Pelosi: CIA misled Congress on torture

McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi charged Thursday that U.S. intelligence officials had misled Congress about the use of torture on terrorism suspects.

The California Democrat recalled a September 2002 briefing in which “the only mention of waterboarding at that briefing was that it was not being employed.”

“But we also now know that techniques including waterboarding had already been employed, and that those briefing me in September 2002 gave me inaccurate and incomplete information.”

In short, the House leader said, “The CIA was misleading the Congress. And at the same time, the administration was misleading the Congress on the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, to which I said the intelligence does not support the imminent threat.”

In an opinion piece April 25 in The Washington Post, former Rep. Porter Goss, R-Fla., who was the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee from 1997 to 2004, wrote that “the techniques on which they were briefed were to actually be employed,” which appears to suggest that the CIA briefers didn’t tell congressional leaders that the “enhanced interrogation techniques” were already in use.

Nevertheless, Pelosi has come under increasing fire recently from Republicans, who have suggested that she needs to be more forthcoming and explain why she didn’t protest the interrogation policy at the time. Pelosi was the House Intelligence Committee’s top Democrat in 2002.

Pelosi said that she’d signed an oath not to disclose classified information, and suggested Thursday that speaking out wouldn’t have made much difference anyway.

“This is their policy,” she said of the Bush administration. “This is what they conceived. This is what they developed. This is what they implemented. This is what they denied was happening.

“And now they’re trying to say, ‘Don’t put the spotlight on us; we told the Congress.’ Well, they didn’t tell us everything that they were doing. And the fact is that anything we would say doesn’t matter anyway.”