Media Ignores Gingrich Frequent Lies

Media declare Gingrich GOP's "ideas man," ignore his frequent falsehoods
Falsehoods offered by Gingrich include:

* During the May 10 edition of Fox Broadcasting Co.'s Fox News Sunday, Gingrich claimed that Democrats have "had control since January of 2007. They haven't passed a law making waterboarding illegal. They haven't gone into any of these things and changed law." However, the Democratically controlled Congress did pass a bill in 2008 that would have banned the use of waterboarding, had President Bush not subsequently vetoed the measure. Gingrich further suggested that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), who according to a recently released CIA document was first briefed about harsh interrogation techniques in September 2002, could have threatened "to pass a law cutting off the money" for the techniques if she objected to them. But Democrats were not in power until January 2007; Pelosi was the ranking member of the House intelligence committee and a senior minority member of the House appropriations committee in 2002, and House minority leader from 2003 to 2006.

* During a March 25 appearance on Fox News' Hannity, Gingrich falsely claimed that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner proposed to "take over non-bank, non-financial system assets" and that "Congress had passed the authorization in the stimulus bill" to pay bonuses to AIG executives. According to Gingrich, those policies "absolutely moves you towards a political dictatorship."

* In a March 3 Twitter post, Gingrich wrote that his wife, Callista, "pointed out flying into [S]anta [B]arbara you can see the oil rigs off shore," and asserted, "Ironically they have had no spill since 1969." In fact, in just the few months preceding Gingrich's post, there had been at least two oil spills reported in or near the Santa Barbara Channel, according to the U.S. Coast Guard, including one spill in mid-February and another in December 2008 that required a coordinated cleanup effort by the Coast Guard, the California Department of Fish and Game Office of Spill Prevention and Response (OSPR), and the company responsible for the spill.

* In a February 22 New York Times article, reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg wrote that Gingrich "sees the stimulus bill as his party's ticket to a revival in 2010, as Republicans decry what they see as pork-barrel spending for projects like marsh-mouse preservation. 'You can imagine the fun people will have with that,' he said." In fact, the bill does not contain any language directing funds to the salt marsh harvest mouse, or its San Francisco wetlands habitat, a fact that the House Republican leadership aide who reportedly originated the claim has reportedly acknowledged.

* During the February 17 edition of Hannity, Gingrich falsely claimed that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act contains "$30 million to save a mouse in San Francisco" and "$8 billion for a high-speed rail to Las Vegas for Harry Reid," adding, "[I]f those aren't set-asides, I don't know what you'd call them."

* During the January 22 edition of Fox News' On the Record, Gingrich referred to a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) initial "analysis" of the recovery package and purported that it analyzed the entire bill, stating: "Look, the Congressional Budget Office has reported that less than 10 percent of the bill will be spent the first year. Some of it would not be spent for 10 years. This is a bill -- this is not a stimulus package, this is a bigger government, more bureaucracy, more powerful politician package in the guise of a stimulus." In fact, as the initial Associated Press report on the CBO "analysis" noted, it did not take into account all aspects of the recovery plan. While the CBO write-up found that "only $26 billion out of $274 billion in infrastructure spending would be delivered into the economy by the Sept. 30 end of the budget year," it did not "cover tax cuts or efforts by Democrats to provide relief to cash-strapped state governments to help with their Medicaid bills," among other provisions.

* On the January 19 edition of Fox News' Happening Now, referring to President Obama's support for the Employee Free Choice Act, Gingrich claimed that Obama was "going to be for the labor unions taking away your right to a secret-ballot vote before being forced to join a union," echoing a common distortion employed by opponents of the legislation.

* Gingrich has repeatedly criticized Pelosi for using a military jet to travel to and from her congressional district, and has also falsely claimed that former Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL) "did not get a private plane" following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. In fact, as Media Matters for America has noted, following 9-11, the House sergeant-at-arms, the Defense Department, and the White House agreed that military planes should be made available to the speaker of the House for national security reasons, and Hastert was the first speaker to use one.

* During the November 16, 2008, broadcast of CBS' Face the Nation, Gingrich said that Republicans "who are about to face this question of, how do you get the economy growing again" should ask Republican governors Mitch Daniels of Indiana and Jon Huntsman of Utah, "[H]ow did they get to the lowest unemployment rate in their respective regions?" However, the most recent Bureau of Labor Statistics records at the time showed that Gingrich's claim was false. In fact, neither Utah nor Indiana had the lowest unemployment rate in its region, and several states with lower unemployment rates were governed by Democrats.

