Tuesday, May 1, 2012
Why Would ANYONE be Surprised that Nancy Pelosi was LYING???
Marc A. Thiessen Opinion Writer
Ex-CIA counterterror chief says Pelosi ‘reinventing the truth’ about waterboarding
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By Marc A. Thiessen, Published: April 30
In an explosive memoir released today, former CIA counterterrorism chief Jose Rodriguez provides new evidence that Rep. Nancy Pelosi lied when she declared she had not been briefed about the use of waterboarding.
Recall that in a Capitol Hill news conference three years ago, Pelosi (D-Calif.) vehemently denied being told about the use of waterboarding at a CIA briefing in September 2002. “We were not — I repeat — were not told that waterboarding or any of these other enhanced interrogation methods were used,” Pelosi said. She later changed her story, telling reporters, “We were told explicitly that waterboarding was not being used.” She claimed she learned about the use of waterboarding the following year, only after other lawmakers were told by the CIA. “I wasn’t briefed, I was informed that somebody else had been briefed about it,” she said.
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If Rodriguez is right, each of these statements is false. But other than a chart released by the CIA noting that Pelosi, then the ranking member of the House intelligence committee, and Rep. Porter Goss (R-Fla.), then chairman of the committee, had been given a “description of the particular [enhanced interrogation techniques] that had been employed,” there was little public evidence to contradict Pelosi’s claims. So she got away with it — until today.
In his new book, “Hard Measures,” Rodriguez reveals that he led a CIA briefing of Pelosi, where the techniques being used in the interrogation of senior al-Qaeda facilitator Abu Zubaida were described in detail. Her claim that she was not told about waterboarding at that briefing, he writes, “is untrue.”
“We explained that as a result of the techniques, Abu Zubaydah was compliant and providing good intelligence. We made crystal clear that authorized techniques, including waterboarding, had by then been used on Zubaydah.” Rodriguez writes that he told Pelosi everything, adding, “We held back nothing.”
How did she respond when presented with this information? Rodriguez writes that neither Pelosi nor anyone else in the briefing objected to the techniques being used. Indeed, he notes, when one member of his team described another technique that had been considered but not authorized or used, “Pelosi piped up immediately and said that in her view, use of that technique (which I will not describe) would have been ‘wrong.’ ” She raised no such concern about waterboarding, he writes. “Since she felt free to label one considered-and-rejected technique as wrong,” Rodriguez adds, “we went away with the clear impression that she harbored no such feelings about the ten tactics [including waterboarding] that we told her were in use.”
So we’re left with a “he said-she said” standoff? Not at all. Rodriguez writes that there’s contemporaneous evidence to back his account of the briefing. Six days after the meeting took place, Rodriguez reveals, “a cable went out from headquarters to the black site informing them that the briefing for the House leadership had taken place.” He explains that “[t]he cable to the field made clear that Goss and Pelosi had been briefed on the state of AZ’s interrogation, specifically including the use of the waterboard and other enhanced interrogation techniques.”
Rodriguez asks, “So Pelosi was another member of Congress reinventing the truth. What’s the big deal?” The big deal, he explains, is “the message they are sending to the men and women of the intelligence community who to this day are being asked to undertake dangerous and sometimes controversial actions on behalf of their government. They are told that the administration and Congress ‘have their back.’ You will forgive CIA officers if they are not filled with confidence.”
Rodriguez compares Pelosi’s actions to the opening scene of the old TV series “Mission: Impossible,” “in which the operatives were told that if anything went wrong, their leaders would ‘disavow any knowledge of your actions.’ That is not how it should work in the real world,” he writes.
It is a big deal for another reason. If Rodriguez is right, it means that Pelosi stood up in a Capitol Hill news conference and lied with a straight face to the American people; that she falsely accused a dedicated civil servant of lying to Congress as part of a political cover-up. Pelosi is hoping to become House speaker again after the November elections. Do we really want someone so ethically challenged to be third in line to the presidency?
There is a simple way to settle this once and for all. Pelosi should formally request that the Obama administration declassify the cable that was sent from headquarters to the field reporting on the details of her Sept. 4, 2002, briefing. If she refuses to do so, it should be taken as an admission by Pelosi that her account of events is a fabrication.
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Susan Thistlewaite: Justifying the unjustifiable
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rlyoung311 wrote:
2:28 AM CDT
Was the internal CIA cable (from headquarters to field) copied to Pelosi? If so, her failure to respond or complain at that time might be a rational basis for concluding that she did not disagree with CIA Headquarters on the contents of the cable. If not, how does an internal CIA memo that Pelosi did not see have any evidentiary weight on the truth or falsity of the contents of the CIA memo? Until we know that Pelosi had contemporaneous knowledge of the internal CIA cable, the existence of thi...See More
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andrew23boyle wrote:
4/30/2012 6:35 PM CDT
What did she know and when?
I'll bet water-boarding would get it out of her!
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tedmacks responds:
4/30/2012 6:39 PM CDT
Would you waterboard or even kill under the following hypothetical scenario?
Let's pretend you got next Wednesday's newpaper today(Monday) nad it talked about Tuesday's (tomorrow) disasterous terrorist attack. Listed among the 10,000 dead were all of your friends and family. The cuplrit who gave the order was in police custody Monday (today) afternoon but was released on bail this evening.
At the moment he is released he gets on a bus and is sitting next to you. All of you have to do is find out...See More
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Pthomas2mm wrote:
4/30/2012 5:12 PM CDT
I think Mr Rodriguez has a point when he is told by members of both parties that they will have your back, and the ranking member and person you briefed denies it happening. It is one thing to disemble or stretch the truth as most politicians do, it is quite another to lie outright. Prove it? There is a classified cable that will either condemn or exonerate Pelosi, we will probably hear in the next few days all of the glowing and patriotic reasons Pelosi won't ask for it to be released. Of c...See More
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tedmacks responds:
4/30/2012 6:35 PM CDT
Libs in private.
Lib 1 "I feel confident that I can say I'm firmly against enhanced interrogation. What are the chances that it will actually be me or anyone that I know would get killed in a preventable attack. Small I think."
Lib 2 "Yeah the chance is remote but we are talking about inncocents getting killed"
Lib 1 " Scroo them, I'll still be able to act holier than thou and besides that they are dead strangers".
Lib 2 "Yeah, scroo them.
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Marc A. Thiessen Opinion Writer
Ex-CIA counterterror chief says Pelosi ‘reinventing the truth’ about waterboarding
Text Size
Reprints
By Marc A. Thiessen, Published: April 30
In an explosive memoir released today, former CIA counterterrorism chief Jose Rodriguez provides new evidence that Rep. Nancy Pelosi lied when she declared she had not been briefed about the use of waterboarding.
Recall that in a Capitol Hill news conference three years ago, Pelosi (D-Calif.) vehemently denied being told about the use of waterboarding at a CIA briefing in September 2002. “We were not — I repeat — were not told that waterboarding or any of these other enhanced interrogation methods were used,” Pelosi said. She later changed her story, telling reporters, “We were told explicitly that waterboarding was not being used.” She claimed she learned about the use of waterboarding the following year, only after other lawmakers were told by the CIA. “I wasn’t briefed, I was informed that somebody else had been briefed about it,” she said.
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If Rodriguez is right, each of these statements is false. But other than a chart released by the CIA noting that Pelosi, then the ranking member of the House intelligence committee, and Rep. Porter Goss (R-Fla.), then chairman of the committee, had been given a “description of the particular [enhanced interrogation techniques] that had been employed,” there was little public evidence to contradict Pelosi’s claims. So she got away with it — until today.
In his new book, “Hard Measures,” Rodriguez reveals that he led a CIA briefing of Pelosi, where the techniques being used in the interrogation of senior al-Qaeda facilitator Abu Zubaida were described in detail. Her claim that she was not told about waterboarding at that briefing, he writes, “is untrue.”
“We explained that as a result of the techniques, Abu Zubaydah was compliant and providing good intelligence. We made crystal clear that authorized techniques, including waterboarding, had by then been used on Zubaydah.” Rodriguez writes that he told Pelosi everything, adding, “We held back nothing.”
How did she respond when presented with this information? Rodriguez writes that neither Pelosi nor anyone else in the briefing objected to the techniques being used. Indeed, he notes, when one member of his team described another technique that had been considered but not authorized or used, “Pelosi piped up immediately and said that in her view, use of that technique (which I will not describe) would have been ‘wrong.’ ” She raised no such concern about waterboarding, he writes. “Since she felt free to label one considered-and-rejected technique as wrong,” Rodriguez adds, “we went away with the clear impression that she harbored no such feelings about the ten tactics [including waterboarding] that we told her were in use.”
So we’re left with a “he said-she said” standoff? Not at all. Rodriguez writes that there’s contemporaneous evidence to back his account of the briefing. Six days after the meeting took place, Rodriguez reveals, “a cable went out from headquarters to the black site informing them that the briefing for the House leadership had taken place.” He explains that “[t]he cable to the field made clear that Goss and Pelosi had been briefed on the state of AZ’s interrogation, specifically including the use of the waterboard and other enhanced interrogation techniques.”
Rodriguez asks, “So Pelosi was another member of Congress reinventing the truth. What’s the big deal?” The big deal, he explains, is “the message they are sending to the men and women of the intelligence community who to this day are being asked to undertake dangerous and sometimes controversial actions on behalf of their government. They are told that the administration and Congress ‘have their back.’ You will forgive CIA officers if they are not filled with confidence.”
Rodriguez compares Pelosi’s actions to the opening scene of the old TV series “Mission: Impossible,” “in which the operatives were told that if anything went wrong, their leaders would ‘disavow any knowledge of your actions.’ That is not how it should work in the real world,” he writes.
It is a big deal for another reason. If Rodriguez is right, it means that Pelosi stood up in a Capitol Hill news conference and lied with a straight face to the American people; that she falsely accused a dedicated civil servant of lying to Congress as part of a political cover-up. Pelosi is hoping to become House speaker again after the November elections. Do we really want someone so ethically challenged to be third in line to the presidency?
There is a simple way to settle this once and for all. Pelosi should formally request that the Obama administration declassify the cable that was sent from headquarters to the field reporting on the details of her Sept. 4, 2002, briefing. If she refuses to do so, it should be taken as an admission by Pelosi that her account of events is a fabrication.
Read more on this topic
The Post’s View: The futility of torture
Susan Thistlewaite: Justifying the unjustifiable
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rlyoung311 wrote:
2:28 AM CDT
Was the internal CIA cable (from headquarters to field) copied to Pelosi? If so, her failure to respond or complain at that time might be a rational basis for concluding that she did not disagree with CIA Headquarters on the contents of the cable. If not, how does an internal CIA memo that Pelosi did not see have any evidentiary weight on the truth or falsity of the contents of the CIA memo? Until we know that Pelosi had contemporaneous knowledge of the internal CIA cable, the existence of thi...See More
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andrew23boyle wrote:
4/30/2012 6:35 PM CDT
What did she know and when?
I'll bet water-boarding would get it out of her!
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tedmacks responds:
4/30/2012 6:39 PM CDT
Would you waterboard or even kill under the following hypothetical scenario?
Let's pretend you got next Wednesday's newpaper today(Monday) nad it talked about Tuesday's (tomorrow) disasterous terrorist attack. Listed among the 10,000 dead were all of your friends and family. The cuplrit who gave the order was in police custody Monday (today) afternoon but was released on bail this evening.
At the moment he is released he gets on a bus and is sitting next to you. All of you have to do is find out...See More
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Pthomas2mm wrote:
4/30/2012 5:12 PM CDT
I think Mr Rodriguez has a point when he is told by members of both parties that they will have your back, and the ranking member and person you briefed denies it happening. It is one thing to disemble or stretch the truth as most politicians do, it is quite another to lie outright. Prove it? There is a classified cable that will either condemn or exonerate Pelosi, we will probably hear in the next few days all of the glowing and patriotic reasons Pelosi won't ask for it to be released. Of c...See More
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Recommended by 19 readers
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tedmacks responds:
4/30/2012 6:35 PM CDT
Libs in private.
Lib 1 "I feel confident that I can say I'm firmly against enhanced interrogation. What are the chances that it will actually be me or anyone that I know would get killed in a preventable attack. Small I think."
Lib 2 "Yeah the chance is remote but we are talking about inncocents getting killed"
Lib 1 " Scroo them, I'll still be able to act holier than thou and besides that they are dead strangers".
Lib 2 "Yeah, scroo them.
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Marc A. Thiessen Opinion Writer
Ex-CIA counterterror chief says Pelosi ‘reinventing the truth’ about waterboarding
Text Size
Reprints
By Marc A. Thiessen, Published: April 30
In an explosive memoir released today, former CIA counterterrorism chief Jose Rodriguez provides new evidence that Rep. Nancy Pelosi lied when she declared she had not been briefed about the use of waterboarding.
Recall that in a Capitol Hill news conference three years ago, Pelosi (D-Calif.) vehemently denied being told about the use of waterboarding at a CIA briefing in September 2002. “We were not — I repeat — were not told that waterboarding or any of these other enhanced interrogation methods were used,” Pelosi said. She later changed her story, telling reporters, “We were told explicitly that waterboarding was not being used.” She claimed she learned about the use of waterboarding the following year, only after other lawmakers were told by the CIA. “I wasn’t briefed, I was informed that somebody else had been briefed about it,” she said.
717
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Marc A. Thiessen
A fellow with the American Enterprise Institute, Thiessen writes a weekly column for The Post.
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Charles Krauthammer
While Syria burns
George F. Will
The exemplary LBJ
.
If Rodriguez is right, each of these statements is false. But other than a chart released by the CIA noting that Pelosi, then the ranking member of the House intelligence committee, and Rep. Porter Goss (R-Fla.), then chairman of the committee, had been given a “description of the particular [enhanced interrogation techniques] that had been employed,” there was little public evidence to contradict Pelosi’s claims. So she got away with it — until today.
In his new book, “Hard Measures,” Rodriguez reveals that he led a CIA briefing of Pelosi, where the techniques being used in the interrogation of senior al-Qaeda facilitator Abu Zubaida were described in detail. Her claim that she was not told about waterboarding at that briefing, he writes, “is untrue.”
“We explained that as a result of the techniques, Abu Zubaydah was compliant and providing good intelligence. We made crystal clear that authorized techniques, including waterboarding, had by then been used on Zubaydah.” Rodriguez writes that he told Pelosi everything, adding, “We held back nothing.”
How did she respond when presented with this information? Rodriguez writes that neither Pelosi nor anyone else in the briefing objected to the techniques being used. Indeed, he notes, when one member of his team described another technique that had been considered but not authorized or used, “Pelosi piped up immediately and said that in her view, use of that technique (which I will not describe) would have been ‘wrong.’ ” She raised no such concern about waterboarding, he writes. “Since she felt free to label one considered-and-rejected technique as wrong,” Rodriguez adds, “we went away with the clear impression that she harbored no such feelings about the ten tactics [including waterboarding] that we told her were in use.”
So we’re left with a “he said-she said” standoff? Not at all. Rodriguez writes that there’s contemporaneous evidence to back his account of the briefing. Six days after the meeting took place, Rodriguez reveals, “a cable went out from headquarters to the black site informing them that the briefing for the House leadership had taken place.” He explains that “[t]he cable to the field made clear that Goss and Pelosi had been briefed on the state of AZ’s interrogation, specifically including the use of the waterboard and other enhanced interrogation techniques.”
Rodriguez asks, “So Pelosi was another member of Congress reinventing the truth. What’s the big deal?” The big deal, he explains, is “the message they are sending to the men and women of the intelligence community who to this day are being asked to undertake dangerous and sometimes controversial actions on behalf of their government. They are told that the administration and Congress ‘have their back.’ You will forgive CIA officers if they are not filled with confidence.”
Rodriguez compares Pelosi’s actions to the opening scene of the old TV series “Mission: Impossible,” “in which the operatives were told that if anything went wrong, their leaders would ‘disavow any knowledge of your actions.’ That is not how it should work in the real world,” he writes.
It is a big deal for another reason. If Rodriguez is right, it means that Pelosi stood up in a Capitol Hill news conference and lied with a straight face to the American people; that she falsely accused a dedicated civil servant of lying to Congress as part of a political cover-up. Pelosi is hoping to become House speaker again after the November elections. Do we really want someone so ethically challenged to be third in line to the presidency?
There is a simple way to settle this once and for all. Pelosi should formally request that the Obama administration declassify the cable that was sent from headquarters to the field reporting on the details of her Sept. 4, 2002, briefing. If she refuses to do so, it should be taken as an admission by Pelosi that her account of events is a fabrication.
Read more on this topic
The Post’s View: The futility of torture
Susan Thistlewaite: Justifying the unjustifiable
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rlyoung311 wrote:
2:28 AM CDT
Was the internal CIA cable (from headquarters to field) copied to Pelosi? If so, her failure to respond or complain at that time might be a rational basis for concluding that she did not disagree with CIA Headquarters on the contents of the cable. If not, how does an internal CIA memo that Pelosi did not see have any evidentiary weight on the truth or falsity of the contents of the CIA memo? Until we know that Pelosi had contemporaneous knowledge of the internal CIA cable, the existence of thi...See More
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andrew23boyle wrote:
4/30/2012 6:35 PM CDT
What did she know and when?
I'll bet water-boarding would get it out of her!
Recommend
Recommended by 23 readers
Reply
Report
tedmacks responds:
4/30/2012 6:39 PM CDT
Would you waterboard or even kill under the following hypothetical scenario?
Let's pretend you got next Wednesday's newpaper today(Monday) nad it talked about Tuesday's (tomorrow) disasterous terrorist attack. Listed among the 10,000 dead were all of your friends and family. The cuplrit who gave the order was in police custody Monday (today) afternoon but was released on bail this evening.
At the moment he is released he gets on a bus and is sitting next to you. All of you have to do is find out...See More
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Pthomas2mm wrote:
4/30/2012 5:12 PM CDT
I think Mr Rodriguez has a point when he is told by members of both parties that they will have your back, and the ranking member and person you briefed denies it happening. It is one thing to disemble or stretch the truth as most politicians do, it is quite another to lie outright. Prove it? There is a classified cable that will either condemn or exonerate Pelosi, we will probably hear in the next few days all of the glowing and patriotic reasons Pelosi won't ask for it to be released. Of c...See More
Recommend
Recommended by 19 readers
Reply
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tedmacks responds:
4/30/2012 6:35 PM CDT
Libs in private.
Lib 1 "I feel confident that I can say I'm firmly against enhanced interrogation. What are the chances that it will actually be me or anyone that I know would get killed in a preventable attack. Small I think."
Lib 2 "Yeah the chance is remote but we are talking about inncocents getting killed"
Lib 1 " Scroo them, I'll still be able to act holier than thou and besides that they are dead strangers".
Lib 2 "Yeah, scroo them.
