Update by Jeff: Former White House Press Secretary Dana Perino explains how asinine Pelosi’s decision to go to war with the CIA really was.

Our favorite California Yankee, Dan Spencer, is all over this one:

Nancy Pelosi continues parsing her denial of never being told about waterboarding and now claims the CIA lied.

Mike Soraghan and Jared Allen report Pelosi now claims that in a September 2002 briefing she was specifically told waterboarding was not being used on detainees:

Those briefings gave me inaccurate and incomplete information.

The question for Pelosi remains: What did she know about the enhanced interrogation techniques, and when did she know it?

The Speaker has precious little credibility left concerning waterboarding. For weeks, Pelosi insisted she wasn’t briefed about waterboarding. Then after a declassified report last week suggested otherwise, Pelosi claimed she pulled a John Kerry-like nuance and claimed she wasn’t told that waterboarding was actually used. Now, after her intelligence aide, Michael Sheehy, confirmed that Pelosi was told in February 2003 that waterboarding was actually used on CIA detainee Abu Zubaydah, she claim[ed in a press conference this morning that] the CIA lied.

Surprise! A politician — a person whose number one goal is to save his or her own skin at any cost, followed closely by the number two goal of simply being reelected ad infinitum — is accusing a de jure (if not de facto) apolitical organization of lying about what they told her in order to salvage her political image nationally and with her radically leftist base.

This isn’t the least bit surprising, especially given Speaker Pelosi’s serpentine maneuvering on this issue ever since word came out that she had been briefed on enhanced interrogation techniques back at the beginning of the American offensive in the War on Terror.

In fact, the challenge here isn’t deciding whom to believe, as the intelligence community has built up an institutional gravitas and record of integrity the erstwhile speaker cannot come close to matching. Rather, the challenge here is deciding which part of Pelosi’s ridiculously transparent and contradictory act is most laughable. Personally, my vote on that front lies with her claim she fought to prevent enhanced interrogation techniques in 2003 by…campaigning for reelection and running for Speaker of the House in 2006!

This naturally begs the question of just what Ms. Pelosi has done since her ascent to that position in January 2007 to prevent the enhanced interrogation techniques she knew were being employed (or didn’t know, depending what time of day you listen to her claims) since 2003 at latest. The answer is, of course, nothing whatsoever — a fact that isn’t likely to save her in the all-out war with the CIA establishment she is, intentionally or not, so recklessly gunning for.

The next thing to watch for will be whether or not the self-righteous hordes that called for Vice President Cheney to be “frog-marched” out of the White House, and who called for the impeachment and removal from office of former President Bush, for what they saw as even the slightest of insults against the CIA, begin piling on Speaker Pelosi and her allies in Congress and the administration.

Alas, such a development is unlikely, as the same intellectual honesty that would compel the media and other leftists to react similarly to Pelosi’s transgressionas as they did to the perceived transgressions of Bush and Cheney would have prevented their reacting in such a way to the latter two in the first place.