Your request is being processed... CIA Director Panetta: Records Show CIA Officers Briefed Lawmakers Truthfully

CIA Director Panetta: Records Show CIA Officers Briefed Lawmakers Truthfully


House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said yesterday at a news conference that "at every step of the way, the [Bush] administration was misleading the Congress" on the
CIA's interrogation methods.

WASHINGTON — CIA Director Leon Panetta says agency records show CIA officers briefed lawmakers truthfully in 2002 on methods of interrogating terrorism suspects, but it is up to Congress to reach its own conclusions about what happened.

Panetta's message to agency employees came one day after Speaker Nancy Pelosi said bluntly the CIA had misled her and other lawmakers about the use of waterboarding and other harsh techniques seven years ago.

Panetta wrote that the political debates about interrogation "reached a new decibel level" with the charges.

He urged agency employees to "ignore the noise and stay focused on your mission."

But agency officials also referred the media to last week's statement from CIA Director Leon Panetta, who suggested that the briefing records that Pelosi demanded be released yesterday are based on the almost seven-year-old recollections of officials present for the briefings. Panetta said Congress would have to determine for itself whose memory was most accurate.

The agency is reviewing a bipartisan request from Pelosi and Rep. Peter Hoekstra (Mich.), the ranking Republican on the House intelligence committee, to release detailed summaries of Pelosi's briefing from 2002. Such a "memorandum for the record" is currently available only to members of the House and Senate intelligence committees to review at the CIA's headquarters in Langley, and to date Hoekstra is the only lawmaker known to have reviewed the notes of the Pelosi briefing. Hoekstra said yesterday that he would need to have further discussions with those present to determine the accuracy of Pelosi's accusation.

By the time of that Sept. 4, 2002, briefing, Abu Zubaida, a key al-Qaeda operative, had already been moved into a "dark site" overseas where CIA operatives interrogated him. In the month before Pelosi's briefing, Abu Zubaida -- whose real name is Zayn al-Abidin Muhammed Hussein -- had been subjected to waterboarding 83 times, government reports show.

Pelosi maintained yesterday that she was not told that waterboarding had been used on Abu Zubaida during that briefing, which was also attended by then-Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.), who chaired the intelligence panel at the time and went on to serve as CIA director.

"I'm telling you that they talked about interrogations that they had done and said, 'We want to use enhanced techniques, and we have legal opinions that say that they are okay. We are not using waterboarding.' That's the only mention, that they were not using it," she said.

Goss was out of the country and could not be reached yesterday. But in an op-ed last month, he declared that he was rendered "slack-jawed" by lawmakers' claims that they were not fully informed about waterboarding. "We understood what the CIA was doing. We gave the CIA our bipartisan support," Goss wrote.

Government officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified briefings, suggested that the record might never be clear as to what Pelosi and Goss were told. One official familiar with the congressional briefings acknowledged the difficulty of establishing exactly what lawmakers were told. Internal CIA memos about the briefings were "not designed to be stenography" but were based on recollections after the fact, the official said. There were no recordings or precise transcripts, he said.

But other current and former intelligence officials suggested that the use of waterboarding was discussed at the 2002 briefing, which was attended by eight people, including four CIA officials, Pelosi, Goss and their top aides.

Even if Pelosi's account were accurate, Republicans suggested, she never raised any formal objection to the interrogation techniques, lending her indirect support to the methods. Hoekstra told reporters that classified briefings usually end with intelligence officials asking lawmakers, "Are we okay to move forward on this?"

Last month, Obama released Bush-era Justice Department documents that provided the legal basis for the use of waterboarding and other harsh tactics on detainees. After the release of those memos, Pelosi joined other Democrats in calling for a "truth commission" to investigate which Bush administration officials authorized the tactics.

Obama has rejected calls for such a commission, saying it would become highly politicized and do little to enhance public knowledge. However, the Senate intelligence committee is conducting a broad review of the interrogation techniques.

House Democrats rallied behind Pelosi. Rep. Silvestre Reyes (D-Tex.), the chairman of the House intelligence committee, described CIA briefings as "notifications and nothing more," citing the occasional practice of limiting the most sensitive information to the "Gang of Four," the leaders of the House and Senate intelligence panels.