Print
E-mail
Proof Positive Pelosi, Other Democrat Leaders Are Liars
The Advocate
By Herb Denenberg, The Bulletin
I have to thank Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., the speaker of the House, for lies that are so obvious you can prove she’s lying by the very words out of her own mouth.
Take her recent comments on the now famous memos on enhanced interrogation, mistakenly referred to by most Democrats as the torture memos. I thank Ms. Pelosi, as her lying is so blatant and obvious that investigations will not be necessary to know for sure that she is lying.
There have been many calls for disclosure of the minutes at which Rep. Pelosi and other congressional leaders were briefed on enhanced interrogation techniques. But that should be unnecessary, as Ms. Pelosi is such an inept liar. Let me explain.
Here are Ms. Pelosi’s words: “In that or any other briefing …we were not, and I repeat, we were not told that waterboarding or any of these other enhanced interrogation techniques were used. What they did tell us is that they had some legislative counsel ... opinions that they could be used.”
Assuming she is telling the truth in that statement, it would be inconceivable if Ms. Pelosi and other top Democrats who were briefed heard the Justice Department thought it was perfectly legal to torture captured terrorists and that she or other Democrats would not have taken swift action, complained up and down the line, and launched investigations.
Surely, she would have spoken up in protest as she mistakenly thought that was torture. She wants us to believe that because the Department of Justice people who did the briefing said torture techniques were legal, but the CIA had not yet used them, that no action was necessary or possible.
If Ms. Pelosi and the other Democrats thought the government had decided torture was legal (i.e., torture in their eyes), why did she assume they were being briefed on the legality of torture? Was it just a seminar in law, perhaps for the continuing legal education most states require of lawyers? Get real, Ms. Pelosi: You knew if you were briefed on torture techniques, then there was a clear intent to use them. You also know if you really thought the techniques were illegal torture, you would have spoken up. This is the classic case of approval and consent by silence. Now she’s making up a story to justify her previous silence.
Even if we assume for the sake of argument the Department of Justice was just taking them on a theoretical excursion into the law of torture, Ms. Pelosi and the other Democrats would still have protested. Recall all their rhetoric on how torture is against all the values America prizes and that practicing torture would place us on the level of the Islamofascist barbarians.
Many of the defenders of the release of the torture memos, mainly Democrats, argue the release of the torture memos caused no harm as the information in them was already well-known and well-publicized. That argument cuts against the Pelosi claim that somehow she really didn’t know torture was actually being used and thought it was only something legal opinions had approved. According to her own defenders, every informed person knew that these enhanced interrogation techniques were being used.
But what did the group do? According to reports, two actually questioned whether the proposed techniques were strong enough to get the needed information from the terrorists. In other words, there was clear approval of the proposed techniques and some wanted even more aggressive questioning.So I suggest if anyone believes Ms. Pelosi’s story, they better get in line to buy the Brooklyn Bridge (which incidentally was saved from destruction by terrorists by a combination of wiretapping and waterboarding, as related by Dick Morris, covered in part in his book Fleeced.).
Now if you still think Ms. Pelosi is telling the truth, her account of what happens gets even more incredible. As the senior Democratic member of the House Intelligence Committee in 2002, even if full disclosure of torture was made, she recently made another preposterous claim: “They don’t come in to consult … They come in to notify… you can’t change what they’re doing.”
I take it back. That statement is not just preposterous … it is idiotic. Congress has always exercised oversight over the CIA and all other federal government agencies. Ms. Pelosi’s claim that Congress is powerless in the face of government abuse has to be one of the biggest lies ever told. This is contradicted by the history of Congress acting on intelligence matters and all other government activity. It is contradicted by common knowledge and common sense. If Ms. Pelosi believes Congress is powerless she may not be lying. She may just be an idiot, and if she wants to take the idiot defense, I would be the last to question her on that.
The phony claim that Congress is without power means that the briefings were just an academic waste of time. But if anyone still wonders whether Congress “can’t change what they’re doing,” you should have a small dose of history. It is covered in an excellent editorial in Investor’s Business Daily (April 27, 2009) headlined, “Pelosi’s Claims of Powerlessness: Oversight: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s contention that she and other Democrats were not told about waterboarding terrorists is dubious enough. Her claim that they could do nothing anyway is blatantly false.”
L. Britt Snider, Bill Clinton’s inspector general of the CIA, staff director of the 9/11 Congressional Inquiry, and investigator for the congressional committee that probed Richard Nixon’s intelligence abuses calls the CIA “perhaps the most scrutinized agency in the executive branch.”
