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).

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.

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.

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.