CIA: Pelosi Briefed on Use of 'Enhanced Interrogations'

[Red Flag 1]

Originally Posted by swpa19

It should prove to be interesting. Keep in mind that Steny Hoyer had already chastised Ms. Palosi for her prior comments, before he changed his view. Mr. Hoyer also felt that HE should have been Speaker of the House.

I look for Mr. Hoyer to quietly prepare the bus for its next mission.

Since it is Pelosi, perhaps an ECO friendly bus...............

RF 1

[The Reaper]

Originally Posted by Red Flag 1

Since it is Pelosi, perhaps an ECO friendly bus...............

RF 1

More likely an US Air Force executive bus that will seat 30 and can cross the country non-stop without stopping to refuel, available 24/7 for Her Highness's exclusive use.

TR

[Box]

Originally Posted by longrange1947

I further predict that the air heads and morons of her constituency will re-elect her, as she will become the darling of the pink moron crowd for taking on the CIA.

I agree.
People would do well to remember that the CIA is being run by a man named Leon Panetta. Panetta may be an ok guy, but he is a "party man" not a "company man". His loyalty lies with the administration not with the reputation and good name of the 'agency'. I doubt he will be at the head of any CIA lynch mob coming to string up the speaker for her assault on the "Liars from Langley" It will be politics as usual... the administration will do its best to help Mr panettas name OUT of the news while the good speaker bows her chest in defiance at the evil spooks from the CIA. Meanwhile loyal party-man (and CIA director) Leon Panetta keeps just enough pressure on the CIA puppet strings to let any REAL fangs from sinking into the good speakers delicate flesh.

just my two cents, I hope I am wrong.

[Abu-Shakra]

Of course! It's everyone's fault but mine. Baghdad Bob thinks Pelosi is FOS.

Maybe Pelosi needs to be waterboarded to get her story straight.

[Sigaba]

Originally Posted by Billy L-bach

I agree.
People would do well to remember that the CIA is being run by a man named Leon Panetta. Panetta may be an ok guy, but he is a "party man" not a "company man". His loyalty lies with the administration not with the reputation and good name of the 'agency'. I doubt he will be at the head of any CIA lynch mob coming to string up the speaker for her assault on the "Liars from Langley" It will be politics as usual... the administration will do its best to help Mr Panetta's name OUT of the news while the good speaker bows her chest in defiance at the evil spooks from the CIA. Meanwhile loyal party-man (and CIA director) Leon Panetta keeps just enough pressure on the CIA puppet strings to let any REAL fangs from sinking into the good speakers delicate flesh.

just my two cents, I hope I am wrong.

Looks like Panetta may be trying to split the difference.

Source is here.

Panetta to CIA employees: We told Pelosi the truth

CIA Director Leon Panetta just sent a stern message to his employees defending the agency against Speaker Nancy Pelosi's criticisms.

His message: We didn't mislead Congress; stay focused on your job.

Panetta's note was sent to reporters via the CIA press office. Here's the key graph:

"Let me be clear: It is not our policy or practice to mislead Congress. That is against our laws and our values. As the Agency indicated previously in response to Congressional inquiries, our contemporaneous records from September 2002 indicate that CIA officers briefed truthfully on the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, describing “the enhanced techniques that had been employed.” Ultimately, it is up to Congress to evaluate all the evidence and reach its own conclusions about what happened."

In some ways, Panetta is doing what any executive would do: He's protecting his people and trying to boost morale for an agency that's under fire. But the political message is much stronger, as you have the a [sic] serious rift now between the most powerful congressional Democrat and one of the top officials in the Obama administration.

Message from the Director: Turning Down the Volume

There is a long tradition in Washington of making political hay out of our business. It predates my service with this great institution, and it will be around long after I’m gone. But the political debates about interrogation reached a new decibel level yesterday when the CIA was accused of misleading Congress.

