So according to Jane Harman:

In early 2003, in my capacity at Ranking Member of the House Intelligence Committee, I received a highly classified briefing on CIA interrogation practices from the agency’s General Counsel. The briefing raised a number of serious concerns and led me to send a letter to the General Counsel. Both the briefing and my letter are classified so I cannot reveal specifics, but I did caution against destruction of any videotapes.

Given the nature of the classification, I was not free to mention this subject publicly until Director Hayden disclosed it yesterday. To my knowledge, the Intelligence Committee was never informed that any videotapes had been destroyed. Surely I was not.

This matter must be promptly and fully investigated and I call for my letter of February 2003, which was never responded to and has been in the CIA’s files ever since, to be declassified.

On some level, obviously, one needs to sympathize with a member of congress who’s being stymied by abuse of the classification procedure. At the same time, this is hardly a one-off. The clearest example, at this point, is probably the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, where the Bush administration released a declassified version that had different bottom-line conclusions than did the classified version. Obviously, while it’s perfectly appropriate to classify substantial portions of an NIE, the conclusions themselves don’t contain sources and methods, and there was no justification for them ever to be classified.

What members who find themselves in the position Harman says she’s in — and the position that Dick Durbin, Carl Levin, and others found themselves in regarding the 2002 NIE — need to realize is that on some level acquiescence in these kind of abuses winds up legitimizing them. A member who believes he or she is in possession of evidence of crimes being committed and covered-up through illegitmate classification ought to seriously consider civil disobedience: calling a press conference, stating the facts, and accepting responsibility for the consequences. The White House could, of course, then turn around and seek to prosecute a member for violating classification laws, and the member could argue justification and we’d have it out. That’s a tough call to make, clearly. But our political leaders have responsibilities to the country and to the constitution and I’ve never seen a candidate for office say something like “I’m the one who likes to abdicate responsibility, decline to make the tough calls, and then when someone else gets to the bottom of things try to make sure that my ass was covered.”

How, you wonder, does the CIA get away with something like destroying video evidence of illegal activity? Surely there’s some congressional oversight. Well, as it turns out, there sort of is: Senator Jay Rockefeller and Rep. Jane Harman knew some of what was going on and were maybe kinda sorta upset about it, but they didn’t take any public action of the sort that might have actually prevented the evidence from being destroyed. As Marty Lederman observes, “Jay Rockefeller is constantly learning of legally dubious (at best) CIA intelligence activities, and then saying nothing about them publicly until they are leaked to the press, at which point he expresses outrage and incredulity — but reveals nothing.”

The Democratic leadership really needs to start taking these Intel Committee postings more seriously. These are jobs that require smart, savvy, credible people who are prepared to wield the authority of their offices effectively. The country, by necessity, is going to have intelligence services who do a lot of things in the dark with someone minimal oversight. The burden of doing that oversight falls on the intelligence committees, and it’s an extremely important job. Time and again Rockefeller looks not ready for prime time.

Reps. Delahunt and Nadler sent me a press release hailing the decision to include their legislative language extending the congressional prohibition on torture to the CIA in the House and Senate Conference Report on the Intelligence Authorization bill for 2008:

“We need policies that reflect our respect for basic human rights. Waterboarding and other acts of torture are not only ineffective interrogation techniques but are contrary to American core values,” Rep. Delahunt said. “We must make it clear that the use of torture is wrong and will not be condoned.”

“America’s values and our respect for the rule of law must be reaffirmed,” said Rep. Nadler. “Torture, including practices like waterboarding, violates the legal and moral standards of all civilized nations. While the notion that torture works has been glorified in television shows and movies, the simple truth is this: torture has never been an effective interrogation method. We must stand for the principles that define this nation and clarify in the law that we will not torture.”

The Nadler-Delahunt bill, H.R. 4114, the American Anti-Torture Act of 2007, would extend the first part of the McCain Amendment, which requires the Department of Defense to comply with the interrogation standards set forth in the Army Field Manual, to all government agencies. This would include the CIA – the agency reportedly responsible for carrying out the Administration’s “enhanced” or “alternate” interrogation program and for operating secret overseas prisons.

I agree. Both Representatives have done excellent work on this issue, and the leadership is to be congratulated on moving forward with it. A presidential veto is all-but-certain and we’ll see where Bush’s values lie when he blocks intelligence funding in order to preserve his legal right to order people tortured.

Ilan Goldberg correctly notes that the sort of funny business on the NIE that I attributed to Yossi Klein Halevi below is popping up all around the conservosphere. He also rightly notes that this should be connected to the long “Team B” legacy on the right, where conservatives look at intelligence reports then jump up and down screaming that they’re insufficiently alarmist. Most of the time, this kind of Team Bing succeeds in bringing political pressure to bear to gin up more alarmist reports, which then turn out to be false, and then in typical up-is-downist manner this becomes adduced as evidence in favor of the unreliability of conventional intelligence methods the next time around.

Laura Rozen’s 2003 Washington Monthly article about “an obscure essay, ‘Leo Strauss and the World of Intelligence (By Which We Do Not Mean Nous),’ published a few years ago by Gary Schmitt and Abram Shulsky” remains a vital explanation of the higher theoretical basis for behaving in this manner. But suffice it to say that there are no accidents here, there’s a deeply flawed method that almost invariably produces unduly alarmist conclusions.