Recommend
Recommended by 4 readers
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Marc A. Thiessen Opinion Writer
Ex-CIA counterterror chief says Pelosi ‘reinventing the truth’ about waterboarding
Text Size
Reprints
By Marc A. Thiessen, Published: April 30
In an explosive memoir released today, former CIA counterterrorism chief Jose Rodriguez provides new evidence that Rep. Nancy Pelosi lied when she declared she had not been briefed about the use of waterboarding.
Recall that in a Capitol Hill news conference three years ago, Pelosi (D-Calif.) vehemently denied being told about the use of waterboarding at a CIA briefing in September 2002. “We were not — I repeat — were not told that waterboarding or any of these other enhanced interrogation methods were used,” Pelosi said. She later changed her story, telling reporters, “We were told explicitly that waterboarding was not being used.” She claimed she learned about the use of waterboarding the following year, only after other lawmakers were told by the CIA. “I wasn’t briefed, I was informed that somebody else had been briefed about it,” she said.
717
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Marc A. Thiessen
A fellow with the American Enterprise Institute, Thiessen writes a weekly column for The Post.
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Charles Krauthammer
While Syria burns
George F. Will
The exemplary LBJ
.
If Rodriguez is right, each of these statements is false. But other than a chart released by the CIA noting that Pelosi, then the ranking member of the House intelligence committee, and Rep. Porter Goss (R-Fla.), then chairman of the committee, had been given a “description of the particular [enhanced interrogation techniques] that had been employed,” there was little public evidence to contradict Pelosi’s claims. So she got away with it — until today.
In his new book, “Hard Measures,” Rodriguez reveals that he led a CIA briefing of Pelosi, where the techniques being used in the interrogation of senior al-Qaeda facilitator Abu Zubaida were described in detail. Her claim that she was not told about waterboarding at that briefing, he writes, “is untrue.”
“We explained that as a result of the techniques, Abu Zubaydah was compliant and providing good intelligence. We made crystal clear that authorized techniques, including waterboarding, had by then been used on Zubaydah.” Rodriguez writes that he told Pelosi everything, adding, “We held back nothing.”
How did she respond when presented with this information? Rodriguez writes that neither Pelosi nor anyone else in the briefing objected to the techniques being used. Indeed, he notes, when one member of his team described another technique that had been considered but not authorized or used, “Pelosi piped up immediately and said that in her view, use of that technique (which I will not describe) would have been ‘wrong.’ ” She raised no such concern about waterboarding, he writes. “Since she felt free to label one considered-and-rejected technique as wrong,” Rodriguez adds, “we went away with the clear impression that she harbored no such feelings about the ten tactics [including waterboarding] that we told her were in use.”
So we’re left with a “he said-she said” standoff? Not at all. Rodriguez writes that there’s contemporaneous evidence to back his account of the briefing. Six days after the meeting took place, Rodriguez reveals, “a cable went out from headquarters to the black site informing them that the briefing for the House leadership had taken place.” He explains that “[t]he cable to the field made clear that Goss and Pelosi had been briefed on the state of AZ’s interrogation, specifically including the use of the waterboard and other enhanced interrogation techniques.”
Rodriguez asks, “So Pelosi was another member of Congress reinventing the truth. What’s the big deal?” The big deal, he explains, is “the message they are sending to the men and women of the intelligence community who to this day are being asked to undertake dangerous and sometimes controversial actions on behalf of their government. They are told that the administration and Congress ‘have their back.’ You will forgive CIA officers if they are not filled with confidence.”
Rodriguez compares Pelosi’s actions to the opening scene of the old TV series “Mission: Impossible,” “in which the operatives were told that if anything went wrong, their leaders would ‘disavow any knowledge of your actions.’ That is not how it should work in the real world,” he writes.
It is a big deal for another reason. If Rodriguez is right, it means that Pelosi stood up in a Capitol Hill news conference and lied with a straight face to the American people; that she falsely accused a dedicated civil servant of lying to Congress as part of a political cover-up. Pelosi is hoping to become House speaker again after the November elections. Do we really want someone so ethically challenged to be third in line to the presidency?
There is a simple way to settle this once and for all. Pelosi should formally request that the Obama administration declassify the cable that was sent from headquarters to the field reporting on the details of her Sept. 4, 2002, briefing. If she refuses to do so, it should be taken as an admission by Pelosi that her account of events is a fabrication.
Read more on this topic
The Post’s View: The futility of torture
Susan Thistlewaite: Justifying the unjustifiable
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rlyoung311 wrote:
2:28 AM CDT
Was the internal CIA cable (from headquarters to field) copied to Pelosi? If so, her failure to respond or complain at that time might be a rational basis for concluding that she did not disagree with CIA Headquarters on the contents of the cable. If not, how does an internal CIA memo that Pelosi did not see have any evidentiary weight on the truth or falsity of the contents of the CIA memo? Until we know that Pelosi had contemporaneous knowledge of the internal CIA cable, the existence of thi...See More
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andrew23boyle wrote:
4/30/2012 6:35 PM CDT
What did she know and when?
I'll bet water-boarding would get it out of her!
Recommend
Recommended by 23 readers
Reply
Report
tedmacks responds:
4/30/2012 6:39 PM CDT
Would you waterboard or even kill under the following hypothetical scenario?
Let's pretend you got next Wednesday's newpaper today(Monday) nad it talked about Tuesday's (tomorrow) disasterous terrorist attack. Listed among the 10,000 dead were all of your friends and family. The cuplrit who gave the order was in police custody Monday (today) afternoon but was released on bail this evening.
At the moment he is released he gets on a bus and is sitting next to you. All of you have to do is find out...See More
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Recommended by 3 readers
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View more responses
Pthomas2mm wrote:
4/30/2012 5:12 PM CDT
I think Mr Rodriguez has a point when he is told by members of both parties that they will have your back, and the ranking member and person you briefed denies it happening. It is one thing to disemble or stretch the truth as most politicians do, it is quite another to lie outright. Prove it? There is a classified cable that will either condemn or exonerate Pelosi, we will probably hear in the next few days all of the glowing and patriotic reasons Pelosi won't ask for it to be released. Of c...See More
Recommend
Recommended by 19 readers
Reply
Report
tedmacks responds:
4/30/2012 6:35 PM CDT
Libs in private.
Lib 1 "I feel confident that I can say I'm firmly against enhanced interrogation. What are the chances that it will actually be me or anyone that I know would get killed in a preventable attack. Small I think."
Lib 2 "Yeah the chance is remote but we are talking about inncocents getting killed"
Lib 1 " Scroo them, I'll still be able to act holier than thou and besides that they are dead strangers".
Lib 2 "Yeah, scroo them.
Recommend
Recommended by 4 readers
Report
View more responses
Load more comments
Marc A. Thiessen Opinion Writer
Ex-CIA counterterror chief says Pelosi ‘reinventing the truth’ about waterboarding
Text Size
Reprints
By Marc A. Thiessen, Published: April 30
In an explosive memoir released today, former CIA counterterrorism chief Jose Rodriguez provides new evidence that Rep. Nancy Pelosi lied when she declared she had not been briefed about the use of waterboarding.
Recall that in a Capitol Hill news conference three years ago, Pelosi (D-Calif.) vehemently denied being told about the use of waterboarding at a CIA briefing in September 2002. “We were not — I repeat — were not told that waterboarding or any of these other enhanced interrogation methods were used,” Pelosi said. She later changed her story, telling reporters, “We were told explicitly that waterboarding was not being used.” She claimed she learned about the use of waterboarding the following year, only after other lawmakers were told by the CIA. “I wasn’t briefed, I was informed that somebody else had been briefed about it,” she said.
717
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Marc A. Thiessen
A fellow with the American Enterprise Institute, Thiessen writes a weekly column for The Post.
Archive
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Charles Krauthammer
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If Rodriguez is right, each of these statements is false. But other than a chart released by the CIA noting that Pelosi, then the ranking member of the House intelligence committee, and Rep. Porter Goss (R-Fla.), then chairman of the committee, had been given a “description of the particular [enhanced interrogation techniques] that had been employed,” there was little public evidence to contradict Pelosi’s claims. So she got away with it — until today.
In his new book, “Hard Measures,” Rodriguez reveals that he led a CIA briefing of Pelosi, where the techniques being used in the interrogation of senior al-Qaeda facilitator Abu Zubaida were described in detail. Her claim that she was not told about waterboarding at that briefing, he writes, “is untrue.”
“We explained that as a result of the techniques, Abu Zubaydah was compliant and providing good intelligence. We made crystal clear that authorized techniques, including waterboarding, had by then been used on Zubaydah.” Rodriguez writes that he told Pelosi everything, adding, “We held back nothing.”
How did she respond when presented with this information? Rodriguez writes that neither Pelosi nor anyone else in the briefing objected to the techniques being used. Indeed, he notes, when one member of his team described another technique that had been considered but not authorized or used, “Pelosi piped up immediately and said that in her view, use of that technique (which I will not describe) would have been ‘wrong.’ ” She raised no such concern about waterboarding, he writes. “Since she felt free to label one considered-and-rejected technique as wrong,” Rodriguez adds, “we went away with the clear impression that she harbored no such feelings about the ten tactics [including waterboarding] that we told her were in use.”
So we’re left with a “he said-she said” standoff? Not at all. Rodriguez writes that there’s contemporaneous evidence to back his account of the briefing. Six days after the meeting took place, Rodriguez reveals, “a cable went out from headquarters to the black site informing them that the briefing for the House leadership had taken place.” He explains that “[t]he cable to the field made clear that Goss and Pelosi had been briefed on the state of AZ’s interrogation, specifically including the use of the waterboard and other enhanced interrogation techniques.”
Rodriguez asks, “So Pelosi was another member of Congress reinventing the truth. What’s the big deal?” The big deal, he explains, is “the message they are sending to the men and women of the intelligence community who to this day are being asked to undertake dangerous and sometimes controversial actions on behalf of their government. They are told that the administration and Congress ‘have their back.’ You will forgive CIA officers if they are not filled with confidence.”
Rodriguez compares Pelosi’s actions to the opening scene of the old TV series “Mission: Impossible,” “in which the operatives were told that if anything went wrong, their leaders would ‘disavow any knowledge of your actions.’ That is not how it should work in the real world,” he writes.
It is a big deal for another reason. If Rodriguez is right, it means that Pelosi stood up in a Capitol Hill news conference and lied with a straight face to the American people; that she falsely accused a dedicated civil servant of lying to Congress as part of a political cover-up. Pelosi is hoping to become House speaker again after the November elections. Do we really want someone so ethically challenged to be third in line to the presidency?
There is a simple way to settle this once and for all. Pelosi should formally request that the Obama administration declassify the cable that was sent from headquarters to the field reporting on the details of her Sept. 4, 2002, briefing. If she refuses to do so, it should be taken as an admission by Pelosi that her account of events is a fabrication.
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rlyoung311 wrote:
2:28 AM CDT
Was the internal CIA cable (from headquarters to field) copied to Pelosi? If so, her failure to respond or complain at that time might be a rational basis for concluding that she did not disagree with CIA Headquarters on the contents of the cable. If not, how does an internal CIA memo that Pelosi did not see have any evidentiary weight on the truth or falsity of the contents of the CIA memo? Until we know that Pelosi had contemporaneous knowledge of the internal CIA cable, the existence of thi...See More
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andrew23boyle wrote:
4/30/2012 6:35 PM CDT
What did she know and when?
I'll bet water-boarding would get it out of her!
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tedmacks responds:
4/30/2012 6:39 PM CDT
Would you waterboard or even kill under the following hypothetical scenario?
Let's pretend you got next Wednesday's newpaper today(Monday) nad it talked about Tuesday's (tomorrow) disasterous terrorist attack. Listed among the 10,000 dead were all of your friends and family. The cuplrit who gave the order was in police custody Monday (today) afternoon but was released on bail this evening.
At the moment he is released he gets on a bus and is sitting next to you. All of you have to do is find out...See More
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Pthomas2mm wrote:
4/30/2012 5:12 PM CDT
I think Mr Rodriguez has a point when he is told by members of both parties that they will have your back, and the ranking member and person you briefed denies it happening. It is one thing to disemble or stretch the truth as most politicians do, it is quite another to lie outright. Prove it? There is a classified cable that will either condemn or exonerate Pelosi, we will probably hear in the next few days all of the glowing and patriotic reasons Pelosi won't ask for it to be released. Of c...See More
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tedmacks responds:
4/30/2012 6:35 PM CDT
Libs in private.
Lib 1 "I feel confident that I can say I'm firmly against enhanced interrogation. What are the chances that it will actually be me or anyone that I know would get killed in a preventable attack. Small I think."
Lib 2 "Yeah the chance is remote but we are talking about inncocents getting killed"
Lib 1 " Scroo them, I'll still be able to act holier than thou and besides that they are dead strangers".
Lib 2 "Yeah, scroo them.
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Marc A. Thiessen Opinion Writer
Ex-CIA counterterror chief says Pelosi ‘reinventing the truth’ about waterboarding
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By Marc A. Thiessen, Published: April 30
In an explosive memoir released today, former CIA counterterrorism chief Jose Rodriguez provides new evidence that Rep. Nancy Pelosi lied when she declared she had not been briefed about the use of waterboarding.
Recall that in a Capitol Hill news conference three years ago, Pelosi (D-Calif.) vehemently denied being told about the use of waterboarding at a CIA briefing in September 2002. “We were not — I repeat — were not told that waterboarding or any of these other enhanced interrogation methods were used,” Pelosi said. She later changed her story, telling reporters, “We were told explicitly that waterboarding was not being used.” She claimed she learned about the use of waterboarding the following year, only after other lawmakers were told by the CIA. “I wasn’t briefed, I was informed that somebody else had been briefed about it,” she said.
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If Rodriguez is right, each of these statements is false. But other than a chart released by the CIA noting that Pelosi, then the ranking member of the House intelligence committee, and Rep. Porter Goss (R-Fla.), then chairman of the committee, had been given a “description of the particular [enhanced interrogation techniques] that had been employed,” there was little public evidence to contradict Pelosi’s claims. So she got away with it — until today.
In his new book, “Hard Measures,” Rodriguez reveals that he led a CIA briefing of Pelosi, where the techniques being used in the interrogation of senior al-Qaeda facilitator Abu Zubaida were described in detail. Her claim that she was not told about waterboarding at that briefing, he writes, “is untrue.”
“We explained that as a result of the techniques, Abu Zubaydah was compliant and providing good intelligence. We made crystal clear that authorized techniques, including waterboarding, had by then been used on Zubaydah.” Rodriguez writes that he told Pelosi everything, adding, “We held back nothing.”
How did she respond when presented with this information? Rodriguez writes that neither Pelosi nor anyone else in the briefing objected to the techniques being used. Indeed, he notes, when one member of his team described another technique that had been considered but not authorized or used, “Pelosi piped up immediately and said that in her view, use of that technique (which I will not describe) would have been ‘wrong.’ ” She raised no such concern about waterboarding, he writes. “Since she felt free to label one considered-and-rejected technique as wrong,” Rodriguez adds, “we went away with the clear impression that she harbored no such feelings about the ten tactics [including waterboarding] that we told her were in use.”
So we’re left with a “he said-she said” standoff? Not at all. Rodriguez writes that there’s contemporaneous evidence to back his account of the briefing. Six days after the meeting took place, Rodriguez reveals, “a cable went out from headquarters to the black site informing them that the briefing for the House leadership had taken place.” He explains that “[t]he cable to the field made clear that Goss and Pelosi had been briefed on the state of AZ’s interrogation, specifically including the use of the waterboard and other enhanced interrogation techniques.”
Rodriguez asks, “So Pelosi was another member of Congress reinventing the truth. What’s the big deal?” The big deal, he explains, is “the message they are sending to the men and women of the intelligence community who to this day are being asked to undertake dangerous and sometimes controversial actions on behalf of their government. They are told that the administration and Congress ‘have their back.’ You will forgive CIA officers if they are not filled with confidence.”
Rodriguez compares Pelosi’s actions to the opening scene of the old TV series “Mission: Impossible,” “in which the operatives were told that if anything went wrong, their leaders would ‘disavow any knowledge of your actions.’ That is not how it should work in the real world,” he writes.
It is a big deal for another reason. If Rodriguez is right, it means that Pelosi stood up in a Capitol Hill news conference and lied with a straight face to the American people; that she falsely accused a dedicated civil servant of lying to Congress as part of a political cover-up. Pelosi is hoping to become House speaker again after the November elections. Do we really want someone so ethically challenged to be third in line to the presidency?
There is a simple way to settle this once and for all. Pelosi should formally request that the Obama administration declassify the cable that was sent from headquarters to the field reporting on the details of her Sept. 4, 2002, briefing. If she refuses to do so, it should be taken as an admission by Pelosi that her account of events is a fabrication.
Read more on this topic
The Post’s View: The futility of torture
Susan Thistlewaite: Justifying the unjustifiable
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rlyoung311 wrote:
2:28 AM CDT
Was the internal CIA cable (from headquarters to field) copied to Pelosi? If so, her failure to respond or complain at that time might be a rational basis for concluding that she did not disagree with CIA Headquarters on the contents of the cable. If not, how does an internal CIA memo that Pelosi did not see have any evidentiary weight on the truth or falsity of the contents of the CIA memo? Until we know that Pelosi had contemporaneous knowledge of the internal CIA cable, the existence of thi...See More
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andrew23boyle wrote:
4/30/2012 6:35 PM CDT
What did she know and when?
I'll bet water-boarding would get it out of her!
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tedmacks responds:
4/30/2012 6:39 PM CDT
Would you waterboard or even kill under the following hypothetical scenario?
Let's pretend you got next Wednesday's newpaper today(Monday) nad it talked about Tuesday's (tomorrow) disasterous terrorist attack. Listed among the 10,000 dead were all of your friends and family. The cuplrit who gave the order was in police custody Monday (today) afternoon but was released on bail this evening.
At the moment he is released he gets on a bus and is sitting next to you. All of you have to do is find out...See More
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Pthomas2mm wrote:
4/30/2012 5:12 PM CDT
I think Mr Rodriguez has a point when he is told by members of both parties that they will have your back, and the ranking member and person you briefed denies it happening. It is one thing to disemble or stretch the truth as most politicians do, it is quite another to lie outright. Prove it? There is a classified cable that will either condemn or exonerate Pelosi, we will probably hear in the next few days all of the glowing and patriotic reasons Pelosi won't ask for it to be released. Of c...See More
Recommend
Recommended by 19 readers
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tedmacks responds:
4/30/2012 6:35 PM CDT
Libs in private.
Lib 1 "I feel confident that I can say I'm firmly against enhanced interrogation. What are the chances that it will actually be me or anyone that I know would get killed in a preventable attack. Small I think."
Lib 2 "Yeah the chance is remote but we are talking about inncocents getting killed"
Lib 1 " Scroo them, I'll still be able to act holier than thou and besides that they are dead strangers".
Lib 2 "Yeah, scroo them.
