In all the murkiness around what Karl Rove calls Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s “complicity” in the Bush-Cheney torture crimes, two things, at least, are clear.

The first is that Republicans are trying to have it both ways. On one hand, they say that because Pelosi was briefed on the Bush administration’s “harsh interrogation tactics” program in 2003 but failed to make a big public stink about it — even though she was merely the ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee and despite the fact that the briefing was double-super top secret — she is equally as guilty of war crimes as Dick Cheney and the rest.

Conversely, though, Republicans are equally adamant that the HITs were not torture. If waterboarding and the other tactics were not torture, ergo there was no war crime.

So why are they rushing in front of every available camera to insist that Pelosi is guilty of … war crimes?

The answer, of course, is because they can. Using the “liberal media” as their foils is one of the few things they’re good at. It’s also quite nearly all they’ve got left. Plus, it works. The news cycles this week have been dominated by cable news readers and pundits parroting the Republicans’ question, “What did Pelosi know and when did she know it?”

But by putting the bum’s rush on Pelosi, aren’t the Republicans tacitly admitting torture was wrong, if not illegal?

This brings us to the second thing that’s clear in this scandal: Republicans are desperate — so desperate, in fact, that it’s they, not the Democrats’ liberal base, who are goading Congress to do the very thing Republicans don’t want them to do: Investigate the Bush-Cheney torture regime.

All this recklessness prompts another question: What are Republicans so desperate to hide?

There are hints. It was revealed recently that at least one suspect was tortured several months before Bush Justice Department flunkies Jay Bybee and John Yoo were ordered to work up memos to provide legal rationales for the torture program. This means that the early incidents that were undertaken without even the flimsy cover of the bogus rationales and so were inarguably illegal.

We also learned recently that the true objective of the torture program was not to keep us safe or to defuse a ticking time bomb, as Republicans have claimed. Instead, Cheney was seeking false confessions that would bolster the Bush administration’s favored but false justification for invading Iraq: That Saddam Hussein was behind the 9/11 attacks. (Never mind the fact that it was widely known that Saddam, the secular dictator, and al Qaeda, the religious extremist terror group, were bitter enemies.)

In fact, earlier this week sources revealed that Cheney himself ordered the torture of one of Saddam’s security officials who was captured during the invasion for the express purpose of obtaining a false confession that Saddam had a role in the 9/11 attacks.

The chance that Nancy Pelosi was complicit with Cheney in setting up the torture regime is nil — zero. But she is vulnerable on this issue, not so much because of the facts, but rather because her support within the liberal base is generally weak because she refused to impeach Bush for lying about the reasons he invaded Iraq, illegally spying on Americans and, yes, torturing suspects.

I, for one, believe — adamantly — that if Pelosi or any Democrat enabled Bush and Cheney to torture suspects, those Democrats should be held accountable, but not until after Bush, Cheney, Condi Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, John Ashcroft, George Tenet, John Yoo and Jay Bybee and any other architects of the torture regime are held to account.

The best course of action now for Pelosi is to investigate Bush-Cheney war crimes. Not only would the investigation clear her name, it would shore up her support among the liberal law-and-order base.