PELOSI VS. THE CIA-----IT'S ON!

The Speaker of the House has decided to claim that the CIA lied to her and others in the intel they provided to House intelligence committees while also claiming this is a pattern from the Bush administration's WMD's that were MIA. Nancy Pelosi's weekly press conference had a more than exuberant press corp waiting to hear her pile of excuses for why she remained silent while the CIA performed harsh interrogations on terrorist, (including waterboarding), that were a threat to this nation. S.A Miller at the Washington Times reports that Pelosi's on a mission:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Thursday said the Bush administration "misled Congress" with inaccurate and incomplete information about harsh interrogation techniques for terrorism suspects and denied being briefed by the CIA about them.

"They mislead us all of the time," she said. "They misrepresented every step of the way."

Mrs. Pelosi, California Democrat, has come under fire for criticizing the use of the techniques, despite recently released documents that show she was briefed about them by the CIA in September 2002.

She has become the center of the controversy about the techniques — including the simulated drowning method known as "waterboarding" — as the Democrat-controlled Congress attempts to use the documents to prosecute Bush administration lawyers and other officials over the approval of the methods." link

Charles Krauthammer, on Fox's Special Report gives Pelosi more than a bad "report card":



OUCH!

While Allahpundit at Hot Air has one take on this "assault" on the CIA, Ice Cold, (a very astute commenter) has a slightly different take:

AP, you’re about as wrong on your point concerning leaks as you could possibly be.

The situations and issues and actions are entirely different.

Any CIA leaks now are RESPONSES to an unprovoked, classless, possibly dangerous, and contemptible attack on CIA regarding interrogation methods. And the leaks concern facts - setting the record straight with facts about concrete matters (briefings of Congress on specific topics).

The leaks (and it went way beyond that) that were intended to be damaging to Bush were not a response to anything, they concerned POLICY as well as on-going operations, and they all represented an agency or personnel/former personnel out of their lane, or even acting criminally.

The outing of the SWIFT operation and the NSA surveillance of domestic connections to foreign terror organizations were criminal violations of federal laws by arrogant reckless morons who appointed themselves FISA appeals chamber judges, Galactic Arbiters of What’s Right, and President (with declassifying authority) all in one. There isn’t the slightest similarity to the Pelosi affair, on any aspect in question.

The absurd game of tendentious and silly NIEs intended to preserve the Ba’athist tyranny, er, prevent the Iraq war, or to prevent any effective interference with the Iranian nuclear weapons program was about policy - way out of their lane, not criminal, and repeated only because the Bush Admin. lacked the judgement or guts to publicly humiliate the perps for their absurd and unimpressive “analysis” (this would have paid enormous benefits in national security and making the CIA a more serious agency).

Again, there was no retaliation for an unprovoked assault on the agency for authorized (and successful, and vital) activities by a ridiculous, mendacious, despicable political creature - which is the Pelosi matter in a nutshell.

I see that Theworldisnotenough has seized on the same point about the difference (or one of them) between the two cases.

If anyone around here is going to be concerned, be concerned (no, appalled and sickened) by the mediocrity of so much CIA “analysis”, the politicization (i.e., adherence to brain-dead Beltway mindsets as reflected in the MSM and the Dem party and half the GOP) of so many federal agencies incl. CIA, the collapse of any standards of decency or respect in the public square (from Durbin to Murtha to Pelosi to Reid) concerning life and death matters in time of war, and the cowardice and mediocrity of the GOP (and in the Bush years, perhaps simply the incomprehension) that fails to reject and resist these things and thus lets them become the new normal.................IceCold on May 14, 2009 at 8:05 PM

(as soon as I find IceCold, I'll let him/her know I tend to agree with this)