* During the July 31, 2008, edition of Fox News' Hannity & Colmes, Gingrich repeatedly mischaracterized Obama's energy policy, falsely suggesting that Obama's only "energy strategy" was to encourage people to keep the tires on their vehicles properly inflated and asserting that Obama "suggested if we all inflated our tires, that we would solve the problem."

* On the October 10, 2006, edition of Hannity & Colmes, Gingrich falsely claimed that Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-NY) "promise[d] to raise taxes" if Democrats were to take over the House of Representatives in that year's midterm elections. In fact, as Media Matters noted, during a September 26, 2006, interview with host Neil Cavuto on Fox News' Your World, Rangel, who was in line to become chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee if Democrats gained a majority in the House, stated that a House controlled by Democrats "would not raise taxes" and "would not roll back" Bush's tax cuts enacted by Congress and set to expire in 2010.

Media ignore question of whether Congress was briefed on torture dissent

Media ignore question of whether Congress was briefed on torture dissent
For example, in its coverage of Pelosi's May 14 press conference, The Washington Post did not note that, during the press conference, Pelosi stated that Congress was not provided with "contrary opinions within the Executive Branch [that] concluded that these [enhanced] interrogation techniques were not legal." Moreover, according to a Media Matters for America review* of the Post's coverage over the past month of what Pelosi knew about these techniques, the Post has not reported on, or raised, the question of whether Pelosi was informed of any dissent within the administration over the use of these techniques. Those who dissented include legal experts from the FBI and military who contested the Justice Department's determination that these EITs were legal; FBI and CIA counterintelligence experts who had reportedly expressed opposition to, and disputed the effectiveness of, the methods; and experts from the military's Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) program who similarly expressed concerns about the efficacy of subjecting detainees to harsh interrogation techniques modeled after ones used in the SERE program. Media Matters has previously documented a recent pattern of the media minimizing the Bush administration's role in the torture debate.

LEGAL OBJECTIONS

In a May 15 Washington Post article on Pelosi's press conference, staff writer Paul Kane wrote that Pelosi's critics "contend that top Democrats were aware that CIA interrogators were using waterboarding, or simulated drowning, and that their support waned only after its use became public and led to an outcry from human rights activists." Similarly, in a May 15 Post analysis, national political correspondent Dan Balz wrote, "Conservatives say that, if Pelosi was so opposed to torture, she should have spoken out forcefully when she learned that these techniques were being employed. Her failure to do so then leaves her in a weakened position to protest now, they argue." But Kane and Balz did not note that, during her press conference, Pelosi stated that she was not told "there were other opinions within the executive branch that concluded that these interrogation techniques were not legal."

According to a May 2008 report from the Justice Department's office of the inspector general, following a meeting with FBI counterterrorism assistant director Pasquale D'Amuro "in approximately August 2002," FBI Director Robert Mueller determined "that the FBI would not participate in joint interrogations of detainees with other agencies in which harsh or extreme techniques not allowed by the FBI would be employed." D'Amuro recommended that the FBI not participate in part because "the use of the aggressive techniques failed to take into account an 'end game.' " D'Amuro added, "[E]ven a military tribunal would require some standard for admissibility of evidence. Obtaining information by way of 'aggressive' techniques would not only jeopardize the government's ability to use the information against the detainees, but also might have a negative impact on the agents' ability to testify in future proceedings." Additionally, in a November 27, 2002, legal analysis, FBI deputy director Marion Bowman wrote that several of the enhanced techniques -- including "[u]se of wet towel and dripping water to induce the misperception of drowning" -- "are not permitted by the US Constitution" and may violate the federal torture statute.

Further, a November 20, 2008, Senate Armed Services Committee report, released jointly by chairman Carl Levin (D-MI) and ranking member Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), documented concerns the military services expressed, including that the enhanced techniques -- requested for use at Guantánamo Bay and authorized by Donald Rumsfeld on December 2, 2002 -- could not withstand legal scrutiny. On November 1, 2002, the Air Force commented on the request by expressing "serious concerns regarding the legality of many of the proposed techniques." The Marine Corps stated in a memo that "several of the Category II and III techniques arguably violate federal law, and would expose our service members to possible prosecution," and that the Corps "disagree[d] with the position that the proposed plan is legally sufficient." The Army, in turn, replied that it "interposes significant legal, policy and practical concerns regarding most of the Category II and all of the Category III techniques proposed." The committee report stated that a legal review subsequently initiated by Capt. Jane Dalton, legal counsel to the Joint Chiefs chairman, was "[q]uashe[d]" by Department of Defense general counsel Jim Haynes.

