Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Who to Trust -- Pelosi or the CIA?

By Jason Leopold
May 20, 2009

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is under fire for complaining that the CIA misled her in classified briefings about the Bush administration’s abusive treatment of “war on terror” detainees. Republicans and many media pundits have accused Pelosi of scapegoating the CIA for her failure to protest those techniques in a timely fashion.

Read on.

2 comments:

Florence Chan said...

This whole Republicans-vs-Pelosi-vs-CIA episode is bizarre and is beginning to resemble the Japanese movie Rashomon except that the characters in the movie at least had legitimate reasons for presenting their own stories.

First, it's bewildering why the Republicans are so excited about rebutting Pelosi. If torture worked and it's exempt from the Geneva Conventions, whether Congress knew in advance would not matter.

Second, I don't understand why Pelosi cared so much about whether people thought she had been briefed. Did it matter? Wouldn't the result (i.e., people being tortured) have been the same whether or not she had been briefed? After all she was the one who insisted that impeachment be off the table unless "somebody had a crime that the President had committed." If she couldn't see a crime the president committed, would she be able to detect anything that's illegal?

Anonymous said...

In reference to the title - neither one really.

But the CIA has a tremendous capacity to cause harm on a world wide scope. The speaker of the House doesn't