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Marc A. Thiessen Opinion Writer
Ex-CIA counterterror chief says Pelosi ‘reinventing the truth’ about waterboarding
Text Size
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By Marc A. Thiessen, Published: April 30
In an explosive memoir released today, former CIA counterterrorism chief Jose Rodriguez provides new evidence that Rep. Nancy Pelosi lied when she declared she had not been briefed about the use of waterboarding.
Recall that in a Capitol Hill news conference three years ago, Pelosi (D-Calif.) vehemently denied being told about the use of waterboarding at a CIA briefing in September 2002. “We were not — I repeat — were not told that waterboarding or any of these other enhanced interrogation methods were used,” Pelosi said. She later changed her story, telling reporters, “We were told explicitly that waterboarding was not being used.” She claimed she learned about the use of waterboarding the following year, only after other lawmakers were told by the CIA. “I wasn’t briefed, I was informed that somebody else had been briefed about it,” she said.
717
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Marc A. Thiessen
A fellow with the American Enterprise Institute, Thiessen writes a weekly column for The Post.
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If Rodriguez is right, each of these statements is false. But other than a chart released by the CIA noting that Pelosi, then the ranking member of the House intelligence committee, and Rep. Porter Goss (R-Fla.), then chairman of the committee, had been given a “description of the particular [enhanced interrogation techniques] that had been employed,” there was little public evidence to contradict Pelosi’s claims. So she got away with it — until today.
In his new book, “Hard Measures,” Rodriguez reveals that he led a CIA briefing of Pelosi, where the techniques being used in the interrogation of senior al-Qaeda facilitator Abu Zubaida were described in detail. Her claim that she was not told about waterboarding at that briefing, he writes, “is untrue.”
“We explained that as a result of the techniques, Abu Zubaydah was compliant and providing good intelligence. We made crystal clear that authorized techniques, including waterboarding, had by then been used on Zubaydah.” Rodriguez writes that he told Pelosi everything, adding, “We held back nothing.”
How did she respond when presented with this information? Rodriguez writes that neither Pelosi nor anyone else in the briefing objected to the techniques being used. Indeed, he notes, when one member of his team described another technique that had been considered but not authorized or used, “Pelosi piped up immediately and said that in her view, use of that technique (which I will not describe) would have been ‘wrong.’ ” She raised no such concern about waterboarding, he writes. “Since she felt free to label one considered-and-rejected technique as wrong,” Rodriguez adds, “we went away with the clear impression that she harbored no such feelings about the ten tactics [including waterboarding] that we told her were in use.”
So we’re left with a “he said-she said” standoff? Not at all. Rodriguez writes that there’s contemporaneous evidence to back his account of the briefing. Six days after the meeting took place, Rodriguez reveals, “a cable went out from headquarters to the black site informing them that the briefing for the House leadership had taken place.” He explains that “[t]he cable to the field made clear that Goss and Pelosi had been briefed on the state of AZ’s interrogation, specifically including the use of the waterboard and other enhanced interrogation techniques.”
Rodriguez asks, “So Pelosi was another member of Congress reinventing the truth. What’s the big deal?” The big deal, he explains, is “the message they are sending to the men and women of the intelligence community who to this day are being asked to undertake dangerous and sometimes controversial actions on behalf of their government. They are told that the administration and Congress ‘have their back.’ You will forgive CIA officers if they are not filled with confidence.”
Rodriguez compares Pelosi’s actions to the opening scene of the old TV series “Mission: Impossible,” “in which the operatives were told that if anything went wrong, their leaders would ‘disavow any knowledge of your actions.’ That is not how it should work in the real world,” he writes.
It is a big deal for another reason. If Rodriguez is right, it means that Pelosi stood up in a Capitol Hill news conference and lied with a straight face to the American people; that she falsely accused a dedicated civil servant of lying to Congress as part of a political cover-up. Pelosi is hoping to become House speaker again after the November elections. Do we really want someone so ethically challenged to be third in line to the presidency?
There is a simple way to settle this once and for all. Pelosi should formally request that the Obama administration declassify the cable that was sent from headquarters to the field reporting on the details of her Sept. 4, 2002, briefing. If she refuses to do so, it should be taken as an admission by Pelosi that her account of events is a fabrication.
Read more on this topic
The Post’s View: The futility of torture
Susan Thistlewaite: Justifying the unjustifiable
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rlyoung311 wrote:
2:28 AM CDT
Was the internal CIA cable (from headquarters to field) copied to Pelosi? If so, her failure to respond or complain at that time might be a rational basis for concluding that she did not disagree with CIA Headquarters on the contents of the cable. If not, how does an internal CIA memo that Pelosi did not see have any evidentiary weight on the truth or falsity of the contents of the CIA memo? Until we know that Pelosi had contemporaneous knowledge of the internal CIA cable, the existence of thi...See More
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andrew23boyle wrote:
4/30/2012 6:35 PM CDT
What did she know and when?
I'll bet water-boarding would get it out of her!
Recommend
Recommended by 23 readers
Reply
Report
tedmacks responds:
4/30/2012 6:39 PM CDT
Would you waterboard or even kill under the following hypothetical scenario?
Let's pretend you got next Wednesday's newpaper today(Monday) nad it talked about Tuesday's (tomorrow) disasterous terrorist attack. Listed among the 10,000 dead were all of your friends and family. The cuplrit who gave the order was in police custody Monday (today) afternoon but was released on bail this evening.
At the moment he is released he gets on a bus and is sitting next to you. All of you have to do is find out...See More
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Recommended by 3 readers
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Pthomas2mm wrote:
4/30/2012 5:12 PM CDT
I think Mr Rodriguez has a point when he is told by members of both parties that they will have your back, and the ranking member and person you briefed denies it happening. It is one thing to disemble or stretch the truth as most politicians do, it is quite another to lie outright. Prove it? There is a classified cable that will either condemn or exonerate Pelosi, we will probably hear in the next few days all of the glowing and patriotic reasons Pelosi won't ask for it to be released. Of c...See More
Recommend
Recommended by 19 readers
Reply
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tedmacks responds:
4/30/2012 6:35 PM CDT
Libs in private.
Lib 1 "I feel confident that I can say I'm firmly against enhanced interrogation. What are the chances that it will actually be me or anyone that I know would get killed in a preventable attack. Small I think."
Lib 2 "Yeah the chance is remote but we are talking about inncocents getting killed"
Lib 1 " Scroo them, I'll still be able to act holier than thou and besides that they are dead strangers".
Lib 2 "Yeah, scroo them.
Recommend
Recommended by 4 readers
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Marc A. Thiessen Opinion Writer
Ex-CIA counterterror chief says Pelosi ‘reinventing the truth’ about waterboarding
Text Size
Reprints
By Marc A. Thiessen, Published: April 30
In an explosive memoir released today, former CIA counterterrorism chief Jose Rodriguez provides new evidence that Rep. Nancy Pelosi lied when she declared she had not been briefed about the use of waterboarding.
Recall that in a Capitol Hill news conference three years ago, Pelosi (D-Calif.) vehemently denied being told about the use of waterboarding at a CIA briefing in September 2002. “We were not — I repeat — were not told that waterboarding or any of these other enhanced interrogation methods were used,” Pelosi said. She later changed her story, telling reporters, “We were told explicitly that waterboarding was not being used.” She claimed she learned about the use of waterboarding the following year, only after other lawmakers were told by the CIA. “I wasn’t briefed, I was informed that somebody else had been briefed about it,” she said.
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Marc A. Thiessen
A fellow with the American Enterprise Institute, Thiessen writes a weekly column for The Post.
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Charles Krauthammer
While Syria burns
George F. Will
The exemplary LBJ
.
If Rodriguez is right, each of these statements is false. But other than a chart released by the CIA noting that Pelosi, then the ranking member of the House intelligence committee, and Rep. Porter Goss (R-Fla.), then chairman of the committee, had been given a “description of the particular [enhanced interrogation techniques] that had been employed,” there was little public evidence to contradict Pelosi’s claims. So she got away with it — until today.
In his new book, “Hard Measures,” Rodriguez reveals that he led a CIA briefing of Pelosi, where the techniques being used in the interrogation of senior al-Qaeda facilitator Abu Zubaida were described in detail. Her claim that she was not told about waterboarding at that briefing, he writes, “is untrue.”
“We explained that as a result of the techniques, Abu Zubaydah was compliant and providing good intelligence. We made crystal clear that authorized techniques, including waterboarding, had by then been used on Zubaydah.” Rodriguez writes that he told Pelosi everything, adding, “We held back nothing.”
How did she respond when presented with this information? Rodriguez writes that neither Pelosi nor anyone else in the briefing objected to the techniques being used. Indeed, he notes, when one member of his team described another technique that had been considered but not authorized or used, “Pelosi piped up immediately and said that in her view, use of that technique (which I will not describe) would have been ‘wrong.’ ” She raised no such concern about waterboarding, he writes. “Since she felt free to label one considered-and-rejected technique as wrong,” Rodriguez adds, “we went away with the clear impression that she harbored no such feelings about the ten tactics [including waterboarding] that we told her were in use.”
So we’re left with a “he said-she said” standoff? Not at all. Rodriguez writes that there’s contemporaneous evidence to back his account of the briefing. Six days after the meeting took place, Rodriguez reveals, “a cable went out from headquarters to the black site informing them that the briefing for the House leadership had taken place.” He explains that “[t]he cable to the field made clear that Goss and Pelosi had been briefed on the state of AZ’s interrogation, specifically including the use of the waterboard and other enhanced interrogation techniques.”
Rodriguez asks, “So Pelosi was another member of Congress reinventing the truth. What’s the big deal?” The big deal, he explains, is “the message they are sending to the men and women of the intelligence community who to this day are being asked to undertake dangerous and sometimes controversial actions on behalf of their government. They are told that the administration and Congress ‘have their back.’ You will forgive CIA officers if they are not filled with confidence.”
Rodriguez compares Pelosi’s actions to the opening scene of the old TV series “Mission: Impossible,” “in which the operatives were told that if anything went wrong, their leaders would ‘disavow any knowledge of your actions.’ That is not how it should work in the real world,” he writes.
It is a big deal for another reason. If Rodriguez is right, it means that Pelosi stood up in a Capitol Hill news conference and lied with a straight face to the American people; that she falsely accused a dedicated civil servant of lying to Congress as part of a political cover-up. Pelosi is hoping to become House speaker again after the November elections. Do we really want someone so ethically challenged to be third in line to the presidency?
There is a simple way to settle this once and for all. Pelosi should formally request that the Obama administration declassify the cable that was sent from headquarters to the field reporting on the details of her Sept. 4, 2002, briefing. If she refuses to do so, it should be taken as an admission by Pelosi that her account of events is a fabrication.
Read more on this topic
The Post’s View: The futility of torture
Susan Thistlewaite: Justifying the unjustifiable
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rlyoung311 wrote:
2:28 AM CDT
Was the internal CIA cable (from headquarters to field) copied to Pelosi? If so, her failure to respond or complain at that time might be a rational basis for concluding that she did not disagree with CIA Headquarters on the contents of the cable. If not, how does an internal CIA memo that Pelosi did not see have any evidentiary weight on the truth or falsity of the contents of the CIA memo? Until we know that Pelosi had contemporaneous knowledge of the internal CIA cable, the existence of thi...See More
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andrew23boyle wrote:
4/30/2012 6:35 PM CDT
What did she know and when?
I'll bet water-boarding would get it out of her!
Recommend
Recommended by 23 readers
Reply
Report
tedmacks responds:
4/30/2012 6:39 PM CDT
Would you waterboard or even kill under the following hypothetical scenario?
Let's pretend you got next Wednesday's newpaper today(Monday) nad it talked about Tuesday's (tomorrow) disasterous terrorist attack. Listed among the 10,000 dead were all of your friends and family. The cuplrit who gave the order was in police custody Monday (today) afternoon but was released on bail this evening.
At the moment he is released he gets on a bus and is sitting next to you. All of you have to do is find out...See More
Recommend
Recommended by 3 readers
Report
View more responses
Pthomas2mm wrote:
4/30/2012 5:12 PM CDT
I think Mr Rodriguez has a point when he is told by members of both parties that they will have your back, and the ranking member and person you briefed denies it happening. It is one thing to disemble or stretch the truth as most politicians do, it is quite another to lie outright. Prove it? There is a classified cable that will either condemn or exonerate Pelosi, we will probably hear in the next few days all of the glowing and patriotic reasons Pelosi won't ask for it to be released. Of c...See More
Recommend
Recommended by 19 readers
Reply
Report
tedmacks responds:
4/30/2012 6:35 PM CDT
Libs in private.
Lib 1 "I feel confident that I can say I'm firmly against enhanced interrogation. What are the chances that it will actually be me or anyone that I know would get killed in a preventable attack. Small I think."
Lib 2 "Yeah the chance is remote but we are talking about inncocents getting killed"
Lib 1 " Scroo them, I'll still be able to act holier than thou and besides that they are dead strangers".
Lib 2 "Yeah, scroo them.
Recommend
Recommended by 4 readers
Report
View more responses
Load more comments
Marc A. Thiessen Opinion Writer
Ex-CIA counterterror chief says Pelosi ‘reinventing the truth’ about waterboarding
Text Size
Reprints
By Marc A. Thiessen, Published: April 30
In an explosive memoir released today, former CIA counterterrorism chief Jose Rodriguez provides new evidence that Rep. Nancy Pelosi lied when she declared she had not been briefed about the use of waterboarding.
Recall that in a Capitol Hill news conference three years ago, Pelosi (D-Calif.) vehemently denied being told about the use of waterboarding at a CIA briefing in September 2002. “We were not — I repeat — were not told that waterboarding or any of these other enhanced interrogation methods were used,” Pelosi said. She later changed her story, telling reporters, “We were told explicitly that waterboarding was not being used.” She claimed she learned about the use of waterboarding the following year, only after other lawmakers were told by the CIA. “I wasn’t briefed, I was informed that somebody else had been briefed about it,” she said.
717
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Marc A. Thiessen
A fellow with the American Enterprise Institute, Thiessen writes a weekly column for The Post.
Archive
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RSS
You may also like...
Charles Krauthammer
While Syria burns
George F. Will
The exemplary LBJ
.
If Rodriguez is right, each of these statements is false. But other than a chart released by the CIA noting that Pelosi, then the ranking member of the House intelligence committee, and Rep. Porter Goss (R-Fla.), then chairman of the committee, had been given a “description of the particular [enhanced interrogation techniques] that had been employed,” there was little public evidence to contradict Pelosi’s claims. So she got away with it — until today.
In his new book, “Hard Measures,” Rodriguez reveals that he led a CIA briefing of Pelosi, where the techniques being used in the interrogation of senior al-Qaeda facilitator Abu Zubaida were described in detail. Her claim that she was not told about waterboarding at that briefing, he writes, “is untrue.”
“We explained that as a result of the techniques, Abu Zubaydah was compliant and providing good intelligence. We made crystal clear that authorized techniques, including waterboarding, had by then been used on Zubaydah.” Rodriguez writes that he told Pelosi everything, adding, “We held back nothing.”
How did she respond when presented with this information? Rodriguez writes that neither Pelosi nor anyone else in the briefing objected to the techniques being used. Indeed, he notes, when one member of his team described another technique that had been considered but not authorized or used, “Pelosi piped up immediately and said that in her view, use of that technique (which I will not describe) would have been ‘wrong.’ ” She raised no such concern about waterboarding, he writes. “Since she felt free to label one considered-and-rejected technique as wrong,” Rodriguez adds, “we went away with the clear impression that she harbored no such feelings about the ten tactics [including waterboarding] that we told her were in use.”
So we’re left with a “he said-she said” standoff? Not at all. Rodriguez writes that there’s contemporaneous evidence to back his account of the briefing. Six days after the meeting took place, Rodriguez reveals, “a cable went out from headquarters to the black site informing them that the briefing for the House leadership had taken place.” He explains that “[t]he cable to the field made clear that Goss and Pelosi had been briefed on the state of AZ’s interrogation, specifically including the use of the waterboard and other enhanced interrogation techniques.”
Rodriguez asks, “So Pelosi was another member of Congress reinventing the truth. What’s the big deal?” The big deal, he explains, is “the message they are sending to the men and women of the intelligence community who to this day are being asked to undertake dangerous and sometimes controversial actions on behalf of their government. They are told that the administration and Congress ‘have their back.’ You will forgive CIA officers if they are not filled with confidence.”
Rodriguez compares Pelosi’s actions to the opening scene of the old TV series “Mission: Impossible,” “in which the operatives were told that if anything went wrong, their leaders would ‘disavow any knowledge of your actions.’ That is not how it should work in the real world,” he writes.
It is a big deal for another reason. If Rodriguez is right, it means that Pelosi stood up in a Capitol Hill news conference and lied with a straight face to the American people; that she falsely accused a dedicated civil servant of lying to Congress as part of a political cover-up. Pelosi is hoping to become House speaker again after the November elections. Do we really want someone so ethically challenged to be third in line to the presidency?
There is a simple way to settle this once and for all. Pelosi should formally request that the Obama administration declassify the cable that was sent from headquarters to the field reporting on the details of her Sept. 4, 2002, briefing. If she refuses to do so, it should be taken as an admission by Pelosi that her account of events is a fabrication.
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rlyoung311 wrote:
2:28 AM CDT
Was the internal CIA cable (from headquarters to field) copied to Pelosi? If so, her failure to respond or complain at that time might be a rational basis for concluding that she did not disagree with CIA Headquarters on the contents of the cable. If not, how does an internal CIA memo that Pelosi did not see have any evidentiary weight on the truth or falsity of the contents of the CIA memo? Until we know that Pelosi had contemporaneous knowledge of the internal CIA cable, the existence of thi...See More
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andrew23boyle wrote:
4/30/2012 6:35 PM CDT
What did she know and when?
I'll bet water-boarding would get it out of her!
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tedmacks responds:
4/30/2012 6:39 PM CDT
Would you waterboard or even kill under the following hypothetical scenario?
Let's pretend you got next Wednesday's newpaper today(Monday) nad it talked about Tuesday's (tomorrow) disasterous terrorist attack. Listed among the 10,000 dead were all of your friends and family. The cuplrit who gave the order was in police custody Monday (today) afternoon but was released on bail this evening.
At the moment he is released he gets on a bus and is sitting next to you. All of you have to do is find out...See More
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Pthomas2mm wrote:
4/30/2012 5:12 PM CDT
I think Mr Rodriguez has a point when he is told by members of both parties that they will have your back, and the ranking member and person you briefed denies it happening. It is one thing to disemble or stretch the truth as most politicians do, it is quite another to lie outright. Prove it? There is a classified cable that will either condemn or exonerate Pelosi, we will probably hear in the next few days all of the glowing and patriotic reasons Pelosi won't ask for it to be released. Of c...See More
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tedmacks responds:
4/30/2012 6:35 PM CDT
Libs in private.