The Media’s Collective Yawn Over Torture for War

The Media’s Collective Yawn Over Torture for War
Faced with what could be the biggest foreign policy bombshell since the Gulf of Tonkin lies cleared the way for Vietnam, the Washington-New York media establishment has chosen to do nothing. Much as D.C. reporters decided several years ago that they were no longer interested covering the Bush administration's duplicity in the run-up to the Iraq war (nor are the David Gregory's of the world interested in revisiting their profession's complicity with the former administration in that regard,) "the press," it seems, has decided to take a pass. And what they're passing on is truly stunning.

In short, evidence is quickly piling up suggesting that the torture of terrorism suspects, and even the alleged request from no less than the office of the vice president of the United States, to waterboard an Iraqi official, had less to do with protecting Americans from further attack after 9/11, than it had to do with bolstering a phony case for invading Iraq. Polls show a plurality of Americans will accept even torture - as sickening as that fact is to anyone who cares about civil liberties - if it's done to save innocent (read American) lives. But how would the American people square the idea of torturing people, not to save lives, but to produce false confessions in order to give a small group of ideologues - the neoconservatives - the war they desired. Most Americans have long since accepted that the Bush administration's case for invading Iraq was flawed, if not totally false. What we didn't know until recently, was that to sell that case, members of the Bush administration, possibly including Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld - maybe even the president of the United States, were willing to do things we're accustomed to ascribing to the North Koreans or Maoist Chinese: using torture not to get good information, but to produce false confessions, to justify an unnecessary war.

The evidence just keeps coming. On Thursday, Colin Powell deputy Lawrence Wilkerson, and former NBC News investigative producer Robert Windrem, offered stunning news. In Wilkerson's words:

... what I have learned is that as the administration authorized harsh interrogation in April and May of 2002--well before the Justice Department had rendered any legal opinion--its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qa'ida.

So furious was this effort that on one particular detainee, even when the interrogation team had reported to Cheney's office that their detainee "was compliant" (meaning the team recommended no more torture), the VP's office ordered them to continue the enhanced methods. The detainee had not revealed any al-Qa'ida-Baghdad contacts yet. This ceased only after Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, under waterboarding in Egypt, "revealed" such contacts. Of course later we learned that al-Libi revealed these contacts only to get the torture to stop.

And per Windrem's reporting in The Daily Beast:

At the end of April 2003, not long after the fall of Baghdad, U.S. forces captured an Iraqi who Bush White House officials suspected might provide information of a relationship between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's regime. Muhammed Khudayr al-Dulaymi was the head of the M-14 section of Mukhabarat, one of Saddam's secret police organizations. His responsibilities included chemical weapons and contacts with terrorist groups.

Two senior U.S. intelligence officials at the time tell The Daily Beast that the suggestion to waterboard an Iraqi prisoner came from the Office of Vice President Cheney.

"To those who wanted or suspected a relationship, he would have been a guy who would know, so [White House officials] had particular interest," Charles Duelfer, head of the Iraqi Survey Group and the man in charge of interrogations of Iraqi officials, told me. So much so that the officials, according to Duelfer, inquired how the interrogation was proceeding.

Those weren't even the first stories on the subject. Last month, McClatchy correspondent Jonathan Landay reported, to precious little response from the rest of the mainstream press, that:

A former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue said that Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld demanded that the interrogators find evidence of al Qaida-Iraq collaboration.

"There were two reasons why these interrogations were so persistent, and why extreme methods were used," the former senior intelligence official said on condition of anonymity because of the issue's sensitivity.

"The main one is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack (after 9/11). But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there."

These are stunning facts - certainly more shocking, and of greater consequence, then finding out whether House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was told that waterboarding was for past, future or present use. And yet, a scan of the major headlines on mainstream news outlets reveals not a single headline about these stunning facts, including the fact that the false al-Libi confession now appears to have been the basis of the following testimony to the United Nations on February 6, 2003:

I can trace the story of a senior terrorist operative telling how Iraq provided training in these weapons to al Qaeda. Fortunately, this operative is now detained, and he has told his story. I will relate it to you now as he, himself, described it.

The testimony was from former Secretary of State Collin Powell. The detained operative, al-Libi, "told his story" after being beaten and locked in a coffin for 17 hours by "CIA surrogates" at a detention facility in Egypt.

