Pelosi is a liar AND Panetta is a moron

Some background, earlier in the year Granny McBotox got her panties in a wad trying to appease her "Bush is a war criminal" by claiming (despite evidence to the contrary) that she knew nothing about interrogation techniques that were used. When the CIA made it clear that Pelosi was briefed, she doubled down and claimed the CIA broke the law by routinely lying to Congress.

Leon Panetta, defending his turf, disputed that claim. Then, he dropped a bomb shell that had the nutroots in froth: the CIA was was running an 8 year secret and illegal assassination program. A program on which Congress had not been advised.

Except, Panetta's a jackass.

On June 23, in the course of a routine briefing by the head of the National Counterterrorism Center, Panetta first learned about the assassination squads. Alarmed, he terminated the program at once and called the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Silvestre Reyes (D-TX). He told Reyes he’d discovered something of grave concern, and requested an urgent briefing for the House and Senate intelligence committees as soon as possible. Less than 24 hours later, he was on the Hill, "with his hair on fire," as a Republican member of the House committee put it. “The whole committee was stunned,” said Rep. Anna G. Eshoo (D-CA).

Afterward, seven Democratic members of the House Intelligence Committee sent Panetta an indignant letter: “Recently you testified that you have determined that top CIA officials have concealed significant actions from all members of Congress, and misled members for a number of years from 2001 to this week," the Democratic lawmakers wrote. They demanded he “correct” his statement back in May that the CIA does not mislead Congress.

Ten days later, one of them leaked the letter.

Panetta had set in motion a chain reaction of atomic proportions. “It was like shoving a rod into that nuclear mass,” a veteran senior CIA officer told me. A lot of Democrats had been waiting for this moment: an opportunity to shine daylight on the abuses of intelligence during the Bush-Cheney years. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, an object of controversy, even ridicule, after charging that the CIA had lied to her about waterboarding, now felt vindicated. The CIA, trapped at last in its tangled web of lies, owed her an apology!

But once Panetta had spoken with Tenet, Goss, and Hayden, he learned that this secret “program” wasn’t much more than a PowerPoint presentation and a task force assigned to think it through. “Sensitive information” had been collected in a single foreign country, my sources tell me. That’s about it. It wasn’t really a coherent program at all so much as a collection of schemes, each attempting to achieve the same objective: to kill terrorists. This was one of perhaps dozens of ideas that had been kicked around at Langley since September 2001, when George W. Bush issued a presidential “finding” authorizing the agency to use deadly force against Osama bin Laden or other terrorists.