Lib 1 "I feel confident that I can say I'm firmly against enhanced interrogation. What are the chances that it will actually be me or anyone that I know would get killed in a preventable attack. Small I think."
Lib 2 "Yeah the chance is remote but we are talking about inncocents getting killed"
Lib 1 " Scroo them, I'll still be able to act holier than thou and besides that they are dead strangers".
Lib 2 "Yeah, scroo them.
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Marc A. Thiessen Opinion Writer
Ex-CIA counterterror chief says Pelosi ‘reinventing the truth’ about waterboarding
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By Marc A. Thiessen, Published: April 30
In an explosive memoir released today, former CIA counterterrorism chief Jose Rodriguez provides new evidence that Rep. Nancy Pelosi lied when she declared she had not been briefed about the use of waterboarding.
Recall that in a Capitol Hill news conference three years ago, Pelosi (D-Calif.) vehemently denied being told about the use of waterboarding at a CIA briefing in September 2002. “We were not — I repeat — were not told that waterboarding or any of these other enhanced interrogation methods were used,” Pelosi said. She later changed her story, telling reporters, “We were told explicitly that waterboarding was not being used.” She claimed she learned about the use of waterboarding the following year, only after other lawmakers were told by the CIA. “I wasn’t briefed, I was informed that somebody else had been briefed about it,” she said.
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If Rodriguez is right, each of these statements is false. But other than a chart released by the CIA noting that Pelosi, then the ranking member of the House intelligence committee, and Rep. Porter Goss (R-Fla.), then chairman of the committee, had been given a “description of the particular [enhanced interrogation techniques] that had been employed,” there was little public evidence to contradict Pelosi’s claims. So she got away with it — until today.
In his new book, “Hard Measures,” Rodriguez reveals that he led a CIA briefing of Pelosi, where the techniques being used in the interrogation of senior al-Qaeda facilitator Abu Zubaida were described in detail. Her claim that she was not told about waterboarding at that briefing, he writes, “is untrue.”
“We explained that as a result of the techniques, Abu Zubaydah was compliant and providing good intelligence. We made crystal clear that authorized techniques, including waterboarding, had by then been used on Zubaydah.” Rodriguez writes that he told Pelosi everything, adding, “We held back nothing.”
How did she respond when presented with this information? Rodriguez writes that neither Pelosi nor anyone else in the briefing objected to the techniques being used. Indeed, he notes, when one member of his team described another technique that had been considered but not authorized or used, “Pelosi piped up immediately and said that in her view, use of that technique (which I will not describe) would have been ‘wrong.’ ” She raised no such concern about waterboarding, he writes. “Since she felt free to label one considered-and-rejected technique as wrong,” Rodriguez adds, “we went away with the clear impression that she harbored no such feelings about the ten tactics [including waterboarding] that we told her were in use.”
So we’re left with a “he said-she said” standoff? Not at all. Rodriguez writes that there’s contemporaneous evidence to back his account of the briefing. Six days after the meeting took place, Rodriguez reveals, “a cable went out from headquarters to the black site informing them that the briefing for the House leadership had taken place.” He explains that “[t]he cable to the field made clear that Goss and Pelosi had been briefed on the state of AZ’s interrogation, specifically including the use of the waterboard and other enhanced interrogation techniques.”
Rodriguez asks, “So Pelosi was another member of Congress reinventing the truth. What’s the big deal?” The big deal, he explains, is “the message they are sending to the men and women of the intelligence community who to this day are being asked to undertake dangerous and sometimes controversial actions on behalf of their government. They are told that the administration and Congress ‘have their back.’ You will forgive CIA officers if they are not filled with confidence.”
Rodriguez compares Pelosi’s actions to the opening scene of the old TV series “Mission: Impossible,” “in which the operatives were told that if anything went wrong, their leaders would ‘disavow any knowledge of your actions.’ That is not how it should work in the real world,” he writes.
It is a big deal for another reason. If Rodriguez is right, it means that Pelosi stood up in a Capitol Hill news conference and lied with a straight face to the American people; that she falsely accused a dedicated civil servant of lying to Congress as part of a political cover-up. Pelosi is hoping to become House speaker again after the November elections. Do we really want someone so ethically challenged to be third in line to the presidency?
There is a simple way to settle this once and for all. Pelosi should formally request that the Obama administration declassify the cable that was sent from headquarters to the field reporting on the details of her Sept. 4, 2002, briefing. If she refuses to do so, it should be taken as an admission by Pelosi that her account of events is a fabrication.
Read more on this topic
The Post’s View: The futility of torture
Susan Thistlewaite: Justifying the unjustifiable
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rlyoung311 wrote:
2:28 AM CDT
Was the internal CIA cable (from headquarters to field) copied to Pelosi? If so, her failure to respond or complain at that time might be a rational basis for concluding that she did not disagree with CIA Headquarters on the contents of the cable. If not, how does an internal CIA memo that Pelosi did not see have any evidentiary weight on the truth or falsity of the contents of the CIA memo? Until we know that Pelosi had contemporaneous knowledge of the internal CIA cable, the existence of thi...See More
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andrew23boyle wrote:
4/30/2012 6:35 PM CDT
What did she know and when?
I'll bet water-boarding would get it out of her!
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tedmacks responds:
4/30/2012 6:39 PM CDT
Would you waterboard or even kill under the following hypothetical scenario?
Let's pretend you got next Wednesday's newpaper today(Monday) nad it talked about Tuesday's (tomorrow) disasterous terrorist attack. Listed among the 10,000 dead were all of your friends and family. The cuplrit who gave the order was in police custody Monday (today) afternoon but was released on bail this evening.
At the moment he is released he gets on a bus and is sitting next to you. All of you have to do is find out...See More
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Pthomas2mm wrote:
4/30/2012 5:12 PM CDT
I think Mr Rodriguez has a point when he is told by members of both parties that they will have your back, and the ranking member and person you briefed denies it happening. It is one thing to disemble or stretch the truth as most politicians do, it is quite another to lie outright. Prove it? There is a classified cable that will either condemn or exonerate Pelosi, we will probably hear in the next few days all of the glowing and patriotic reasons Pelosi won't ask for it to be released. Of c...See More
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Recommended by 19 readers
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tedmacks responds:
4/30/2012 6:35 PM CDT
Libs in private.
Lib 1 "I feel confident that I can say I'm firmly against enhanced interrogation. What are the chances that it will actually be me or anyone that I know would get killed in a preventable attack. Small I think."
Lib 2 "Yeah the chance is remote but we are talking about inncocents getting killed"
Lib 1 " Scroo them, I'll still be able to act holier than thou and besides that they are dead strangers".
Lib 2 "Yeah, scroo them.
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Marc A. Thiessen Opinion Writer
Ex-CIA counterterror chief says Pelosi ‘reinventing the truth’ about waterboarding
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By Marc A. Thiessen, Published: April 30
In an explosive memoir released today, former CIA counterterrorism chief Jose Rodriguez provides new evidence that Rep. Nancy Pelosi lied when she declared she had not been briefed about the use of waterboarding.
Recall that in a Capitol Hill news conference three years ago, Pelosi (D-Calif.) vehemently denied being told about the use of waterboarding at a CIA briefing in September 2002. “We were not — I repeat — were not told that waterboarding or any of these other enhanced interrogation methods were used,” Pelosi said. She later changed her story, telling reporters, “We were told explicitly that waterboarding was not being used.” She claimed she learned about the use of waterboarding the following year, only after other lawmakers were told by the CIA. “I wasn’t briefed, I was informed that somebody else had been briefed about it,” she said.
717
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Marc A. Thiessen
A fellow with the American Enterprise Institute, Thiessen writes a weekly column for The Post.
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If Rodriguez is right, each of these statements is false. But other than a chart released by the CIA noting that Pelosi, then the ranking member of the House intelligence committee, and Rep. Porter Goss (R-Fla.), then chairman of the committee, had been given a “description of the particular [enhanced interrogation techniques] that had been employed,” there was little public evidence to contradict Pelosi’s claims. So she got away with it — until today.
In his new book, “Hard Measures,” Rodriguez reveals that he led a CIA briefing of Pelosi, where the techniques being used in the interrogation of senior al-Qaeda facilitator Abu Zubaida were described in detail. Her claim that she was not told about waterboarding at that briefing, he writes, “is untrue.”
“We explained that as a result of the techniques, Abu Zubaydah was compliant and providing good intelligence. We made crystal clear that authorized techniques, including waterboarding, had by then been used on Zubaydah.” Rodriguez writes that he told Pelosi everything, adding, “We held back nothing.”
How did she respond when presented with this information? Rodriguez writes that neither Pelosi nor anyone else in the briefing objected to the techniques being used. Indeed, he notes, when one member of his team described another technique that had been considered but not authorized or used, “Pelosi piped up immediately and said that in her view, use of that technique (which I will not describe) would have been ‘wrong.’ ” She raised no such concern about waterboarding, he writes. “Since she felt free to label one considered-and-rejected technique as wrong,” Rodriguez adds, “we went away with the clear impression that she harbored no such feelings about the ten tactics [including waterboarding] that we told her were in use.”
So we’re left with a “he said-she said” standoff? Not at all. Rodriguez writes that there’s contemporaneous evidence to back his account of the briefing. Six days after the meeting took place, Rodriguez reveals, “a cable went out from headquarters to the black site informing them that the briefing for the House leadership had taken place.” He explains that “[t]he cable to the field made clear that Goss and Pelosi had been briefed on the state of AZ’s interrogation, specifically including the use of the waterboard and other enhanced interrogation techniques.”
Rodriguez asks, “So Pelosi was another member of Congress reinventing the truth. What’s the big deal?” The big deal, he explains, is “the message they are sending to the men and women of the intelligence community who to this day are being asked to undertake dangerous and sometimes controversial actions on behalf of their government. They are told that the administration and Congress ‘have their back.’ You will forgive CIA officers if they are not filled with confidence.”
Rodriguez compares Pelosi’s actions to the opening scene of the old TV series “Mission: Impossible,” “in which the operatives were told that if anything went wrong, their leaders would ‘disavow any knowledge of your actions.’ That is not how it should work in the real world,” he writes.
It is a big deal for another reason. If Rodriguez is right, it means that Pelosi stood up in a Capitol Hill news conference and lied with a straight face to the American people; that she falsely accused a dedicated civil servant of lying to Congress as part of a political cover-up. Pelosi is hoping to become House speaker again after the November elections. Do we really want someone so ethically challenged to be third in line to the presidency?
There is a simple way to settle this once and for all. Pelosi should formally request that the Obama administration declassify the cable that was sent from headquarters to the field reporting on the details of her Sept. 4, 2002, briefing. If she refuses to do so, it should be taken as an admission by Pelosi that her account of events is a fabrication.
Read more on this topic
The Post’s View: The futility of torture
Susan Thistlewaite: Justifying the unjustifiable
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rlyoung311 wrote:
2:28 AM CDT
Was the internal CIA cable (from headquarters to field) copied to Pelosi? If so, her failure to respond or complain at that time might be a rational basis for concluding that she did not disagree with CIA Headquarters on the contents of the cable. If not, how does an internal CIA memo that Pelosi did not see have any evidentiary weight on the truth or falsity of the contents of the CIA memo? Until we know that Pelosi had contemporaneous knowledge of the internal CIA cable, the existence of thi...See More
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andrew23boyle wrote:
4/30/2012 6:35 PM CDT
What did she know and when?
I'll bet water-boarding would get it out of her!
Recommend
Recommended by 23 readers
Reply
Report
tedmacks responds:
4/30/2012 6:39 PM CDT
Would you waterboard or even kill under the following hypothetical scenario?
Let's pretend you got next Wednesday's newpaper today(Monday) nad it talked about Tuesday's (tomorrow) disasterous terrorist attack. Listed among the 10,000 dead were all of your friends and family. The cuplrit who gave the order was in police custody Monday (today) afternoon but was released on bail this evening.
At the moment he is released he gets on a bus and is sitting next to you. All of you have to do is find out...See More
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Recommended by 3 readers
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Pthomas2mm wrote:
4/30/2012 5:12 PM CDT
I think Mr Rodriguez has a point when he is told by members of both parties that they will have your back, and the ranking member and person you briefed denies it happening. It is one thing to disemble or stretch the truth as most politicians do, it is quite another to lie outright. Prove it? There is a classified cable that will either condemn or exonerate Pelosi, we will probably hear in the next few days all of the glowing and patriotic reasons Pelosi won't ask for it to be released. Of c...See More
Recommend
Recommended by 19 readers
Reply
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tedmacks responds:
4/30/2012 6:35 PM CDT
Libs in private.
Lib 1 "I feel confident that I can say I'm firmly against enhanced interrogation. What are the chances that it will actually be me or anyone that I know would get killed in a preventable attack. Small I think."
Lib 2 "Yeah the chance is remote but we are talking about inncocents getting killed"
Lib 1 " Scroo them, I'll still be able to act holier than thou and besides that they are dead strangers".
Lib 2 "Yeah, scroo them.
Recommend
Recommended by 4 readers
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Marc A. Thiessen Opinion Writer
Ex-CIA counterterror chief says Pelosi ‘reinventing the truth’ about waterboarding
Text Size
Reprints
By Marc A. Thiessen, Published: April 30
In an explosive memoir released today, former CIA counterterrorism chief Jose Rodriguez provides new evidence that Rep. Nancy Pelosi lied when she declared she had not been briefed about the use of waterboarding.
Recall that in a Capitol Hill news conference three years ago, Pelosi (D-Calif.) vehemently denied being told about the use of waterboarding at a CIA briefing in September 2002. “We were not — I repeat — were not told that waterboarding or any of these other enhanced interrogation methods were used,” Pelosi said. She later changed her story, telling reporters, “We were told explicitly that waterboarding was not being used.” She claimed she learned about the use of waterboarding the following year, only after other lawmakers were told by the CIA. “I wasn’t briefed, I was informed that somebody else had been briefed about it,” she said.
717
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Marc A. Thiessen
A fellow with the American Enterprise Institute, Thiessen writes a weekly column for The Post.
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Charles Krauthammer
While Syria burns
George F. Will
The exemplary LBJ
.
If Rodriguez is right, each of these statements is false. But other than a chart released by the CIA noting that Pelosi, then the ranking member of the House intelligence committee, and Rep. Porter Goss (R-Fla.), then chairman of the committee, had been given a “description of the particular [enhanced interrogation techniques] that had been employed,” there was little public evidence to contradict Pelosi’s claims. So she got away with it — until today.
In his new book, “Hard Measures,” Rodriguez reveals that he led a CIA briefing of Pelosi, where the techniques being used in the interrogation of senior al-Qaeda facilitator Abu Zubaida were described in detail. Her claim that she was not told about waterboarding at that briefing, he writes, “is untrue.”
“We explained that as a result of the techniques, Abu Zubaydah was compliant and providing good intelligence. We made crystal clear that authorized techniques, including waterboarding, had by then been used on Zubaydah.” Rodriguez writes that he told Pelosi everything, adding, “We held back nothing.”
How did she respond when presented with this information? Rodriguez writes that neither Pelosi nor anyone else in the briefing objected to the techniques being used. Indeed, he notes, when one member of his team described another technique that had been considered but not authorized or used, “Pelosi piped up immediately and said that in her view, use of that technique (which I will not describe) would have been ‘wrong.’ ” She raised no such concern about waterboarding, he writes. “Since she felt free to label one considered-and-rejected technique as wrong,” Rodriguez adds, “we went away with the clear impression that she harbored no such feelings about the ten tactics [including waterboarding] that we told her were in use.”
So we’re left with a “he said-she said” standoff? Not at all. Rodriguez writes that there’s contemporaneous evidence to back his account of the briefing. Six days after the meeting took place, Rodriguez reveals, “a cable went out from headquarters to the black site informing them that the briefing for the House leadership had taken place.” He explains that “[t]he cable to the field made clear that Goss and Pelosi had been briefed on the state of AZ’s interrogation, specifically including the use of the waterboard and other enhanced interrogation techniques.”
Rodriguez asks, “So Pelosi was another member of Congress reinventing the truth. What’s the big deal?” The big deal, he explains, is “the message they are sending to the men and women of the intelligence community who to this day are being asked to undertake dangerous and sometimes controversial actions on behalf of their government. They are told that the administration and Congress ‘have their back.’ You will forgive CIA officers if they are not filled with confidence.”
Rodriguez compares Pelosi’s actions to the opening scene of the old TV series “Mission: Impossible,” “in which the operatives were told that if anything went wrong, their leaders would ‘disavow any knowledge of your actions.’ That is not how it should work in the real world,” he writes.
It is a big deal for another reason. If Rodriguez is right, it means that Pelosi stood up in a Capitol Hill news conference and lied with a straight face to the American people; that she falsely accused a dedicated civil servant of lying to Congress as part of a political cover-up. Pelosi is hoping to become House speaker again after the November elections. Do we really want someone so ethically challenged to be third in line to the presidency?
There is a simple way to settle this once and for all. Pelosi should formally request that the Obama administration declassify the cable that was sent from headquarters to the field reporting on the details of her Sept. 4, 2002, briefing. If she refuses to do so, it should be taken as an admission by Pelosi that her account of events is a fabrication.
Read more on this topic
The Post’s View: The futility of torture
Susan Thistlewaite: Justifying the unjustifiable
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rlyoung311 wrote:
2:28 AM CDT
Was the internal CIA cable (from headquarters to field) copied to Pelosi? If so, her failure to respond or complain at that time might be a rational basis for concluding that she did not disagree with CIA Headquarters on the contents of the cable. If not, how does an internal CIA memo that Pelosi did not see have any evidentiary weight on the truth or falsity of the contents of the CIA memo? Until we know that Pelosi had contemporaneous knowledge of the internal CIA cable, the existence of thi...See More
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andrew23boyle wrote:
4/30/2012 6:35 PM CDT
What did she know and when?
I'll bet water-boarding would get it out of her!
Recommend
Recommended by 23 readers
Reply
Report
tedmacks responds:
4/30/2012 6:39 PM CDT
Would you waterboard or even kill under the following hypothetical scenario?
Let's pretend you got next Wednesday's newpaper today(Monday) nad it talked about Tuesday's (tomorrow) disasterous terrorist attack. Listed among the 10,000 dead were all of your friends and family. The cuplrit who gave the order was in police custody Monday (today) afternoon but was released on bail this evening.
At the moment he is released he gets on a bus and is sitting next to you. All of you have to do is find out...See More
Recommend
Recommended by 3 readers
Report
View more responses
Pthomas2mm wrote:
4/30/2012 5:12 PM CDT
I think Mr Rodriguez has a point when he is told by members of both parties that they will have your back, and the ranking member and person you briefed denies it happening. It is one thing to disemble or stretch the truth as most politicians do, it is quite another to lie outright. Prove it? There is a classified cable that will either condemn or exonerate Pelosi, we will probably hear in the next few days all of the glowing and patriotic reasons Pelosi won't ask for it to be released. Of c...See More
Recommend
Recommended by 19 readers
Reply
Report
tedmacks responds:
4/30/2012 6:35 PM CDT
Libs in private.
