The Speaker Is in the House

Obama has made it clear he wants to "turn the page" on the ugly memories of enhanced interrogation techniques. But Pelosi's troops won't let her. She has to steer a path between the liberal outriders in her caucus eager to avenge the Bush legacy and the newly energized GOP, which is struggling to find a way to defend it. Now she's caught in a row of her own about what she knew and when she knew it.

Goss, who went on to run the Bush CIA, describes himself as "slack-jawed" at her defense of what he sees as selective amnesia. Actually, if you parse out Goss's code words in his critical Washington Post op-ed, he subtly concedes the point that he and Pelosi were not told that waterboarding had already been used. He wrote, future conditional tense, that enhanced interrogation techniques were "to actually be employed."

Pelosi's explanation does not cut any ice with Sen. John McCain, who infuriated the Bushies by speaking out on torture. "She was briefed on it," he told reporters on his way to a Republican Senate lunch last Tuesday.

But Pelosi has a point, too: that the CIA pulled a fast one by limiting its briefing to the Gang of Four and then warning them not to talk to anyone else. "If you're to talk about it, charges could be filed against you," she told me. "When I was a junior member and I read all the intelligence estimates, little did I know, until I was a ranking member, that I didn't understand half of what was going on ... they just dribble it out."

You could almost hear Newt Gingrich licking his chops when he gave me his opinion of that response a few days later. "It is increasingly likely Pelosi has lied," he told me on the phone. "Someone is going to show up soon and say they were in the room. The alternative is that she didn't understand what she was being told—which is pretty unacceptable for the third person in line to be president."

Pelosi held her ground, even as news reports surfaced that a top aide of hers attended a briefing in February 2003, along with fellow California Rep. Jane Harman, at which they were told that waterboarding was in fact being used in interrogating Abu Zubaydah. Harman, who succeeded Pelosi as the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, wrote a protest letter to the administration that Pelosi supported but did not sign.

The leak propelled her into a press conference on Thursday, when she confirmed she had heard from her aide about waterboarding in February 2003—but then, and only then. "They didn't tell us everything they were doing," she said. "We had to get a new president to change the policy." Asked a follow-up on her way out of the room, Pelosi lost her cool, stalked back to the podium and gave a soundbite that was a telling clue to her state of mind at the time: "I was fighting the war in Iraq at that point, too, you know."

She couldn't say what I suspect was the truth: "Look, we were conned about torture in the first briefing, and then, when I found out, it was too late. What was I going to do? Sure, Jane Harman sent her letter. Good for her. I was trying to fight this next horror show coming down in Iraq. The Republicans were killing us, and you in the press rolled over, too. You have to pick your battles, guys. This was hardball."

She's clearly fit to be tied that all the heat is on her, when it's the Bush administration that ought to be in the dock. She knows, too, that so few of the congressional Democrats had served in the executive branch, they didn't realize how radically the White House was rewiring it.