Source: http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=326678070127102
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Friday, May 08, 2009 4:20 PM PT
Interrogations: Not since Bill Clinton has there been a bigger fib told by a public official. A report from the director of national intelligence confirms Nancy Pelosi knew waterboarding had already been performed.
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Lying to Congress is a crime. Lying from Congress is not. Otherwise, House Speaker Pelosi would rightfully belong in the same facility that Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff was sent to for being found guilty of having a faulty memory.
Just as Bill Clinton swore he never had sex with that woman, Pelosi wagged her finger at an April press conference and swore she was advised only on the legality of waterboarding — that it might be used but not that it had.
In December 2007, after the Washington Post reported that she had knowledge of these procedures and did not object, Pelosi admitted she'd been "briefed on interrogation techniques the administration was considering using in the future."
When asked about a September 2002 meeting with intelligence officials and then-House Intelligence Committee Chairman Porter Goss, Pelosi proclaimed: "In that or any other briefing . . . we were not, and I repeat were not, told that waterboarding or any of these other enhanced interrogation techniques were used."
How is it then that a memo issued by the director of National Intelligence and the Central Intelligence Agency says the Pelosi-Goss briefing covered EITs, an abbreviation for enhanced interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, a technique successfully used on Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheik Mohammed.
The meeting is described in the 10-page memo as a "briefing on EITs, including the use of EITs on Zubaydah, background on authorities and a description of particular EITs that had been employed." "Had been" is past tense. According to the interrogation memos recently released, Zubaydah was waterboarded in August 2002, a month before Pelosi was told about it.
The memo outlines many other briefings with members of Congress, including Rep. Jane Harman, who became the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee when Pelosi became minority leader.
"Among those being briefed, there was a pretty full understanding of what the CIA was doing," recalls Goss, who chaired the committee from 1997 to 2004 before becoming CIA director. "And the reaction in the room was not just approval, but encouragement."
Congress twice had a chance to specifically proscribe waterboarding, but passed on it.
It could have done so in the Detainee Act of 2005 and the Military Commissions Act of 2006. Instead it passed the buck, settling on opposition to vague "cruel, human and degrading" practices. When Democrats, led by Pelosi, seized control of Congress in 2006, they ignored the subject.
Brendan Daly, a Pelosi spokesman, says Pelosi's recollection of the 2002 meeting is different from the way it was described in the report from the DNI's office.
In a Washington Post op-ed, Goss was left "slack jawed" that any member so briefed could "claim to have not understood that the techniques on which they were briefed were to actually be employed."
"It must be hard," Goss wrote, "for most Americans of common sense to imagine how a member of Congress can forget being told about the interrogation of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed. In that case, though, perhaps it is not amnesia but political expedience."
History, it has been said, is a lie agreed upon. Nancy Pelosi is attempting to rewrite history.
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