Republican leaders have declared their outrage that Nancy Pelosi would say the CIA misled congress. And Republican Senator Kit Bond says that the agency would not dare.
"They would never lie to Congress, because they would be crushed."
Of course the CIA would dare. The Congress has spent the last eight years either aiding the Bush administration's every wild action, or made patently empty threats to investigate that ended with the executive branch laughing at Congressional subpoenas.
However, the noise over the CIA's honor may be the silliest proclaimation that Newt, and Kit, and Rush, and Bobo... er, Bill have made. The CIA has a long history of purposely misleading Congress.
A recent book on the CIA by New York Times reporter Tim Weiner recalled several examples, including former CIA directer Richard Helms telling the Senate in 1973 that the CIA had no involvement in that year's coup in Chile, a lie that led to Helms pleading guilty to perjury in 1977. Weiner also described CIA director William Casey's frequent dissembling in the Iran/Contra scandal.
Not only has the CIA misled Congress in the past, they've been caught at it in the last year.
In 2001, a plane carrying Baptist missionaries from Michigan was shot down in Peru as part of a drug interdiction program run by the CIA and Peruvian officials. The victims' cause was taken up by Republican lawmakers, and an ensuing internal CIA investigation "concluded that agency officials deliberately misled Congress, the White House and federal prosecutors" about the incident.
The report on this operation was produced in 2008. So the CIA was demonstrated to have lied to Congress in a report that was issued last year -- a report instigated by charges of misleading Congress made by the same Republicans now howling that no one can doubt the CIA.
What about the exact subject of Pelosi's charge that the CIA wasn't being accurate? What about the briefings? Pundits have placed great faith in these records.
Washington Post columnist David Ignatius wrote dismissively of Pelosi's "campaign for self-vindication," since to him the evidence is clear: "If you read the CIA's careful 10-page summary of the 40 briefings it has given to Congress since 2002 on 'enhanced interrogation techniques,' it's pretty hard not to conclude that Pelosi is shading the truth to retrospectively cover her backside."
So, the evidence against Pelosi consists of the CIA's "careful 10-page summary." How does that summary hold up when checked against other records?
Another Democratic lawmaker--former Sen. Bob Graham--was listed as having been briefed four times. When Graham--a famously meticulous diarist--told the CIA that he was actually only briefed once, they agreed and corrected their records.
Let's review:
- The CIA is known to have misled Congress on numerous occasions.
- In 2008, Republicans accused the CIA of lying, and that accusation turned out to be true.
- On the briefing dates themselves, the CIA has already admitted they were wrong in 75% of the cases for which their information has been tested.
- House Republican leader John Boehner has admitted that the CIA lied to Congress.
- Even Porter Goss won't stand behind the story that the CIA has been selling.
With that in mind, is there anything "outrageous" about Pelosi's statement?
Not only has the CIA proven to have played Congress on any number of occassions, and to have already distorted the information about how they briefed Congress on torture, it's now clear that torture was going on for months before any sort of briefing was held. That torture wasn't even papered over by a series of legal distortions provided by ideologues planted in the Justice Department. Torture went on -- day, after day, after day -- with every step approved by the president's personal lawyer.
Every day a CIA contractor was calling the White House asking "can I strip him naked and leave him in the cold?" Yes, said the White House. "Can I keep him awake for days and torment him with noise?" Yes. Oh, yes. "Can I smack him around a little, show him who's boss?" Yes, yes, yes, said the White House.
It's not abstract. It didn't require a tribunal, or a panel of lawyers, or a series of memos. It wasn't covered in any briefing. The White House, alone, was authorizing not just torture, but every nuance of torture.
Investigating -- and prosecuting -- those actions is not "looking back." It's holding ourselves up to the standards we say we believe. It's not "pointing fingers," it's doing the job that government is elected to do. It's following the law. It's not "turning the page" when you ignore criminal acts committed at the highest level of the United States government. That's called "a cover up." If we do not see this through to its end, we are, all of us, complicit.