Speaker Pelosi weighs in on what she knew and shen she knew it:
"On one occasion, in the fall of 2002, I was briefed on interrogation techniques the Administration was considering using in the future. The Administration advised that legal counsel for the both the CIA and the Department of Justice had concluded that the techniques were legal.
"I had no further briefings on the techniques. Several months later, my successor as Ranking Member of the House Intelligence Committee, Jane Harman, was briefed more extensively and advised the techniques had in fact been employed. It was my understanding at that time that Congresswoman Harman filed a letter in early 2003 to the CIA to protest the use of such techniques, a protest with which I concurred."
This only partly acquits Pelosi, and it absolutely buries Harman. It also, more importantly, calls into question the way the Post framed yesterday's story. Here, as a reminder, is what they wrote:
In September 2002, four members of Congress met in secret for a first look at a unique CIA program designed to wring vital information from reticent terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. For more than an hour, the bipartisan group, which included current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA's overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.
Among the techniques described, said two officials present, was waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill. But on that day, no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder, two U.S. officials said."The briefer was specifically asked if the methods were tough enough," said a U.S. official who witnessed the exchange.
The Post - or perhaps more accurately, administration official who spoke with the Post - claimed that Pelosi was present at multiple briefings where techniques were discussed in detail. Pelosi explicitly denies both the number and content of those meetings. Moreover, although the statement is brief, she implies that the focus of the briefing was the legal rationale for the policy, not a description of the techniques being used. That is a difference in kind, not degree.
By her own admission, however, the same cannot be said for Rep. Harman. Harman was at the briefing that included a description of the techniques being employed, and with Pelosi's support, she did nothing more than file a letter of complaint. Now to be fair, Pelosi has since stripped Harman of her role as chair of that committee, so it is not as if she did nothing. And given that Pelosi was not herself at the briefing, it would have been difficult - and yes, perhaps even impossible - for her to go public with what would have essentially been second-hand information. Given the way our political discourse works, that likely would have done more harm than good.
The investigations need to go forward. We need to find out who knew what when, and we need the results of the findings to be made public. They govern in our names. When they act, they do so with our authority.
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