HE SAID, SHE SAID

"The lady doth protest too much, methinks"
Hamlet, Act III, scene 2

OK we have duelling stories again in politics, this time about "torture" approval and awareness. Democrats in congress are claiming they knew nothing, nooothink! about waterboarding and the CIA was going rogue on them. Meanwhile, Porter Goss, former director at the CIA wrote an angry and scathing attack on these congressmen, pointing out what he recalls is very different from their version of events:

Let me be clear. It is my recollection that:

-- The chairs and the ranking minority members of the House and Senate intelligence committees, known as the Gang of Four, were briefed that the CIA was holding and interrogating high-value terrorists.

-- We understood what the CIA was doing.

-- We gave the CIA our bipartisan support.

-- We gave the CIA funding to carry out its activities.

-- On a bipartisan basis, we asked if the CIA needed more support from Congress to carry out its mission against al-Qaeda.

I do not recall a single objection from my colleagues. They did not vote to stop authorizing CIA funding. And for those who now reveal filed "memorandums for the record" suggesting concern, real concern should have been expressed immediately -- to the committee chairs, the briefers, the House speaker or minority leader, the CIA director or the president's national security adviser -- and not quietly filed away in case the day came when the political winds shifted.

Now Nancy Pelosi has responded in a CNN interview with Candy Crowley:

PELOSI: Well, first of all, let me say that perhaps we do live in an alternate universe, Porter and I.

Porter’s orientation is that he was a member of the CIA before he came to Congress and he speaks now as a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

CROWLEY: Is he wrong?

PELOSI: Perhaps he is seeing it from his perspective. If they say we have a legal opinion, it means we’re going to use it. That’s not how I heard it. They said they had a legal opinion. They said they weren’t going to use and when they did they would come back to Congress to report to us on that. But that’s how I heard that.

So she claims, yes, they were told about it but nobody was going to use it, and Goss is in an alternate universe.

Glenn Thrush on the left-leaning site Politico carried this story and what struck me as humorous was that almost none of the commenters believed Speaker Pelosi's story. They called her a liar, they called her out of touch with reality, and almost no one believed a word she said. A few claimed that the CIA was engaged in torture without congressional approval - which is probably true to the extent of referring to that specific congress' approval, but the CIA doesn't need to go to congress for every single act, they just need approval to take actions in overall situations, then apply them under guidelines congress sets down. Given that the CIA is executive branch and congress is legislative, having them oversee the CIA is at best constitutionally questionable, but even were that not so, the objection being raised at sites like Firedoglake is irrelevant.

If Speaker Pelosi wants to clear up the story, all she has to do is release the transcripts. Let's see the congressional minutes, madame speaker. The fact you don't care to do so speaks volumes. The fact is, congress knew, approved - or at least did not disapprove - and kept quiet about things just like Goss says, until the time came when they could make political hay out of it. They want to prosecute lawyers for giving political opinions, a strange and incomprehensible position for anyone to take, and seem to be taking action to "stop fascism" which the left claimed was going on under President Bush.

Pelosi knew and did not stop what she could have, because she knew it was critical for national security and needed to be done, no matter how regrettable or unpleasent it might have been. Honestly I believe most Americans understand that and given that it unquestionably stopped the LA terrorist attack, are fine with scumbag terrorists being made uncomfortable to find out what we need to know. She knew, and nobody is buying her lame story.