Pelosi's Tortured Denials

As we've said before, the memo contradicts Pelosi's story. We know that the CIA had already waterboarded Abu Zubaydah in August 2002. So if CIA officials really did brief Pelosi and Goss on techniques used on Zubaydah, as the memo clearly states, then Pelosi had to know that waterboarding was more than a theoretical possibility.

What's more, Goss backs up the CIA's version of events, writing in an opinion piece for The Washington Post that:

Goss: In the fall of 2002, while I was chairman of the House intelligence committee, senior members of Congress were briefed on the CIA's "High Value Terrorist Program," including the development of "enhanced interrogation techniques" and what those techniques were. This was not a one-time briefing but an ongoing subject with lots of back and forth between those members and the briefers. Today, 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.

Michigan Rep. Peter Hoekstra, the current ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, likewise sides with the CIA, though he overstates the case somewhat. Hoekstra claims in the Wall Street Journal: "It was not necessary to release details of the enhanced interrogation techniques, because members of Congress from both parties have been fully aware of them since the program began in 2002." Even the CIA hasn't gone that far. The much-disputed briefing with Goss and Pelosi took place Sept. 4, 2002. But the CIA had begun waterboarding at least a full month earlier. Still, Hoekstra does claim that congressional leaders knew of the activities in the fall of 2002, just as the CIA claims.

And even one of Pelosi's fellow Democrats, CIA Director Leon Panetta, is standing by the CIA's version. He says "contemporaneous records" from 2002 back up the accounts given in the 10-page memo released May 6. In a memo to CIA employees, and posted on the agency's Web site May 15, Panetta defended his agency:

Panetta (May 15 memo): As the Agency indicated previously in response to Congressional inquiries, our contemporaneous records from September 2002 indicate that CIA officers briefed truthfully on the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, describing "the enhanced techniques that had been employed."

Whom Do You Trust?
So whose story should we believe? The politician who has changed her story already? Or the government agency with its specific time line supported by one of the lawmakers it briefed and also by Panetta? Normally we'd say that's a pretty easy call. But things aren't quite so simple. There are reasons for thinking that the CIA memos aren't all that reliable either.

For one thing, while Panetta says the CIA's 10-page summary of briefings is "the most thorough information we have," he also admits the possibility that it may not be entirely correct. He said in cover letters to chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Silvestre Reyes of Texas and to ranking-member Rep. Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, that the account is based on the recollections of CIA officials and on memos created for the record, but he left it to the committee "to determine whether this information is an accurate summary of what actually happened."

Panetta (May 5 letter to Silvestre Reyes): This letter presents the most thorough information we have on dates, locations, and names of all Members of Congress who were briefed by the CIA on enhanced interrogation techniques. This information, however, is drawn from the past files of the CIA and represents MFRs [memoranda for the record] completed at the time and notes that summarized the best recollections of those individuals. In the end, you and the Committee will have to determine whether this information is an accurate summary of what actually happened.

And sure enough, three different legislators have disputed various details in the CIA's account of the briefings. Former Sen. Bob Graham, a Democrat who in September 2002 served as chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in an interview with the Huffington Post that prior to the release of the memo, the CIA initially told him that CIA records indicated he'd been briefed four times on torture policies. Graham, however, has rather famously chronicled pretty much every aspect of his life (right down to, say, what he puts in his pockets each day) since his first run for governor of Florida in 1977. Graham checked his notebooks and discovered that, in fact, he was briefed only once, on Sept. 27, 2002. Graham said he informed CIA officials of the discrepancy, tellingNPR that after the agency reviewed its records "they indicated that I was correct. Their information was in error. There was no briefing on the first three of four dates."

One CIA official later reportedly offered an explanation for the discrepancy to Spencer Ackerman, who published a story in the liberal-leaning Washington Independentquoting an unnamed "U.S. intelligence official familiar with the briefings" as saying the other three briefings may have involved discussions of detainee interrogations generally, but not the so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques." Graham, however, has said that he has no records of the three disputed briefings recorded in his notebooks.

Since then, two other Democrats have come forward to dispute the accuracy of the CIA memos. An aide to West Virginia Sen. Jay Rockefeller, former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told Politico that the memo showed Rockefeller attending a Feb. 4, 2003, briefing that he did not in fact attend. The CIA memo includes Rockefeller's name with an asterisk, noting that while Rockefeller did not attend the briefing, he was individually briefed later. The aide claims that the individual briefing was actually seven months later, on Sept. 4, 2003.

Moreover, the aide took exception to the claim that the briefings disclosed the full extent of the interrogation program, saying that "Senator Rockefeller has repeatedly stated he was not told critical information that would have cast significant doubt on the program's legality and effectiveness."

Most recently, Rep. David Obey, a Wisconsin Democrat, wrote a letter to Panetta claiming that yet another detail is wrong. The memo lists a congressional staffer as having attended a Sept. 19, 2006, briefing. The staffer, however, tells Obey that while he did go to the briefing room, he was turned away by the CIA briefers.

Nor are accusations that the CIA misled Congress particularly new. In May 2006, The Washington Post reported that Mary McCarthy, a former CIA deputy inspector general, "became convinced that 'CIA people had lied' " during a Senate briefing in which CIA officials said that the agency had never violated international treaties prohibiting cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment of prisoners. McCarthy had been fired a month earlier, for leaking classified information to Post reporter Dana Priest.