Excuse me, who's been running Congress for the past two years?

After almost a month of changing stories about what she knew and when she knew it, the Nanster has come up with a new explanation - that the CIA deliberately lied to her about not having used enhanced interrogation techniques on Zubaydah.Now isn't that a crime - to lie to members of Congress? Why, if this were the situation, hadn't Nancy Pelosi jumped on this as soon as she took over the big gavel? Wouldn't she have been furious to find out that she'd been lied to by the CIA? In fact, why didn't she use this as her first version of what happened. Kinda makes you a bit suspicious of her changing stories, doesn't it?

As Ed Morrissey puts it, Pelosi has placed the CIA in the position of having to leak again to prove their honesty in briefing Congress.

Pelosi to CIA: I double-dog dare you to leak again

Heh, heh.

The Democrats must be absolutely thrilled to have their preferred narrative of evil Bush officials plotting how to torture poor Al Qaeda guys transformed into a story of what Nancy knew and when she knew it.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration has punted on Dick Cheney's FOIA request to release the memos that he claims prove that the enhanced interrogations got valuable information. As Stephen Hayes writes,

Although Obama decided yesterday to block the public release of photos depicting prisoner abuse, he has promised to run the most transparent administration in history. The day after he took office, Obama issued a memorandum for executive branch departments and agencies.

He proclaimed: “The Freedom of Information Act should be administered with a clear presumption: In the face of doubt, openness prevails. The Government should not keep information confidential merely because public officials might be embarrassed by disclosure, because errors and failures might be revealed, or because of speculative or abstract fears…All agencies should adopt a presumption in favor of disclosure, in order to renew their commitment to the principles embodied in FOIA, and to usher in a new era of open Government. The presumption of disclosure should be applied to all decisions involving FOIA.”

A senior Bush administration official points to the irony of Obama administration’s position -- using a FOIA technicality to block the public disclosure of information.

“So, because Amnesty International has filed a broad FOIA request for detainee related materials, the American people are unable to see memos that document the effectiveness of our detainee program. Wouldn’t the legal memos previously released also, presumably, have been subject to this FOIA? Why wasn’t their release blocked under the same provision?”

The administration claims that the enhanced interrogations were not effective - how probable is it that they would block release of information that would show Dick Cheney was a liar by citing some very transparent claim of preserving the info for the ongoing FOIA requests from Amnesty International?

Just as Pelosi's story is transparently false, so is the administration argument of why they're releasing some information about the interrogations and not others. I guess they think that they're all above Emerson's "hobgoblin of little minds" - consistency. It's a real shame when the facts get in the way of their partisan efforts to demonize everything about the Bush administration while trying to keep their own hands clean.