Nancy Pelosi’s allegations that she was misled by the Bush administration in the secret, you-can’t-discuss-this-with-anyone, briefings she was treated to as the ranking House Democrat on the Intelligence Committee has taken the torture debate to a new level. Greg Sargent has former Senator Bob Graham, who was Pelosi’s opposite number on Senate Intelligence, saying something similar:
Former Senator Bob Graham, who received a classified briefing on terror detainees during the same month in the fall of 2002 as Nancy Pelosi, was not briefed about the use of either waterboarding or enhanced interrogation techniques during the meeting, he claimed in an interview with me.
Graham’s assertion — his first public comments since the release of the intelligence document detailing torture briefings given to members of Congress — directly contradicts the document’s claim that he had been briefed on enhanced interrogation techniques, or EITs. Graham is now the second Dem official to deny on the record the document’s contents and raises questions about its claim that Pelosi had been told, which she has denied.
You can see more along these lines from the award-winning Marcy Wheeler.
Can I say that in a larger sense I think the idea that congressional oversight can be established by briefing a number of members of congress that you can count on one hand seems a bit absurd on its face. The government sometimes needs to do something in secret. But if the reasons for keeping it secret are sufficiently un-compelling that operational security requires it to be kept secret from members of congress then that sounds a lot more like a cover-up than a legitimate national security concern.
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