Let me be clear: It is not our policy or practice to mislead Congress. That is against our laws and our values. As the Agency indicated previously in response to Congressional inquiries, our contemporaneous records from September 2002 indicate that CIA officers briefed truthfully on the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, describing “the enhanced techniques that had been employed.” Ultimately, it is up to Congress to evaluate all the evidence and reach its own conclusions about what happened.

My advice — indeed, my direction — to you is straightforward: ignore the noise and stay focused on your mission. We have too much work to do to be distracted from our job of protecting this country.

We are an Agency of high integrity, professionalism, and dedication. Our task is to tell it like it is — even if that’s not what people always want to hear. Keep it up. Our national security depends on it.

Is Panetta telling his people to stop rolling around in the mud with Pelosi, knowing that others are going at her or he's trying to protect the embattled speaker's reputation by not weighing in more fully?

[Defender968]

Let me be clear: It is not our policy or practice to mislead Congress.

Hmmmm......who else says that, sounds so very familiar....wonder why

If I were a betting man, I'd say that was yet another great political move by the one. Say what you want he is a brilliant political animal.

[Box]

I am truly surprised at the response from Mr Panetta. He may actually be the small glimmer of light that shows there are still a few good eggs left.
Even if it is just administration politics... good on you Mr Panetta for being one of the few people in DC willing to say out loud that essentially "Madam speaker is full crap"

I withdraw my previous comments towards Mr Panetta, again, good on you Mr Panetta, thanks for standing up for your men.
Have a good weekend sir.

[ZonieDiver]

There is a long tradition in Washington of making political hay out of our business. It predates my service with this great institution, and it will be around long after I’m gone. But the political debates about interrogation reached a new decibel level yesterday when the CIA was accused of misleading Congress.

I don't know his motives, or if he is representing his boss in some "agenda" or whatever. All I know is that words DO have meaning, and these words speak volumes to me. There is much to learn from public records about the dereliction of duty of Congress-critters in the run-up to the Iraq war.

When it was popular to be tough...they feined toughness. When that aspect waned, many of them reverted to their natural tendencies. A pox upon them all - those who lie and equivocate - and those colleagues of theirs who refuse to provide date and time that would prove their equivocation and prevarication.

[Defender968]

Originally Posted by Billy L-bach

I am truly surprised at the response from Mr Panetta. He may actually be the small glimmer of light that shows there are still a few good eggs left.
Even if it is just administration politics... good on you Mr Panetta for being one of the few people in DC willing to say out loud that essentially "Madam speaker is full crap"

I withdraw my previous comments towards Mr Panetta, again, good on you Mr Panetta, thanks for standing up for your men.
Have a good weekend sir.

Personally I lean more towards this being a savvy political move rather than a glimmer of a good egg.

The way I see it he had three options. First if Mr. Panetta comes out completely soft and folds to the speaker, he would significantly degrade the credibility of the CIA, he'd personally have even less credibility with his people than he already has, and those who are actually watching would scream politics and the discussion would continue. Conversely if he comes out playing hardball, brings the truth showing that the speaker is lying, she looks real bad, and the discussion continues and is a distraction to the administration, while the agency would come out smelling like roses the Dims would take a pretty big credibility hit as their leader would be proved a liar, I don't think the one would allow that. The last and only other option is to throw this type of semi tough statement out, not really calling Nancy on the carpet while maintaining some semblance of credibility with his people. So he tries to blow a little sunshine up their asses while diffusing the situation the best he can, damage control is all he did IMO.

The fact that “let me be clear” was in the statement leads me to believe the presidents people actually drafted the response, how many times has the one uttered those exact same words, I think the only phrases he’s used more are hope and change!

Just my .02 though, and I’ve been known to be a little bit of a cynic.

[Sigaba]

Originally Posted by ZonieDiver

....There is much to learn from public records about the dereliction of duty of Congress-critters in the run-up to the Iraq war.

When it was popular to be tough...they feined toughness. When that aspect waned, many of them reverted to their natural tendencies. A pox upon them all - those who lie and equivocate - and those colleagues of theirs who refuse to provide date and time that would prove their equivocation and prevarication.

