Gingriched: The Missing Rest of the Story about Pelosi and CIA Criticisms.
Here’s the exchange from last Sunday’s Meet the Press:
Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL): I’d just say that I’m afraid Mr. Gingrich is suffering from a little political amnesia here. He’s forgotten that in year 2007, he criticized the National Intelligence estimate in regard to the capability of Iran to develop nuclear weapons and said that — if I remember the quote correctly, I’m looking down here — that what they did damaged our national security and misled the American people. Mr. Gingrich, would you like to make an apology to our intelligence agency for what you said in 2007?
Newt Gingrich (R-Everywhere): I said that particular report was intellectually dishonest. It was a public, non-classified report, and we were debating it. I said it was intellectually dishonest. I never said the CIA lied to the Congress, which would be illegal. It would be a felony.
Senator Durban was referring to a December 2007 Gingrich article, Iran NIE: Bureaucratic Coup D’etat, in the conservative online magazine Human Events.com. Many have cited this article, as Durbin did, to either support or rebut Gingrich’s call for Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) to apologize or step down for her statements recently about the CIA and Bush era torture briefings for Members of Congress.
Gingrich defended by asserting that he was merely criticizing the State Department in his criticism of the NIE. He actually wrote that they “wrote [the] document” – the NIE. However, as he well knew, the NIE is and was then compiled and authored by the Director of National Intelligence and the National Intelligence Council, in which the CIA plays an integral role.
That misleading phrase aside, he goes on further in the article to do what he denied doing to Senator Durbin and others: he accuses the CIA of lying to Congress. Thus far, I’ve not heard of this being reported by the media. It occurs later in his December 2007 article, in a second section titled, “The NIE Is the Tip of the Iceberg: A North Korean-Syrian Nuclear Site?”
But the NIE is just the tip of the iceberg.
Last summer, you may recall, the Israelis bombed a site in Syria. Today, there is a public rumor that the site was a North Korean-Syrian nuclear site. But the thing is nobody is talking about this. No one in the administration will tell the American people if this is true and, if so, what this means to our national security.
It is a fundamental disservice to us as Americans to have such potentially threatening activity going on and not to be told the truth about it. We need an intelligence community that we can trust to tell us the truth.
Or we need leadership that will insist on this minimal standard from its intelligence bureaucracy.
In either case, we need more than we’re getting.
Now, let’s note that even Gingrich who is notoriously freewheeling with the truth, or even the very idea of “truth” as a concept, cannot back away from those words. He directly accused the intelligence community — all of them, including the CIA — of lying to the American public. I’m unsurprised.
Yes, as Gingrich defends himself to Durbin, he did not write that the intelligence community lied to Congress, yet his written condemnation is nothing more than a distinction without a difference. Gingrich is such a virtuoso of mendacity that he attempts to draw fine lines of distinction like this one so that he can weasel in and out of any discussion untarred. And, unfortunately, Durbin and others haven’t confronted him with the rest of the story he wrote in Human Events.
Why the media reporting has overlooked this I’ll never know, but they do remain in thrall of anything and everything Gingrich. Yeah, that liberal media . . .
