Say Anything Blog

Too bad for them Republicans said no.

Democrats failed Tuesday to push the House into an unusual secret session to discuss a classified intelligence analysis on global terrorism that says the Iraq war is nourishing a new generation of extremist operatives.

The proposal from House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., was denied by a vote of 171-217. Such a session hasn’t happened in the House since July 1983, when the chamber went into a closed session to discuss the United States’ support for paramilitary operations in Nicaragua.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Pelosi said the secret session was needed to allow members to better understand the intelligence community’s most recent assessment on global terrorism, some of which leaked to the news media over the weekend.

So, for Pelosi and Democrats, when the media was running information from portions of the NIE that made the war in Iraq look bad they were all too happy to clamber up on the bandwagon and use the information to bash Bush and Republicans.

But now that there’s talk of making the whole memo public, or at least significantly more of it, they’re scrambling to keep discussions of it behind closed doors.

Telling, isn’t it, that Democrats only want to talk about this memo when the only parts of it known to citizens are the parts picked out by reporters to be made public?

Update: You can read the full declassified report here.