Investor’s Business Daily gives a series of examples of Congress taking action when it objected to the CIA doing something. One of the most famous examples involved a briefing at the White House for intelligence committee leaders on the Iran arms-for-hostages initiative in mid-November 1986.
By the end of the year, there were seven investigations that were launched on what finally became known as the Iran-Contra affair. Some 300,000 documents were examined, more than 500 witnesses were interviewed, and there were more than 40 days of congressional hearings on the subject. And Ms. Pelosi says Congress has no power.
To make oversight even easier, in 1989, an office of CIA inspector general was established. According to Mr. Snider, who wrote the book, The Agency & The Hill: CIA’s Relationship with Congress, 1946-2004, this gave the oversight committees “a place they could go within the Agency to ask for oversight inquiries that exceed the committees’ own capabilities.
This was even clarified further by the 1992 Intelligence Organization Act. It specified the CIA director’s responsibility to provide intelligence to Congress that is, in the words of the law itself, “timely, objective, independent of political considerations, and based upon all sources available to the intelligence community.”
Another example of congressional oversight and power in action occurred after hearing testimony of CIA misconduct in Guatemala. Both Senate and House intelligence committees investigated. The CIA inspector general also investigated. He followed the committees’ request and examined all agency knowledge of human rights abuses by any CIA actions.
Again, according to Mr. Snider, these investigations led to major changes. They included the CIA’s setting up “on its own initiative, a systematic notification process to protect against another failure to notify Congress of significant information concerning its operations.”
This is all clinched, writes Investor’s Business Daily, by the words of former CIA director of congressional affairs, John Moseman, who in describing this process said of Congress: “They wouldn’t come back to us anymore when something went wrong and claim they’d never been told about it. If they had a problem with something, then it was up to them to let us know about it.”
So Rep. Pelosi, Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., former Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., or other Democrats knew they could and should go to the CIA with their objections, if they had any. They did not, and that demonstrates they had no objections.
The Investor’s Business Daily piece concludes, “The speaker [Nancy Pelosi] and her fellow top liberal Democrats were not powerless, as she now claims. But they were, and remain gutless.” And I’d add, they were not only gutless, but those Democrats who now criticize the torture memos are world-class hypocrites and liars. They will not produce the minutes of the briefings because that will just be further proof of the obvious — that Ms. Pelosi is a serial liar. In addition, if she thought she was powerless as a member of Congress, she is a total incompetent and should resign. If she doesn’t know about congressional oversight, her ignorance exceeds all measurement. It would be great if she could be impeached, but incompetence is not a ground of impeachment nor is congenital lying. If they were, the ranks of Congress would be decimated.
And I should clear up a few points. What the Democrats call torture is not torture. It involves techniques applied to our own military during training. These techniques are used at the Virginia Military Institute. And I suspect that some fraternity hazing would come close to the Democrat’s definition of torture. One of the techniques of torture was putting a caterpillar in a closed space with terrorists. That isn’t torture (except for the caterpillar).
As Ralph Reid noted, he was sleep deprived during his college exam periods, and he didn’t consider that torture. I don’t think it’s torture, either.
Furthermore, if I thought torture would save New York or Los Angeles from being destroyed by a terrorist with a weapon of mass destruction, I’d vote for torture. However, I’d be against torture if the city about to be destroyed were Washington, D.C. And my only wish is that the Obama administration and the Democrats would have as much concern for the safety of Americans as they have sensitivity for the feelings of terrorists.
Herb Denenberg is a former Pennsylvania Insurance Commissioner, Pennsylvania Public Utility Commissioner, and professor at the Wharton School. He is a longtime Philadelphia journalist and consumer advocate. He is also a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of the Sciences. His column appears daily in The Bulletin. You can reach him at advocate@thebulletin.us.
Take her recent comments on the now famous memos on enhanced interrogation, mistakenly referred to by most Democrats as the torture memos. I thank Ms. Pelosi, as her lying is so blatant and obvious that investigations will not be necessary to know for sure that she is lying.
There have been many calls for disclosure of the minutes at which Rep. Pelosi and other congressional leaders were briefed on enhanced interrogation techniques. But that should be unnecessary, as Ms. Pelosi is such an inept liar. Let me explain.