Lib 1 "I feel confident that I can say I'm firmly against enhanced interrogation. What are the chances that it will actually be me or anyone that I know would get killed in a preventable attack. Small I think."
Lib 2 "Yeah the chance is remote but we are talking about inncocents getting killed"
Lib 1 " Scroo them, I'll still be able to act holier than thou and besides that they are dead strangers".
Lib 2 "Yeah, scroo them.
Recommend
Recommended by 4 readers
Report
View more responses
Load more comments
Marc A. Thiessen Opinion Writer
Ex-CIA counterterror chief says Pelosi ‘reinventing the truth’ about waterboarding
Text Size
Reprints
By Marc A. Thiessen, Published: April 30
In an explosive memoir released today, former CIA counterterrorism chief Jose Rodriguez provides new evidence that Rep. Nancy Pelosi lied when she declared she had not been briefed about the use of waterboarding.
Recall that in a Capitol Hill news conference three years ago, Pelosi (D-Calif.) vehemently denied being told about the use of waterboarding at a CIA briefing in September 2002. “We were not — I repeat — were not told that waterboarding or any of these other enhanced interrogation methods were used,” Pelosi said. She later changed her story, telling reporters, “We were told explicitly that waterboarding was not being used.” She claimed she learned about the use of waterboarding the following year, only after other lawmakers were told by the CIA. “I wasn’t briefed, I was informed that somebody else had been briefed about it,” she said.
717
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Marc A. Thiessen
A fellow with the American Enterprise Institute, Thiessen writes a weekly column for The Post.
Archive
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You may also like...
Charles Krauthammer
While Syria burns
George F. Will
The exemplary LBJ
.
If Rodriguez is right, each of these statements is false. But other than a chart released by the CIA noting that Pelosi, then the ranking member of the House intelligence committee, and Rep. Porter Goss (R-Fla.), then chairman of the committee, had been given a “description of the particular [enhanced interrogation techniques] that had been employed,” there was little public evidence to contradict Pelosi’s claims. So she got away with it — until today.
In his new book, “Hard Measures,” Rodriguez reveals that he led a CIA briefing of Pelosi, where the techniques being used in the interrogation of senior al-Qaeda facilitator Abu Zubaida were described in detail. Her claim that she was not told about waterboarding at that briefing, he writes, “is untrue.”
“We explained that as a result of the techniques, Abu Zubaydah was compliant and providing good intelligence. We made crystal clear that authorized techniques, including waterboarding, had by then been used on Zubaydah.” Rodriguez writes that he told Pelosi everything, adding, “We held back nothing.”
How did she respond when presented with this information? Rodriguez writes that neither Pelosi nor anyone else in the briefing objected to the techniques being used. Indeed, he notes, when one member of his team described another technique that had been considered but not authorized or used, “Pelosi piped up immediately and said that in her view, use of that technique (which I will not describe) would have been ‘wrong.’ ” She raised no such concern about waterboarding, he writes. “Since she felt free to label one considered-and-rejected technique as wrong,” Rodriguez adds, “we went away with the clear impression that she harbored no such feelings about the ten tactics [including waterboarding] that we told her were in use.”
So we’re left with a “he said-she said” standoff? Not at all. Rodriguez writes that there’s contemporaneous evidence to back his account of the briefing. Six days after the meeting took place, Rodriguez reveals, “a cable went out from headquarters to the black site informing them that the briefing for the House leadership had taken place.” He explains that “[t]he cable to the field made clear that Goss and Pelosi had been briefed on the state of AZ’s interrogation, specifically including the use of the waterboard and other enhanced interrogation techniques.”
Rodriguez asks, “So Pelosi was another member of Congress reinventing the truth. What’s the big deal?” The big deal, he explains, is “the message they are sending to the men and women of the intelligence community who to this day are being asked to undertake dangerous and sometimes controversial actions on behalf of their government. They are told that the administration and Congress ‘have their back.’ You will forgive CIA officers if they are not filled with confidence.”
Rodriguez compares Pelosi’s actions to the opening scene of the old TV series “Mission: Impossible,” “in which the operatives were told that if anything went wrong, their leaders would ‘disavow any knowledge of your actions.’ That is not how it should work in the real world,” he writes.
It is a big deal for another reason. If Rodriguez is right, it means that Pelosi stood up in a Capitol Hill news conference and lied with a straight face to the American people; that she falsely accused a dedicated civil servant of lying to Congress as part of a political cover-up. Pelosi is hoping to become House speaker again after the November elections. Do we really want someone so ethically challenged to be third in line to the presidency?
There is a simple way to settle this once and for all. Pelosi should formally request that the Obama administration declassify the cable that was sent from headquarters to the field reporting on the details of her Sept. 4, 2002, briefing. If she refuses to do so, it should be taken as an admission by Pelosi that her account of events is a fabrication.
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rlyoung311 wrote:
2:28 AM CDT
Was the internal CIA cable (from headquarters to field) copied to Pelosi? If so, her failure to respond or complain at that time might be a rational basis for concluding that she did not disagree with CIA Headquarters on the contents of the cable. If not, how does an internal CIA memo that Pelosi did not see have any evidentiary weight on the truth or falsity of the contents of the CIA memo? Until we know that Pelosi had contemporaneous knowledge of the internal CIA cable, the existence of thi...See More
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andrew23boyle wrote:
4/30/2012 6:35 PM CDT
What did she know and when?
I'll bet water-boarding would get it out of her!
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tedmacks responds:
4/30/2012 6:39 PM CDT
Would you waterboard or even kill under the following hypothetical scenario?
Let's pretend you got next Wednesday's newpaper today(Monday) nad it talked about Tuesday's (tomorrow) disasterous terrorist attack. Listed among the 10,000 dead were all of your friends and family. The cuplrit who gave the order was in police custody Monday (today) afternoon but was released on bail this evening.
At the moment he is released he gets on a bus and is sitting next to you. All of you have to do is find out...See More
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Pthomas2mm wrote:
4/30/2012 5:12 PM CDT
I think Mr Rodriguez has a point when he is told by members of both parties that they will have your back, and the ranking member and person you briefed denies it happening. It is one thing to disemble or stretch the truth as most politicians do, it is quite another to lie outright. Prove it? There is a classified cable that will either condemn or exonerate Pelosi, we will probably hear in the next few days all of the glowing and patriotic reasons Pelosi won't ask for it to be released. Of c...See More
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tedmacks responds:
4/30/2012 6:35 PM CDT
Libs in private.
Lib 1 "I feel confident that I can say I'm firmly against enhanced interrogation. What are the chances that it will actually be me or anyone that I know would get killed in a preventable attack. Small I think."
Lib 2 "Yeah the chance is remote but we are talking about inncocents getting killed"
Lib 1 " Scroo them, I'll still be able to act holier than thou and besides that they are dead strangers".
Lib 2 "Yeah, scroo them.
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Marc A. Thiessen Opinion Writer
Ex-CIA counterterror chief says Pelosi ‘reinventing the truth’ about waterboarding
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By Marc A. Thiessen, Published: April 30
In an explosive memoir released today, former CIA counterterrorism chief Jose Rodriguez provides new evidence that Rep. Nancy Pelosi lied when she declared she had not been briefed about the use of waterboarding.
Recall that in a Capitol Hill news conference three years ago, Pelosi (D-Calif.) vehemently denied being told about the use of waterboarding at a CIA briefing in September 2002. “We were not — I repeat — were not told that waterboarding or any of these other enhanced interrogation methods were used,” Pelosi said. She later changed her story, telling reporters, “We were told explicitly that waterboarding was not being used.” She claimed she learned about the use of waterboarding the following year, only after other lawmakers were told by the CIA. “I wasn’t briefed, I was informed that somebody else had been briefed about it,” she said.
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If Rodriguez is right, each of these statements is false. But other than a chart released by the CIA noting that Pelosi, then the ranking member of the House intelligence committee, and Rep. Porter Goss (R-Fla.), then chairman of the committee, had been given a “description of the particular [enhanced interrogation techniques] that had been employed,” there was little public evidence to contradict Pelosi’s claims. So she got away with it — until today.
In his new book, “Hard Measures,” Rodriguez reveals that he led a CIA briefing of Pelosi, where the techniques being used in the interrogation of senior al-Qaeda facilitator Abu Zubaida were described in detail. Her claim that she was not told about waterboarding at that briefing, he writes, “is untrue.”
“We explained that as a result of the techniques, Abu Zubaydah was compliant and providing good intelligence. We made crystal clear that authorized techniques, including waterboarding, had by then been used on Zubaydah.” Rodriguez writes that he told Pelosi everything, adding, “We held back nothing.”
How did she respond when presented with this information? Rodriguez writes that neither Pelosi nor anyone else in the briefing objected to the techniques being used. Indeed, he notes, when one member of his team described another technique that had been considered but not authorized or used, “Pelosi piped up immediately and said that in her view, use of that technique (which I will not describe) would have been ‘wrong.’ ” She raised no such concern about waterboarding, he writes. “Since she felt free to label one considered-and-rejected technique as wrong,” Rodriguez adds, “we went away with the clear impression that she harbored no such feelings about the ten tactics [including waterboarding] that we told her were in use.”
So we’re left with a “he said-she said” standoff? Not at all. Rodriguez writes that there’s contemporaneous evidence to back his account of the briefing. Six days after the meeting took place, Rodriguez reveals, “a cable went out from headquarters to the black site informing them that the briefing for the House leadership had taken place.” He explains that “[t]he cable to the field made clear that Goss and Pelosi had been briefed on the state of AZ’s interrogation, specifically including the use of the waterboard and other enhanced interrogation techniques.”
Rodriguez asks, “So Pelosi was another member of Congress reinventing the truth. What’s the big deal?” The big deal, he explains, is “the message they are sending to the men and women of the intelligence community who to this day are being asked to undertake dangerous and sometimes controversial actions on behalf of their government. They are told that the administration and Congress ‘have their back.’ You will forgive CIA officers if they are not filled with confidence.”
Rodriguez compares Pelosi’s actions to the opening scene of the old TV series “Mission: Impossible,” “in which the operatives were told that if anything went wrong, their leaders would ‘disavow any knowledge of your actions.’ That is not how it should work in the real world,” he writes.
It is a big deal for another reason. If Rodriguez is right, it means that Pelosi stood up in a Capitol Hill news conference and lied with a straight face to the American people; that she falsely accused a dedicated civil servant of lying to Congress as part of a political cover-up. Pelosi is hoping to become House speaker again after the November elections. Do we really want someone so ethically challenged to be third in line to the presidency?
There is a simple way to settle this once and for all. Pelosi should formally request that the Obama administration declassify the cable that was sent from headquarters to the field reporting on the details of her Sept. 4, 2002, briefing. If she refuses to do so, it should be taken as an admission by Pelosi that her account of events is a fabrication.
Read more on this topic
The Post’s View: The futility of torture
Susan Thistlewaite: Justifying the unjustifiable
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rlyoung311 wrote:
2:28 AM CDT
Was the internal CIA cable (from headquarters to field) copied to Pelosi? If so, her failure to respond or complain at that time might be a rational basis for concluding that she did not disagree with CIA Headquarters on the contents of the cable. If not, how does an internal CIA memo that Pelosi did not see have any evidentiary weight on the truth or falsity of the contents of the CIA memo? Until we know that Pelosi had contemporaneous knowledge of the internal CIA cable, the existence of thi...See More
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andrew23boyle wrote:
4/30/2012 6:35 PM CDT
What did she know and when?
I'll bet water-boarding would get it out of her!
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tedmacks responds:
4/30/2012 6:39 PM CDT
Would you waterboard or even kill under the following hypothetical scenario?
Let's pretend you got next Wednesday's newpaper today(Monday) nad it talked about Tuesday's (tomorrow) disasterous terrorist attack. Listed among the 10,000 dead were all of your friends and family. The cuplrit who gave the order was in police custody Monday (today) afternoon but was released on bail this evening.
At the moment he is released he gets on a bus and is sitting next to you. All of you have to do is find out...See More
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Pthomas2mm wrote:
4/30/2012 5:12 PM CDT
I think Mr Rodriguez has a point when he is told by members of both parties that they will have your back, and the ranking member and person you briefed denies it happening. It is one thing to disemble or stretch the truth as most politicians do, it is quite another to lie outright. Prove it? There is a classified cable that will either condemn or exonerate Pelosi, we will probably hear in the next few days all of the glowing and patriotic reasons Pelosi won't ask for it to be released. Of c...See More
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Recommended by 19 readers
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tedmacks responds:
4/30/2012 6:35 PM CDT
Libs in private.
Lib 1 "I feel confident that I can say I'm firmly against enhanced interrogation. What are the chances that it will actually be me or anyone that I know would get killed in a preventable attack. Small I think."
Lib 2 "Yeah the chance is remote but we are talking about inncocents getting killed"
Lib 1 " Scroo them, I'll still be able to act holier than thou and besides that they are dead strangers".
Lib 2 "Yeah, scroo them.
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Marc A. Thiessen Opinion Writer
Ex-CIA counterterror chief says Pelosi ‘reinventing the truth’ about waterboarding
Text Size
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By Marc A. Thiessen, Published: April 30
In an explosive memoir released today, former CIA counterterrorism chief Jose Rodriguez provides new evidence that Rep. Nancy Pelosi lied when she declared she had not been briefed about the use of waterboarding.
Recall that in a Capitol Hill news conference three years ago, Pelosi (D-Calif.) vehemently denied being told about the use of waterboarding at a CIA briefing in September 2002. “We were not — I repeat — were not told that waterboarding or any of these other enhanced interrogation methods were used,” Pelosi said. She later changed her story, telling reporters, “We were told explicitly that waterboarding was not being used.” She claimed she learned about the use of waterboarding the following year, only after other lawmakers were told by the CIA. “I wasn’t briefed, I was informed that somebody else had been briefed about it,” she said.
717
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Marc A. Thiessen
A fellow with the American Enterprise Institute, Thiessen writes a weekly column for The Post.
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If Rodriguez is right, each of these statements is false. But other than a chart released by the CIA noting that Pelosi, then the ranking member of the House intelligence committee, and Rep. Porter Goss (R-Fla.), then chairman of the committee, had been given a “description of the particular [enhanced interrogation techniques] that had been employed,” there was little public evidence to contradict Pelosi’s claims. So she got away with it — until today.
In his new book, “Hard Measures,” Rodriguez reveals that he led a CIA briefing of Pelosi, where the techniques being used in the interrogation of senior al-Qaeda facilitator Abu Zubaida were described in detail. Her claim that she was not told about waterboarding at that briefing, he writes, “is untrue.”
“We explained that as a result of the techniques, Abu Zubaydah was compliant and providing good intelligence. We made crystal clear that authorized techniques, including waterboarding, had by then been used on Zubaydah.” Rodriguez writes that he told Pelosi everything, adding, “We held back nothing.”
How did she respond when presented with this information? Rodriguez writes that neither Pelosi nor anyone else in the briefing objected to the techniques being used. Indeed, he notes, when one member of his team described another technique that had been considered but not authorized or used, “Pelosi piped up immediately and said that in her view, use of that technique (which I will not describe) would have been ‘wrong.’ ” She raised no such concern about waterboarding, he writes. “Since she felt free to label one considered-and-rejected technique as wrong,” Rodriguez adds, “we went away with the clear impression that she harbored no such feelings about the ten tactics [including waterboarding] that we told her were in use.”
So we’re left with a “he said-she said” standoff? Not at all. Rodriguez writes that there’s contemporaneous evidence to back his account of the briefing. Six days after the meeting took place, Rodriguez reveals, “a cable went out from headquarters to the black site informing them that the briefing for the House leadership had taken place.” He explains that “[t]he cable to the field made clear that Goss and Pelosi had been briefed on the state of AZ’s interrogation, specifically including the use of the waterboard and other enhanced interrogation techniques.”
Rodriguez asks, “So Pelosi was another member of Congress reinventing the truth. What’s the big deal?” The big deal, he explains, is “the message they are sending to the men and women of the intelligence community who to this day are being asked to undertake dangerous and sometimes controversial actions on behalf of their government. They are told that the administration and Congress ‘have their back.’ You will forgive CIA officers if they are not filled with confidence.”
Rodriguez compares Pelosi’s actions to the opening scene of the old TV series “Mission: Impossible,” “in which the operatives were told that if anything went wrong, their leaders would ‘disavow any knowledge of your actions.’ That is not how it should work in the real world,” he writes.
It is a big deal for another reason. If Rodriguez is right, it means that Pelosi stood up in a Capitol Hill news conference and lied with a straight face to the American people; that she falsely accused a dedicated civil servant of lying to Congress as part of a political cover-up. Pelosi is hoping to become House speaker again after the November elections. Do we really want someone so ethically challenged to be third in line to the presidency?
There is a simple way to settle this once and for all. Pelosi should formally request that the Obama administration declassify the cable that was sent from headquarters to the field reporting on the details of her Sept. 4, 2002, briefing. If she refuses to do so, it should be taken as an admission by Pelosi that her account of events is a fabrication.
Read more on this topic
The Post’s View: The futility of torture
Susan Thistlewaite: Justifying the unjustifiable
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rlyoung311 wrote:
2:28 AM CDT
Was the internal CIA cable (from headquarters to field) copied to Pelosi? If so, her failure to respond or complain at that time might be a rational basis for concluding that she did not disagree with CIA Headquarters on the contents of the cable. If not, how does an internal CIA memo that Pelosi did not see have any evidentiary weight on the truth or falsity of the contents of the CIA memo? Until we know that Pelosi had contemporaneous knowledge of the internal CIA cable, the existence of thi...See More
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andrew23boyle wrote:
4/30/2012 6:35 PM CDT
What did she know and when?
I'll bet water-boarding would get it out of her!
Recommend
Recommended by 23 readers
Reply
Report
tedmacks responds:
4/30/2012 6:39 PM CDT
Would you waterboard or even kill under the following hypothetical scenario?
Let's pretend you got next Wednesday's newpaper today(Monday) nad it talked about Tuesday's (tomorrow) disasterous terrorist attack. Listed among the 10,000 dead were all of your friends and family. The cuplrit who gave the order was in police custody Monday (today) afternoon but was released on bail this evening.
At the moment he is released he gets on a bus and is sitting next to you. All of you have to do is find out...See More
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Recommended by 3 readers
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Pthomas2mm wrote:
4/30/2012 5:12 PM CDT
I think Mr Rodriguez has a point when he is told by members of both parties that they will have your back, and the ranking member and person you briefed denies it happening. It is one thing to disemble or stretch the truth as most politicians do, it is quite another to lie outright. Prove it? There is a classified cable that will either condemn or exonerate Pelosi, we will probably hear in the next few days all of the glowing and patriotic reasons Pelosi won't ask for it to be released. Of c...See More
Recommend
Recommended by 19 readers
Reply
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tedmacks responds:
4/30/2012 6:35 PM CDT
Libs in private.