IMO, decades from now, I think the failure of federal legislators to do their jobs and to ask tough questions of the Bush administration will be the third leg to the three legged stool that answers the question "What went wrong?"

[Red Flag 1]

Originally Posted by Sigaba

IMO, decades from now, I think the failure of federal legislators to do their jobs and to ask tough questions of the Bush administration will be the third leg to the three legged stool that answers the question "What went wrong?"

Those who win write the history. IMHO, this should include events well before 9/11. I pray the USA writes this history.

My $.02.

RF 1

[Sigaba]

On what planet was this article written? "Rare stumble"? As Roger Smith would say, "Really?"

Source is here.

May 16, 2009
In Detainee Furor, a Rare Stumble by Pelosi
By CARL HULSE

WASHINGTON — After many failed efforts, Republicans have finally found a weak spot in Nancy Pelosi’s political armor as a fight over detainee interrogations engulfs Ms. Pelosi, Republicans and intelligence officials.

The furor was heightened on Friday when the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Leon E. Panetta, pushed back against an assertion by Ms. Pelosi, a Democrat who is the House speaker, that she had been misled by agency representatives seven years ago about harsh treatment of terrorism suspects, a claim that struck a raw nerve at the spy headquarters.

Mr. Panetta, a former Democratic congressman from California and a longtime associate of Ms. Pelosi, issued a statement that said the agency’s “contemporaneous records from September 2002 indicate that C.I.A. officers briefed truthfully,” a rebuttal of Ms. Pelosi’s claim on Thursday that intelligence officials had lied to her.

The deepening dispute over what Ms. Pelosi was told in September 2002 has challenged her credibility and raised new questions about whether she passed up an early opportunity to expose the Bush administration’s harsh treatment of detainees.

Lawmakers and senior government officials say the public furor could also give momentum to the push for an inquiry into the Bush administration’s interrogation policies as well as into what senior members of Congress knew about the treatment of detainees. In his statement, Mr. Panetta said it would ultimately be “up to Congress to evaluate all the evidence and reach its own conclusions about what happened.”

As for the speaker, she no doubt faces a difficult period. But few think the sharp focus on the interrogation matter is a serious threat to the authority of Ms. Pelosi, a powerful figure who weathered previous Republican assaults with hardly a scratch.

“It is an embarrassment,” said Ross K. Baker, an expert on Congress at Rutgers University, “and clearly nobody wants to be embarrassed, particularly a speaker of the House. But other than that, there is nothing here that threatens her job.”

Ms. Pelosi is not the only one with political exposure. Should any investigation determine that the C.I.A. misled members of Congress, the result could be severely damaging to the agency and to the Republican leaders who have relentlessly pressed the issue against Ms. Pelosi.

Bob Graham, a former Democratic senator from Florida, who as the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee underwent a briefing similar to Ms. Pelosi’s about three weeks after hers, sides with the speaker. He said he recalled a “bland” session.

“I do not have any recollection that day of there being a discussion of something that would have been as neon as waterboarding or other torture techniques,” Mr. Graham said.

He said his confidence in the C.I.A.’s account of the briefings had also been shaken by what he said was an incorrect assertion by the agency that he had been briefed on four dates. Mr. Graham, who famously keeps a detailed record of his daily activities, checked and determined that the agency was wrong about three dates and that he had attended only one session before leaving the Intelligence Committee.

“This is just a small chapter of a long, long book of C.I.A. inaccuracies, particularly in the early part of this decade,” he said.

But Mr. Graham was not present for the briefing with Ms. Pelosi. The only other lawmaker present, Porter J. Goss, then a Republican congressman from Florida who was the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and later became the C.I.A. director, has contradicted her account. He said he and Ms. Pelosi were told that the agency intended to use the harsh methods.

Republicans on Friday continued to dispute Ms. Pelosi’s assertion that at her sole 2002 briefing as a member of the House Intelligence Committee, she was told that the Bush administration had determined waterboarding was legal but that it was not being used.

