Zed.
I’m looking for teh surprise here.

“They misled us every step of the way.”

I could have told you that, most of us in the blogosphere knew that almost everything the Bush Administration said about almost everything was either a flat out lie or a statement parsed to insinuate the lie without actually saying it. Especially anything to do with Iraq.

How naive can you get?

in the face of the Speaker’s clarity we have dunderhead Contessa Brewer (pouting with arms crossed) asking if it was obfuscation -

We didn’t think that the DOJ was the only department politicized by the Bushies, did we? There is a certain segment of the CIA who was always convinced that they were Keiffer Sutherland. Bush just gave them the scope to act on it. Now they have to try to hide back under their rock.

Tell Contessa Brewer to talk to Bob Graham. He says that the CIA not only is lying, but invented two “briefing sessions” that never happened:

http://emptywheel.firedoglake……-sessions/

I liked the presser. For once a D is standing up for herself. She did a powerful job.

YOU took ‘Impeachment” off the table Ms Pelosi and as such YOU pretty much put yourself position you now find yourself – of being accused of being complicit in the high crimes that YOU refused to hold the WH responsible for…. and you did it for political expediency and I cannot feel sorry for you now. You could have done something, you chose to do nothing… you ARE complicit whether you want to accept that or not.

If you see a crime taking place and you just stand there and watch…. get the picture yet Nancy ?

Wow, she really looks unnerved reading this statement. She knows that the game is now afoot. She’s not very used to being courageous.

Thank you, Nancy. Years late, but thank you.

Boner is on the case!

It’s unfortunate that waterboarding has been established as unique and beyond the pale in the canon of “enhanced interrogation techniques” as you can see it gives the speaker of the house an out from the tangled web woven around her.

I will be sure to watch ABC tonight to see if Chuckles mantions this.

pelosi can thank marcy herself for laying the ground work that allows pelosi to say that without loosing credibility

I hope she understands the debt she owes to one marcy wheeler

Well said.

“give em a light and they’ll follow it anywhere”.

cept for they typo! :)

Boner is saying that he can say that since he started attending briefings the CIA has been meticulous and he thought honest. That there were more lawyers than briefers. Recalling however the CIA list of people at the briefings when Pelosi was briefed I remember only two sets of CIA initials.

He’s just mad ’cause his tan got outed. :)

She said; he said; she said; he said. The thugs are doing the only thing they do well……stir the water ’til it’s so dirty there’s no seeing the truth at the bottom of the bowl.

To me Pelosi is parsing. The allegation is that she was told by one of her aides that they were in fact waterboarding people. So in order to convey the impression that she did not know of the waterboarding, she keeps saying she wasn’t ever briefed on that fact by the CIA and categorically denies it.

It is therefore possible (and I believe almost obvious at this point) that she both a) knew that people were being actively waterboarded, and b) that she was never officially briefed by the CIA on that fact. The fact that she was not told directly by the CIA, but rather by an aide, allows her to keep what she continues to think is plausible deniability.

Do we believe her? Or is this a cya move?

I’m not sure. As someone else said-little late Nancy.

Was this done in reaction to Rove’s article?

I still think that she would like to sweep the whole thing under the carpet but her hand is being forced.

I.e., show me where she denies ever being told BY ANYBODY that we were waterboarding people. She doesn’t – she says she was never directly told that BY THE CIA. She’s using the aide as political cover. She knew.

In a country that’s unwilling to uphold the rule of law and hold those responsible for torture accountable what’s a littl lie between different branches of the government? They’re both on the same side, the plutocracy.

She attended a briefing and was told that waterboarding was not being used despite the fact that it had been used 83 times on one detainee. Five months later the staffer attended a meeting in which the wb was admitted to and to which a letter was sent to CIA complaining.

That’s it in a nutshell. When history and truth aren’t on your side, blind everybody with bullshit.

This thing is getting crazier and crazier by the”HOUR”,this is taking us back to the days of”I voted for it,before I voted against it”I am just using that to show how this latest stuff is sounding.I was there but they didn’t say anything,I mean they said something but I didn’t hear it.

