Analysis: Pelosi flap could advance 'truth commission'

[babylonsister]

Analysis: Pelosi flap could advance 'truth commission'
By Mike Soraghan
Posted: 05/17/09 06:03 PM


House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's fight with the CIA has put her in one of the toughest spots she's been in since she became speaker.

But it may also have advanced her goal of creating a "truth commission" to investigate the Bush administration's interrogation techniques and whether they amounted to illegal torture.

If nothing else, Pelosi's hard-to-prove assertion that the CIA lied to her in a briefing has renewed interest among Republicans and Democrats in what the Bush administration was doing with detainees six years ago and what it told Congress and other officials.

That's exactly what President Obama was trying to avoid earlier this year when he shot down the idea of a truth commission by saying he wanted to “look forward, not backwards.”

His position seemed to square at the time with Republicans, who also don't want the Bush administration in the news as they try to dig out of an electoral hole.

But to go after Pelosi, Republicans have had to start looking back, too. Republican former speaker Newt Gingrich is talking about a House investigation into Pelosi's claim. Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.), the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, is demanding increasingly detailed records of what the CIA told Congress about its interrogation program in 2002 and 2003.

more...

http://thehill.com/leading-the-news/analysis-pelosi-flap-could-advance-truth-commission-2009-05-17.html

[rschop]

1. Speaker Pelosi

Pelosi has hosted herself on a petard of her own making. She and the rest of the US Congress had known that the CIA had lied to Congress for years, and let them get away with it with no retribution. The most obvious example of this are the attacks on 9/11. It is now clear from the record that the CIA knew about Mihdhar and Hazmi 21 months before September 11, 2001, but never gave this information to the FBI until August 23, 2001, when it was almost too late to find them. The Congress even knew that at that point when this information was sent over to the FBI, that the CIA had then forced the shutdown of FBI investigations that could have found Mihdhar and Hazmi in time to prevent the attacks on 9/11, in effect intentionally allowing the attacks on 9/11 to take place that killed almost 3000 people. She and Congress then knew that the CIA lied about this to hide their culpability in the attacks on 9/11, a fact that must have been an open secret in Washington DC for years. So now when the CIA has lied yet once again, she is stuck with the monster she and the rest of the US Congress has created!

[kentuck]

2. Do you have a source..?

Or a link that can verify those specificities?

[rschop]

3. Reply: Do you have a link?

Yes see the link, www.eventson911.com, this site also links to a number of other official US government sites that have the actual source documents for all of this information.