Senator Christopher S. Bond, Republican of Missouri, a member of the Intelligence Committee, said on the “Today” show on NBC: “I have looked at the underlying materials, not only the records they kept but the cables they sent out to the field. From what was apparently contemporaneous documents, it’s clear that they did tell her.”

The furor surrounding Ms. Pelosi’s claim that she was misled has obscured one undisputed fact about the briefings. The Sept. 4, 2002, session, the first given to anyone in Congress on the so-called enhanced interrogation methods, came weeks after the C.I.A. had started to use the methods. Even if Ms. Pelosi had taken action, it is doubtful it would have averted the firestorm about torture that was to come.

Fellow Democrats say they support the speaker, and they will probably become more united as she faces attacks from polarizing opponents like Newt Gingrich, who lashed out at the speaker on Friday, or faces calls from the right to step down. The Democrats say her predicament shows the perils of classified briefings, which can handcuff those who attend if they hear something objectionable.

Since Ms. Pelosi became speaker in 2007, Republicans have repeatedly sought to undercut her, questioning her use of government aircraft and accusing her of aiding pet interests and of acting high-handedly. But the assaults had gained little traction before this latest episode, and with their fortunes down, Republicans are doing what they can to keep the issue alive.

In Ms. Pelosi’s home state, California, residents say they are having a hard time accepting her account. “I’m very skeptical of what she’s saying, and when she goes to get re-elected, this could really damage her credibility,” said Delphine Langille of San Ramon, one of several people interviewed Friday outside of City Hall in San Francisco.

Mr. Panetta’s message to C.I.A. employees, under the heading “Turning Down the Volume,” appeared to be an effort to calm the dispute between the speaker and the agency and show that despite his outsider status he would stand up for his employees.

In a statement issued Friday evening, Ms. Pelosi also sought to quiet matters.

“My criticism of the manner in which the Bush administration did not appropriately inform Congress is separate from my respect for those in the intelligence community who work to keep our country safe,” she said. “What is important now is to be united in our commitment to ensuring the security of our country.”

Scott Shane contributed reporting from Washington, and Malia Wollan from San Francisco.

The weak spot remains where it has always been: between Ms. Pelosi's ears.

"Credibility" is not a word I've ever associated with Ms. Pelosi.

[alright4u]

Make no mistake, she is lying.

[Utah Bob]

Who You Calling Debriefed?
Taunted by the GOP, Nancy Pelosi throws a punch—at the CIA.
By John DickersonPosted Friday, May 15, 2009, at 10:06 AM ET

Nancy Pelosi is tough. With Republicans already attacking her, she's picked a new, even bigger fight with the CIA. At a press conference Thursday, Pelosi said the CIA lied in the past, is lying in the present, and generally makes a habit of it. "They mislead us all the time," she said. The weaker among us would be content to fight just one foe.
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Pelosi is on the attack because she's been on the defensive. Republicans charge that she's a hypocrite. She wants a truth commission to examine the role of Bush officials who authorized enhanced interrogation techniques (some of which amounted to torture), but she was in the loop when those techniques were first discussed and didn't cry foul.

Pelosi has insisted she was not briefed by the CIA about the use of water-boarding or any enhanced interrogation techniques, but the CIA recently undermined her case. The agency released an account of a September 2002 meeting that the CIA says Pelosi attended and at which those harsh techniques were discussed. Pelosi said the CIA account was wrong and then went a step further. She said briefers in that meeting explicitly said water-boarding was not being used. We now know that at the time Abu Zubaydah had been water-boarded 83 times. Pelosi charged the agency with deliberately misleading Congress as part of the larger effort to mislead the nation in the run-up to the Iraq war.

