What Did Pelosi Know? »
Posted By Progressive 6 months ago in Political NewsRepublicans are using reports that the speaker was briefed on torture to turn around the debate and duck further hearings. The Daily Beast's Scott Horton asks: Will the tactic work?
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Progressive
There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating: people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing. -- Oscar Wilde
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hyperbola6 months ago
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We know that the Bush administration lied to congress, the american people, the UN and the world in the lead up to the Iraq war. Indeed, even Dick Armey of the GOP, House Majority Leader of the time, says that he was lied to by Bush and Cheney and that without those lies he would have rejected the Iraq war. Why should we assume they didn't lie to Congress about torture. Let's hear ALL the evidence.
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FTA:
"""Among the details that ABC initially omitted from its report was a particularly telling one. The CIA schedule did not rest on contemporaneous records, but rather an after-the-fact attempt by CIA agents to reconstruct what had happened. In fact, the intelligence officers weren’t so confident of their recollection of what happened.CIA Director Leon Panetta, in a cover memo, stated that the information supplied the Senate Select Intelligence Committee was based on “notes that summarized the best recollections of those individuals. In the end, you and the Committee will have to determine whether this information is an accurate summary of what actually happened.” And indeed, former committee chair, Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), almost immediately pointed out that the CIA schedule had an obvious error—showing him as present at a briefing he did not attend.... -
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icono16 months ago
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Agree. Investigate the situation, gather the relevant facts, then start the prosecutions if need be. Otherwise drop it and move on.
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However, if this situation does 'go to trial', and in the absence of a clear scapegoat or, if you prefer, an obvious villain, then some high ranking Demos as well as Repubs and members of the so called 'intelligence community' will take a major political hit and possibly do jail time if they are not forced to resign their positions to save public embarrassment to the political image of both parties and limit the political damage to both parties. -
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Endoscopy6 months ago
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RFE etc. all ignore what many congressmen have stated both in the House and the Senate. Pelosie admitted it as well but tried to put a spin on it saying that she did not understand the significance. In 2002 ALL members of the House and Senate were invited secret meetings to be briefed on the methods that the CIA etc. were going to use. The door keepers later told that ALL but one agreed with the methods. Several asked if harsher methods should be used. Keep in mind that all methods were in keeping with the torture law. But radical liberals have to rant and spout ignorant things about the issue. Truth means nothing to RADICAL LIBERALS. What the law is and the fact that Pelosie really admitted that she went to the briefing. If she and the others were against the methods all they had to do was in the appropriate committee create a law changing the present torture law. They did nothing. That action speaks louder than Pelosies obfuscations.
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Georgia506 months ago
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This Crat apologist wants to argue over what Pelosi did or did not know. Such a nice try.
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The depth of what Pelosi knew is made irrelevant by her abject silence on the matter back then. Had she been briefed only to the extent she claims, she would have come out publicly against EIT. The twit is not even a good liar.-
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icono16 months ago
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I agree; these things do not happen in a vacuum in DC. If Pelosi was 'briefed' by the CIA about the 'process of the techniques', the 'objective of the techniques', and the 'human subject the techniques would be 'applied' to', so were other high ranking politicians from both parties.
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This could easily turn into a bipartisan debacle that will ultimately underline and uncover the everyday skirting of the Constution and basic laws of the land that the DC power elite do on a daily basis.
Also this 'snowball from hell' could easily 'roll up some politicians and other DC functionaries' that no one would of thought would of been involved in the whole questionable affair. -
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edvf1000r6 months ago
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Ridiculous. Anything Pelosi (and Republicans as well) was told during those briefings was highly classified information. None of the legislators involved could have disclosed any classified information to the public or the press, or indeed anyone without a serious security clearance.
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antibrainwasher6 months ago
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Cheney and Bush ordered torture to prove a link between Iraq and 911. Period. This was a neocon lie, thought up by the zionist neocons and oil tycoons and war profiteers to destroy Iraq, and turn a tribal religious region into a democracy, it was a completely insane scheme.
