The controversy regarding Speaker Nancy Pelosi isn’t going away and it isn’t political – she may call it that, and the media may think it is. But it’s about national security. The question is whether Pelosi was informed, at a briefing by intelligence officers on September 4, 2002, that the CIA had used and was using enhanced interrogation techniques – specifically waterboarding – on captured al Qaeda terrorists.br /Prior to her infamous press conference earlier this month, she insisted that the CIA had not told her anytime in 2002 that waterboarding and other enhanced techniques were being used. At the press conference she went beyond this to assert that “the only mention of waterboarding at [the September 2002] briefing was that it was not being employed.”However, CIA director Leon Panetta wrote a memo to CIA employees stating that “our contemporaneous records from September 2002 indicate that CIA officers briefed truthfully on the interrogation of [Al Qaeda terrorist] Abu Zubaydah, describing ‘the enhanced techniques that had been employed.'”But Speaker Pelosi did not confine the question to the reliability of memory. Instead, she made the allegation that the CIA intentionally misled her – misled Congress – and not just once, but routinely. “They mislead us all the time,” she said. In other words, she charged that the CIA, as a matter of policy, violated the law by lying to Congress.Speaker Pelosi’s wildly unbelievable charges require that all good Americans must demand the she step down from being the Speaker of the House, which is second in line (after the VP) to presidential succession. Pelosi has to go!