Here are Ms. Pelosi’s words: “In that or any other briefing …we were not, and I repeat, we were not told that waterboarding or any of these other enhanced interrogation techniques were used. What they did tell us is that they had some legislative counsel ... opinions that they could be used.”
Assuming she is telling the truth in that statement, it would be inconceivable if Ms. Pelosi and other top Democrats who were briefed heard the Justice Department thought it was perfectly legal to torture captured terrorists and that she or other Democrats would not have taken swift action, complained up and down the line, and launched investigations.
Surely, she would have spoken up in protest as she mistakenly thought that was torture. She wants us to believe that because the Department of Justice people who did the briefing said torture techniques were legal, but the CIA had not yet used them, that no action was necessary or possible.
If Ms. Pelosi and the other Democrats thought the government had decided torture was legal (i.e., torture in their eyes), why did she assume they were being briefed on the legality of torture? Was it just a seminar in law, perhaps for the continuing legal education most states require of lawyers? Get real, Ms. Pelosi: You knew if you were briefed on torture techniques, then there was a clear intent to use them. You also know if you really thought the techniques were illegal torture, you would have spoken up. This is the classic case of approval and consent by silence. Now she’s making up a story to justify her previous silence.
Even if we assume for the sake of argument the Department of Justice was just taking them on a theoretical excursion into the law of torture, Ms. Pelosi and the other Democrats would still have protested. Recall all their rhetoric on how torture is against all the values America prizes and that practicing torture would place us on the level of the Islamofascist barbarians.
Many of the defenders of the release of the torture memos, mainly Democrats, argue the release of the torture memos caused no harm as the information in them was already well-known and well-publicized. That argument cuts against the Pelosi claim that somehow she really didn’t know torture was actually being used and thought it was only something legal opinions had approved. According to her own defenders, every informed person knew that these enhanced interrogation techniques were being used.
But what did the group do? According to reports, two actually questioned whether the proposed techniques were strong enough to get the needed information from the terrorists. In other words, there was clear approval of the proposed techniques and some wanted even more aggressive questioning.So I suggest if anyone believes Ms. Pelosi’s story, they better get in line to buy the Brooklyn Bridge (which incidentally was saved from destruction by terrorists by a combination of wiretapping and waterboarding, as related by Dick Morris, covered in part in his book Fleeced.).
Now if you still think Ms. Pelosi is telling the truth, her account of what happens gets even more incredible. As the senior Democratic member of the House Intelligence Committee in 2002, even if full disclosure of torture was made, she recently made another preposterous claim: “They don’t come in to consult … They come in to notify… you can’t change what they’re doing.”
I take it back. That statement is not just preposterous … it is idiotic. Congress has always exercised oversight over the CIA and all other federal government agencies. Ms. Pelosi’s claim that Congress is powerless in the face of government abuse has to be one of the biggest lies ever told. This is contradicted by the history of Congress acting on intelligence matters and all other government activity. It is contradicted by common knowledge and common sense. If Ms. Pelosi believes Congress is powerless she may not be lying. She may just be an idiot, and if she wants to take the idiot defense, I would be the last to question her on that.
The phony claim that Congress is without power means that the briefings were just an academic waste of time. But if anyone still wonders whether Congress “can’t change what they’re doing,” you should have a small dose of history. It is covered in an excellent editorial in Investor’s Business Daily (April 27, 2009) headlined, “Pelosi’s Claims of Powerlessness: Oversight: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s contention that she and other Democrats were not told about waterboarding terrorists is dubious enough. Her claim that they could do nothing anyway is blatantly false.”
L. Britt Snider, Bill Clinton’s inspector general of the CIA, staff director of the 9/11 Congressional Inquiry, and investigator for the congressional committee that probed Richard Nixon’s intelligence abuses calls the CIA “perhaps the most scrutinized agency in the executive branch.”
Investor’s Business Daily gives a series of examples of Congress taking action when it objected to the CIA doing something. One of the most famous examples involved a briefing at the White House for intelligence committee leaders on the Iran arms-for-hostages initiative in mid-November 1986.
By the end of the year, there were seven investigations that were launched on what finally became known as the Iran-Contra affair. Some 300,000 documents were examined, more than 500 witnesses were interviewed, and there were more than 40 days of congressional hearings on the subject. And Ms. Pelosi says Congress has no power.
To make oversight even easier, in 1989, an office of CIA inspector general was established. According to Mr. Snider, who wrote the book, The Agency & The Hill: CIA’s Relationship with Congress, 1946-2004, this gave the oversight committees “a place they could go within the Agency to ask for oversight inquiries that exceed the committees’ own capabilities.
