CIA Admits Lying To Congress; Where Is The Apology To Pelosi?

A top CIA official admitted Tuesday that the intelligence community failed to fully inform Congress about its spying activities.  Most significantly, as Jason Leopold points out, the CIA failed to reveal to leading members of the House and Senate intelligence committees that the agency tortured detainees.

Speaking to reporters immediately after the hearing, Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Illinois, pictured) said the CIA’s failure to disclose details about its use of so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” is a “symptom of a larger disease.”

Schakowsky revealed that, in addition to withholding information from lawmakers about torture, the CIA lied or misled Congress about the shooting down of an airplane over Peru in 2001 carrying American missionaries, the destruction of torture tapes and a top secret assassination program aimed at targeting leaders of al-Qaeda. She would not reveal details of what the fifth case was. A 2008 CIA inspector general’s report had already concluded that the agency lied to Congress about the Peru incident.

When House Speaker Nancy Pelosi revealed that the CIA misled Congress in the torture issue, she was roundly criticized, even after CIA chief Leon Panetta acknowledged that the agency lied to Congress.

“We were told explicitly that waterboarding was not being used,” Pelosi told reporters during a press conference last May. The CIA “misled us all the time.”

Perhaps the fine, upstanding truth-seekers who mocked Madame Speaker would like to make a correction.

By: Alan

Alan Colmes is the publisher of Liberaland.