Torture may not seem a HealthBeat topic. But I’m willing to declare torture a medical problem. (Whether the victim or the torturer suffers from the greater problem is open to debate).            

            As regular readers know, I could go on at length.  But let me just say this. Why has the media focused on Nancy Pelosi?  Was she the Secretary of Defense at the time? Was she the director of the CIA?  Was she the president?  Could she possibly have  been  responsible for authorizing the torture?

         No. 

         Did she receive information from those responsible that should have told her that the U.S was engaging in inhumane behavior? I don’t know. But Pelosi is just one of many members of Congress who may well have known what was going on, and given the Bush administration’s stubborn refusal to share power with Congress  I doubt any of them could have stopped it.

       More importantly, as Washington Post's Greg Sargent pointed out yesterday, “Nancy Pelosi's claims about what she was told and when about torture are getting far more intense media scrutiny than the CIA's claims are. Simple fairness demands that both side’s claims get treated with a similar level of skepticism,” Sargent continues. “And they’re not. Sargent also notes that most news reports omit the fact that two other senior Democrats–Bob Graham and Jay Rockefeller–have publicly claimed that the CIA didn’t brief them about the use of torture in the manner the agency has claimed.

        Why, then, the focus on Pelosi?  The answer: “Cherchez la Femme”

       “Find the woman” is based on the Medieval belief that women are the root of all evil.  In Eden, Eve committed the first sin by succumbing to Satan and eating the apple. (Or at least that is what Genesis tells us.)  In the Middle Ages, religious scholars took this as a justification for primal misogyny.  More recently, the 1854 book The Mohicans of Paris by Alexandre Dumas warned: Il y a une femme dans toutes les affaires; aussitôt qu'on me fait un rapport, je dis: Cherchez la femme (There is a woman in every case; as soon as they bring me a report, I say, 'Look for the woman')

The phrase then became a truism for both the detective novel and film noir: no matter what the problem, a dame is probably at the bottom of it.

 Little wonder then, that when a great crime has been committed, many still believe that here is only one solution: Cherchez la Femme.

Thus, the media’s “expose” of torture zeroes in on Nancy Pelosi—distracting everyone from who in the Bush administration knew about the torture, when they knew about it, and who authorized it.