and Rep. Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, all Republicans.

Yes, Nancy Pelosi — the same Nancy Pelosi who, along with Mr Obama, is considering the above-noted investigations.

She was already “ethically challenged” back in January of 2007 when I wrote about her involvement in Starkist Tuna and the minimum wage.

She also paid her husband, Paul Pelosi, almost $100,000 from her own PAC funds for rent, utilities and accounting fees racked up by her husband’s real estate and investment firm. Federal Election Commission records show those payments quadrupled after Mr. Pelosi took over as treasurer of his wife’s committee in 2007. Oddly enough, Ms Pelosi supported banning this practice in 2007. But still did it nevertheless.

Are you really certain you want to open that door and walk down this road, Demorats?