Lib 1 "I feel confident that I can say I'm firmly against enhanced interrogation. What are the chances that it will actually be me or anyone that I know would get killed in a preventable attack. Small I think."
Lib 2 "Yeah the chance is remote but we are talking about inncocents getting killed"
Lib 1 " Scroo them, I'll still be able to act holier than thou and besides that they are dead strangers".
Lib 2 "Yeah, scroo them.
Recommend
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Marc A. Thiessen Opinion Writer
Ex-CIA counterterror chief says Pelosi ‘reinventing the truth’ about waterboarding
Text Size
Reprints
By Marc A. Thiessen, Published: April 30
In an explosive memoir released today, former CIA counterterrorism chief Jose Rodriguez provides new evidence that Rep. Nancy Pelosi lied when she declared she had not been briefed about the use of waterboarding.
Recall that in a Capitol Hill news conference three years ago, Pelosi (D-Calif.) vehemently denied being told about the use of waterboarding at a CIA briefing in September 2002. “We were not — I repeat — were not told that waterboarding or any of these other enhanced interrogation methods were used,” Pelosi said. She later changed her story, telling reporters, “We were told explicitly that waterboarding was not being used.” She claimed she learned about the use of waterboarding the following year, only after other lawmakers were told by the CIA. “I wasn’t briefed, I was informed that somebody else had been briefed about it,” she said.
717
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Marc A. Thiessen
A fellow with the American Enterprise Institute, Thiessen writes a weekly column for The Post.
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Charles Krauthammer
While Syria burns
George F. Will
The exemplary LBJ
.
If Rodriguez is right, each of these statements is false. But other than a chart released by the CIA noting that Pelosi, then the ranking member of the House intelligence committee, and Rep. Porter Goss (R-Fla.), then chairman of the committee, had been given a “description of the particular [enhanced interrogation techniques] that had been employed,” there was little public evidence to contradict Pelosi’s claims. So she got away with it — until today.
In his new book, “Hard Measures,” Rodriguez reveals that he led a CIA briefing of Pelosi, where the techniques being used in the interrogation of senior al-Qaeda facilitator Abu Zubaida were described in detail. Her claim that she was not told about waterboarding at that briefing, he writes, “is untrue.”
“We explained that as a result of the techniques, Abu Zubaydah was compliant and providing good intelligence. We made crystal clear that authorized techniques, including waterboarding, had by then been used on Zubaydah.” Rodriguez writes that he told Pelosi everything, adding, “We held back nothing.”
How did she respond when presented with this information? Rodriguez writes that neither Pelosi nor anyone else in the briefing objected to the techniques being used. Indeed, he notes, when one member of his team described another technique that had been considered but not authorized or used, “Pelosi piped up immediately and said that in her view, use of that technique (which I will not describe) would have been ‘wrong.’ ” She raised no such concern about waterboarding, he writes. “Since she felt free to label one considered-and-rejected technique as wrong,” Rodriguez adds, “we went away with the clear impression that she harbored no such feelings about the ten tactics [including waterboarding] that we told her were in use.”
So we’re left with a “he said-she said” standoff? Not at all. Rodriguez writes that there’s contemporaneous evidence to back his account of the briefing. Six days after the meeting took place, Rodriguez reveals, “a cable went out from headquarters to the black site informing them that the briefing for the House leadership had taken place.” He explains that “[t]he cable to the field made clear that Goss and Pelosi had been briefed on the state of AZ’s interrogation, specifically including the use of the waterboard and other enhanced interrogation techniques.”
Rodriguez asks, “So Pelosi was another member of Congress reinventing the truth. What’s the big deal?” The big deal, he explains, is “the message they are sending to the men and women of the intelligence community who to this day are being asked to undertake dangerous and sometimes controversial actions on behalf of their government. They are told that the administration and Congress ‘have their back.’ You will forgive CIA officers if they are not filled with confidence.”
Rodriguez compares Pelosi’s actions to the opening scene of the old TV series “Mission: Impossible,” “in which the operatives were told that if anything went wrong, their leaders would ‘disavow any knowledge of your actions.’ That is not how it should work in the real world,” he writes.
It is a big deal for another reason. If Rodriguez is right, it means that Pelosi stood up in a Capitol Hill news conference and lied with a straight face to the American people; that she falsely accused a dedicated civil servant of lying to Congress as part of a political cover-up. Pelosi is hoping to become House speaker again after the November elections. Do we really want someone so ethically challenged to be third in line to the presidency?
There is a simple way to settle this once and for all. Pelosi should formally request that the Obama administration declassify the cable that was sent from headquarters to the field reporting on the details of her Sept. 4, 2002, briefing. If she refuses to do so, it should be taken as an admission by Pelosi that her account of events is a fabrication.
Read more on this topic
The Post’s View: The futility of torture
Susan Thistlewaite: Justifying the unjustifiable
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rlyoung311 wrote:
2:28 AM CDT
Was the internal CIA cable (from headquarters to field) copied to Pelosi? If so, her failure to respond or complain at that time might be a rational basis for concluding that she did not disagree with CIA Headquarters on the contents of the cable. If not, how does an internal CIA memo that Pelosi did not see have any evidentiary weight on the truth or falsity of the contents of the CIA memo? Until we know that Pelosi had contemporaneous knowledge of the internal CIA cable, the existence of thi...See More
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andrew23boyle wrote:
4/30/2012 6:35 PM CDT
What did she know and when?
I'll bet water-boarding would get it out of her!
Recommend
Recommended by 23 readers
Reply
Report
tedmacks responds:
4/30/2012 6:39 PM CDT
Would you waterboard or even kill under the following hypothetical scenario?
Let's pretend you got next Wednesday's newpaper today(Monday) nad it talked about Tuesday's (tomorrow) disasterous terrorist attack. Listed among the 10,000 dead were all of your friends and family. The cuplrit who gave the order was in police custody Monday (today) afternoon but was released on bail this evening.
At the moment he is released he gets on a bus and is sitting next to you. All of you have to do is find out...See More
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Recommended by 3 readers
Report
View more responses
Pthomas2mm wrote:
4/30/2012 5:12 PM CDT
I think Mr Rodriguez has a point when he is told by members of both parties that they will have your back, and the ranking member and person you briefed denies it happening. It is one thing to disemble or stretch the truth as most politicians do, it is quite another to lie outright. Prove it? There is a classified cable that will either condemn or exonerate Pelosi, we will probably hear in the next few days all of the glowing and patriotic reasons Pelosi won't ask for it to be released. Of c...See More
Recommend
Recommended by 19 readers
Reply
Report
tedmacks responds:
4/30/2012 6:35 PM CDT
Libs in private.
Lib 1 "I feel confident that I can say I'm firmly against enhanced interrogation. What are the chances that it will actually be me or anyone that I know would get killed in a preventable attack. Small I think."
Lib 2 "Yeah the chance is remote but we are talking about inncocents getting killed"
Lib 1 " Scroo them, I'll still be able to act holier than thou and besides that they are dead strangers".
Lib 2 "Yeah, scroo them.
Recommend
Recommended by 4 readers
Report
View more responses
Load more comments
Marc A. Thiessen Opinion Writer
Ex-CIA counterterror chief says Pelosi ‘reinventing the truth’ about waterboarding
Text Size
Reprints
By Marc A. Thiessen, Published: April 30
In an explosive memoir released today, former CIA counterterrorism chief Jose Rodriguez provides new evidence that Rep. Nancy Pelosi lied when she declared she had not been briefed about the use of waterboarding.
Recall that in a Capitol Hill news conference three years ago, Pelosi (D-Calif.) vehemently denied being told about the use of waterboarding at a CIA briefing in September 2002. “We were not — I repeat — were not told that waterboarding or any of these other enhanced interrogation methods were used,” Pelosi said. She later changed her story, telling reporters, “We were told explicitly that waterboarding was not being used.” She claimed she learned about the use of waterboarding the following year, only after other lawmakers were told by the CIA. “I wasn’t briefed, I was informed that somebody else had been briefed about it,” she said.
717
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Marc A. Thiessen
A fellow with the American Enterprise Institute, Thiessen writes a weekly column for The Post.
Archive
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RSS
You may also like...
Charles Krauthammer
While Syria burns
George F. Will
The exemplary LBJ
.
If Rodriguez is right, each of these statements is false. But other than a chart released by the CIA noting that Pelosi, then the ranking member of the House intelligence committee, and Rep. Porter Goss (R-Fla.), then chairman of the committee, had been given a “description of the particular [enhanced interrogation techniques] that had been employed,” there was little public evidence to contradict Pelosi’s claims. So she got away with it — until today.
In his new book, “Hard Measures,” Rodriguez reveals that he led a CIA briefing of Pelosi, where the techniques being used in the interrogation of senior al-Qaeda facilitator Abu Zubaida were described in detail. Her claim that she was not told about waterboarding at that briefing, he writes, “is untrue.”
“We explained that as a result of the techniques, Abu Zubaydah was compliant and providing good intelligence. We made crystal clear that authorized techniques, including waterboarding, had by then been used on Zubaydah.” Rodriguez writes that he told Pelosi everything, adding, “We held back nothing.”
How did she respond when presented with this information? Rodriguez writes that neither Pelosi nor anyone else in the briefing objected to the techniques being used. Indeed, he notes, when one member of his team described another technique that had been considered but not authorized or used, “Pelosi piped up immediately and said that in her view, use of that technique (which I will not describe) would have been ‘wrong.’ ” She raised no such concern about waterboarding, he writes. “Since she felt free to label one considered-and-rejected technique as wrong,” Rodriguez adds, “we went away with the clear impression that she harbored no such feelings about the ten tactics [including waterboarding] that we told her were in use.”
So we’re left with a “he said-she said” standoff? Not at all. Rodriguez writes that there’s contemporaneous evidence to back his account of the briefing. Six days after the meeting took place, Rodriguez reveals, “a cable went out from headquarters to the black site informing them that the briefing for the House leadership had taken place.” He explains that “[t]he cable to the field made clear that Goss and Pelosi had been briefed on the state of AZ’s interrogation, specifically including the use of the waterboard and other enhanced interrogation techniques.”
Rodriguez asks, “So Pelosi was another member of Congress reinventing the truth. What’s the big deal?” The big deal, he explains, is “the message they are sending to the men and women of the intelligence community who to this day are being asked to undertake dangerous and sometimes controversial actions on behalf of their government. They are told that the administration and Congress ‘have their back.’ You will forgive CIA officers if they are not filled with confidence.”
Rodriguez compares Pelosi’s actions to the opening scene of the old TV series “Mission: Impossible,” “in which the operatives were told that if anything went wrong, their leaders would ‘disavow any knowledge of your actions.’ That is not how it should work in the real world,” he writes.
It is a big deal for another reason. If Rodriguez is right, it means that Pelosi stood up in a Capitol Hill news conference and lied with a straight face to the American people; that she falsely accused a dedicated civil servant of lying to Congress as part of a political cover-up. Pelosi is hoping to become House speaker again after the November elections. Do we really want someone so ethically challenged to be third in line to the presidency?
There is a simple way to settle this once and for all. Pelosi should formally request that the Obama administration declassify the cable that was sent from headquarters to the field reporting on the details of her Sept. 4, 2002, briefing. If she refuses to do so, it should be taken as an admission by Pelosi that her account of events is a fabrication.
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rlyoung311 wrote:
2:28 AM CDT
Was the internal CIA cable (from headquarters to field) copied to Pelosi? If so, her failure to respond or complain at that time might be a rational basis for concluding that she did not disagree with CIA Headquarters on the contents of the cable. If not, how does an internal CIA memo that Pelosi did not see have any evidentiary weight on the truth or falsity of the contents of the CIA memo? Until we know that Pelosi had contemporaneous knowledge of the internal CIA cable, the existence of thi...See More
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andrew23boyle wrote:
4/30/2012 6:35 PM CDT
What did she know and when?
I'll bet water-boarding would get it out of her!
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tedmacks responds:
4/30/2012 6:39 PM CDT
Would you waterboard or even kill under the following hypothetical scenario?
Let's pretend you got next Wednesday's newpaper today(Monday) nad it talked about Tuesday's (tomorrow) disasterous terrorist attack. Listed among the 10,000 dead were all of your friends and family. The cuplrit who gave the order was in police custody Monday (today) afternoon but was released on bail this evening.
At the moment he is released he gets on a bus and is sitting next to you. All of you have to do is find out...See More
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Pthomas2mm wrote:
4/30/2012 5:12 PM CDT
I think Mr Rodriguez has a point when he is told by members of both parties that they will have your back, and the ranking member and person you briefed denies it happening. It is one thing to disemble or stretch the truth as most politicians do, it is quite another to lie outright. Prove it? There is a classified cable that will either condemn or exonerate Pelosi, we will probably hear in the next few days all of the glowing and patriotic reasons Pelosi won't ask for it to be released. Of c...See More
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tedmacks responds:
4/30/2012 6:35 PM CDT
Libs in private.
Lib 1 "I feel confident that I can say I'm firmly against enhanced interrogation. What are the chances that it will actually be me or anyone that I know would get killed in a preventable attack. Small I think."
Lib 2 "Yeah the chance is remote but we are talking about inncocents getting killed"
Lib 1 " Scroo them, I'll still be able to act holier than thou and besides that they are dead strangers".
Lib 2 "Yeah, scroo them.
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Marc A. Thiessen Opinion Writer
Ex-CIA counterterror chief says Pelosi ‘reinventing the truth’ about waterboarding
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By Marc A. Thiessen, Published: April 30
In an explosive memoir released today, former CIA counterterrorism chief Jose Rodriguez provides new evidence that Rep. Nancy Pelosi lied when she declared she had not been briefed about the use of waterboarding.
Recall that in a Capitol Hill news conference three years ago, Pelosi (D-Calif.) vehemently denied being told about the use of waterboarding at a CIA briefing in September 2002. “We were not — I repeat — were not told that waterboarding or any of these other enhanced interrogation methods were used,” Pelosi said. She later changed her story, telling reporters, “We were told explicitly that waterboarding was not being used.” She claimed she learned about the use of waterboarding the following year, only after other lawmakers were told by the CIA. “I wasn’t briefed, I was informed that somebody else had been briefed about it,” she said.
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If Rodriguez is right, each of these statements is false. But other than a chart released by the CIA noting that Pelosi, then the ranking member of the House intelligence committee, and Rep. Porter Goss (R-Fla.), then chairman of the committee, had been given a “description of the particular [enhanced interrogation techniques] that had been employed,” there was little public evidence to contradict Pelosi’s claims. So she got away with it — until today.
In his new book, “Hard Measures,” Rodriguez reveals that he led a CIA briefing of Pelosi, where the techniques being used in the interrogation of senior al-Qaeda facilitator Abu Zubaida were described in detail. Her claim that she was not told about waterboarding at that briefing, he writes, “is untrue.”
“We explained that as a result of the techniques, Abu Zubaydah was compliant and providing good intelligence. We made crystal clear that authorized techniques, including waterboarding, had by then been used on Zubaydah.” Rodriguez writes that he told Pelosi everything, adding, “We held back nothing.”
How did she respond when presented with this information? Rodriguez writes that neither Pelosi nor anyone else in the briefing objected to the techniques being used. Indeed, he notes, when one member of his team described another technique that had been considered but not authorized or used, “Pelosi piped up immediately and said that in her view, use of that technique (which I will not describe) would have been ‘wrong.’ ” She raised no such concern about waterboarding, he writes. “Since she felt free to label one considered-and-rejected technique as wrong,” Rodriguez adds, “we went away with the clear impression that she harbored no such feelings about the ten tactics [including waterboarding] that we told her were in use.”
So we’re left with a “he said-she said” standoff? Not at all. Rodriguez writes that there’s contemporaneous evidence to back his account of the briefing. Six days after the meeting took place, Rodriguez reveals, “a cable went out from headquarters to the black site informing them that the briefing for the House leadership had taken place.” He explains that “[t]he cable to the field made clear that Goss and Pelosi had been briefed on the state of AZ’s interrogation, specifically including the use of the waterboard and other enhanced interrogation techniques.”
Rodriguez asks, “So Pelosi was another member of Congress reinventing the truth. What’s the big deal?” The big deal, he explains, is “the message they are sending to the men and women of the intelligence community who to this day are being asked to undertake dangerous and sometimes controversial actions on behalf of their government. They are told that the administration and Congress ‘have their back.’ You will forgive CIA officers if they are not filled with confidence.”
Rodriguez compares Pelosi’s actions to the opening scene of the old TV series “Mission: Impossible,” “in which the operatives were told that if anything went wrong, their leaders would ‘disavow any knowledge of your actions.’ That is not how it should work in the real world,” he writes.
It is a big deal for another reason. If Rodriguez is right, it means that Pelosi stood up in a Capitol Hill news conference and lied with a straight face to the American people; that she falsely accused a dedicated civil servant of lying to Congress as part of a political cover-up. Pelosi is hoping to become House speaker again after the November elections. Do we really want someone so ethically challenged to be third in line to the presidency?
There is a simple way to settle this once and for all. Pelosi should formally request that the Obama administration declassify the cable that was sent from headquarters to the field reporting on the details of her Sept. 4, 2002, briefing. If she refuses to do so, it should be taken as an admission by Pelosi that her account of events is a fabrication.
Read more on this topic
The Post’s View: The futility of torture
Susan Thistlewaite: Justifying the unjustifiable
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rlyoung311 wrote:
2:28 AM CDT
Was the internal CIA cable (from headquarters to field) copied to Pelosi? If so, her failure to respond or complain at that time might be a rational basis for concluding that she did not disagree with CIA Headquarters on the contents of the cable. If not, how does an internal CIA memo that Pelosi did not see have any evidentiary weight on the truth or falsity of the contents of the CIA memo? Until we know that Pelosi had contemporaneous knowledge of the internal CIA cable, the existence of thi...See More
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andrew23boyle wrote:
4/30/2012 6:35 PM CDT
What did she know and when?
I'll bet water-boarding would get it out of her!
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tedmacks responds:
4/30/2012 6:39 PM CDT
Would you waterboard or even kill under the following hypothetical scenario?
Let's pretend you got next Wednesday's newpaper today(Monday) nad it talked about Tuesday's (tomorrow) disasterous terrorist attack. Listed among the 10,000 dead were all of your friends and family. The cuplrit who gave the order was in police custody Monday (today) afternoon but was released on bail this evening.
At the moment he is released he gets on a bus and is sitting next to you. All of you have to do is find out...See More
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Pthomas2mm wrote:
4/30/2012 5:12 PM CDT
I think Mr Rodriguez has a point when he is told by members of both parties that they will have your back, and the ranking member and person you briefed denies it happening. It is one thing to disemble or stretch the truth as most politicians do, it is quite another to lie outright. Prove it? There is a classified cable that will either condemn or exonerate Pelosi, we will probably hear in the next few days all of the glowing and patriotic reasons Pelosi won't ask for it to be released. Of c...See More
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tedmacks responds:
4/30/2012 6:35 PM CDT
Libs in private.
