Conducting an ill-considered press conference last Thursday, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi upped the stakes in her war of words with the CIA. Shifting among several inconsistent explanations of what she knew in 2002 about the interrogation techniques the agency was using on al-Qaeda captives, Pelosi accused the CIA of lying to her and “misleading the Congress of the United States.” Pelosi concedes that she attended a CIA briefing on interrogation tactics in September 2002, when she was the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. Though al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah already had been subjected to waterboarding by that time, Pelosi claims that the CIA lied to her, saying that the simulated-drowning tactic had not yet been used. This is a serious charge: Lying to Congress is a crime, as is failing to make a report of covert activity when doing so is required. Worrisome business, but Pelosi was not content to leave it at that and went on to accuse the agency of routinely lying to Congress: “They mislead us all the time,” she charged.
CIA director Leon Panetta, a Democratic heavyweight who once served in the same California congressional delegation as Pelosi, issued a blunt refutation. In a memo he made public, Panetta explained that “CIA officers briefed [Pelosi and others] truthfully on the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, describing the ‘enhanced techniques that had been employed.’”
It is telling that Panetta emphasized that particular techniques, such as waterboarding, had been discussed. The CIA’s own records of the Pelosi briefing document that those in attendance were informed not only of the fact that waterboarding and other techniques had been discussed, but also that they had been used. This is also the recollection of former CIA director Porter Goss, who in 2002 was the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and attended the same briefing as Pelosi. Goss maintains that both he and Pelosi, together with their Senate counterparts and staffers, were fully informed about the enhanced-interrogation techniques. Far from raising objections, Congress ensured that the CIA had bipartisan support and funding for its programs.
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Updating Congress on the interrogation program, Goss points out, was not a one-time event but “an ongoing subject.” This is borne out by Panetta’s disclosure of a chronological chart summarizing some 40 separate briefings for members of Congress and their staffers. These include eleven briefings between the first one (which Pelosi attended) and early 2005, before John McCain’s crusade against harsh interrogation measures led to legal changes that effectively ended the CIA program late that year.
It has become the fashion among Democrats in Washington to call for a “truth commission.” We’d prefer the plain truth. At this point, what we’ve got is Pelosi’s multiple conflicting accounts of what she knew, and when, about waterboarding and other enhanced-questioning methods, along with a stark inconsistency between her versions of events and both Goss’s recollection and CIA records. The situation is further complicated by the Obama administration’s disingenuous disclosure practices — which have revealed our methods (thereby forearming our enemies) but still deny the American people critical information about how the CIA program improved national intelligence and served to thwart terrorist operations.
On that last point, the administration has denied another request by former vice president Dick Cheney for the disclosure of memoranda that document the interrogation program’s effectiveness. Obama’s rationale — a purported reluctance to interfere with litigation pending under the Freedom of Information Act — is laughable: If the president had been concerned about pending FOIA litigation, he wouldn’t have revealed details about the interrogation methods in the first place.
It is past time for a full disclosure of the briefing notes and other communications between the CIA and all members of Congress and staffers who were informed about the interrogation program, coupled with a detailed account of the program’s effectiveness. It is absurd that, with the Obama administration announcing it will resume military-commission trials against al-Qaeda detainees, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s lawyers should be given insights about his interrogations while Americans are kept in the dark. We don’t need a committee of Washington solons to tell us how to think about the relevant information. We need the relevant information.
