Do my eyes deceive me?

Florida's Senator Bob Graham on the Colbert Report May 20th 2009.

Did I just see Bob Graham defend House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on the Colbert Report? Very Nearly, Well Almost, just about.

Colbert's segment May 20th focused on the RIGHTWING's "PELOSI FRONT". They've been "Thumping the BIG-MEDIA DRUMS" for more than a week now trying to stir up dust about the discrepancies between the CIA's version of who told what to whom, during the 2002 Congressional briefings on TORTURE. * & **

It is profoundly wished in the crusty dank regions where conservatives hatch their nefarious plans that by attacking Pelosi they draw attention to her and create enough free floating confusion about what the Cheney-Rumsfeld-Yoo administration meant when they said "We do not Torture."

We just have that new stuff in the Improved Market-Tested Mumbo-Jumbo Box, we like to call it - ENHANCED interrogation.

When during a recent press conference Speaker Pelosi was asked was she calling the CIA liars?, the always plain-spoken Pelosi stated without mincing words "she was mislead." Pelosi, has stated she was not informed about the TORTURE ("E.I."), and this has led to a spattering of faux-news, sketch comedy segments with special appearances by Uncle Newtie G., and back from his 8 year tour of Secret Undisclosed Locations disgraced former VP Cheney and by special arrangement with the Obama Administration, a guest slot featuring Leon [no honest I really am a dem] Panetta (currently mayor of spooktown) who defended the CIA, by stating that it is not their business to deceive??? [REALLY?]

He continued to lie by saying they were comprehensive and forthcoming in all their briefings. [Who writes that stuff?]
What else would you expect from Cheney era spooks, but full-disclosure RIGHT?

Senator Bob, Chair of the Intelligence Committee at the time (in 2002) said, [while meticulously never mentioning that Pelosi woman] quoted from his notoriously thorough diary, stating flatly his daily logs "do not reflect three of the four meetings that the CIA claimed".

According to Senator Bob, chair of the Intelligence Committee at the time, it just didn't happen. He went on to say the one meeting that did occur roughly when the CIA reported that it did, the attendance was such that it couldn't have included high level security briefings because there were people in attendance who could not have been present at such briefings. [BOB TALKS OUTTA SCHOOL?] (He has a book to promote!***)

When Colbert asked "if a Senator found out about water-boarding what would he do? Write it down?" "No" Graham replied, "he would try to engage the MEDIA!" - you, dear readers are the media!

IT wasn't CORPO-FAUX-NEWS he was talking about!

solidarity & peace
RW Spisak

* [Cheney Yoo-Speak ] "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques"
(with the all new improved market tested language)

** [The Rest of the World - Prosecutable WAR CRIMES]

*** America - The Owners Manual by Senator Bob Graham

Supplemental
"“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,” Graham told me by phone moments ago, in a reference to the terror suspect who had been repeatedly waterboarded the month before.

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.

Graham claimed he would have remembered if he’d been told about the use of torture. “Something as unexpected and dramatic as that would be the kind of thing that you would normally expect to recall even years later,” he said. " [greg sargant's blog]

WATCH THE CLIP

RE Experience

by RW Spisak

It is a rare thing, for Americans to elect a person who has been president before, unless it's for a second term. President Obama will have to wait a few years, for that election. This in fact addresses your concern about our current president's lack of presidential experience.

While it's true, he hasn't say, run an oil company, or even a baseball team... as did our former business school educated president. [Who spent us into this hole, by cutting taxes, (his all-purpose cure) while pretending that the costs of Iraq, and Afghanistan didn't need to be accounted for in the actual budget.] Our current president who having achieved a very high quality legal education, proceeded, not to cash in on Greed St, but instead went to work in a community to improve the lot of unemployed steel workers. [That's experience, unfortunately for many Americans we need, right about now!]

That might not compare to the gilded son of a CIA chief, Senator, and President, but it seems like he cared about investing his life in helping others. He didn't dodge a war, or even National Guard service, like the "former governor" who served before him.

You evidently may not recall, the blame shuffling of the Bush administration during the post 9/11 hearings when they pointedly discussed their perception of the shortcomings of President Clinton's several responses to earlier attacks on the towers, and the USS Cole, some of us do.

But you also inadvertently forget that in the period just before former President Bush took one of his many ranch vacations, he received a briefing that specifically HIGHLIGHTED Bin Ladin's immanent plans to attack this country from the air, using the exact techniques that had been planned for just months earlier at a European defense summit, where an attack from the air by hijacked planes, was prepared against. Like you Ms. Rice's memory needed refreshing, because her widely reported disingenuous initial comments were, "WE HAD NO IDEA of that sort of impending attack".

I guess there are times, when a compromised memory can be of some small service.

Orignial L2E entitled: Obama's Poor Record