Obama's CIA director: Pelosi a liar:

Subject: Obama''s CIA director: Pelosi a liar: Sat May 16, 2009 9:27 am

CIA director says Pelosi received the truth

By Sam Youngman

Posted: 05/15/09 02:19 PM [ET]

CIA Director Leon Panetta challenged House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s accusations that the agency lied to her, writing a memo to his agents saying she received nothing but the truth.

Panetta said that "ultimately, it is up to Congress to evaluate all the evidence and reach its own conclusions about what happened."

Pelosi (D-Calif.) infuriated Republicans this week when she said in a news conference that she was "misled" by CIA officials during a briefing in 2002 about whether the U.S. was waterboarding alleged terrorist detainees.

Panetta, President Obama's pick to run the clandestine agency and President Clinton's former chief of staff, wrote in a memo to CIA employees Friday that "CIA officers briefed truthfully on the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, describing 'the enhanced techniques that had been employed,'" according to CIA records.

"We are an agency of high integrity, professionalism and dedication," Panetta said in the memo. "Our task is to tell it like it is — even if that’s not what people always want to hear. Keep it up. Our national security depends on it."

In the pep talk-style memo titled "Turning Down the Volume," Panetta encourages CIA employees to return to their normal business and not to be distracted by the shout-fest Pelosi's remarks created.

"My advice — indeed, my direction — to you is straightforward: Ignore the noise and stay focused on your mission," Panetta wrote. "We have too much work to do to be distracted from our job of protecting this country."

In what may be the most critical moment of her speakership, Pelosi is under fire about what she knew of the enhanced interrogation techniques used by the Bush administration and when she knew it.

At the same news conference where she accused the CIA of misleading her on the topic, Pelosi acknowledged for the first time
that she knew in 2003 that terrorism suspects were waterboarded. She
said she learned that from an aide who sat in on a briefing in February 2003.

For weeks, Pelosi had dodged questions about what she knew about waterboarding and when she knew it. Republicans have called her a hypocrite for criticizing techniques as "torture" when she tacitly agreed to the practices after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. At least one lawmaker — Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) — called on Pelosi Friday to step down as Speaker.

At the same time, liberal groups could question why she didn't push back harder against the Bush administration. Pelosi defended herself for not speaking out at the time about information disclosed in a classified briefing. Asked why she didn't co-sign a formal objection by Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.), who attended the briefing with Pelosi aide Mike Sheehy, Pelosi said any objection would have done little good.

"No letter could change the policy," she said on May 14 at a news conference. "It was clear we had to change the leadership in Congress and in the White House. That was my job, the Congress part."

Number of posts : 2156 Location : Arizona Registration date : 2008-11-18

Subject: Re: Obama's CIA director: Pelosi a liar: Tue May 19, 2009 4:31 pm

........say now, IMHO it is time to get out the politico lie detector for our public servants. What say You? jocolor

Cheers,bgates.

Subject: Re: Obama's CIA director: Pelosi a liar: Tue May 19, 2009 4:41 pm

Pelosi's self torture.

REVIEW & OUTLOOKMAY 18, 2009
Pelosi's Self-Torture
The speaker is engulfed by her own game of political retribution.
Given House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's acknowledged skill at torturing the Bush Administration in recent years, it no doubt afforded her critics some pleasure yesterday to watch her twist in the wind in front of the press over what she knew and when about the CIA's terrorist interrogations. With mockery even from Jon Stewart on Comedy Central, Mrs. Pelosi has turned herself into a spectacle about a subject that she and fellow Democrats had themselves reduced to a spectacle of demagogic accusation and blame, repeatedly threatening to put Bush officials in the dock for "condoning torture."

Permit us, then, to reel in this travesty and attempt to put both Speaker Pelosi and her targets in the Bush Administration into perspective. No, better yet, let Speaker Pelosi's California colleague, Senator Dianne Feinstein, do it.

Asked this week about Mrs. Pelosi's variable recollections, Senator Feinstein, who chairs the Intelligence Committee, responded: "I think it's a tempest in a teapot really to say, Well, Speaker Pelosi should have known all of this, she should have stopped this, she should have done this or done that. I don't want to make an apology for anybody, but in 2002, it wasn't 2006, '07, '08 or '09. It was right after 9/11, and there were in fact discussions about a second wave of attacks."

Indeed there were discussions about a second wave of attacks in 2002. In an interview two years ago, former CIA Director George Tenet said of that post-attack period: "I've got reports of nuclear weapons in New York City, apartment buildings that are going to be blown up, planes that are going to fly into airports all over again."

It was precisely in this atmosphere, months after the initial, horrific attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, that the CIA asked the Justice Department for legal guidance on the now-famous "EITs," or enhanced interrogation techniques at the center of this current tempest.

Bush lawyers such as John Yoo and Jay Bybee produced memorandums carefully setting out the legal limits of what the CIA could do. Also in 2002, the CIA began the briefings of Congress on these interrogations that now haunt Speaker Pelosi.

If Washington were still able to conduct a national-security policy fitting the world's lone superpower, the Feinstein standard would apply to both Nancy Pelosi and the Bush officials. Instead, Congressional Democrats, unable to let go of their long Bush obsession, persist in calling for a Truth Commission, as did Ms. Pelosi herself yesterday in her prepared statement.

Amid her rope-a-dope session with a suddenly pugnacious press corps, Speaker Pelosi said one other thing that deserves attention by people still hoping to save Washington from itself. She suggested that we "must review" the National Security Act of 1947 with an eye toward giving "larger numbers of Congress" access to classified briefings. This in the interest of "proper oversight."

Is she serious? The mess that now engulfs her and other Democrats can be solved by giving more Congressfolk access to the nation's most sensitive secrets? Only a Member of Congress could conclude that you can enhance political accountability by making it more diffuse.

Back in the 1970s, Congress in the spectacle of the Church-Pike hearings pilloried the CIA for being what Senator Frank Church called a "rogue elephant on the rampage." That exercise, it is now widely acknowledged, damaged U.S. intelligence-gathering for a generation.

Speaker Pelosi, John Conyers, Carl Levin and their supporters are now close to repeating this destructive exercise with hearings intended to be little more than bear-baitings of the defeated Bush Administration. President Obama in his fashion tries to split the difference by asserting that the CIA interrogators will somehow be fenced off from any such exercise while leaving the door open to prosecution of those who wrote the legal opinions.

This Administration uses the word "responsibility" a lot, and it would improve the charged political atmosphere of Washington considerably if senior officials there took the idea more seriously. Speaker Pelosi and other senior Members of Congress were brought into the complex loop of the post-September 11 world with a long series of CIA briefings, as the law requires. Now, when disclosure of the details of those briefings undermines the Democrats' political game, Mrs. Pelosi tries to dump responsibility back onto the CIA. Yesterday she even said the agency "gave me inaccurate and incomplete information." So CIA officials now led by Obama appointee Leon Panetta are lying. No wonder this draws the ridicule of comedians.

Whatever one's politics may be, there has to be some recognition that Washington -- the U.S. government -- simply can't function if it is endlessly entangled in the exquisitely argued, one might say absurd, blame-games that she and some Democrats are running against former Bush officials, and that now threaten the political standing of the Speaker herself.

Barack Obama won the election and as President he now has a government to run. With that responsibility comes the necessity to make difficult decisions, as those he has made on prisoner photos and military tribunals attest. If he is to succeed, he needs a capital city of responsible partners, not a running circus with the Speaker of the House at the center, blaming everyone else as she flees from any responsibility for what she heard and did.