The reason this new attack on the CIA is such a bold and perhaps very bad idea is that the CIA is very good at these battles. As a senior Bush administration official once put it after losing several rounds of Washington warfare to the CIA, "We brought a knife to a gun fight." Bush administration officials engaged in a protracted fight with the CIA over exaggerated claims the president made in a speech about Saddam Hussein's attempts to buy uranium in Niger. Every time an administration official would assert that it was the CIA's fault that Bush got it wrong, a contradictory piece of evidence would appear in the newspaper, leaked by people within the CIA. Dislike of the agency is perhaps the only thing Speaker Pelosi and Dick Cheney can agree on.

Who is telling the truth in the Pelosi matter? It's hard to know in what is now a classic Washington case of he said/she said. There weren't a lot of people in the key September 2002 meeting who can come forward to corroborate events, though former Democratic Sen. Bob Graham, who was then chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, has backed up Pelosi's criticism of the CIA in an interview with the Huffington Post.

Former Rep. Porter Goss, who attended the meeting with Pelosi, has taken the CIA's side. But he's a Republican who later went on to run the CIA. He's got political reasons to contradict her as part of the GOP's broader attempt to distract attention from a past where Republicans are in far more political and legal danger. And Goss has residual reasons to stick up for the guys who once worked for him.

Current CIA Director Leon Panetta, a Democrat from California who once served with Pelosi in Congress, released a statement that suggested that these techniques were discussed but that also said the agency couldn't be certain. Pelosi didn't help her credibility Thursday when she admitted that despite earlier denials, she did later know water-boarding was being used. Her explanation for the discrepancy: Her previous denials were about what she personally had been briefed on. She learned about water-boarding from a staffer. That kind of parsing is hard to sustain in a public fight. It also raises questions about why, if she was so adamant about torture, she didn't do more at the time. By contrast, when John McCain learned about water-boarding, he did get exercised about it and took measures to stop it.

Yesterday, administration officials and Democratic political veterans were puzzled by Pelosi's gambit. She's put the spotlight on herself and has given weakened Republicans a fight they can enjoy, engage in, and possibly win. They can't put a scratch on the popular president, but Pelosi and the Democratic Congress are not as popular. Normally a politician in Pelosi's position could say she's moving forward to do important business rather than picking at the past, but she and other Democrats are the ones advocating for rummaging through the past.

The escalating mess is exactly why President Obama didn't want a thorough look into the question of torture. Fights like these distract from his effort to get politicians to focus on other matters, and the arguments potentially weaken his party by either undermining its high-road position on torture or making leading Democrats look unsteady, as Pelosi looked during her halting and jittery press conference. As one former senior Bush official put it, "Their real political problem [with investigating torture] is when they look back, they will find many of their own there. This shit storm will leave everyone stinky. Or might just leave their side in deeper doo-doo for the worst political sin: hypocrisy."

At some point the president may be asked what his view of the Pelosi matter is. It's a tricky spot. He doesn't want to get in the middle of a he said/she said debate. If he defends Pelosi, he alienates the CIA. That relationship is already tender because Obama released Bush-era torture memos against the wishes of the CIA, whose agents participated in the torture. On the other hand, if Obama defends the CIA, he undermines his leader in the House and angers her liberal supporters.

At the moment, it looks as though the controversy has put more momentum behind the idea of a truth commission to sort out all of the competing claims. Pelosi renewed her call for one, as did her House counterpart, Minority Leader John Boehner. At the rate the debate is going, perhaps by the time such a commission has started its work Pelosi will have found a third fight to pick.

Source is Here

[grog18b]

...that she really isn't lying, but just plain dumb? I mean really... Some of the things she has said over the years, like the 500,000 Americans that loose their jobs every month... I mean... That's just plain stupid. Watching the videos of her... She looks like she has some kind of mental disorder similar to a cross between Turrette's and Alsheimers. Ever see the one video of BO's speech, and her standing behind him jumping up and down like she had to take a really bad piss?

She just isn't normal... Like when she had the hissy over Holder bringing up the AW ban, and she came out against it saying "It isn't the right time". Yeah, because SHE didn't bring it up... and she's what... 3rd in line for the big chair? God help us if there is an accident.