Matt Yglesias

Yes, Virginia, Intelligence Agencies Mislead People

Of all the ridiculous pseudo-controversies I’ve witnessed in politics, the one between Nancy Pelosi and the CIA from earlier this year was surely the dumbest. Pelosi alleged that she’d been misled by the CIA regarded the details of some illegal orders that CIA personnel had carried out. The right then began to savage Pelosi, not based on specific information that she was wrong about this, but based on the lunatic notion that it’s just outrageous in general to claim that the CIA would ever lie to congress. Even more preposterously, the political press decided to treat these attacks very seriously as if we’re a nation of naive children that doesn’t realize intelligence agencies sometimes help presidents cover up illegal activities.

At any rate, here’s Spencer Ackerman with the news that six members of congress report that Leon Panetta conceded in testimony that the CIA has, in fact, misled congress:

I’ve said this before, but a lot of the structure of the current set-up of the CIA is basically designed to give presidents an outlet for illegal orders. It needs to change. There’s room for government secrecy, but there’s no good reason for the government to be keeping secrets from congress. That’s what you do if the president is trying to get you to help him cover up something that’s illegal.

Pelosi & Reid Commit to Immigration Reform

Harry Reid (D-NV)

An item in yesterday’s Congress Daily said that Nancy Pelosi “told the Asian American and Pacific Islander Summit this morning that Congress would tackle immigration reform after finishing with health care and energy.” CD opined that “it seems unlikely that Congress could work through all three mega-issues this year” but Pelosi didn’t say that. Harry Reid, meanwhile, explicitly said he thought immigration could be done this year:

“As far as I’m concerned, we have three major issues we have to do this year, if at all possible: No. 1 is healthcare; No 2 is energy, global warming; No. 3 is immigration reform,” Reid said. “It’s going to happen this session, but I want it this year, if at all possible.”

Obviously, this still may not happen. But it’s good to hear. In the immediate wake of the Sonia Sotomayor announcement, you sometimes heard that now that we’re getting a Latina justice, there’s no need to do immigration reform. The reality, however, is that the presence of huge numbers of undocumented immigrants in the United States is a very real problem that needs to be confronted. Efforts to make any other kind of social policy—be it health care, higher education, labor law reform, whatever—wind up being complicated by the problem. You could try to solve the problem in an impractical and inhumane manner by deporting everyone, or you can try to find a practical way of getting law-abiding people paying taxes on put on a path to citizenship. Just trying to ignore the issue isn’t going to viable.

Arlen Specter Backs Pelosi

I appreciate that there are some basic political truths that are awkward for most politicians to actually utter. But one reason that it’s good to have some politicians around who are worried about their left flank, is that you can get this sort of thing from Arlen Specter (D-PA):

“The CIA has a very bad record when it comes … to honesty. It goes back a long time,” Specter said in a speech before the American Law Institute at a Washington hotel.

The Republican-turned-Democrat listed a handful of examples in the past where the CIA has withheld key information from Congress.

“It’s a real problem as to how you get the information,” he said.

Right on. Not that we should be acting like the CIA is just somehow full of dishonest people. But it’s an agency that’s well-equipped to do things in secret. Sometimes presidents like to use it because they want to do something legitimate that requires secrecy. But the secrecy capabilities are also useful if you want to do something that’s illegal or immoral. Like torture people. But when the CIA is being asked to do illegal and immoral things in order to keep them secret, that naturally tends to extend toward keeping congress in the dark. There are many historical instances of this, and it shouldn’t surprise anyone if the CIA’s briefings on the Bush torture program turn out to have been less-than-thorough.

Good for Specter.

The Right’s Torture Backfire

In a new Daily Beast column I argue that even though the right’s effort to change the subject on torture away from “what did the Bush administration do?”, to “what was Nancy Pelosi briefed about?” has been an incredible tactical success, it stands a huge chance of backfiring:

And here’s where the right’s tactical acumen comes up short. Various conservative commentators have expressed their hope that gunning for Pelosi will blunt progressive calls for a “truth commission” to thoroughly investigate what really happened on Bush’s trip to the “dark side”. Fox’s Neil Cavuto said we might be in a “Mexican standoff” wherein Pelosi would agree to drop the idea of investigations to prevent herself from attracting scrutiny. Steven Hayes, Dick Cheney’s official biographer, said, “Democrats who have been so enthusiastic about truth commissions have to be stopping and saying, OK, wait a second.” What conservatives are missing here is that this is a fight they were winning before they started gunning for Pelosi. Their best ally in this fight was Barack Obama, whose desire to “move forward” rather than focusing on the past had been the subject of much consternation. Had conservatives simply reached out to grab the hand that was being extended to them, they could have gotten what they wanted.

