It's one thing to be a liar, and another to be an incompetent liar. Or maybe it's not. Most people are bad liars. When Al Gore lied, and knew he was lying, he got even more stiff and waxy than his default condition. Bill Clinton on the other hand…
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is no Bill Clinton. When the "enhanced interrogation" scandal began to heat up, Pelosi was shocked, shocked to learn that the CIA has approved what she now calls torture. That knee-jerk was followed by an admission that she knew about it, but only before it was used. She couldn't say that she objected. Well, that was clear as the mud under a waterboarded suspect, so she and her staff have been in a tizzy since.
At her weekly press conference (hat tip to politics daily),
Pelosi tried to stick to her original story that she was never briefed on the waterboarding of terror detainees. But she also acknowledged for the first time that she did know, at least of as February 2003, that America was using this method of interrogation, even though it's defined as torture and barred under the Geneva Conventions.
"I wasn't briefed,'' she explained today. "I was informed someone else had been briefed." That someone being her top security adviser. Parsing isn't pretty, is it?
In this case, the parsing was butt ugly. But it got uglier. In a stammering, shaking, let me read, let me read this again kind of way, she ended up accusing the CIA of lying to her. "I am saying," she said, that "the CIA was misleading the Congress and at the same time the administration was misleading the Congress on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq."
It is not at all clear that she had planned to say that. The Speaker enhanced interrogated herself at the conference, and put herself in a much worse position than she was already in. Having accused the CIA of lying, she was in fact accusing them of criminal behavior. If she is serious, the charge ought to be delivered to the Justice Department. But that puts her at odds with the Obama Administration, which is now in the position of having to defend the CIA.
Obama's CIA Director, Leon Panetta, had to come out and all but accuse the Speaker of the House of lying. From Glenn Thrush at Politico, here is what Panetta said:
"Let me be clear: It is not our policy or practice to mislead Congress. That is against our laws and our values. As the Agency indicated previously in response to Congressional inquiries, our contemporaneous records from September 2002 indicate that CIA officers briefed truthfully on the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, describing "the enhanced techniques that had been employed." Ultimately, it is up to Congress to evaluate all the evidence and reach its own conclusions about what happened."
It's pretty clear that Panetta is right. The CIA has released a summary of briefings of members of Congress, including Speaker Pelosi, in which the facts were revealed. Pelosi has treed herself, and that means that all the hounds are barking at her just now.
And that is what lying often accomplishes. It puts you at odds with yourself: the you that knows the truth and the you that says the opposite. Why did Speaker Pelosi cleave her own soul in twain? She could have just admitted the obvious: in the aftermath of 9/11, not knowing if the next blow was about to fall, the Bush Administration and Congress were focused on deflecting such a blow. They weren't being so fastidious about the rights of terrorists. This is the kind of thing that looks like a sin only in retrospect.
But to admit that is to give up the game on enhanced interrogation. It admits the obvious: that both parties and both houses of Congress were in fact complicit in whatever the Bush Administration did. And that also gives up the fondest hope of Bush haters everywhere: that Dubya will someday end up in his own orange jump suit.
Ms. Pelosi is a mess right now. The Obama Administration, meanwhile, is affirming Bush national security policy on one issue after another. The Democrats remain incapable of generating a coherent foreign policy of their own.
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