California Conservative

I knew that Nancy Pelosi was caught in a very sticky web the minute I watched her press conference where she denied being briefed on waterboarding. Based on Paul Kane’s reporting for the Washington Post, I’m certain that Ms. Pelosi will be the news story this entire weekend and well into next week. Here’s the key portion of Mr. Kane’s article:

In a 10-page memo outlining an almost seven-year history of classified briefings, intelligence officials said that Pelosi and then-Rep. Porter Goss (R-Fla.) were the first two members of Congress ever briefed on the interrogation tactics. Then the ranking member and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, respectively, Pelosi and Goss were briefed Sept. 4, 2002, one week before the first anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

The memo, issued by the Director of National Intelligence and the Central Intelligence Agency to Capitol Hill, notes the Pelosi-Goss briefing covered “EITs including the use of EITs on Abu Zubaydah.” EIT is an acronym for enhanced interrogation technique. Zubaydah was one of the earliest valuable al-Qaeda members captured and the first to have the controversial tactic known as water boarding used against him.

It didn’t take Ms. Pelosi’s office to respond to Kane’s article:

In a carefully worded statement, Pelosi’s office said today that she had never been briefed about the use of waterboarding, only that it had been approved by Bush administration lawyers as a legal technique to use in interrogations.

“As this document shows, the Speaker was briefed only once, in September 2002. The briefers described these techniques, said they were legal, but said that waterboarding had not yet been used,” said Brendan Daly, Pelosi’s spokesman.

Mr. Daly should familiarize himself with the meaning of the phrase “including the use of EITs on Abu Zubaydah” because he’ll hear that phrase alot during the next week. Here’s another nail in Ms. Pelosi’s coffin (H/T Gateway Pundit):

The report details a Sept. 4, 2002 meeting between intelligence officials and Pelosi, then-House intelligence committee chairman Porter Goss, and two aides. At the time, Pelosi was the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee.

The meeting is described as a “Briefing on EITs including use of EITs on Abu Zubaydah, background on authorities, and a description of particular EITs that had been employed.”

This is another instance where the coverup is worse than the original incident. Had Ms. Pelosi said that she knew of the interrogations and objected to the techniques used, this might’ve been a one day story. Instead, Ms. Pelosi gift-wrapped a present for the NRCC. It isn’t that the 2010 elections will focus on foreign policy. It’s that they’ll use this incident to portray Ms. Pelosi as not being trustworthy. Unless I miss my guess, I’m betting that they’re putting a web video showing then Speaker-Elect Pelosi promising to have the most transparent, most ethical Congress in history.

One of the questions the press should ask Speaker Pelosi at her next press conference is why she didn’t object like Nancy Harman objected. I’d ask her why she doesn’t want to admit that she didn’t object to EIT’s because she was worried about preventing the next terrorist attack. Do Democrats put a higher priority on being popular with the rest of the world than they put on preventing terrorist attacks? Why are Democrats ashamed of doing whatever it takes to prevent terrorist attacks?

Speaker Pelosi gave the GOP a great gift. The economic tumult has people worried. When people are worried, they start looking for leaders they can trust. Speaker Pelosi suffered a major hit in that category this week.

Technorati Tags: Speaker Pelosi, CIA, Interrogations, Porter Goss, Jane Harman, Terrorist Attacks, al-Qaeda, Abu Zubaydah, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, 9/11

Cross-posted at LetFreedomRingBlog

This entry was posted on Friday, May 8th, 2009 at 12:22 am and is filed under Author: Gary Gross, Intel, Investigations, Pelosi, Terrorism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.