Earlier this morning Nancy Pelosi told reporters that the CIA had specifically denied waterboarding prisoners back when they briefed her in 2002. Fine, I said, but “what about reports that one of your aides, Michael Sheehy, was briefed about waterboarding in early 2003 and passed the news along to you? Any comment on that?”
Robert Waldmann in turn has a pair of questions for me:
1) Did you listen to Pelosi’s statement and/or read a transcript ?
2) Should you have checked what she said before accusing her of an omission ?
Um, no. And yes. Sorry. I screwed up. I didn’t read Pelosi’s whole statement, which did indeed address the issue of the 2003 briefing:
Five months later, in February 2003, a member of my staff informed me that the Republican chairman and new Democratic Ranking Member of the House Intelligence Committee had been briefed about the use of certain techniques which had been the subject of earlier legal opinions.
Following that briefing, a letter raising concerns was sent to CIA General Counsel Scott Muller by the new Democratic Ranking Member of the House Intelligence Committee, the appropriate person to register a protest.
This is a reference to Jane Harman’s letter, which raised some questions about whether the president had approved the various interrogation techniques then in use. It was hardly a full-throated denunciation of torture, and it’s never been clear whether Pelosi even knew about the letter at the time. In other words, there are still plenty of questions here.
But I still should have looked up the whole statement first. Sorry.
