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 adminstration 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-NEWS he was talking about!
* [Cheney Yoo-Speak ] "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques"
""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. "
WATCH THE CLIP
