The Washington Post reports today that, in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal, "Cheney personally oversaw at least four briefings" of members of Congress on torture. From the reporting, it appears that the majority of those he briefed were Republicans.
The Cheney-led briefings came at some of the most critical moments for the program, as congressional oversight committees were threatening to investigate or even terminate the techniques, according to lawmakers, congressional officials, and current and former intelligence officials....
An official who witnessed one of Cheney's briefing sessions with lawmakers said the vice president's presence appeared calculated to give additional heft to the CIA's case for maintaining the program. Cheney left it to the professional briefers to outline the interrogation practices, while he mounted an impassioned defense of the program....
The CIA declined to comment on why Cheney's presence in some meetings was left out of the records. One senior intelligence official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the identities of individual briefers are intentionally concealed in all cases -- their names do not appear in any of the CIA documents that describe congressional briefings. In at least some cases, he added, the identity of the briefer was never recorded in the agency's internal records.
For all but seven of the 40 meetings listed, however, the documents outlined which agency led the briefing and which provided support. And on at least five occasions, they spelled out that then-CIA Director Michael V. Hayden led the classified meetings....
"His office was ground zero. It was his office you dealt with at the end of the day," recalled Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), who jousted with Cheney over the system of interrogations.
One of the most critical Cheney-led briefings came in late October 2005, when the vice president and Porter J. Goss, then director of the CIA, read Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) into the program on the interrogation methods, according to congressional and intelligence sources....
Before the McCain briefing, Cheney met with a friendlier audience, his longtime friends Sens. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.) and Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), who oversaw the Pentagon's annual spending bill, to which the McCain amendment was attached. Cochran said yesterday that it was the first time he had been given a full description of what waterboarding entailed....
CIA records indicate that another briefing -- for which the briefer's name is "not available" -- was given to Senate GOP leaders on Nov. 1, 2005. That was the same day Cheney made a regular appearance at the weekly Tuesday luncheon for Senate Republicans. Cheney usually engaged only in brief, quiet asides with senators at the lunches. But at this meeting -- the day before The Washington Post published a detailed account of the CIA's secret overseas prison system -- Cheney rose to speak, and the room was cleared of all staff.
The only indication in this report that Cheney dealt with Democrats was a meeting in March, 2005, when he met with Democrats Rockefeller and Harman along with Republicans Roberts and Hoekstra to kill an investigation of torture that Roberts was leaning toward supporting. The meeting worked.
This report adds no insight to what Congressional Dems knew and when, but it does add to the increasing pile of evidence that the torture program was in Cheney's hands from the get-go. It even includes this snippet from a dispute between Graham, who apparently disputed the legality of the program, and Addington: "'I've got all the authority I need right here,' Addington said, pulling from his coat a pocket-size copy of the Constitution, according to the senator, suggesting there was no doubt about the system's legal footing."
Update: Greg Sargent, Marcy, and Zachary Roth all have interesting takes on how this relates to Cheney's secret memo quest and the torture timeline.