Congressman Darrell Issa has been pushing to resolve the CIA/Pelosi controversy, which began when the House Speaker denied that she was informed of torture procedures administered by our military in the War on Terror. Now he asks, who is lying, her or the CIA? Certainly it must be one or the other…

The following TIME article recaps the issue nicely.  Here are some excerpts:

Not many people get away with calling the Central Intelligence Agency a bald-faced liar, at least not when they’re speaking to a room packed with dozens of national media outlets. And yet that is exactly what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi did on Thursday. “Madam Speaker, just to be clear,” stuttered a reporter at a Capitol Hill press conference, “you’re accusing the CIA of lying to you in September of 2002?” “Yes,” Pelosi declared definitively, “misleading the Congress of the United States. I am.”
And with that, she upped the ante in the high-stakes spat over who knew what — and when — about the Bush Administration’s enhanced interrogation techniques (EITs), like waterboarding, which many now classify as torture.

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Sure enough, CIA charts of who was briefed and when started surfacing. Topping the list? Pelosi, then the top Democrat on the intelligence committee the CIA says was briefed in September 2002 “on EITs including use of EITs on Abu Zubaydah, background on authorities, and a description of the particular EITs that had been employed.” Zubaydah, a deputy to Osama bin Laden, was waterboarded 83 times in August 2002, according to Justice Department documents. Pelosi says she was never informed that the tactics described to her that day were employed — just that they were under consideration. “We were told specifically that waterboarding was not being used,” Pelosi said Thursday.
So who is right and who is wrong? Don’t ask CIA director Leon Panetta, who, in a letter to Hoekstra, kicked the hot potato back to Congress by simply stating that the chart seems in line with the notes from the time but that memories are subjective and “in the end, you and the Committee will have to determine whether this information is an accurate summary of what actually happened.”

[...]

Goss, who went on to head the CIA, said in an Op-Ed in the Washington Post that they had been told about the EITs. “Today, I am slack-jawed to read that members claim to have not understood that the techniques on which they were briefed were to actually be employed; or that specific techniques such as ‘waterboarding’ were never mentioned,” Goss wrote.

[...]

In making the case for a truth commission, it is perhaps counterproductive to label as fungible evidence you don’t like and then accuse the bureaucrats of conspiracies to mislead. In doing so Pelosi has unleashed a storm that threatens to undermine not only the intelligence community but her own office and the Democratic agenda.  Read more