By Jonathan Bronstein, Talk Radio News Service
The slow revelation of the use of torture by the Central Intelligence Agency can be likened to a child slowly pulling off a band-aid and crying louder and louder with each hair pulled out of the follicle.
With each removed hair, or revelation in the news, the groans of the American people are only amplified as they want the truth about the CIA’s use of waterboarding and which U.S government officials knew but remained silent.
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), who was briefed by the CIA on interrogation techniques during September 2002, virulently denied that she knew the CIA employed water boarding.
In fact during a press conference this afternoon, she repeatedly answered numerous questions regarding her knowledge of when the CIA employed enhanced interrogation techniques, like waterboarding. She did this after her press secretary yelled out “last question.” Pelosi even answered as she was walked out of the room.
“I am speaking from my own experience, and we were told that it (waterboarding) was not being used,” said Pelosi emphatically.
Admitting that she was briefed by the CIA in September 2002, Pelosi said that the unnamed agent did not tell her that they used waterboarding, and promised her that the CIA would notify her if waterboarding was ever employed.
Pelosi said that the briefing in 2002 was “ incomplete and inaccurate,” as the waterboarding of terrorist and Bin Laden confidant, Abu Zubaydah, had occurred a month earlier.
After trying to clear her own name, Pelosi attempted to shift the blame to the CIA because it had not been forthright with information regarding the agency’s true actions.
“They (the CIA) misrepresented every step of the way, and they don’t want that focus on them, and they have tried to shift the focus on us (Congress),” said Pelosi.
At the same time of her briefing, Pelosi stated that “The Bush Adminstration was misleading the American people about the threat of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.”
As a result, Pelosi has been a leading advocate in the need for an independent “Truth Commission” that would work “to determine how intelligence was misused, and how controversial and possibly illegal activities, like torture, were authorized within the executive branch.”
However, House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) called the “Truth Commission” a “politically motivated investigation into our intelligence agency.”
Boehner feels that such an investigation is “dangerous and wrong.
But if this investigation does occur, he wants to see all the information presented, including what Pelosi knew, when she knew it and what she did about it.
Additionally, Boehner believes that Pelois’s numerous stories have led to “more questions than answers,” and bluntly questioned if the Democrats were not being truthful themselves.
“When you look at the number of briefings that the Speaker was in and other Democratic members of the House and Senate its pretty clear that they were well aware of what these enhanced interrogation techniques were, they were well aware that they have been used,” said Boehner.
Pelosi’s statements have only stoked the flames of suspicion, and her calls for a “Truth Commission,” at least according to Boehner, may lead to some unintended and unwanted discoveries.