Lib 1 "I feel confident that I can say I'm firmly against enhanced interrogation. What are the chances that it will actually be me or anyone that I know would get killed in a preventable attack. Small I think."
Lib 2 "Yeah the chance is remote but we are talking about inncocents getting killed"
Lib 1 " Scroo them, I'll still be able to act holier than thou and besides that they are dead strangers".
Lib 2 "Yeah, scroo them.
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Marc A. Thiessen Opinion Writer
Ex-CIA counterterror chief says Pelosi ‘reinventing the truth’ about waterboarding
Text Size
Reprints
By Marc A. Thiessen, Published: April 30
In an explosive memoir released today, former CIA counterterrorism chief Jose Rodriguez provides new evidence that Rep. Nancy Pelosi lied when she declared she had not been briefed about the use of waterboarding.
Recall that in a Capitol Hill news conference three years ago, Pelosi (D-Calif.) vehemently denied being told about the use of waterboarding at a CIA briefing in September 2002. “We were not — I repeat — were not told that waterboarding or any of these other enhanced interrogation methods were used,” Pelosi said. She later changed her story, telling reporters, “We were told explicitly that waterboarding was not being used.” She claimed she learned about the use of waterboarding the following year, only after other lawmakers were told by the CIA. “I wasn’t briefed, I was informed that somebody else had been briefed about it,” she said.
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If Rodriguez is right, each of these statements is false. But other than a chart released by the CIA noting that Pelosi, then the ranking member of the House intelligence committee, and Rep. Porter Goss (R-Fla.), then chairman of the committee, had been given a “description of the particular [enhanced interrogation techniques] that had been employed,” there was little public evidence to contradict Pelosi’s claims. So she got away with it — until today.
In his new book, “Hard Measures,” Rodriguez reveals that he led a CIA briefing of Pelosi, where the techniques being used in the interrogation of senior al-Qaeda facilitator Abu Zubaida were described in detail. Her claim that she was not told about waterboarding at that briefing, he writes, “is untrue.”
“We explained that as a result of the techniques, Abu Zubaydah was compliant and providing good intelligence. We made crystal clear that authorized techniques, including waterboarding, had by then been used on Zubaydah.” Rodriguez writes that he told Pelosi everything, adding, “We held back nothing.”
How did she respond when presented with this information? Rodriguez writes that neither Pelosi nor anyone else in the briefing objected to the techniques being used. Indeed, he notes, when one member of his team described another technique that had been considered but not authorized or used, “Pelosi piped up immediately and said that in her view, use of that technique (which I will not describe) would have been ‘wrong.’ ” She raised no such concern about waterboarding, he writes. “Since she felt free to label one considered-and-rejected technique as wrong,” Rodriguez adds, “we went away with the clear impression that she harbored no such feelings about the ten tactics [including waterboarding] that we told her were in use.”
So we’re left with a “he said-she said” standoff? Not at all. Rodriguez writes that there’s contemporaneous evidence to back his account of the briefing. Six days after the meeting took place, Rodriguez reveals, “a cable went out from headquarters to the black site informing them that the briefing for the House leadership had taken place.” He explains that “[t]he cable to the field made clear that Goss and Pelosi had been briefed on the state of AZ’s interrogation, specifically including the use of the waterboard and other enhanced interrogation techniques.”
Rodriguez asks, “So Pelosi was another member of Congress reinventing the truth. What’s the big deal?” The big deal, he explains, is “the message they are sending to the men and women of the intelligence community who to this day are being asked to undertake dangerous and sometimes controversial actions on behalf of their government. They are told that the administration and Congress ‘have their back.’ You will forgive CIA officers if they are not filled with confidence.”
Rodriguez compares Pelosi’s actions to the opening scene of the old TV series “Mission: Impossible,” “in which the operatives were told that if anything went wrong, their leaders would ‘disavow any knowledge of your actions.’ That is not how it should work in the real world,” he writes.
It is a big deal for another reason. If Rodriguez is right, it means that Pelosi stood up in a Capitol Hill news conference and lied with a straight face to the American people; that she falsely accused a dedicated civil servant of lying to Congress as part of a political cover-up. Pelosi is hoping to become House speaker again after the November elections. Do we really want someone so ethically challenged to be third in line to the presidency?
There is a simple way to settle this once and for all. Pelosi should formally request that the Obama administration declassify the cable that was sent from headquarters to the field reporting on the details of her Sept. 4, 2002, briefing. If she refuses to do so, it should be taken as an admission by Pelosi that her account of events is a fabrication.
Read more on this topic
The Post’s View: The futility of torture
Susan Thistlewaite: Justifying the unjustifiable
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rlyoung311 wrote:
2:28 AM CDT
Was the internal CIA cable (from headquarters to field) copied to Pelosi? If so, her failure to respond or complain at that time might be a rational basis for concluding that she did not disagree with CIA Headquarters on the contents of the cable. If not, how does an internal CIA memo that Pelosi did not see have any evidentiary weight on the truth or falsity of the contents of the CIA memo? Until we know that Pelosi had contemporaneous knowledge of the internal CIA cable, the existence of thi...See More
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andrew23boyle wrote:
4/30/2012 6:35 PM CDT
What did she know and when?
I'll bet water-boarding would get it out of her!
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tedmacks responds:
4/30/2012 6:39 PM CDT
Would you waterboard or even kill under the following hypothetical scenario?
Let's pretend you got next Wednesday's newpaper today(Monday) nad it talked about Tuesday's (tomorrow) disasterous terrorist attack. Listed among the 10,000 dead were all of your friends and family. The cuplrit who gave the order was in police custody Monday (today) afternoon but was released on bail this evening.
At the moment he is released he gets on a bus and is sitting next to you. All of you have to do is find out...See More
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Pthomas2mm wrote:
4/30/2012 5:12 PM CDT
I think Mr Rodriguez has a point when he is told by members of both parties that they will have your back, and the ranking member and person you briefed denies it happening. It is one thing to disemble or stretch the truth as most politicians do, it is quite another to lie outright. Prove it? There is a classified cable that will either condemn or exonerate Pelosi, we will probably hear in the next few days all of the glowing and patriotic reasons Pelosi won't ask for it to be released. Of c...See More
Recommend
Recommended by 19 readers
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tedmacks responds:
4/30/2012 6:35 PM CDT
Libs in private.
Lib 1 "I feel confident that I can say I'm firmly against enhanced interrogation. What are the chances that it will actually be me or anyone that I know would get killed in a preventable attack. Small I think."
Lib 2 "Yeah the chance is remote but we are talking about inncocents getting killed"
Lib 1 " Scroo them, I'll still be able to act holier than thou and besides that they are dead strangers".
Lib 2 "Yeah, scroo them.
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By Marc A. Thiessen, Published: April 30
In an explosive memoir released today, former CIA counterterrorism chief Jose Rodriguez provides new evidence that Rep. Nancy Pelosi lied when she declared she had not been briefed about the use of waterboarding.
Recall that in a Capitol Hill news conference three years ago, Pelosi (D-Calif.) vehemently denied being told about the use of waterboarding at a CIA briefing in September 2002. “We were not — I repeat — were not told that waterboarding or any of these other enhanced interrogation methods were used,” Pelosi said. She later changed her story, telling reporters, “We were told explicitly that waterboarding was not being used.” She claimed she learned about the use of waterboarding the following year, only after other lawmakers were told by the CIA. “I wasn’t briefed, I was informed that somebody else had been briefed about it,” she said.
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Marc A. Thiessen
A fellow with the American Enterprise Institute, Thiessen writes a weekly column for The Post.
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Charles Krauthammer
While Syria burns
George F. Will
The exemplary LBJ
.
If Rodriguez is right, each of these statements is false. But other than a chart released by the CIA noting that Pelosi, then the ranking member of the House intelligence committee, and Rep. Porter Goss (R-Fla.), then chairman of the committee, had been given a “description of the particular [enhanced interrogation techniques] that had been employed,” there was little public evidence to contradict Pelosi’s claims. So she got away with it — until today.
In his new book, “Hard Measures,” Rodriguez reveals that he led a CIA briefing of Pelosi, where the techniques being used in the interrogation of senior al-Qaeda facilitator Abu Zubaida were described in detail. Her claim that she was not told about waterboarding at that briefing, he writes, “is untrue.”
“We explained that as a result of the techniques, Abu Zubaydah was compliant and providing good intelligence. We made crystal clear that authorized techniques, including waterboarding, had by then been used on Zubaydah.” Rodriguez writes that he told Pelosi everything, adding, “We held back nothing.”
How did she respond when presented with this information? Rodriguez writes that neither Pelosi nor anyone else in the briefing objected to the techniques being used. Indeed, he notes, when one member of his team described another technique that had been considered but not authorized or used, “Pelosi piped up immediately and said that in her view, use of that technique (which I will not describe) would have been ‘wrong.’ ” She raised no such concern about waterboarding, he writes. “Since she felt free to label one considered-and-rejected technique as wrong,” Rodriguez adds, “we went away with the clear impression that she harbored no such feelings about the ten tactics [including waterboarding] that we told her were in use.”
So we’re left with a “he said-she said” standoff? Not at all. Rodriguez writes that there’s contemporaneous evidence to back his account of the briefing. Six days after the meeting took place, Rodriguez reveals, “a cable went out from headquarters to the black site informing them that the briefing for the House leadership had taken place.” He explains that “[t]he cable to the field made clear that Goss and Pelosi had been briefed on the state of AZ’s interrogation, specifically including the use of the waterboard and other enhanced interrogation techniques.”
Rodriguez asks, “So Pelosi was another member of Congress reinventing the truth. What’s the big deal?” The big deal, he explains, is “the message they are sending to the men and women of the intelligence community who to this day are being asked to undertake dangerous and sometimes controversial actions on behalf of their government. They are told that the administration and Congress ‘have their back.’ You will forgive CIA officers if they are not filled with confidence.”
Rodriguez compares Pelosi’s actions to the opening scene of the old TV series “Mission: Impossible,” “in which the operatives were told that if anything went wrong, their leaders would ‘disavow any knowledge of your actions.’ That is not how it should work in the real world,” he writes.
It is a big deal for another reason. If Rodriguez is right, it means that Pelosi stood up in a Capitol Hill news conference and lied with a straight face to the American people; that she falsely accused a dedicated civil servant of lying to Congress as part of a political cover-up. Pelosi is hoping to become House speaker again after the November elections. Do we really want someone so ethically challenged to be third in line to the presidency?
There is a simple way to settle this once and for all. Pelosi should formally request that the Obama administration declassify the cable that was sent from headquarters to the field reporting on the details of her Sept. 4, 2002, briefing. If she refuses to do so, it should be taken as an admission by Pelosi that her account of events is a fabrication.
Read more on this topic
The Post’s View: The futility of torture
Susan Thistlewaite: Justifying the unjustifiable
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rlyoung311 wrote:
2:28 AM CDT
Was the internal CIA cable (from headquarters to field) copied to Pelosi? If so, her failure to respond or complain at that time might be a rational basis for concluding that she did not disagree with CIA Headquarters on the contents of the cable. If not, how does an internal CIA memo that Pelosi did not see have any evidentiary weight on the truth or falsity of the contents of the CIA memo? Until we know that Pelosi had contemporaneous knowledge of the internal CIA cable, the existence of thi...See More
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mil1 responds:
10:16 AM CDT
If the cable said she had been briefed fully and she was in fact briefed fully and therefore was lying---it means quite a bit. If the cable exists and shows Rodriguez is lying ti means something else---that is we can ignore the rest of Rodriguez's information. Pelosi lying however means there needs to be a much deeper investigation.
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andrew23boyle wrote:
4/30/2012 6:35 PM CDT
What did she know and when?
I'll bet water-boarding would get it out of her!
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tedmacks responds:
4/30/2012 6:39 PM CDT
Would you waterboard or even kill under the following hypothetical scenario?
Let's pretend you got next Wednesday's newpaper today(Monday) nad it talked about Tuesday's (tomorrow) disasterous terrorist attack. Listed among the 10,000 dead were all of your friends and family. The cuplrit who gave the order was in police custody Monday (today) afternoon but was released on bail this evening.
At the moment he is released he gets on a bus and is sitting next to you. All of you have to do is find out...See More
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Pthomas2mm wrote:
4/30/2012 5:12 PM CDT
I think Mr Rodriguez has a point when he is told by members of both parties that they will have your back, and the ranking member and person you briefed denies it happening. It is one thing to disemble or stretch the truth as most politicians do, it is quite another to lie outright. Prove it? There is a classified cable that will either condemn or exonerate Pelosi, we will probably hear in the next few days all of the glowing and patriotic reasons Pelosi won't ask for it to be released. Of c...See More
Recommend
Recommended by 19 readers
Reply
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tedmacks responds:
4/30/2012 6:35 PM CDT
Libs in private.
Lib 1 "I feel confident that I can say I'm firmly against enhanced interrogation. What are the chances that it will actually be me or anyone that I know would get killed in a preventable attack. Small I think."
Lib 2 "Yeah the chance is remote but we are talking about inncocents getting killed"
Lib 1 " Scroo them, I'll still be able to act holier than thou and besides that they are dead strangers".
Lib 2 "Yeah, scroo them.
Recommend
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By Marc A. Thiessen, Published: April 30
In an explosive memoir released today, former CIA counterterrorism chief Jose Rodriguez provides new evidence that Rep. Nancy Pelosi lied when she declared she had not been briefed about the use of waterboarding.
Recall that in a Capitol Hill news conference three years ago, Pelosi (D-Calif.) vehemently denied being told about the use of waterboarding at a CIA briefing in September 2002. “We were not — I repeat — were not told that waterboarding or any of these other enhanced interrogation methods were used,” Pelosi said. She later changed her story, telling reporters, “We were told explicitly that waterboarding was not being used.” She claimed she learned about the use of waterboarding the following year, only after other lawmakers were told by the CIA. “I wasn’t briefed, I was informed that somebody else had been briefed about it,” she said.
720
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Marc A. Thiessen
A fellow with the American Enterprise Institute, Thiessen writes a weekly column for The Post.
Archive
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Charles Krauthammer
While Syria burns
George F. Will
The exemplary LBJ
.
If Rodriguez is right, each of these statements is false. But other than a chart released by the CIA noting that Pelosi, then the ranking member of the House intelligence committee, and Rep. Porter Goss (R-Fla.), then chairman of the committee, had been given a “description of the particular [enhanced interrogation techniques] that had been employed,” there was little public evidence to contradict Pelosi’s claims. So she got away with it — until today.
In his new book, “Hard Measures,” Rodriguez reveals that he led a CIA briefing of Pelosi, where the techniques being used in the interrogation of senior al-Qaeda facilitator Abu Zubaida were described in detail. Her claim that she was not told about waterboarding at that briefing, he writes, “is untrue.”
“We explained that as a result of the techniques, Abu Zubaydah was compliant and providing good intelligence. We made crystal clear that authorized techniques, including waterboarding, had by then been used on Zubaydah.” Rodriguez writes that he told Pelosi everything, adding, “We held back nothing.”
How did she respond when presented with this information? Rodriguez writes that neither Pelosi nor anyone else in the briefing objected to the techniques being used. Indeed, he notes, when one member of his team described another technique that had been considered but not authorized or used, “Pelosi piped up immediately and said that in her view, use of that technique (which I will not describe) would have been ‘wrong.’ ” She raised no such concern about waterboarding, he writes. “Since she felt free to label one considered-and-rejected technique as wrong,” Rodriguez adds, “we went away with the clear impression that she harbored no such feelings about the ten tactics [including waterboarding] that we told her were in use.”
So we’re left with a “he said-she said” standoff? Not at all. Rodriguez writes that there’s contemporaneous evidence to back his account of the briefing. Six days after the meeting took place, Rodriguez reveals, “a cable went out from headquarters to the black site informing them that the briefing for the House leadership had taken place.” He explains that “[t]he cable to the field made clear that Goss and Pelosi had been briefed on the state of AZ’s interrogation, specifically including the use of the waterboard and other enhanced interrogation techniques.”
Rodriguez asks, “So Pelosi was another member of Congress reinventing the truth. What’s the big deal?” The big deal, he explains, is “the message they are sending to the men and women of the intelligence community who to this day are being asked to undertake dangerous and sometimes controversial actions on behalf of their government. They are told that the administration and Congress ‘have their back.’ You will forgive CIA officers if they are not filled with confidence.”
Rodriguez compares Pelosi’s actions to the opening scene of the old TV series “Mission: Impossible,” “in which the operatives were told that if anything went wrong, their leaders would ‘disavow any knowledge of your actions.’ That is not how it should work in the real world,” he writes.
It is a big deal for another reason. If Rodriguez is right, it means that Pelosi stood up in a Capitol Hill news conference and lied with a straight face to the American people; that she falsely accused a dedicated civil servant of lying to Congress as part of a political cover-up. Pelosi is hoping to become House speaker again after the November elections. Do we really want someone so ethically challenged to be third in line to the presidency?
There is a simple way to settle this once and for all. Pelosi should formally request that the Obama administration declassify the cable that was sent from headquarters to the field reporting on the details of her Sept. 4, 2002, briefing. If she refuses to do so, it should be taken as an admission by Pelosi that her account of events is a fabrication.
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rlyoung311 wrote:
2:28 AM CDT
Was the internal CIA cable (from headquarters to field) copied to Pelosi? If so, her failure to respond or complain at that time might be a rational basis for concluding that she did not disagree with CIA Headquarters on the contents of the cable. If not, how does an internal CIA memo that Pelosi did not see have any evidentiary weight on the truth or falsity of the contents of the CIA memo? Until we know that Pelosi had contemporaneous knowledge of the internal CIA cable, the existence of thi...See More
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mil1 responds:
10:16 AM CDT
If the cable said she had been briefed fully and she was in fact briefed fully and therefore was lying---it means quite a bit. If the cable exists and shows Rodriguez is lying ti means something else---that is we can ignore the rest of Rodriguez's information. Pelosi lying however means there needs to be a much deeper investigation.
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andrew23boyle wrote:
4/30/2012 6:35 PM CDT
What did she know and when?
I'll bet water-boarding would get it out of her!
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tedmacks responds:
4/30/2012 6:39 PM CDT
Would you waterboard or even kill under the following hypothetical scenario?
Let's pretend you got next Wednesday's newpaper today(Monday) nad it talked about Tuesday's (tomorrow) disasterous terrorist attack. Listed among the 10,000 dead were all of your friends and family. The cuplrit who gave the order was in police custody Monday (today) afternoon but was released on bail this evening.
