Source:

The pollster for the House GOP leadership has conducted a poll to determine the effectiveness of one of the GOP’s leading attacks on Nancy Pelosi - that she wasn’t being truthful when she claimed the CIA lied to her about torture.

The poll, which I obtained from a source, found that it may be working. People believe that the CIA didn’t mislead Pelosi by a wide margin, 49%-27%. (more…)

Ben Cunningham:

Link

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National Journal:

In the latest National Journal Congressional Insiders Poll, 71% (24) of the 34 House and Senate Dems surveyed said that Speaker Nancy Pelosi “hurt herself a little” in how she’s handled the CIA waterboarding controversy. She said the intelligence agency had misled her when its representatives briefed her in 2002 on the use of harsh interrogation techniques on terrorist detainees. After Pelosi’s charge, CIA director Leon Panetta said that the CIA briefers had not misled her. Only 12% (four) of the Insiders said she “hurt herself a lot.” At the same time, 12% (four) said she “helped herself a little” by taking on the issue. Another 6% (two) of the Insiders said that Pelosi had neither helped nor hurt herself in how she’s handed the controversy.

AP:

WASHINGTON (AP) - House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Friday she won’t talk any more about her charge that the CIA lied in 2002 about using waterboarding on terrorism suspects.

“I have made the statement that I’m going to make on this,” she told reporters at a Capitol Hill news conference. “I don’t have anything more to say about it. I stand by my comment.”

But Republicans aren’t letting this one slide.

The Hill:

Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.) took the opportunity Wednesday to defend House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who has come under fire in recent weeks over a controversy surrounding when she was told of the use of enhanced interrogation techniques being used by the CIA.

“The CIA has a very bad record when it comes to - I was about to say ‘candid’; that’s too mild - to honesty,” Specter, a former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a lunch address to the American Law Institute. He cited misleading information about the agency’s involvement in mining harbors in Nicaragua and the Iran-Contra affair.

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Pelosi:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has “stepped in it” by accusing the CIA of lying to her, Republican National Chairman Michael Steele charged on Sunday.

“She has put the Democratic Party in a position where the question for me is does the president support Nancy Pelosi’s version of what happened, or the CIA director’s version of what happened,” Steele said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

“Nancy Pelosi has stepped in it big time,” he added. “You have the speaker of the House saying that she wasn’t told, that she doesn’t have a clue, and the evidence contradicts that.”

Redstate:

GOP leader: Pelosi should show proof or apologize

WASHINGTON (CNN) - A key Republican leader demanded Sunday that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi produce evidence to back up her assertion that she was misled by the CIA on the use of so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

[snip]

“Lying to the Congress of the United States is a crime,” House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

“If the speaker is accusing the CIA and other intelligence officials of lying or misleading the Congress, then she should come forward with evidence and turn that over to the Justice Department so they be prosecuted. And if that’s not the case, I think she ought to apologize to our intelligence professionals around the world.”

Jim Geraghty at NRO:

In an effort to defuse the crisis, Nancy Pelosi offers a statement clarifying that when she said earlier in the week that the CIA lies to Congress “all the time,” she really meant to express her “great respect for the dedicated men and women of the intelligence community who are deeply committed to the safety and security of the American people.”

Video at Real Clear Politics:

Columnist Charles Krauthammer on Nancy Pelosi’s statement today: “The charge that the C.I.A. lied to her is extremely serious one. She is now at war with the C.I.A., and it has the means by leaking selectively of destroying her, and I suspect it will do that.”

Wired:

It’s part of a sculpture called Kryptos, created by DC artist James Sanborn. He got the commission in 1988, when the CIA was constructing a new building behind its original headquarters. The agency wanted an outdoor installation for the area between the two buildings, so a solicitation went out for a piece of public art that the general public would never see. Sanborn named his proposal after the Greek word for hidden. The work is a meditation on the nature of secrecy and the elusiveness of truth, its message written entirely in code.

