Graham denies torture briefing

By Michael J.W. Stickings

This -- from Greg Sargent -- is very, very interesting:

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.

"I do not have any recollection of being briefed on waterboarding or other forms of extraordinary interrogation techniques, or Abu Zubaydah being subjected to them," Graham told me by phone moments ago, in a reference to the terror suspect who had been repeatedly waterboarded the month before.

Graham is the only other Dem aside from Pelosi to get briefed in 2002, so they are both in effect asserting that no Dem was briefed on the use of EITs that year.

The other side -- the pro-torture enthusiasts -- are defending themselves in part by claiming that top Democrats knew what was going on and did not intervene. What Graham is saying, though, even more clearly than Pelosi, is that they weren't actually told what was going on, that they were intentionally being kept in the dark.

For more on this, make sure to read Emptywheel: "[T]he big news should be what it always has been -- that the Bush Administration and the CIA did not give the legally required briefing on their covert ops to Congress."

And why didn't they? Because they were up to something not just controversial but illegal.

Judge them accordingly.