But in their zeal to score a tactical win, the right has made a truth commission more likely not less likely. Obama wanted to avoid a backward-looking focus on torture in part because it distracted from his legislative agenda. But if we’re going to be looking backward anyway, thanks to conservatives’ insistence on complaining about Pelosi, then the move forward strategy lacks a rationale. And far from forcing a standoff in which Pelosi will abandon her support for an investigation, the right has forced her into a corner from which she can’t give in to moderate Democrats’ opposition to such a move without looking like she’s cravenly attempting to save her own skin.

I’ve seen polling which suggests that the public is reasonably sympathetic to the pro-torture position. But I’m quite certain the public isn’t generally aware of facts that would certainly come out in a truth commission process. For example, that the Bush administration’s torture techniques were specifically modeled on techniques employed by Chinese forces during the Korean War for the purpose of extracting false confessions. That the experts in the techniques whose advice was sought in designing the torture program warned interrogators that the methods were illegal and unlikely to produce reliable information. That one principle purpose of the torture program appears to have been to generate false information about links between al-Qaeda and Iraq. Or that abusive detention practices occurred far beyond Abu Ghraib and have led to the deaths of many people.

Conservatives Hoping that Pelosi Attacks Will Keep the Truth About Torture Buried

The whole series of recent attacks on Nancy Pelosi has been a bit bizarre. Whether you love torture or despise it, and whether you believe Pelosi or not, there’s just no way of looking at the history of torture in America in which Pelosi comes out as anything other than a bit player. So it’s good to see what Faiz Shakir points out here, a montage of conservatives explaining that the point of this Pelosi mau-mauing is to try to intimidate progressives into abandoning efforts to investigate what, exactly, was done and why:

Pelosi, to her credit, has stood firm against this. She’s consistently not only defended herself, but defender her position in favor of establishing a truth commission to get to the bottom of all of this. But the right is hoping to scare her into tossing her principles overboard in an effort to keep herself out of controversy.

Bob Graham Says CIA Has Admitted to Errors in Breifing Records, CIA Not Talking

According to former Senator Bob Graham, who’s best-known for his incredibly meticulous note-taking, the CIA has made mistakes in its account of briefing sessions to him and has admitted the error: “On three of the four occasions, when I consulted my schedule and my notes, it was clear that no briefing had taken place, and the CIA eventually concurred in that. So their record keeping is a little bit suspect.”

Obviously, that raises the question of whether or not there might be mistakes in the CIA’s official record of its briefings of Nancy Pelosi. After all, if I had a legal mandate to brief people about something, but was also under orders from the President of the United States to participate in a cover-up of an illegal and barbaric campaign of torture, I might fudge my records. Spencer Ackerman tried to do some reporting: “I asked CIA spokesman George Little whether Graham is telling the truth and he declined comment.”

That’s very strange. Presumably the CIA either did make this concession to Graham, in which case their account of what transpired vis-a-vis Pelosi is suspect, or else the CIA did not make this concession and Graham is slandering them. Seems like the public ought to know which.

Bob Graham Says He Was Misled In Briefings

Nancy Pelosi’s allegations that she was misled by the Bush administration in the secret, you-can’t-discuss-this-with-anyone, briefings she was treated to as the ranking House Democrat on the Intelligence Committee has taken the torture debate to a new level. Greg Sargent has former Senator Bob Graham, who was Pelosi’s opposite number on Senate Intelligence, saying something similar:

Former Senator Bob Graham, who received a classified briefing on terror detainees during the same month in the fall of 2002 as Nancy Pelosi, was not briefed about the use of either waterboarding or enhanced interrogation techniques during the meeting, he claimed in an interview with me.

Graham’s assertion — his first public comments since the release of the intelligence document detailing torture briefings given to members of Congress — directly contradicts the document’s claim that he had been briefed on enhanced interrogation techniques, or EITs. Graham is now the second Dem official to deny on the record the document’s contents and raises questions about its claim that Pelosi had been told, which she has denied.

You can see more along these lines from the award-winning Marcy Wheeler.

Can I say that in a larger sense I think the idea that congressional oversight can be established by briefing a number of members of congress that you can count on one hand seems a bit absurd on its face. The government sometimes needs to do something in secret. But if the reasons for keeping it secret are sufficiently un-compelling that operational security requires it to be kept secret from members of congress then that sounds a lot more like a cover-up than a legitimate national security concern.