So now the health insurance industry gloats about a 1.5% cost reduction.  No one was willing to talk about the 30% administrative overhead in health care, an exhorbitant piece that should be easy to cut.

No one bothered to talk about the fact that private health insurers add NO VALUE whatsoever to health care and Single-payer advocates were dragged out of the room.

Health care leaders who attended the meeting have a different interpretation. They say they agreed to slow health spending in a more gradual way and did not pledge specific year-by-year cuts.

"There's been a lot of misunderstanding that has caused a lot of consternation among our members," said Richard J. Umbdenstock, the president of the American Hospital Association. "I've spent the better part of the last three days trying to deal with it." C&L

Panetta didn't say that the CIA told Congress that the techniques had already been used on Zubaydah, and one has to believe that he didn't say that because the notes do not support that assertion.

But he is saying that Congress ought to investigate to determine what really happened.  And I could not agree more.

From Marcy Wheeler:

The CIA briefing list records that the following people participated in the briefing: Nancy Pelosi, her staffer Michael Sheehy, Porter Goss, his staffer Tim Sample, briefers from the CounterTerrorism Center (CTC), and the Office of Congressional Affairs (OCA; elsewhere, we've been told four people, total, from CIA attended).  

While CIA doesn't say it, the chances are very good that the head of CTC was among the four CIA officials who attended that briefing--he probably led the briefing. On September 4, 2002, the head of CTC was Jose Rodriguez.

Who is Jose Rodriguez?  He's the guy who oversaw the destruction of the torture tapes - he's admitted that - although he has a story about why.

Rodriguez doesn't deny having the torture tapes destroyed--tapes showing Abu Zubaydah's torture, which Rodriguez probably briefed Nancy Pelosi incompletely on on September 4, 2002. Rather, he says that 1) they had intended to destroy the tapes going back to 2002, 2) Congress had been briefed on the plan to destroy them in 2003, and 3) Rodriguez got the legal okay to destroy them in 2005.

Who is the other suspect in the torture tape destruction?  Porter Goss as Director of CIA in 2005.

We know that Goss was explicitly warned, in writing, not to destroy the torture tapes. We know that Goss didn't tell Rodriguez not to destroy the tapes. And there are reasons to believe that the rest of Goss' story about the torture tape is less than forthcoming.

So Jose Rodriguez, may have, at a time when (he now says) he was already thinking about destroying the torture tapes of Abu Zubaydah's torture, briefed Nancy Pelosi and Porter Goss on the techniques used to torture Zubaydah. He, or someone else at the briefing, went back afterwards and wrote down what he remembered from the briefing, which is that he described the techniques used on Zubaydah (though not neecssarily that he had told Pelosi and Goss those techniques had been used). Porter Goss has said Nancy Pelosi is nuts not to have assumed--at that time--that they were going to use waterboarding going forward. But even he, thus far, has not claimed that CIA told them torture had already been used.

So, the two prime suspects in the torture tape destruction are present when Pelosi is briefed - and in all the statements that have been flying about, Goss isn't really disputing, and the CIA, through Panetta, isn't really disputing, that they did not brief her that the CIA was already using the enhanced interrogation techniques.

Is it any wonder, then, that the focus now is to bring Pelosi down?  This is all bright-shiny-object stuff designed to keep people from realizing that the CIA did NOT properly brief the Congress on waterboarding.

Back to parsing Panetta's statement:

This is a statement given at a time when the very people being investigated (probably)--Rodriguez and Goss--are two of the three key players in the briefing at the time.And this is a statement that narrowly affirms the accuracy of the briefing (given the briefing notes), while admitting that Congress should determine the full story. Yes, Panetta gives that narrow defense of CIA's statement. But the bulk of Panetta's statement implores the rest of CIA not to get hung up on the circus happening around them.  

Panetta is doing two things. First, affirming that CIA has not misrepresented what got recorded in the briefing notes and that the language of the briefing notes is accurate--as far as that goes. And, at the same time, casting doubt on the full meaning of the statement while imploring the rest of CIA not to get distracted by yet another challenge to CIA's credibility.

They are extremely worried that someone is going to start listening to Nancy Pelosi, that she is going to get others to start calling for a thorough investigation, and therefore has to be neutralized.

Also, if you go back and look at what Pelosi was saying back in 2002 and 2003, much of which is part of the public record, it is entirely consistent with what she is saying today.

Pelosi has not been one of my favorite people of late - like the last two-plus years - and I think it is possible that she may have been protecting people when she refused to consider impeachment from 2006 forward.

But - I think she has a target on her back, put there knowingly and unfairly, and with intent to distract and drum up opposition to any investigation.