Well technically the statement came from her mouthpiece, but same difference:

Pelosi spokesman Brendan Daly dismissed such criticism as "Republican attempts to create a distraction" from their own culpability on interrogation. Over the past week, a half-dozen senior Republican and Democratic aides canvassed by POLITICO have outlined a menu of options Pelosi could have pursued to protest harsh interrogations... Pelosi has angered Republicans by pushing for a "truth commission" into the Bush administration's possible use of torture, but the news that she learned of waterboarding in 2003 has left her on the defensive.

I like calling how we're calling them "truth commissions." That has a nice 1948-esque air to it, leaving more nuanced leftists to insist that what's really in play are "truth and reconciliation commissions." Just like they had in post-Apartheid South Africa. Because Khalid Sheikh Mohammed - he's basically our contemporary Mandela.

The thing about the torture debate - as liberals have graciously informed the rest of us - is that it's a no-brainer. As a leftist friend recently emailed me, "the pragmatic arguments don't fly as a defense." That was stated as an axiom of course, not as the conclusion to some actual argument. It also happens to be news to Obama's National Intelligence Director, to a laundry list of Bush-era intelligence officials and policy wonks, and to Clinton's chief of the CIA's bin Laden unit:

In a breathtaking display of self-righteousness and intellectual arrogance, the president told Americans that his personal beliefs are more important than protecting their country, their homes and their families... Obama's hit man and White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel led the charge by telling the American people that the interrogation techniques are a major recruiting tool for al-Qaeda and its Islamist partners. Well, no, Mr. Emanuel, that is not at all the case... they do not even make the Islamists' hit parade of anti-U.S. recruiting tools... Next, the president used his personal popularity and the stature of his office to implicitly identify as liars those former senior U.S. officials who know -- not "argue" or "contend" or "assert" but know -- that the interrogation techniques have yielded intelligence essential to the nation's defense.

Although it's not really my friend's fault that he didn't know, given how major media outlets have been working overtime to literally bury any news that waterboarding works.

If you want numbers on that middle section - about how our interrogation techniques have little to no correlation with anti-American fervor - they're here. The embarrassing takedown that Trapper handed Obama on the Churchill quote also put to rest any strategic arguments about how coercive interrogations are somehow metaphysically disabling to nations.

On the tactical level - do Democrats really believe that four decades of CIA interrogators just never noticed that waterboarding doesn't work? Like they were distracted when that memo came through so they just kept right on doing it? Because that would be a level of self-righteous arrogance that's breathtaking even by their admittedly impressive standards.

On the plus side, human rights groups and liberal foreign policy experts agree that releasing the torture memos - which, by the by, detonated CIA morale - was an inspired geopolitical gesture. So there's that.

References and previously after the jump...