Posted on 05/15/2009 6:33:33 PM PDT by LdSentinal
Caught in a web of half-truths, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi yesterday accused the CIA of misleading Congress about the waterboarding of top Al Qaeda terrorists. Her brazenness was a thing to behold.
There she was, forced into admitting that she had been well aware the CIA was using the tactic after having insistently led the world to believe otherwise.
Did she apologize for dissembling? Did she beg pardon for failing to be sufficiently clear in her statements? Did she plead that there had been a misunderstanding of what she knew and when?
No, no and no. Cornered, the speaker went on the attack with bravado.
"I am saying that the CIA was misleading the Congress and at the same time the administration was misleading the Congress on weapons of mass destruction," Pelosi declaimed, apparently hoping that shopworn anti-war rhetoric would save the day.
Not this time.
Not when she, as the most powerful figure in the House, has railed against the Bush administration for waterboarding three Al Qaeda ringleaders.
Not when she has also called for establishing a so-called truth commission to ferret out who knew what when about the use of enhanced interrogation techniques after 9/11.
Not when the CIA brought her into the loop about waterboarding early on.
The record is now established that, at the least, Pelosi failed to object to waterboarding when it was going on, and that, at the most, she gave the practice her explicit blessing.
The CIA last week produced logs of briefings about post-9/11 interrogations. Its reconstruction stated that in September 2002, Pelosi was given "a description of the particular" techniques "that had been employed" on master terrorist Abu Zubaydah. Those included waterboarding.
The speaker challenged the CIA's account, asserting that the agency had told her only about techniques that might be used in the future.
Ex-CIA chief Porter Goss, a former Florida congressman who attended the briefing, backed the CIA version. He also remembered Pelosi asking whether the CIA was doing enough.
Yesterday, facing increasingly skeptical questions, Pelosi confessed that in February 2003, the CIA had in fact told one of her top aides that the agency had begun to waterboard a small number of detainees.
Which left Pelosi in the position of trying to argue that she had been truthful because the CIA had never informed her personally. And then she accused the CIA of "misleading" her at her briefing about the then-present use of waterboarding.
Give her the benefit of the doubt, assume Pelosi's memory is accurate - she still learned the facts about waterboarding just a few months later.
What's tortured here is the truth.
It is indeed big news that they hit Pelosi so hard on this.
On Sept. 4, 2002, less than a year after 9/11, the CIA briefed Rep. Porter Goss, then House Intelligence Committee chairman, and Mrs. Pelosi, then the committee’s ranking Democrat, on EITs including water boarding. They were the first members of Congress to be informed.
So, who was the director of the CIA, from 9/11 to 2004?
George J. Tenet was the Director of CIA, from 1997–2004 .
Tenet was appointed by President Clinton and approved by Congress. Tenet then became the CIA director in August of 1997.
So, Pelosi is now saying that George Tenet lied to her or ordered his congressional briefers to lie to Nancy.
The plank the plank. Extend the plank.
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