B3: The Guardian through the years has criticized Rep. Nancy Pelosi for many things, from leading the fight to privatize the Presidio to her early support of the Iraq War to her unnecessary move to take impeachment of President Bush off the table during the election season.
But we are happy to come to her defense now that now she is under fire for saying that CIA briefing officials told her in September 2002 only that they had determined that so-called enhanced interrogation techniques were legal, not that they were using them, as the New York Times put it on Friday (5/22/09). Why? Why is she under fire and not the people who did the torturing and former Vice President Dick Cheney who without shame is publicly supporting waterboarding and torture?
Why is she under fire for lying by people who lied us into war and lied about torture? Here is one of the best accounts I’ve seen, written by the media advocacy group called Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR).
Media Advisory
Does the CIA Ever Lie?
Parsing the Pelosi torture controversy
The debate over Bush-era torture tactics like waterboarding has morphed into a full-blown Washington scandal. But the target isn’t the Bush administration officials who ordered the torture; instead, the corporate media’s focus is on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who claims that she was not fully briefed by the CIA on the use of waterboarding in late 2002. The prevailing assumption in much of the coverage is that the CIA couldn’t possibly have misled members of Congress–despite the fact that this has happened repeatedly.
The media reaction has been intense. Right-wing pundits and the Fox News Channel are treating the issue as the most important political story of the moment. Pelosi is “undermining our national security. She’s emboldening our enemies,” declared host Sean Hannity (5/15/09). MSNBC’s Morning Joe has covered the subject repeatedly, with host Joe Scarborough expressing utter disbelief (5/15/09) that the CIA could possibly have misled Pelosi, since Congress could cut off the CIA’s funding. “They would never lie to Congress, because they would be crushed,” Sen. Kit Bond (R.-Mo.) said on the show.