Back when the subject first came up, Dem speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi originally said she was never briefed on enhanced interrogation techniques like waterboarding, even though she was a member (don't laugh) of the House Intelligence Committee and sat in on the super-secret briefings after 9/11 where waterboarding and enhanced interrogation techniques were discussed and approved. Under pressure, she finally admitted she heard a little something about waterboarding but claims not to remember exactly what she heard ... although other Congressmen who were in the same briefings recalled things very differently.
Unfortunately, the CIA just released documents that show Pelosi knew all about it...and approved it. Whoopsie...
Intelligence officials released documents this evening saying that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was briefed in September 2002 about the use of harsh interrogation tactics against al-Qaeda prisoners, seemingly contradicting her repeated statements over the past 18 months that she was never told that these techniques were actually being used.
In a 10-page memo outlining an almost seven-year history of classified briefings, intelligence officials said that Pelosi and then-Rep. Porter Goss (R-Fla.) were the first two members of Congress ever briefed on the interrogation tactics. Then the ranking member and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, respectively, Pelosi and Goss were briefed Sept. 4, 2002, one week before the first anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
The memo, issued by the Director of National Intelligence and the Central Intelligence Agency to Capitol Hill, notes the Pelosi-Goss briefing covered "EITs including the use of EITs on Abu Zubaydah." EIT is an acronym for enhanced interrogation technique. Zubaydah was one of the earliest valuable al-Qaeda members captured and the first to have the controversial tactic known as water boarding used against him. {...}
The new memo shows that intelligence officials were willing to share the information about waterboarding with only a sharply closed group of people. Three years after the initial Pelosi-Goss briefing, Bush officials still limited interrogation technique briefings to just the chairman and ranking member of the House and Senate intelligence committees, the so-called Gang of Four in the intelligence world.
In October 2005, CIA officials began briefing other congressional leaders with oversight of the intelligence community, including top appropriators who provided the agency its annual funding. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a prisoner-of-war in Vietnam and an opponent of torture techniques, was also read into the program at that time even though he did not hold a special committee position overseeing the intelligence community.
I wonder...is Pelosi that clueless that she thought the CIA was going to take the fall all by themselves? So much for the most ethical Congress in history.
On the plus side, this may likely end any fantasies congressional lunatics like Patrick Leahey, Henry Waxman, and John Conyers had about bringing ex-Bush Administration officials in the dock and trying them.There would be far too many prominent Democrats on trial with them.
3 comments:
while i understand what ff is saying in the last paragraph, i don't exactly agree with his conclusion.
imo, it's just enough to keep repeating this mantra ad nauseum.
you know, kinda like we killed 100,000 innocent civilians in iraq.
ask susan sarandon about that one, and i used sarandon as an example cause i can't spell that dumba$$ garafolo's last name. i would have used her as an example instead.
every couple of weeks or months they will come out with the same blather with no intention of taking any action. solely to impregnate the base prior to the elections in 2010 or some such. maybe prior to celebrating hussein's 200th day in office.
it really has nothing to do with taking any legal action. sort of like the dimocratic party with taking any action at all. just taking our liberties and worth.
I'm not sure we can trust the CIA on any thing. They have been wrong in so many areas, the bigglest screw up being Iraq and weapons of mass destruction. In fact, the CIA has performed so poorly over such a long period of time that Mr. Obama would do much better to skip the daily briefings from US intellegence agencies and simply read sources like Joshuapundit. He would be far better informed about the situation in the world!!
With that said, if top Democrats knew about the interrogation techniques, as I suspect they did, this would explain alot as to why there have been no prosecutions of President Bush or any top officials in his Administration.
I think it's likely she didn't think it through or else she thought since the CIA screwed Bush so severely that that meant they were on the democrats side.
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