Nancy Pelosi

Facing reality is a tough job but somebody's got to do it. And we foretell for you the events of the future NOT because we want them to happen, but to get you to act to keep them from happening. But to do that you need an action page, so here it is.

Put The Public Option Up For A Vote: www.peaceteam.net/action/pnum1038.php

And now we will explain why this action page is so critical. To understand the current political dynamic, first you must understand that the Democrats are PLANNING on losing the next couple election cycles. UNTIL you understand that, the events to unfold in the next couple years (unless you act to derail them) will make no sense to you.

By Dave Lindorff

In an article in the Sunday New York Times, headlined
“Medicare for All? ‘Crazy,’ ‘Socialized’ and Unlikely,”reporter
Katherine Q. Seelye did her best to damn the idea of government
insurance for all with faint praise.

By Dave Lindorff

If this were the democracy that the Founding Fathers thought they
were creating, word from CIA Director Leon Panetta that his agency had
lied to Congress and specifically that it had lied repeatedly from
9-11-2001 through the end of 2008 concerning an as-yet undisclosed
secret program, would have virtually every member of Congress in a
state of rebellion, demanding answers.

After all, the CIA is required by law to report to at least the
majority and minority leaders of the House and Senate Intelligence
Committees and to the majority and minority leaders of both houses of
Congress about such things.

But not only did the spy agency not report on what it was up to; it lied about what it was up to.

Dick Cheney's rabid dogs in the Corporate Media are drooling over the prospect of savaging Speaker Pelosi for daring to agree with Jonathan Karl's accusation that the CIA lied to her.

Surprise! A rightwing Rasmussen poll found a 43%-41% plurality siding with Pelosi, not the CIA!

How likely is it that the CIA misled Pelosi about the use of waterboarding when interrogating prisoners?

20% Very likely
23% Somewhat likely
19% Not very likely
22% Not at all likely
16% Not sure

Dick Cheney's blackmail campaign against Nancy Pelosi hit another IED yesterday when Greg Sargent asked former Sen. Bob Graham whether he was briefed by the CIA about the torture of Abu Zubaydah in September 2002.

I do not have any recollection of being briefed on waterboarding or other forms of extraordinary interrogation techniques, or Abu Zubaydah being subjected to them.

Sargent adds,

Graham is the only other Dem aside from Pelosi to get briefed in 2002, so they are both in effect asserting that no Dem was briefed on the use of EITs that year. The date of the next briefing was in February 2003.

Dick Cheney may be out of the White House, but he's still doing what he loves best - waging a secret war based on deliberately distorted "intelligence." But he's no longer waging a war on Terror. Instead, he's waging a war on Nancy Pelosi.

Why? Because he's trying to stop Eric Holder from investigating his War Crimes, but he has no way to stop him directly because Elections Have Consequences - including firing corrupt AG's like Michael Mukasey. So instead he hopes he can blackmail Pelosi into stopping Holder.

Will he succeed? No.

Cheney's whole blackmail campaign against Pelosi rests on the smear that the CIA briefed her about waterboarding on 9/4/02 and she approved.

Republicans (led by Dick Cheney) are fighting every effort to expose the Torture Scandal, with one glaring exception: they are moving at warp speed to "prove" Nancy Pelosi approved waterboarding.

Only she didn't. So they're lying. And so is the Corporate Media.

Abu Zubaydah was the first prisoner waterboarded by the CIA. He was waterboarded 83 times in August 2002. Pelosi received her first briefing on "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques" (EIT) on September 4, 2002. But the CIA didn't tell her they had just waterboarded Abu Zubaydah!

Here's what Pelosi said on April 23:

By Dave Lindorff

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 far left and the far right,
and even among some in the apolitical, cynical middle of the political
spectrum, that somehow the Bush/Cheney administration must have been
blackmailing at least the key members of the Congressional leadership,
most likely through the use of electronic monitoring by the National
Security Agency (NSA).

On Thursday, Newsweek's Howard Fineman broke huge news about Nancy Pelosi on Countdown:

the news based on talking to people around her and advisers to her just this afternoon after that story broke is that she is very serious about this. 

The one part of it that Nancy Pelosi doesn‘t really want to mess with, I‘m told, is the evidence about the war in Iraq. Now, the whole question of the buildup for the war and whether lies were told about that and the reason for that is—she believes that she and other Democrats on the Hill knew that it was a phony deal, said so at the time, and she doesn‘t think there is any percentage of going over that particularly. 

By Dave Lindorff

The most entertaining thing about this Wall Street crisis and the
refusal of the House of Representatives (not failure but refusal) to
pass a bailout bill negotiated by the Bush White House and the House
leadership is how shocked and upset those leaders and the pundit class
have been by the idea that members of Congress would actually heed the
wishes of their constituents!

The Founding Fathers always saw the lower house of Congress as
voice of the people—the elected body that, because its members had to
face the voters every two years, would be most responsive to public
sentiment.