Pelosi: What Did She Know and When Did She Know it?...Speaker Accuses CIA of Lying!

What did Speaker of the House, Democrat, Nancy Pelosi, know about the same interrogation techniques that she has so strongly spoken out against, and when did she know it? Those are the two questions she's been parsing the last few weeks, and today she threw more gasoline on the fire, basically accusing the CIA of lying to Congress. Today, she continued to repeat her contention that she was briefed only once (isn't that enough?) on enhanced interrogation methods seven years ago, and she accused the CIA of misleading Congress.

"Yes I am saying the CIA was misleading the Congress, and at the same time the (Bush) administration was misleading the Congress on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, to which I said that this intelligence doesn't support the imminent threat," Pelosi said at her weekly news conference.

Pelosi is in sizzling, hot water.

On September 4th, 2002, the CIA briefed the (at the time) House Intelligence Committee chairman, Representative Porter Goss, and Nancy Pelosi, who at the time was the ranking Democrat on the committee, on the enhanced interrogation techniques (EIT's). In December of 2007, she admitted that she did attend the briefing, but refused to specify what she was or wasn't told. At the time, the Washington Post reported that Pelosi "did not raise objections at the time."

Then, at a news conference last month, the Speaker said, "We were not -- I repeat -- were not told that waterboarding or any of these other enhanced interrogation methods were used." She also asserted that the CIA "did not tell us they were using that, flat out. And any, any contention to the contrary is simply not true." She had earlier said publicly, on TV, "I can say flat-out, they never told us that these enhanced interrogations were being used." The term, "flat-out" must be scoring well in focus group believability tests since she's using it so often.

Both fellow Democrat and The Obama administration's own CIA director, Leon Panetta, and Mr. Goss (who went on to become the head of the CIA in the Bush administration) both have disputed Speaker Pelosi's account.

In a report to Congress on May 5, Mr. Panetta described the CIA's 2002 meeting with Mrs. Pelosi as "Briefing on EITs including use of EITs on Abu Zubaydah, background on [legal] authorities, and a description of the particular EITs that had been employed."

Mr. Goss says he and Mrs. Pelosi were both informed at the 2002 briefing about the use of the EITs and "on a bipartisan basis, we asked if the CIA needed more support from Congress to carry out its mission." He is backed by CIA sources who say Mr. Goss and Mrs. Pelosi "questioned whether we were doing enough" to extract information.

We also know that Michael Sheehy, then Mrs. Pelosi's top aide on the Intelligence Committee and later her national security adviser, not only attended the September 2002 meeting but was also briefed by the CIA on EITs on Feb. 5, 2003, and told about a videotape of Zubaydah being waterboarded. Is it possible that Mr. Sheehy didn't communicate this to the Speaker? So far, he has not commented publicly about the 2002 or the 2003 meetings.

Pelosi continued to dig herself into a deeper hole today, "Every step of the way the administration was misleading the Congress and that is the issue and that's why we need a truth commission," she said. Under a bombardment of questioning, Pelosi firmly insisted that she was not aware that waterboarding or other enhanced interrogation techniques were being used on terrorism suspects. "I am telling you they told me they approved these and said they wanted to use them but said they were not using waterboarding," she said.

For Nancy Pelosi to be telling the truth, there have to be a lot of liars, including both the present CIA director, a loyal member of Ms. Pelosi's own party, and the prior CIA director. If Mr. Sheehy agrees with the current and former CIA director, Porter Goss, is she going to call him a liar too?

Pelosi has said that she believes that waterboarding, one of the EIT's, is illegal torture, and therefore a crime. If she truly believed this, doesn't she have the responsibility and duty to complain at the time? Does, according to her standards, her not doing so make her an accessory to the crime of torture?

No, it doesn't. But it does make her a liar and therefore unsuitable to be the Speaker of the House, the third in line to the presidency. The nation's safety should not be used for political grandstanding. Let the truth come out.