Congressman David Obey has become the fourth Democrat to dispute CIA claims regarding torture briefings. Speaker Pelosi, former Senator Bob Graham, and Sen. Jay Rockefeller have all disputed the CIA's claims about briefings they received.
Obey has released a letter he just sent to Panetta regarding the accuracy of the CIA's claims:
Dear Director Panetta:
In light of current controversy about CIA briefing practices, I was surprised to learn that the agency erroneously listed an appropriations staffer as being in a key briefing on September 19, 2006, when in fact he was not. The list the agency released entitled "Member Briefings on Enhanced Interrogation Techniques (EITs)", shows that House Appropriations Committee defense appropriations staffer Paul Juola was in that briefing on that date. In fact, Mr. Juola recollects that he walked members to the briefing room, met General Hayden and Mr.Walker, who were the briefers, and was told that he could not attend the briefing. We request that you immediately correct this record.
Sincerely,
David R. Obey
This isn't an earth-shattering revelation, by any means. But it does point to the fact that the CIA's record keeping has been, at best, sloppy. Which is undoubtedly one of the reasons why, as Greg points out, Panetta hasn't actually disputed Pelosi's claim that she was lied to. There's another distinction that seems to be getting lost in the reporting on this issue.
While we're on the topic, Greg has another important but overlooked data point. Rep. Pete (I found the WMD) Hoekstra has been claiming from the outset of the scandal that he has seen the briefing docs and that Pelosi is lying. Yesterday on Fox, he conceded that the documents "won’t be crystal clear as to exactly what went on in that briefing." There are other documents, apparently, that will have to be released.
So let's release the damned documents, already, and have us a good old fashioned investigation.
Update: Per MikeS in comments, Marcy has a compendium of errors in CIA documents, including today's revelation from TPMMuckraker that while the CIA consistently uses the term "enhanced interrogation techniques" in the documents supposedly from 2002, though it wasn't using that terminology until 2004.