Free Republic

The head of the Secret Service accepted full responsibility Thursday for last week's security breach at President Barack Obama's first state dinner, but he said that the president and Vice President Joe Biden were never in danger from a party-crashing couple who shook hands and posed for pictures with them. Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan told the House Homeland Security Committee that his agents were at fault for allowing uninvited Washington socialites Tareq and Michaele Salahi into a lavish state dinner for Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Sullivan told the committee that three uniformed agents had been put on administrative...

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi argued at a news conference Thursday that Republicans are focusing on how much she knew about CIA enhanced interrogation techniques in 2002 and 2003 as a "diversionary tactic to take the spotlight off those who conceived, developed and implemented these policies, which all of us long opposed." Yet Pelosi's failure to protest what she alternately calls "enhanced interrogation methods" and "torture" - depending on whether the controversy threatens to make her look bad or the Bush administration - goes to the very heart of whether or not the "truth commission" she supports is anything more than...

A CNN news clip from May 22, 2002, shows Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi was not as out-of-the-loop as she now claims on interrogations. William Jacobson provided a little more evidence that Pelosi was not the clueless babe in the woods in 2002 that she now says she was. Pelsoi, after all, was the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. No one in Congress would know more than she. Jacobson dug out this from an old CNN clip: CNN.com, May 22, 2002: Last Monday night, the New York Joint Terrorism Task Force–a round-the-clock operation at the New...