At least, she never complained then. This was the year after 9/11 after all.
The three prisoners who were waterboarded were Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, Abu Zubaydah, an Al Qaeda operative also involved in 9/11, and Abd al Rahim al Nashiri, a Saudi believed to have had a leadership role in the bombing of the U.S. Navy destroyer Cole in Yemen in 2000.
Nancy Pelosi was briefed, along with a number of other Democrats, on methods of interrogation being used and proposed to be used:
Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, who in 2002 was the ranking Democrat on the House committee, has said in public statements that she recalls being briefed on the methods, including waterboarding. She insists, however, that the lawmakers were told only that the C.I.A. believed the methods were legal — not that they were going to be used.
By contrast, the ranking Republican on the House committee at the time, Porter J. Goss of Florida, who later served as C.I.A. director, recalls a clear message that the methods would be used.
“We were briefed, and we certainly understood what C.I.A. was doing,” Mr. Goss said in an interview. “Not only was there no objection, there was actually concern about whether the agency was doing enough.”
Current House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) agrees Pelosi knew what was happening and raised no concerns at the time.
“All of this information was downloaded to congressional leaders of both parties with no objections being raised,” he told reporters, specifically citing Pelosi as someone who received the briefings. “Not a word was raised at the time, not one word.”
So what’s the story with her now vitriolic denunciations of what she at least tacitly approved at the time? And is she including herself when she demands that those who knew about or carried out those high-level interrogations be prosecuted?
Well, duh, no, because now she is saying she didn’t know. Not really. Sort of. Just thought it was talk, you know. Not that anyone was actually, you know, doing anything.
More from former CIA Director Porter J Goss:
After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, members of the committees charged with overseeing our nation’s intelligence services had no higher priority than stopping al-Qaeda. In the fall of 2002, while I was chairman of the House intelligence committee, senior members of Congress were briefed on the CIA’s “High Value Terrorist Program,” including the development of “enhanced interrogation techniques” and what those techniques were. This was not a one-time briefing but an ongoing subject with lots of back and forth between those members and the briefers.
Today, I am slack-jawed to read that members claim to have not understood that the techniques on which they were briefed were to actually be employed; or that specific techniques such as “waterboarding” were never mentioned. It must be hard for most Americans of common sense to imagine how a member of Congress can forget being told about the interrogations of Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed. In that case, though, perhaps it is not amnesia but political expedience.
Indeed.