New Jane post up: “Democrats for Loan Sharking”

…blind everybody with bullshit.

so that’s why my ears were burning….

And Larry Wilkerson chimes in:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/…..-Bombshell

G’day to ya, friend rat -

And what I should have tacked on to that is that the thugs *know* the so-called MSM will eat. it. up; lets ‘em fill up the 24/7 drooling, “food fight! food fight!“

Here is one of my favorite quotes to that effect. From an episode of The Simpsons:

Friends, the press and the government are in bed together in an embrace so intimate and wrong, they could spoon on a twin mattress and still have room for Ted Koppel. Journalists used to question the reasons for war and expose abuse of power. Now, like toothless babies, they suckle on the sugary teat of misinformation and poop it into the diaper we call the 6:00 News. Demand more of your government. Demand more of your press.
-Kent Brockman

May I add to that,very well put by the way:

We have too many high sounding words, and too few actions that correspond with them.
Abigail Adams (1744 – 1818), letter to John Adams

Pelosi is a lying through teeth. Does anyone on this blog think she is honest?

It has always been that way. Talk is cheap (or so I’ve been told).:-)

I don’t doubt that at all. I absolutely agree that the CIA is lying about what was said at that briefing. But I also think she’s being slightly deceptive about what she knew and when she knew it by keeping the focus on official briefings of the CIA.

You took the words right out of my mouth.

Now, for political expediency, Nancy is trying to get ahead of the bus the CIA is trying to toss her under.

Better late than never, I suppose.

It just continues to baffle me that so many people are leaping to Pelosi’s defense on this issue. It’s perfectly obvious from her comments today that she did indeed know of the actual use of waterboarding immediately after her aide was briefed in Feb 2003. She says nothing to dispute that, and indeed basically implies it when she says her own obligation to deal with the issue was somehow covered by the letter Harman wrote.

So what is the difference between being informed in Oct 2002 vs Feb 2003? Only whether Pelosi’s “objection” was somehow adequately expressed by Harman’s letter — in which of course Pelosi’s own name never came up.

On the face of it, that claim is absurd. Her assertion that it would have been somehow inappropriate for her to express her own independent objection, or to have her own name brought up in Harman’s letter, is a complete fabrication on her part. The only thing that prevented such an action in the face of clear instances of the use of torture and of a war crime is her own abject cowardice.

Can we admit to that fact ourselves? The fact that Republicans are morally depraved does not imply that some Democrats aren’t repulsive cowards.

Indeed. I hope I was making my point clear enough. Pelosi effectively states she’s got no problem with “enhanced interrogation techniques” if they don’t include waterboarding. I for one have a problem with the use of anything the CIA might call an “enhanced interrogation technique”. We’re talking about a class of actions that does not exclude waterboarding.

If the current speaker didn’t understand what was meant by “enhanced interrogation techniques” way back when it was critical to know, then she should’ve find out straightaway.

Pelosi may have not been complicit, but her behavior and that of other Democrats involved were not exactly profiles in courage.

Told waterboarding would be legal, though assured it wouldn’t be employed? She concluded that we needed to elect a new leadership… damn right. Then she did hear that the techniques were being used, but she wasn’t the ranking members anymore. She worked hard to get the GOP voted out of power. I believe more could have been done.

Still, I’m happy to see Pelosi get this out there, and hopefully out of the way, as this is another distraction from where the real scandal lies: with the Executive Branch as it ran under Bush, and on how DoD and CIA still operate today under the Army Field Manual’s Appendix M (which no politician, I’d note, ever mentions).

Denny Hastert was the republican Speaker of the House in 2002 & 2003, so what the hell did he do when he found about waterboarding? Huh? Nothing! Just spent his days covering up the crimes of the Bush Regime!

Actually, in the one and only briefing she got…waterboarding was not mentioned. She learned of the waterboarding in 2003 when Jane Harman wrote a letter of disgust and through her staffer who attended a briefing around the same time for her.

Sometimes a thing begins and the dynamic just carries it and people along. I trust Pelosi and expect we’ll find it was some politicization at the CIA by the Bushies. One more nail in the coffin.