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Politics

Lawmakers aware of waterboarding

By Washington Post
Published December 9, 2007

WASHINGTON - 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 future-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 CIA gave key legislative overseers about 30 private briefings, some of which included descriptions of that technique and other harsh interrogation methods, according to interviews with multiple U.S. officials with firsthand knowledge.

With one known exception, no formal objections were raised by the lawmakers briefed about the harsh methods during the two years in which waterboarding was employed, from 2002 to 2003, said Democrats and Republicans with direct knowledge of the matter. The lawmakers who held oversight roles during the period included Pelosi and fellow Democrats Rep. Jane Harman (Calif.) and Sens. Bob Graham (Fla.) and John D. Rockefeller IV (W.Va.), and Republicans Rep. Porter Goss (Fla.) and Sen. Pat Roberts (Kan).

"Among those being briefed, there was a pretty full understanding of what the CIA was doing," said Goss, who chaired the House intelligence committee from 1997 to 2004 and then served as CIA director from 2004 to 2006. "And the reaction in the room was not just approval, but encouragement."

Lawmakers have varied recollections about the topics covered in the briefings.

Graham left the Senate intelligence committee in January 2003, and was replaced by Rockefeller. "Personally, I was unaware of it, so I couldn't object," Graham said in an interview. He said he now believes the techniques constituted torture and were illegal.

Pelosi declined to comment directly on her reaction to the classified briefings. But a congressional source familiar with Pelosi's position said Pelosi recalls that techniques described by the CIA were still in the planning stage - they had been designed and cleared with agency lawyers but not yet put in practice - and acknowledged that Pelosi did not raise objections at the time.

Harman, who replaced Pelosi as the committee's top Democrat in January 2003, disclosed Friday that she filed a classified letter to the CIA in February of that year as an official protest about the interrogation program.

Roberts declined to comment on his participation in the briefings. Rockefeller also declined to talk about the briefings, but the West Virginia Democrat's public statements show him leading the push in 2005 for expanded congressional oversight and an investigation of CIA interrogation practices.

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., a former Vietnam War prisoner who is seeking the GOP presidential nomination, took an interest in the program even though he was not a member of the intelligence committee, and spoke out against waterboarding in private conversations with White House officials in late 2005 before denouncing it publicly.

In May 2007, four months after Democrats regained control of Congress and well after the CIA had forsworn further waterboarding, four senators submitted written objections to the CIA's use of that tactic and other, still unspecified "enhanced" techniques in two classified letters to Hayden last spring, shortly after receiving a classified hearing on the topic.

One letter was sent on May 1 by Sen. Russell Feingold, D-Wis. A similar letter was sent May 10 by a bipartisan group of three senators: Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., and Ron Wyden, D-Ore.

In a rare public statement last month that broached the subject of his classified objections, Feingold complained about administration claims of congressional support, saying that it was "not the case" that lawmakers briefed on the CIA's program "have approved it or consented to it."

[Last modified December 9, 2007, 01:29:57]