Almost 20 years after its dedication, the text has yet to be fully deciphered. A bleary-eyed global community of self-styled cryptanalysts-along with some of the agency’s own staffers-has seen three of its four sections solved, revealing evocative prose that only makes the puzzle more confusing. Still uncracked are the 97 characters of the fourth part (known as K4 in Kryptos-speak). And the longer the deadlock continues, the crazier people get.

Yael Abouhalkah, Star editorial board member:

The more House Speaker Nancy Pelosi talks about torture, the worse her credibility looks.

Now Pelosi has picked a fight with the CIA, implying the agency is making her look bad by releasing information about meetings on torture she attended years ago.

Sorry, but Pelosi has made herself look like an inept congressional leader all by herself.

It now appears clear that, as Pelosi finally acknowledged, she knew almost six years ago that the CIA was torturing detainees with waterboarding.

Jim Geraghty:

Over at RealClearPolitics, they’ve posted the video of White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs not touching Pelosi’s accusation with a ten-foot pole, emphasizing that the president is “keeping the American people safe by looking forward.” When Major Garrett emphasizes that this is a serious charge, Gibbs says he won’t honor the invitation to get into the middle of that fight.

The elected official third in line to the presidency has accused the CIA of repeated crimes, and the Agency has responded by essentially calling this official a liar. And the president’s representative tells the public he has nothing to say on the matter.

This is, essentially, voting “present.”

Redstate:

I told you.

I damned well told you.

Rendition is back, you pro-torturing, posturing, hypocritical Leftist fools:

Obama preserves renditions as counter-terrorism tool
The role of the CIA’s controversial prisoner-transfer program may expand, intelligence experts say.

Under executive orders issued by Obama recently, the CIA still has authority to carry out what are known as renditions, secret abductions and transfers of prisoners to countries that cooperate with the United States.

Current and former U.S. intelligence officials said that the rendition program might be poised to play an expanded role going forward because it was the main remaining mechanism — aside from Predator missile strikes — for taking suspected terrorists off the street.

The rendition program became a source of embarrassment for the CIA, and a target of international scorn, as details emerged in recent years of botched captures, mistaken identities and allegations that prisoners were turned over to countries where they were tortured.

[snip]

But the Obama administration appears to have determined that the rendition program was one component of the Bush administration’s war on terrorism that it could not afford to discard.

And when I say “back” I mean that it’s going to become the damned default option for detainees. You howled when we tried to go with an unlawful detainee designation to handle these cases; you shrieked when we set up Gitmo; and you’d whine if we shot them out of hand. The only thing left is to hand these sons of bitches over to countries without our Bill of Rights and hope that this is enough.

There’s a big hole in the ground in Manhattan that says that it won’t be. But back to the matter at hand:

• Mark Kleiman. Obama supporter? Then you are now officially pro-torture.
• Andrew Sullivan. Obama supporter? Then you are now officially pro-torture.
• Hillary* Bok. Obama supporter? Then you are now officially pro-torture.
• Glenn Greenwald. Obama supporter? Then you are now officially pro-torture.
• Kevin Drum. Obama supporter? Then you are now officially pro-torture.
• Duncan Black. Obama supporter? Then you are now officially pro-torture.
• Markos Moulitsas. Obama supporter? Then you are now officially pro-torture.
• Jerome Armstrong. Obama supporter? Then you are now officially pro-torture.
• Matt Stoller. Obama supporter? Then you are now officially pro-torture.
• All the damned rest of you on the Online Left. Every single one of you who supported Obama. You are now officially pro-torture.

Weekly Standard:

Does anyone doubt that this will be a total sham? It will allow the Senate Democrats to “investigate” the evidence they want to look at without considering the national security ramifications. Without having to make a judgment on whether or not the officials broke the law, the Senate Democrats avoid all of the sticky issues concerning whether or not questionable, but not necessarily unlawful, actions were necessary to protect the country. It allows them to cherry-pick the story, present it in a light that is most favorable to them, feeds the base, and keeps alive a “Blame America/Bush/Republicans” storyline indefinitely.

There are other investigations into detention policies that may or may not bear on the substantive issues, but this one has all of the appearances of being a political operation.