What it is ain’t exactly clear. Leon Panetta, Once Bill Clinton’s Chief of Staff and currently Obama’s head of the CIA fired back – point blank – at Nancy Pelosi for charging that the CIA lied to her. This is calling Pelosi a liar, flat out:
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.
There is no cover for Pelosi on this one. She just did herself a lot of damage. If the Executive branch is hitting her this hard, they are doing so for some reason.
It is not clear what is going on right now, but there is obviously a power play in progress. This is now Democrat on Democrat. Pelosi appears to be on the ropes, if not down for the count. She is being publicly humiliated for a reason.
The why, I cannot tell you.
“She is being publicly humiliated for a reason.”
She has always been a fool and the Democrats do not tolerate her type of stupidity forever. She has become a serious public embarrassment, so under the wheels of the bus she must go.
I can guess why: Obama is all about the acquiring, expansion, and holding of power. He made a mistake with the release of the memos and his waffling over a witch hunt, and it hurt him politically and with the agency.
Meanwhile, Nancy way overplayed her hand, calling for truth commissions and sticking with her various stories, even though the WaPo had shown back in 2007 that she had been briefed on waterboarding – and had supported it. Now she’s painted a great big target on her back. And Obama is aiming at that target.
This situation does two things for him: it allows him to repair his relations somewhat with the agency by backtracking on the prosecutions and letting Panetta act as Obama’s proxy to humiliate Nancy publicly. Second, this seriously weakens or maybe even eliminates a rival for power in the Democratic Party. Nancy had already made it clear she wanted the White House to deal with the Democrat caucus through her, which no President would accept. Now he ha a chance to break her, and he’s taking it.
They’re not about to let a good crisis go to waste.
So if it’s not the policy of the CIA to lie to Congress and they didn’t lie to Nancy Pelosi in 2002 about waterboarding, did they also not lie to George Bush about what they thought they knew about WMD in Iraq?
“…did they also not lie to George Bush about what they thought they knew about WMD in Iraq?”
Lenin’s Rules, #22 (…b)
(i): All mistakes, poorly phrased statements or simple stupidity that might assist the Right are “Lies”. With a capital L.
(ii): If some similar thing assists the Left then it is complete truth, a scientific consensus, established science or such similar phrase.
(iii): It remains so until such time as it is obviously and demonstrably wrong and even the stupidest peasant or party hack knows it. It then disappears, it was never said, and never supported by any person of he Left, ever.
Obama has clear goals and agendas in the domestic area…nothing he is doing is unplanned. In fact I think all of the “mistakes” _are_ planned and have been for a while.
However he was less then prepared for the foreign area and said and believed some things that the reality of foreign relations…an area he can’t game…altered. Now he has to silence the Medea Benjamin wing of the Democrat Party to deal with that reality. The destruction of leader of the Kook Fringe will send a strong message to them. He has enough on his plate getting America socialized without having to deal with the Nutz Rootz as well.