This was even clarified further by the 1992 Intelligence Organization Act. It specified the CIA director’s responsibility to provide intelligence to Congress that is, in the words of the law itself, “timely, objective, independent of political considerations, and based upon all sources available to the intelligence community.”
Another example of congressional oversight and power in action occurred after hearing testimony of CIA misconduct in Guatemala. Both Senate and House intelligence committees investigated. The CIA inspector general also investigated. He followed the committees’ request and examined all agency knowledge of human rights abuses by any CIA actions.
Again, according to Mr. Snider, these investigations led to major changes. They included the CIA’s setting up “on its own initiative, a systematic notification process to protect against another failure to notify Congress of significant information concerning its operations.”
This is all clinched, writes Investor’s Business Daily, by the words of former CIA director of congressional affairs, John Moseman, who in describing this process said of Congress: “They wouldn’t come back to us anymore when something went wrong and claim they’d never been told about it. If they had a problem with something, then it was up to them to let us know about it.”
So Rep. Pelosi, Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., former Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., or other Democrats knew they could and should go to the CIA with their objections, if they had any. They did not, and that demonstrates they had no objections.
The Investor’s Business Daily piece concludes, “The speaker [Nancy Pelosi] and her fellow top liberal Democrats were not powerless, as she now claims. But they were, and remain gutless.” And I’d add, they were not only gutless, but those Democrats who now criticize the torture memos are world-class hypocrites and liars. They will not produce the minutes of the briefings because that will just be further proof of the obvious — that Ms. Pelosi is a serial liar. In addition, if she thought she was powerless as a member of Congress, she is a total incompetent and should resign. If she doesn’t know about congressional oversight, her ignorance exceeds all measurement. It would be great if she could be impeached, but incompetence is not a ground of impeachment nor is congenital lying. If they were, the ranks of Congress would be decimated.
And I should clear up a few points. What the Democrats call torture is not torture. It involves techniques applied to our own military during training. These techniques are used at the Virginia Military Institute. And I suspect that some fraternity hazing would come close to the Democrat’s definition of torture. One of the techniques of torture was putting a caterpillar in a closed space with terrorists. That isn’t torture (except for the caterpillar).
As Ralph Reid noted, he was sleep deprived during his college exam periods, and he didn’t consider that torture. I don’t think it’s torture, either.
Furthermore, if I thought torture would save New York or Los Angeles from being destroyed by a terrorist with a weapon of mass destruction, I’d vote for torture. However, I’d be against torture if the city about to be destroyed were Washington, D.C. And my only wish is that the Obama administration and the Democrats would have as much concern for the safety of Americans as they have sensitivity for the feelings of terrorists.
Herb Denenberg is a former Pennsylvania Insurance Commissioner, Pennsylvania Public Utility Commissioner, and professor at the Wharton School. He is a longtime Philadelphia journalist and consumer advocate. He is also a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of the Sciences. His column appears daily in The Bulletin. You can reach him at advocate@thebulletin.us.
 |
||
| Obama Has Guaranteed Us Another 9/11 Attack |
Reader Comments
The following are comments from the readers. In no way do they represent the view of thebulletin.us.
sheena2112 wrote on Apr 28, 2009 10:05 PM:
" JRussell's is in obvious denial since he must protect that sniveling, corrupt party of his otherwise known as the Democrats.
Partisan hacks are so yesterday....it's time to see things for what they are. Pelosi's lying through her false teeth on this one.
Time to get rid of all the career politicians. Too much power makes fertile ground for thieves, liars and self-serving fools. "
Partisan hacks are so yesterday....it's time to see things for what they are. Pelosi's lying through her false teeth on this one.
Time to get rid of all the career politicians. Too much power makes fertile ground for thieves, liars and self-serving fools. "
Dallas Diorio wrote on Apr 29, 2009 10:23 AM:
" When I heard Pelosi utter those words, "...we were not, and I repeat, we were not told that waterboarding," immediately I remembered the infamous lie, "I have not had sex with tat woman."
It would make a great historical example of bold faced lying on the TV series, Lie to Me. "
It would make a great historical example of bold faced lying on the TV series, Lie to Me. "
You must register with a valid email to post comments. Only your Member ID will be posted with the comments.
Registered users sign in here: |
Become a Registered User |
JRussell wrote on Apr 27, 2009 7:49 AM: