Return to the Article
Return to the Article |
Remember, Madam Speaker's official story is that she was briefed merely on the White House's belief that waterboarding was legal, not that they ever planned to actually, you know, use it. I'm starting to lose count of how much evidence there is to the contrary at this point: First was this 2007 WaPo report on Pelosi being given a virtual tour of a CIA "black site" at which waterboarding would be used, then came Porter Goss's op-ed last week reminding her that he got the same briefings she got and he knew exactly what was going on,...And now, a memo has surfaced from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the CIA that shows "Truth Commission" Pelosi to be a towering hypocrite and a liar.
In a 10-page memo outlining an almost seven-year history of classified briefings, intelligence officials said that Pelosi and then-Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.) were the first two members of Congress briefed on the tactics. Then the ranking member and chairman of the House intelligence committee, respectively, Pelosi and Goss were briefed Sept. 4, 2002, one week before the anniversary of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
The memo, issued to Capitol Hill by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Central Intelligence Agency, notes that the Pelosi-Goss briefing covered "EITs including the use of EITs" on Abu Zubaida. EIT is an acronym for enhanced interrogation technique, and Abu Zubaida, whose real name is Zayn al-Abidin Muhammed Hussein, was one of the earliest valuable al-Qaeda members captured. He also was the first to have the controversial tactic of simulated drowning, or waterboarding, used against him.
The issue of what Pelosi knew and when she knew it has become a tussle on Capitol Hill. Republicans have accused her of knowing for years about the interrogation techniques CIA agents were using and of objecting only when the tactics became public and antiwar activists protested.
"As this document shows, the speaker was briefed only once, in September 2002. The briefers described these techniques, said they were legal, but said that waterboarding had not yet been used," said Brendan Daly, Pelosi's spokesman.
Republican congressional officials familiar with the document and other still-classified records on congressional briefings said it would have been negligent for CIA briefers to fail to mention the use of waterboarding after Abu Zubaydah had been subjected to the method so extensively.
Overall, the chart describes 40 briefings over a seven-year period during which CIA and other U.S. intelligence officials described the agency's interrogation program to senior lawmakers.
The records were requested by congressional Republicans, who have accused Democrats on Capitol Hill of hypocrisy for expressing outrage in recent weeks over the CIA's use of harsh interrogation methods after the release of Justice Department memos describing them in detail.