In a press conference this morning, Nancy Pelosi said that the CIA misled Congress in 2002 when they briefed Congress, that they specifically told her waterboarding was not being used (which Marcy has already pointed out) and called for the release of the briefings.
Marcy also reports on new information from former Senator Bob Graham, who at the time was chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee. A few days ago, Graham told Greg Sargent that "he was not briefed about the use of either waterboarding or enhanced interrogation techniques" during the classified briefing he received from the CIA in the fall of 2002.
Today, in an interview on WNYC's Brian Leher show, Graham asserted that the CIA is lying about two briefing sessions they say occured.
[W]hen asked to respond to Philip Zelikow's assertion that members of Congress from both parties had been briefed on this program, Graham said that when he asked the CIA when he had been briefed on the program, the CIA gave him the dates of four briefings, two in April 2002 and two in September 2002, when they claimed they had briefed him about the program. But after Graham consulted his own records, he pointed out that on two of those dates, he had not attended any briefing. After Graham pointed this out to the CIA, they conceded their own dates were incorrect....
CIA claimed Graham had been briefed on two days when no briefing occurred, which is not dissimilar from their claims that Jello Jay was briefed on February 4, 2003 when he didn't attend the briefing in question.
The CIA is just making shit up about these briefings, even to the point of claiming there were briefings when none occurred. Can we set aside, now, the notion that the CIA's own version of what it told Congress when has any credibility in the least?
And Bob Graham, of anybody, would have meticulous records about briefings. Graham is a compulsive diary keeper, having kept a running account of his every waking moment for his entire political life. He would not have diaried the contents of any classified briefing, but you can bet there would have been an entry accounting for the time he would have spent in those briefings.
All of the briefing materials should be declassified and released so that we can finally put to rest the game of what Democrat knew what when. Pelosi's, Graham's, and Rockefeller's stories remain consistent--remarkably so considering that they were never briefed at the same time. The Democrats in Congress were not responsible for conceiving of or implementing the Bush torture regime.
But we need to know what they knew, and when, and what they did or didn't do about it. The horrors of the Bush administration didn't happen in a vacuum. Strike that--they did happen in a vacuum, a vacuum created by the nearly complete failure of Congress to actually do its job. So Congressional leaders can't be let off the hook either, until we know what happened.
So, as John Cole says, "if the Democrats want a truth commission, and the Republicans and Dick Cheney want a truth commission, why can’t we order up a double order of truth commission?... Make it happen."