House Speaker Nancy Pelosi appears to be on the defensive over what exactly she knew — and when she knew it — about the Bush administration’s "enhanced interrogation" techniques.

The California Democrat befuddled some reporters, Republicans and others last week when she gave what Politico says were some "convoluted answers" to reporters about the interrogations. Now Republicans have jumped at the chance to pummel Pelosi’s insistence that she didn’t know what was going on. CIA Chief Porter Goss said she must be suffering from "amnesia" — since he was with her in 2002 when they were briefed by the CIA on the techniques.

Goss wrote over the weekend:

I am slack-jawed to read that members claim to have not understood that the techniques on which they were briefed were to actually be employed; or that specific techniques such as ‘waterboarding’ were never mentioned. It must be hard for most Americans of common sense to imagine how a member of Congress can forget being told about the interrogations of Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed. In that case, though, perhaps it is not amnesia but political expedience.

A Pelosi adviser told Politico that the speaker knew the GOP was going to come after her, and that they likely will again once another batch of alleged torture photos comes out. No doubt that’s going to stir up yet another political mess about how the U.S. treated terror suspects.

The Washington Times reports today that Obama’s release of the CIA memos on interrogation techniques last week, and his recent acquiescence to a bipartisan review panel to look into those aspects of Bush’s presidency, has caused such a furor, even some congressional Democrats want it to just go away. Although, it seems Obama is backing off of that stance now, saying we need to insted look forward. And the newspaper agrees:

The politicization of policy differences has been a fact of life in Washington since the Watergate era, but in the past one could reasonably expect that such political warfare would end when a new administration commenced. Investigatory panels, such as the ‘Commission of Inquiry’ called for by Sen. Patrick Leahy, Vermont Democrat, would represent an unprecedented escalation of political warfare in the American system. Proponents of such tribunals exhibit a spirit of political retribution not seen since the end of the Civil War.

What do you think? Should we have a so-called "truth commission" to look into alleged Bush-era misdeeds, or should the country move on and focus on other things, like the economy?