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Cheney is still trying to cover it up on tv after he and his entire ship of fools was voted out.
Eyes on the prize. The prize is the chickenhawk mass murdering war profiteer, the traitor and murdering psychopath Cheney. The cons are good a throwing strawmen and swiftboating and lying, that's what cons do. Its called fogging or muddying the water.
Cons are nothing if not cowards. Repugs will fight to the death rather than admit they are lying sacks, which they are. Its up to Eric Holder to set justice on these lockstepping cowards. -
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mmrhe6 months ago
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Let's assume Pelosi WAS breifed.
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What does that prove?
Only that Bush and Cheney were successful at Steamrolling their crooked agenda by tapping into the rampant fear and paranoia following the attacks.
And THAT is the truly despicable aspect of the whole ordeal!-
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hyperbola6 months ago
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Americans tend to forget that one of the major reasons that we revised our regulations on spying on Americans during the 1970s was the blackmail of Americans, including members of congress, during the Vietnam War. Given that the first leaks about domestic spying from the National Security Agency dealt with spying by Cheney on other, republican congressmen (who rejected the Iraq war), I would not be surprised if such blackmail has been used again.
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Harman, AIPAC and NSA Wiretaps - Are Members of Congress Being Blackmailed?
http://www.propeller.com/story/2009/04/25/harman-a...
For some time now, many Americans have wondered how Congress, the elected body that the nation’s Founding Fathers saw as the bulwark of liberty, could have been so thoroughly unwilling to, or incapable of challenging the dictatorial power-grabs and the eight-year Constitution wrecking campaign of the Bush/Cheney administration.
There has been speculation on both the left and the right, and even among some in the apolitical, cynical middle of the political spectrum, that somehow the Bush/Cheney administration must have been blackmailing key members of the Congressional leadership, most likely through the use of electronic monitoring by the National Security Agency (NSA).
.... the NSA in 2006 recorded Rep. Harman negotiating with an alleged Israeli agent about helping Israel win a reduction in the espionage charges filed by the US in 2005 against two members of the AIPAC lobby accused of providing US intelligence information to the Israeli government. .... Attorney General Alberto Gonzales subsequently intervened with the FBI to prevent any prosecution of Harman, a key member of Congress on whom the administration was relying to help it persuade the NY Times to withhold its NSA wiretapping exposé until after the 2006 election. In the event, Rep. Harman did later make calls to a Times editor, the paper did hold its story until after the election, and Harman later was a leading backer of the administration’s controversial (and illegal) NSA spying program. ...
There are several serious issues here. One is the extraordinary glimpse it offers into the extent to which Israel has penetrated the centers of power in Washington. It is illegal for foreign governments to directly lobby and to offer to arrange financial contributions for members of the US government, but here, clearly, Israeli agents were doing just that. The role of AIPAC as a front for the Israeli government in Washington, as exposed here, is simply stomach-turning, and should make it a toxic organization to politicians.
A second issue is the NSA’s spying activities themselves..... Back in 1978, Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in direct response to the disclosure during the Watergate hearings and subsequent investigations that the Nixon Administration had been using the NSA to conduct illegal monitoring of the communications of anti-war activists, and of members of Congress. -
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Natureboy6 months ago
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"Let's assume Pelosi WAS breifed. What does that prove?"
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It proves that Pelosi subborned torture.
Give me a break, falling back on "the rampant fear and paranoia following the attacks" is weak, like Eichmann and Goebbels saying "I guess you had to be there at the time" to justify their actions.
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slate6 months ago
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antibrainwasher6 months ago
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So, in your con head, that justifies torture to cover up the invasion and sending to their death 5000 americans and trillions of dollars for a neocon lie and war profiteer neocon fest, meanwhile, the arabs that murdered 3000 americans go free.