At the moment he is released he gets on a bus and is sitting next to you. All of you have to do is find out...See More
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Pthomas2mm wrote:
4/30/2012 5:12 PM CDT
I think Mr Rodriguez has a point when he is told by members of both parties that they will have your back, and the ranking member and person you briefed denies it happening. It is one thing to disemble or stretch the truth as most politicians do, it is quite another to lie outright. Prove it? There is a classified cable that will either condemn or exonerate Pelosi, we will probably hear in the next few days all of the glowing and patriotic reasons Pelosi won't ask for it to be released. Of c...See More
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tedmacks responds:
4/30/2012 6:35 PM CDT
Libs in private.
Lib 1 "I feel confident that I can say I'm firmly against enhanced interrogation. What are the chances that it will actually be me or anyone that I know would get killed in a preventable attack. Small I think."
Lib 2 "Yeah the chance is remote but we are talking about inncocents getting killed"
Lib 1 " Scroo them, I'll still be able to act holier than thou and besides that they are dead strangers".
Lib 2 "Yeah, scroo them.
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By Marc A. Thiessen, Published: April 30
In an explosive memoir released today, former CIA counterterrorism chief Jose Rodriguez provides new evidence that Rep. Nancy Pelosi lied when she declared she had not been briefed about the use of waterboarding.
Recall that in a Capitol Hill news conference three years ago, Pelosi (D-Calif.) vehemently denied being told about the use of waterboarding at a CIA briefing in September 2002. “We were not — I repeat — were not told that waterboarding or any of these other enhanced interrogation methods were used,” Pelosi said. She later changed her story, telling reporters, “We were told explicitly that waterboarding was not being used.” She claimed she learned about the use of waterboarding the following year, only after other lawmakers were told by the CIA. “I wasn’t briefed, I was informed that somebody else had been briefed about it,” she said.
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If Rodriguez is right, each of these statements is false. But other than a chart released by the CIA noting that Pelosi, then the ranking member of the House intelligence committee, and Rep. Porter Goss (R-Fla.), then chairman of the committee, had been given a “description of the particular [enhanced interrogation techniques] that had been employed,” there was little public evidence to contradict Pelosi’s claims. So she got away with it — until today.
In his new book, “Hard Measures,” Rodriguez reveals that he led a CIA briefing of Pelosi, where the techniques being used in the interrogation of senior al-Qaeda facilitator Abu Zubaida were described in detail. Her claim that she was not told about waterboarding at that briefing, he writes, “is untrue.”
“We explained that as a result of the techniques, Abu Zubaydah was compliant and providing good intelligence. We made crystal clear that authorized techniques, including waterboarding, had by then been used on Zubaydah.” Rodriguez writes that he told Pelosi everything, adding, “We held back nothing.”
How did she respond when presented with this information? Rodriguez writes that neither Pelosi nor anyone else in the briefing objected to the techniques being used. Indeed, he notes, when one member of his team described another technique that had been considered but not authorized or used, “Pelosi piped up immediately and said that in her view, use of that technique (which I will not describe) would have been ‘wrong.’ ” She raised no such concern about waterboarding, he writes. “Since she felt free to label one considered-and-rejected technique as wrong,” Rodriguez adds, “we went away with the clear impression that she harbored no such feelings about the ten tactics [including waterboarding] that we told her were in use.”
So we’re left with a “he said-she said” standoff? Not at all. Rodriguez writes that there’s contemporaneous evidence to back his account of the briefing. Six days after the meeting took place, Rodriguez reveals, “a cable went out from headquarters to the black site informing them that the briefing for the House leadership had taken place.” He explains that “[t]he cable to the field made clear that Goss and Pelosi had been briefed on the state of AZ’s interrogation, specifically including the use of the waterboard and other enhanced interrogation techniques.”
Rodriguez asks, “So Pelosi was another member of Congress reinventing the truth. What’s the big deal?” The big deal, he explains, is “the message they are sending to the men and women of the intelligence community who to this day are being asked to undertake dangerous and sometimes controversial actions on behalf of their government. They are told that the administration and Congress ‘have their back.’ You will forgive CIA officers if they are not filled with confidence.”
Rodriguez compares Pelosi’s actions to the opening scene of the old TV series “Mission: Impossible,” “in which the operatives were told that if anything went wrong, their leaders would ‘disavow any knowledge of your actions.’ That is not how it should work in the real world,” he writes.
It is a big deal for another reason. If Rodriguez is right, it means that Pelosi stood up in a Capitol Hill news conference and lied with a straight face to the American people; that she falsely accused a dedicated civil servant of lying to Congress as part of a political cover-up. Pelosi is hoping to become House speaker again after the November elections. Do we really want someone so ethically challenged to be third in line to the presidency?
There is a simple way to settle this once and for all. Pelosi should formally request that the Obama administration declassify the cable that was sent from headquarters to the field reporting on the details of her Sept. 4, 2002, briefing. If she refuses to do so, it should be taken as an admission by Pelosi that her account of events is a fabrication.
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rlyoung311 wrote:
2:28 AM CDT
Was the internal CIA cable (from headquarters to field) copied to Pelosi? If so, her failure to respond or complain at that time might be a rational basis for concluding that she did not disagree with CIA Headquarters on the contents of the cable. If not, how does an internal CIA memo that Pelosi did not see have any evidentiary weight on the truth or falsity of the contents of the CIA memo? Until we know that Pelosi had contemporaneous knowledge of the internal CIA cable, the existence of thi...See More
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mil1 responds:
10:16 AM CDT
If the cable said she had been briefed fully and she was in fact briefed fully and therefore was lying---it means quite a bit. If the cable exists and shows Rodriguez is lying ti means something else---that is we can ignore the rest of Rodriguez's information. Pelosi lying however means there needs to be a much deeper investigation.
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andrew23boyle wrote:
4/30/2012 6:35 PM CDT
What did she know and when?
I'll bet water-boarding would get it out of her!
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Recommended by 23 readers
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tedmacks responds:
4/30/2012 6:39 PM CDT
Would you waterboard or even kill under the following hypothetical scenario?
Let's pretend you got next Wednesday's newpaper today(Monday) nad it talked about Tuesday's (tomorrow) disasterous terrorist attack. Listed among the 10,000 dead were all of your friends and family. The cuplrit who gave the order was in police custody Monday (today) afternoon but was released on bail this evening.
At the moment he is released he gets on a bus and is sitting next to you. All of you have to do is find out...See More
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Pthomas2mm wrote:
4/30/2012 5:12 PM CDT
I think Mr Rodriguez has a point when he is told by members of both parties that they will have your back, and the ranking member and person you briefed denies it happening. It is one thing to disemble or stretch the truth as most politicians do, it is quite another to lie outright. Prove it? There is a classified cable that will either condemn or exonerate Pelosi, we will probably hear in the next few days all of the glowing and patriotic reasons Pelosi won't ask for it to be released. Of c...See More
Recommend
Recommended by 19 readers
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tedmacks responds:
4/30/2012 6:35 PM CDT
Libs in private.
Lib 1 "I feel confident that I can say I'm firmly against enhanced interrogation. What are the chances that it will actually be me or anyone that I know would get killed in a preventable attack. Small I think."
Lib 2 "Yeah the chance is remote but we are talking about inncocents getting killed"
Lib 1 " Scroo them, I'll still be able to act holier than thou and besides that they are dead strangers".
Lib 2 "Yeah, scroo them.
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Pause loading new comments
rlyoung311 wrote:
2:28 AM CDT
Was the internal CIA cable (from headquarters to field) copied to Pelosi? If so, her failure to respond or complain at that time might be a rational basis for concluding that she did not disagree with CIA Headquarters on the contents of the cable. If not, how does an internal CIA memo that Pelosi did not see have any evidentiary weight on the truth or falsity of the contents of the CIA memo? Until we know that Pelosi had contemporaneous knowledge of the internal CIA cable, the existence of thi...See More
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Recommended by 1 reader
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mil1 responds:
10:16 AM CDT
If the cable said she had been briefed fully and she was in fact briefed fully and therefore was lying---it means quite a bit. If the cable exists and shows Rodriguez is lying ti means something else---that is we can ignore the rest of Rodriguez's information. Pelosi lying however means there needs to be a much deeper investigation.
Recommend
Report
andrew23boyle wrote:
4/30/2012 6:35 PM CDT
What did she know and when?
I'll bet water-boarding would get it out of her!
Recommend
Recommended by 23 readers
Reply
Report
tedmacks responds:
4/30/2012 6:39 PM CDT
Would you waterboard or even kill under the following hypothetical scenario?
Let's pretend you got next Wednesday's newpaper today(Monday) nad it talked about Tuesday's (tomorrow) disasterous terrorist attack. Listed among the 10,000 dead were all of your friends and family. The cuplrit who gave the order was in police custody Monday (today) afternoon but was released on bail this evening.
At the moment he is released he gets on a bus and is sitting next to you. All of you have to do is find out...See More
Recommend
Recommended by 3 readers
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Pthomas2mm wrote:
4/30/2012 5:12 PM CDT
I think Mr Rodriguez has a point when he is told by members of both parties that they will have your back, and the ranking member and person you briefed denies it happening. It is one thing to disemble or stretch the truth as most politicians do, it is quite another to lie outright. Prove it? There is a classified cable that will either condemn or exonerate Pelosi, we will probably hear in the next few days all of the glowing and patriotic reasons Pelosi won't ask for it to be released. Of c...See More
Recommend
Recommended by 19 readers
Reply
Report
tedmacks responds:
4/30/2012 6:35 PM CDT
Libs in private.
Lib 1 "I feel confident that I can say I'm firmly against enhanced interrogation. What are the chances that it will actually be me or anyone that I know would get killed in a preventable attack. Small I think."
Lib 2 "Yeah the chance is remote but we are talking about inncocents getting killed"
Lib 1 " Scroo them, I'll still be able to act holier than thou and besides that they are dead strangers".
Lib 2 "Yeah, scroo them.
Recommend
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The Post’s View: The futility of torture
Susan Thistlewaite: Justifying the unjustifiable
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rlyoung311 wrote:
2:28 AM CDT
Was the internal CIA cable (from headquarters to field) copied to Pelosi? If so, her failure to respond or complain at that time might be a rational basis for concluding that she did not disagree with CIA Headquarters on the contents of the cable. If not, how does an internal CIA memo that Pelosi did not see have any evidentiary weight on the truth or falsity of the contents of the CIA memo? Until we know that Pelosi had contemporaneous knowledge of the internal CIA cable, the existence of thi...See More
Recommend
Recommended by 1 reader
Reply
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mil1 responds:
10:16 AM CDT
If the cable said she had been briefed fully and she was in fact briefed fully and therefore was lying---it means quite a bit. If the cable exists and shows Rodriguez is lying ti means something else---that is we can ignore the rest of Rodriguez's information. Pelosi lying however means there needs to be a much deeper investigation.
Recommend
Report
andrew23boyle wrote:
4/30/2012 6:35 PM CDT
What did she know and when?
I'll bet water-boarding would get it out of her!
Recommend
Recommended by 23 readers
Reply
Report
tedmacks responds:
4/30/2012 6:39 PM CDT
Would you waterboard or even kill under the following hypothetical scenario?
Let's pretend you got next Wednesday's newpaper today(Monday) nad it talked about Tuesday's (tomorrow) disasterous terrorist attack. Listed among the 10,000 dead were all of your friends and family. The cuplrit who gave the order was in police custody Monday (today) afternoon but was released on bail this evening.
At the moment he is released he gets on a bus and is sitting next to you. All of you have to do is find out...See More
Recommend
Recommended by 3 readers
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Pthomas2mm wrote:
4/30/2012 5:12 PM CDT
I think Mr Rodriguez has a point when he is told by members of both parties that they will have your back, and the ranking member and person you briefed denies it happening. It is one thing to disemble or stretch the truth as most politicians do, it is quite another to lie outright. Prove it? There is a classified cable that will either condemn or exonerate Pelosi, we will probably hear in the next few days all of the glowing and patriotic reasons Pelosi won't ask for it to be released. Of c...See More
Recommend
Recommended by 19 readers
Reply
Report
tedmacks responds:
4/30/2012 6:35 PM CDT
Libs in private.
Lib 1 "I feel confident that I can say I'm firmly against enhanced interrogation. What are the chances that it will actually be me or anyone that I know would get killed in a preventable attack. Small I think."
Lib 2 "Yeah the chance is remote but we are talking about inncocents getting killed"
Lib 1 " Scroo them, I'll still be able to act holier than thou and besides that they are dead strangers".
Lib 2 "Yeah, scroo them.
Recommend
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The Post’s View: The futility of torture
Susan Thistlewaite: Justifying the unjustifiable
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Pause loading new comments
rlyoung311 wrote:
2:28 AM CDT
Was the internal CIA cable (from headquarters to field) copied to Pelosi? If so, her failure to respond or complain at that time might be a rational basis for concluding that she did not disagree with CIA Headquarters on the contents of the cable. If not, how does an internal CIA memo that Pelosi did not see have any evidentiary weight on the truth or falsity of the contents of the CIA memo? Until we know that Pelosi had contemporaneous knowledge of the internal CIA cable, the existence of thi...See More
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Recommended by 1 reader
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mil1 responds:
10:16 AM CDT
If the cable said she had been briefed fully and she was in fact briefed fully and therefore was lying---it means quite a bit. If the cable exists and shows Rodriguez is lying ti means something else---that is we can ignore the rest of Rodriguez's information. Pelosi lying however means there needs to be a much deeper investigation.
Recommend
Report
andrew23boyle wrote:
4/30/2012 6:35 PM CDT
What did she know and when?
I'll bet water-boarding would get it out of her!
Recommend
Recommended by 23 readers
Reply
Report
tedmacks responds:
4/30/2012 6:39 PM CDT
Would you waterboard or even kill under the following hypothetical scenario?
Let's pretend you got next Wednesday's newpaper today(Monday) nad it talked about Tuesday's (tomorrow) disasterous terrorist attack. Listed among the 10,000 dead were all of your friends and family. The cuplrit who gave the order was in police custody Monday (today) afternoon but was released on bail this evening.
At the moment he is released he gets on a bus and is sitting next to you. All of you have to do is find out...See More
Recommend
Recommended by 3 readers
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Pthomas2mm wrote:
4/30/2012 5:12 PM CDT
I think Mr Rodriguez has a point when he is told by members of both parties that they will have your back, and the ranking member and person you briefed denies it happening. It is one thing to disemble or stretch the truth as most politicians do, it is quite another to lie outright. Prove it? There is a classified cable that will either condemn or exonerate Pelosi, we will probably hear in the next few days all of the glowing and patriotic reasons Pelosi won't ask for it to be released. Of c...See More
Recommend
Recommended by 19 readers
Reply
Report
tedmacks responds:
4/30/2012 6:35 PM CDT
Libs in private.
Lib 1 "I feel confident that I can say I'm firmly against enhanced interrogation. What are the chances that it will actually be me or anyone that I know would get killed in a preventable attack. Small I think."
Lib 2 "Yeah the chance is remote but we are talking about inncocents getting killed"
Lib 1 " Scroo them, I'll still be able to act holier than thou and besides that they are dead strangers".
Lib 2 "Yeah, scroo them.
Recommend
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Ex-CIA counterterror chief says Pelosi ‘reinventing the truth’ about waterboarding
By Marc A. Thiessen, Published: April 30
In an explosive memoir released today, former CIA counterterrorism chief Jose Rodriguez provides new evidence that Rep. Nancy Pelosi lied when she declared she had not been briefed about the use of waterboarding.
Recall that in a Capitol Hill news conference three years ago, Pelosi (D-Calif.) vehemently denied being told about the use of waterboarding at a CIA briefing in September 2002. “We were not — I repeat — were not told that waterboarding or any of these other enhanced interrogation methods were used,” Pelosi said. She later changed her story, telling reporters, “We were told explicitly that waterboarding was not being used.” She claimed she learned about the use of waterboarding the following year, only after other lawmakers were told by the CIA. “I wasn’t briefed, I was informed that somebody else had been briefed about it,” she said.
If Rodriguez is right, each of these statements is false. But other than a chart released by the CIA noting that Pelosi, then the ranking member of the House intelligence committee, and Rep. Porter Goss (R-Fla.), then chairman of the committee, had been given a “description of the particular [enhanced interrogation techniques] that had been employed,” there was little public evidence to contradict Pelosi’s claims. So she got away with it — until today.
In his new book, “Hard Measures,” Rodriguez reveals that he led a CIA briefing of Pelosi, where the techniques being used in the interrogation of senior al-Qaeda facilitator Abu Zubaida were described in detail. Her claim that she was not told about waterboarding at that briefing, he writes, “is untrue.”
“We explained that as a result of the techniques, Abu Zubaydah was compliant and providing good intelligence. We made crystal clear that authorized techniques, including waterboarding, had by then been used on Zubaydah.” Rodriguez writes that he told Pelosi everything, adding, “We held back nothing.”
How did she respond when presented with this information? Rodriguez writes that neither Pelosi nor anyone else in the briefing objected to the techniques being used. Indeed, he notes, when one member of his team described another technique that had been considered but not authorized or used, “Pelosi piped up immediately and said that in her view, use of that technique (which I will not describe) would have been ‘wrong.’ ” She raised no such concern about waterboarding, he writes. “Since she felt free to label one considered-and-rejected technique as wrong,” Rodriguez adds, “we went away with the clear impression that she harbored no such feelings about the ten tactics [including waterboarding] that we told her were in use.”
So we’re left with a “he said-she said” standoff? Not at all. Rodriguez writes that there’s contemporaneous evidence to back his account of the briefing. Six days after the meeting took place, Rodriguez reveals, “a cable went out from headquarters to the black site informing them that the briefing for the House leadership had taken place.” He explains that “[t]he cable to the field made clear that Goss and Pelosi had been briefed on the state of AZ’s interrogation, specifically including the use of the waterboard and other enhanced interrogation techniques.”
Rodriguez asks, “So Pelosi was another member of Congress reinventing the truth. What’s the big deal?” The big deal, he explains, is “the message they are sending to the men and women of the intelligence community who to this day are being asked to undertake dangerous and sometimes controversial actions on behalf of their government. They are told that the administration and Congress ‘have their back.’ You will forgive CIA officers if they are not filled with confidence.”
Rodriguez compares Pelosi’s actions to the opening scene of the old TV series “Mission: Impossible,” “in which the operatives were told that if anything went wrong, their leaders would ‘disavow any knowledge of your actions.’ That is not how it should work in the real world,” he writes.
It is a big deal for another reason. If Rodriguez is right, it means that Pelosi stood up in a Capitol Hill news conference and lied with a straight face to the American people; that she falsely accused a dedicated civil servant of lying to Congress as part of a political cover-up. Pelosi is hoping to become House speaker again after the November elections. Do we really want someone so ethically challenged to be third in line to the presidency?
There is a simple way to settle this once and for all. Pelosi should formally request that the Obama administration declassify the cable that was sent from headquarters to the field reporting on the details of her Sept. 4, 2002, briefing. If she refuses to do so, it should be taken as an admission by Pelosi that her account of events is a fabrication.
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