Gingrich weighs in Pelosi's changing stories about interrogation techniques

From Fox News Sunday today:

WALLACE: House Speaker Pelosi continues to deny that she was ever briefed on the enhanced interrogation techniques that were actually used against Al Qaida operative Abu Zubaydah.
But a newly released list of congressional briefings -- and let’s put it up -- says that Pelosi received, quote, “a description of the particular EITs,” or enhanced interrogation techniques, “that had been employed,” this just a month after Zubaydah had been waterboarded 83 times. How do you explain the discrepancy?

GINGRICH: Well, I think she has a lot of explaining to do. I don’t. She clearly -- she’s now changed her story again and said well, she’d been reassured they were all legal. So initially she didn’t know about it, had not been briefed. Then she had been briefed, but it wasn’t clear. Now she’d been briefed and, in fact, had been told it was all legal so she didn’t worry about it.

I think she has, you know, a lot of explaining to do. I think on national security matters, she has an obligation either to say nothing or to tell the truth. And it’s pretty clear in this case she’s not telling the truth. . . .

WALLACE: I want to ask you about one other aspect of this. Pelosi says even if she was briefed on this that there was nothing she could do because these were classified briefings. She and the Republican chairman of the committee got this information. There’s nothing they could do. You as House speaker received these kinds of briefings back in the ‘90s. If you objected to a secret operation, was there something you could do?

GINGRICH: Sure. I mean, the first thing you do is call the president and tell him you will feel compelled to pass a law cutting off the money. I mean, there are lots of things you can do if you want to do it. The Congress is pretty powerful if it wants to be.

And second, you know, they’ve had control since January of 2007. They haven’t passed a law making waterboarding illegal. They haven’t gone into any of these things and changed law. In fact, they’ve had several -- they -- recently, you find that Attorney General Holder’s own Justice Department is saying, “Well, you know, some of these memos are actually right. They’re not wrong.”

So this is -- what we’re seeing now in a very sad way is as bitter a partisan attack on the Bush people as we’ve seen since the McCarthy era. The degree that they’re putting specific people at risk for criminal prosecution is unprecedented in modern America. . . . .