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you locksteppers don't even realize what your doing, just born to be a brainless brownshirts I guess, repeating the same crap you hear on faux noise, and they don't even pay you. In your pathetic mind, you set up another strawman, and copy your masters at propanda central. -
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slate6 months ago
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"So, in your con head, that justifies torture to cover up the invasion and sending to their death 5000 americans and trillions of dollars for a neocon lie and war profiteer neocon fest, meanwhile, the arabs that murdered 3000 americans go free."
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No Anti brain.
In my quite moderate thinking, this is just the usual thing the Dems and you have done for years. It's always Bush's and Republican's fault and even when Dems do wrong you find a way to give them a pass and lay all blame on Bush. If she was told about it and she did nothing (which is the case) she is just as guilty, because she didn't use her ability to call the media and announce what was going on.
All it would have taken was one call to CNN and it would have been world wide news. But what did she do? She pulled a schultz and kew.saw/heard nothing. Why? Because she saw it as a future feather in her bee buzzed bonnet that she could use to excoriate the Republicans, because she knew there were plenty that thought like you do, that would give her a pass and want to only blame the ;hated' Bush administration.
Now she has to face the music, since she did nothing to stop it, she is also culpable for the torture.
How's that bounce around in your socialist melon? -
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hyperbola6 months ago
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No Slate, Pelosi the zionist imperialist. Unfortunately both our political parties are heavily contaminated with them.
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Pelosi the Israel-First Hawk
http://www.propeller.com/story/2009/04/30/pelosi-t...
Reports by international human rights groups and from within Israel in recent weeks have revealed the massive scale of war-crimes and other violations of international humanitarian law, committed by Israeli forces during their three-week offensive against the Gaza Strip earlier this year. Despite this, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has steadfastly stood by her insistence that the U.S.-backed Israeli government has no legal or moral responsibility for the tragic consequence of the war.
This is just one episode in a long history of efforts by Pelosi to undermine international humanitarian law, in regards to actions by a country she has repeatedly referred to as America's most important ally in the Middle East. It's also part of her overall right-wing agenda in the Middle East. As the powerful Speaker of the House, Pelosi could very well undermine efforts by President Barack Obama in the coming years to moderate U.S. policy toward that volatile region.
...Pelosi's siding with the Bush administration in its defense of violations of international humanitarian law by U.S. allies was nothing new. When Bush defended Israel's assaults on Lebanon's civilian infrastructure in 2006 and defied the international community by blocking UN efforts to impose a ceasefire, Pelosi voted in favor of a resolution commending him for "fully supporting Israel." This Pelosi-backed resolution claimed that Israel's actions were legitimate self-defense under the UN Charter and, despite evidence to the contrary, praised "Israel's longstanding commitment to minimizing civilian loss and welcom[ed] Israel's continued efforts to prevent civilian casualties." Directly contradicting empirical studies by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and even the U.S. Army War College, all of which noted the absence of any credible evidence of even a single civilian fatality resulting from such practices, she went on recording insisting that the nearly 800 civilian deaths were a result of Hezbollah using "human shields." Pelosi also echoed Bush's defense of Israel's 2002 West Bank offensive, which also was directed primarily at civilian targets. Once again contradicting findings by reputable human rights groups, she voted in favor of a resolution sponsored by right-wing Republican leader Tom DeLay claiming the massive assault was "aimed solely at the terrorist infrastructure."...
Double Standards
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NoWayMan6 months ago
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well, whatever pelosi knew, cheney, bush, rummy, gonzo etc must have known more.
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and if pelosi has to go jail with the rest of these aholes, so be it.
I'm more interested in justice than in protecting people from the dem party.
and all this "what did nancy know" is just a feeble attempt at re-direction because it implies that whatever she knew, all the repubs knew more. which we all know is true since they were the ones calling the shots.
so go ahead, keep asking about what nancy knew. because whatever she knew, she was told by someone from the bush white house, so they all knew as well.
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