Pelosi Plotline Thickens
09 May 2009 8:49 am by Taylor Marsh
But the fact remains that there remains no evidence that Speaker Pelosi was personally briefed on waterboarding in her single briefing in September 2002, one month after the CIA waterboarded Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded over six dozen times. In 2003, a top Pelosi aide was. Briefings that none of the participants were allowed to talk about, which compounds the problem when things go wrong. And, according to Greg Sargent, Pete Hoekstra is promising details on Pelosi.
However, in 2003 the information about EIT briefings was shared more broadly, if still in a manner that left questions about what exactly was being done. This is in keeping with Bush-Cheney secrecy that we all know pervaded the previous Administration. More, with Michael Sheehy the aide spoken of below:
A top aide to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi attended a CIA briefing in early 2003 in which it was made clear that waterboarding and other harsh techniques were being used in the interrogation of an alleged al-Qaeda operative, according to documents the CIA released to Congress on Thursday.
Pelosi has insisted that she was not directly briefed by Bush administration officials that the practice was being actively employed. …
[...]Harman was surprised at what she learned, particularly that intelligence officials had video of the waterboarding of Abu Zubaida and were planning on destroying it. Captured in early 2002, Abu Zubaida, whose real name is Zayn al-Abidin Muhammed Hussein, faced months of standard interrogations before being sent to a CIA-run facility where the harsher techniques were used.
Harman wrote to the CIA’s general counsel on Feb. 10, 2003, to question whether the methods “are consistent with the principles and policies of the United States. Have enhanced techniques been authorized and approved by the president?”
But any reading of the contagion of stories on the issue of waterboarding reveals that Democrats eventually did know about the procedure, even if they weren’t personally briefed, some as early as 2003. Pelosi not being personally briefed, when her aide was, but also Harman who wrote a letter to which Pelosi openly admits she agrees, reveals some sort of guilty knowledge about what was going on. As does the information that Rockefeller, someone who has never been a profile in courage on anything (that I remember), was also aware of what was going on.
Pelosi’s denial of being briefed on waterboarding continues to stand. But will the distinctions she’s making make a difference as we learn the wide circle of Democrats who eventually had inklings of what was going on inside the interrogations? It seems clear that knowledge flowed to Pelosi from others, even if she wasn’t personally briefed.
Neither Pelosi nor her staff would comment on how she learned of the techniques she now considers torture, and Harman said in an interview that she “did not recall” discussing the issue with Pelosi. Sheehy was Pelosi’s top aide on the intelligence committee when she served as the ranking Democrat on that panel, and he remained her top national security aide until he left the speaker’s office this year.
Pelosi never filed any official letter of protest, but some lawmakers said such objections to the Bush administration at that time were pointless.
“I felt that it was minimally responsive,” Harman said of the CIA’s response to her February 2003 letter. “It didn’t address the issue I asked.”
Let’s put the truth, the whole truth, on the table. No matter where it leads.
