Former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has now been formally exposed for lying about her knowledge of so-called enhanced interrogation techniques such as waterboarding by a new book from a former CIA counterterrorism officer who actually gave her a briefing about them.
In other words, Pelosi and other congressional Democrats who later decried the use of "torture" when it became politically advantageous, knew about and did not object to them for years beforehand:
In his new book, “Hard Measures,” Jose 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. [...]
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.”
As Townhall's Guy Benson notes, Pelosi's lie here is really quite outrageous:
To recap: Roughly one year after 9/11, Nancy Pelosi and other select members of Congress were told in great detail about a program of EITs that US interrogators were employing to wring actionable intelligence out of captured terrorists. No one objected. Years later, when Democrats were indignantly denouncing "torture" as an inexpiable sin of Bush and the Republicans, Pelosi disavowed any knowledge of the meeting she had attended. She deliberately lied about a sensitive national security question in order to score the cheapest of political points, tossing the American intelligence community under the bus in the process. This is absolutely shameful. House Democrats' code of Congressional conduct features the following passage, describing the grounds on which a member may be censured:
