Nancy Pelosi Is Lying

Now that President Obama has teed her up — by releasing documents before he thought out all the possible repercussions (except, he thought, to make his MoveOn crowd happy [as if]) — Nancy Pelosi is yowling loudly no way no how, no siree, au contraire, that she was aware that she and lead Congressional members were explicitly informed about waterboarding. Rep. Pete Hoekstra who was in on the THIRTY meetings informing members of Congress about what was going on, confirms that “they knew and knew in detail exactly what was going on.”

President Obama has rashly opened a huge can of worms, and his motive is disgustingly impure — it was an ill-considered attempt to placate his hard-core left supporters in MoveOn and big money bags George Soros. As Porter Goss writes in “Security Before Politics,” published in today’s Washington Post:

Since leaving my post as CIA director almost three years ago, I have remained largely silent on the public stage. I am speaking out now because I feel our government has crossed the red line between properly protecting our national security and trying to gain partisan political advantage.

Yes, the Obama team had a few meetings about releasing the documents, but apparently not enough meetings, and no one sufficiently looked at the big picture. Now this story has gotten completely away from them, as if the gate’s been opened, releasing a huge herd of wild horses.

Part of being an effective leader is having the wisdom and experience to foresee the “blowback” from one’s options before jumping at a “solution.” I just watched a great episode of “West Wing” in which President Bartlet uses chess games to teach his younger staff about how to make smart moves while foreseeing what is bound to happen. Over and over again, President Bartlet says, “Look at the entire board. Look at the entire board. Look at the entire board.” While these chess games are going on simultaneously in different rooms, Bartlet is also “playing” both China and Taiwan but not revealing to either his ultimate goal. In so doing, by making just the right moves at the right time and never tipping off either country, Bartlet gets the Taiwanese a free election and calms the nerves of the Chinese. And his young staff get an invaluable lesson.

President Obama, by NOT looking at the entire board, has imperiled Speaker Pelosi and every other Democrat who was in on those 30 secret meetings. Goss writes:

A disturbing epidemic of amnesia seems to be plaguing my former colleagues on Capitol Hill. After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, members of the committees charged with overseeing our nation’s intelligence services had no higher priority than stopping al-Qaeda. In the fall of 2002, while I was chairman of the House intelligence committee, senior members of Congress were briefed on the CIA’s “High Value Terrorist Program,” including the development of “enhanced interrogation techniques” and what those techniques were. This was not a one-time briefing but an ongoing subject with lots of back and forth between those members and the briefers.

Today, I am slack-jawed to read that members claim to have not understood that the techniques on which they were briefed were to actually be employed; or that specific techniques such as “waterboarding” were never mentioned. It must be hard for most Americans of common sense to imagine how a member of Congress can forget being told about the interrogations of Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed. In that case, though, perhaps it is not amnesia but political expedience.

Let me be clear. It is my recollection that:

– The chairs and the ranking minority members of the House and Senate intelligence committees, known as the Gang of Four, were briefed that the CIA was holding and interrogating high-value terrorists.

– We understood what the CIA was doing.

– We gave the CIA our bipartisan support.

– We gave the CIA funding to carry out its activities.

– On a bipartisan basis, we asked if the CIA needed more support from Congress to carry out its mission against al-Qaeda.

I do not recall a single objection from my colleagues. They did not vote to stop authorizing CIA funding. And for those who now reveal filed “memorandums for the record” suggesting concern, real concern should have been expressed immediately — to the committee chairs, the briefers, the House speaker or minority leader, the CIA director or the president’s national security adviser — and not quietly filed away in case the day came when the political winds shifted. And shifted they have.

Besides the outright lies of Speaker Pelosi et al., Goss gets into the likely outcome of the carelessly opened “can of worms” as well as the culprit who, sigh, does not have the experience or inclination to be a REAL LEADER, which requires careful forethought and looking FIRST at the “entire board”:

Circuses are not new in Washington, and I can see preparations being made for tents from the Capitol straight down Pennsylvania Avenue. The CIA has been pulled into the center ring before. The result this time will be the same: a hollowed-out service of diminished capabilities. After Sept. 11, the general outcry was, “Why don’t we have better overseas capabilities?” I fear that in the years to come this refrain will be heard again: once a threat — or God forbid, another successful attack — captures our attention and sends the pendulum swinging back. There is only one person who can shut down this dangerous show: President Obama.

Unfortunately, much of the damage to our capabilities has already been done. It is certainly not trust that is fostered when intelligence officers are told one day “I have your back” only to learn a day later that a knife is being held to it. After the events of this week, morale at the CIA has been shaken to its foundation.

We must not forget: Our intelligence allies overseas view our inability to maintain secrecy as a reason to question our worthiness as a partner. These allies have been vital in almost every capture of a terrorist.

The suggestion that we are safer now because information about interrogation techniques is in the public domain conjures up images of unicorns and fairy dust. We have given our enemy invaluable information about the rules by which we operate. … (Read all.)

Here’s Rep. Pete Hoekstra giving Sean Hannity the skinny on how much select members of Congress were told, in THIRTY briefings. (See article.) As Rep. Hoekstra notes, “[T]hey knew and they knew in detail exactly what was going on.”

Columnist Carolyn Lochhead lays out Nancy Pelosi’s trouble with veracity, and John Boehner’s delight in Nancy’s uncomfortable squirming, in the San Francisco Chronicle:

[...]

[A] full-blown battle has opened between House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, and her GOP counterpart, Ohio’s John Boehner about how much top Congressional leaders knew about water boarding in 2002. It is being fueled in part by a timeline released by the Senate Intelligence Committee, chaired by another California Democrat, Dianne Feinstein.

Boehner released news reports from 2007 that seemed to contradict Pelosi, and Pelosi’s office fired back with their own. Boehner said Congressional leaders “received an awful lot of information” about interrogations, and that “not a word was raised at the time, not one word. And I think you’re going to hear more and more about the bigger picture here, that … the war on terror after 9/11 was done in a bipartisan basis on lots of fronts.”

Pelosi spent much of her press conference today addressing questions about what she knew.

The timeline showed that in the fall of 2002 Pelosi and other key members of the House Intelligence Committee were briefed on waterboarding and other interrogation methods Democrats now describe as torture.

We at No Quarter take personal delight in the pickle in which Nancy finds herself. It was she who abetted the plan to make sure that Barack got nominated and that Hillary didn’t. The popular theory is that Nancy wanted someone she could control so she could run the show in Congress.

Well, it turns out that Barack isn’t the only leader who needed to learn how to look at the entire board.

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