SPEAKER PELOSI: THE CIA LIED TO ME

Jason Linkins jason@huffingtonpost.com
Media Shocked - Shocked! - That Pelosi Criticizes The CIA

There's much to consider where Nancy Pelosi and past intelligence briefings on interrogation, detention, and torture. Especially after today! Plenty of observers, myself included, have found her attempt to navigate her way through a timeline of events to be wanting where satisfaction or clarity is concerned. I'd further suggest that if her central contention is going to be that she was legally barred from disclosing the contents of those briefings, that should provoke a whole new set of convserations: if a law prohibits a person from disclosing wrongdoing -- and violations of the Geneva Convention certainly fall into that category -- then that law is an ass, as they say.

That said, the media has decided on what their big takeaway of the day is, and frankly, it has focused on the most quotidian aspect of this controversy: that Nancy Pelosi is suggesting that the CIA has misled her. Dog bites man!

I've already watched a bunch of occasions in which our beloved dayside news anchors have stared, aghast, into the camera, and exclaimed, "Nancy Pelosi is taking on the CIA!" as if it were the most incredulous and surprising occurence to have ever happened. But this is hardly the first time the CIA has been accused of misleading. Heck, it happens all the damn time, really:

--John Boehner said today that, "I've dealt with our intelligence professionals for the last three-and-a-half years on an almost daily basis, and it's hard for me to imagine that our intelligence area would ever mislead a member of Congress." But when the topic was the December 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, Boehner sang a different tune: "Either I don't have confidence in what they told me several months ago or I don't have confidence in what they're telling me today." And on the February 11, 2007 edition of Meet The Press, Boehner said, "It's clear to all of us, Democrats and Republicans, that we have flawed intelligence. The CIA have bad intelligence, the Pentagon had bad intelligence and, for that matter, all of our allies around the world had the same bad intelligence. And so that's why Republicans voted to set up the National Intelligence Directorate to reform our intelligence activities."