It's important to remember that the people who seem to interpret Osama bin Laden have never read his writings. His fanaticism is not extended to destroying America (he sees that as America doing it to itself) but he doesn't want ground troops in Islamic countries.

Torture used on Zubaydah undoubtably hardened him from responding with valid information.

A program developed by the army for future interrogations was made to elicit false information from the tortured who have been captured. This was one of the reasons
torture was used on the detainees at Gitmo but the stupidity of it was that it was shown
that resistance to torture could ensue and false information could be extracted.

If you wanted to go with the "ticking-time bomb" theory, a tortured detainee would be motivated to obscure true information until it was too late. That would be easy to do.

The CIA is not in business to be totally honest in it's dealing with the American public.
It's a spy unit and justifies all kinds of duplicity to make it's case.

Pelosi may well be telling the truth. Bob Graham backs her up with his copious notes.

She may have dodged the issue by not talking about it but she also may not have been briefed and is being vilified by Republicans for it for political purposes.

I suspect that the CIA is not in the business of informing anyone about it's secretive
activities. I think the Republican senators who are accusing her of dissembling are themselves capable of it as well as their self-righteous support of the CIA.

Whether Pelosi knew or not is of course obscured by the fact that she didn't raise a ruckus but who in congress who were briefed did? They are all culpable if they in fact knew of it.