In statements to the press this week, President Bush and White House press secretary Dana Perino claimed that members of Congress had been “fully briefed” on a classified CIA program that sanctioned the use of harsh interrogation techniques. Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman John Rockefeller disputed this claim on Friday. This morning, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said that she too was not briefed on the secret memos.

At a town hall meeting with the Democratic Club of Westside Progressives in Los Angeles yesterday afternoon, Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) was asked about her knowledge of the secret “torture memos” revealed this week by the New York Times. Like Rockefeller and Pelosi, Harman said she was not “fully briefed”:

We were not fully briefed. We were told about operational details but not these memos. Jay Rockefeller said the same thing, and I associate myself with his remarks. And we want to see these memos.

At the time of the secret approval to the CIA in 2005, Rep. Harman was the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee and a member of the “Gang of Eight” routinely briefed on intelligence matters.

At the same town hall meeting, Harman revealed that an unidentified Republican member of Congress told her that if President Bush were to attack Iran, then even he would vote for impeachment.

– dday

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UPDATE: dday has more tidbits on the Harman town hall.

On the Chris Matthews Show today, NBC’s Howard Fineman revealed that the intelligence community will release “three different reports” in upcoming weeks to “slow down” the administration’s current drumbeat for war with Iran:

The intelligence community over the next few months is going to come out with three different reports on Iran about internal political problems of Iran, about the economy, and about their nuclear capability.

Those are going to be key to decide what the Bush administration is going to do, and it’s the intelligence community I think trying to slow down what the president, most particularly the vice president, want to do in Iran.

Watch it:

The intelligence community’s warning against war with Iran echo its warnings prior to the invasion of Iraq. Pre-war intelligence forewarned that occupying Iraq could be a “long, difficult and probably turbulent challenge” and would “accelerate” regional terrorism.

Similarly, the administration “ignore[d] the intelligence community’s belief that the militant Islamist al-Qaida and Saddam’s secular dictatorship were unlikely allies,” instead setting up an “alternative intelligence” shop to disseminate false information about Hussein. Mohamad El Baradei of the International Atomic Energy Agency has also warned that pre-Iraq failures are being repeated with respect to Iran.

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