You'd think that these would be top stories, worthy of serious consideration by a press corps that so shamefully let down the American people in the run-up to the Iraq invasion. The implications of these new revelations are stunning: a sitting president, vice president and defense secretary, selling a false case to the American people about an impending invasion of a country that had done no harm to us, and then using torture to produce false confessions in order to further the lie. Instead, the vaunted press corps is fixated - almost to the point of obsession - with Speaker Pelosi.

Even NBC News, the only outlet that has covered the story at all, has so far, relegated it to its "opinion/news" programs - "Countdown with Keith Olbermann" and "The Rachel Maddow Show," implying that the idea of the Bush administration torturing in order to justify war is nothing more than a liberal audience interest story, rather than a significant constitutional breach. The torture-Iraq link ceases to exist during MSNBC's daytime news programming. MSNBC.com, NBC's online arm, had zero headlines posted today, though they did put up a top story about whether inmates should be able to raise their babies in jail. Rival CNN has, to my viewing, ignored the story on air, and banished it to their international site online, while the Pelosi melodrama makes the domestic CNN.com front page. The New York Times had zero headlines on this subject on their website today, while Washingtonpost.com has six separate pieces on Pelosi, including an editorial, and not a single one on the torture-Iraq link. CBSnews.com takes a pass too, as does ABC News' online site, which instead boasts headlines about "John and Kate" and their marital dilemma. (I didn't bother to check Fox, since my interest was only in news outlets.)

And while the Washington Post today published an op-ed by neoconservative Charles Krauthammer justifying torture with the time-worn "ticking time bomb" meme, his paper's editors surely know by now that the Bush-Cheney torture program wasn't about a ticking time bomb. There's ample evidence of that. It's just that the Post, like her sisters in the print and broadcast media, are choosing to ignore, or to bury it.

Why would they do that? Perhaps members of the D.C. media establishment are loath to revisit at time period that wasn't exactly their shining moment. As New York Times White House correspondent Elizabeth Bumiller helpfully admitted back in 2004, during the run-up to the Iraq invasion:

'I think we were very deferential because ... it's live, it's very intense, it's frightening to stand up there. Think about it, you're standing up on prime-time live TV asking the president of the United States a question when the country's about to go to war. There was a very serious, somber tone that evening, and no one wanted to get into an argument with the president at this very serious time.'"

And argue they did not. As Dan Rather observed during a speech at the National Conference of Media Reform last summer:

"In the wake of 9/11 and in the run-up to Iraq, . . . news organizations made a decision -- consciously or unconsciously, but unquestionably in a climate of fear -- to accept the overall narrative frame given them by the White House, a narrative that went like this: Saddam Hussein, brutal dictator, harbored weapons of mass destruction and, because of his supposed links to al Qaeda, this could not be tolerated in a post-9/11 world.

David Sirota, writing in the Huffington Post, lamented in 2005 that the "gang of 500" - the main body of White House reporterdom - lost interest in covering the Iraq war because it was "hard" and besides, the American people didn't care about Iraq anymore. One Sirota observation seems especially relevant today:

...the American public keenly recognizes that many major media today are simply no longer interested in reporting on anything that might fundamentally challenge the Establishment power structure. For when the media seems more interested in covering what's on the President's Ipod and what the President's dancing habits are than they are the death/maiming of American soldiers in Iraq, well, we've got a serious problem.

No truer words...
Joy-Ann Reid is a writer and columnist for the South Florida Times and blogs at reidreport.com

Republicans Tortured to Justify War

Republicans Tortured to Justify War by Joe Conason
Dick Cheney keeps saying "enhanced interrogation" was used to stop imminent attacks, but evidence is mounting that the real reason was to invent evidence linking Saddam Hussein to al-Qaida.

The single most pertinent question that Dick Cheney is never asked -- at least not by the admiring interviewers he has encountered so far -- is whether he, Donald Rumsfeld and George W. Bush used torture to justify the illegal invasion of Iraq. As he tours television studios, radio stations and conservative think tanks, the former vice-president hopes to persuade America that only waterboarding kept us safe for seven years.

Yet evidence is mounting that under Cheney's direction, "enhanced interrogation" was not used exclusively to prevent imminent acts of terror or collect actionable intelligence -- the aims that he constantly emphasizes -- but to invent evidence that would link al-Qaida with Saddam Hussein and connect the late Iraqi dictator to the 9/11 attacks.

In one report after another, from journalists, former administration officials and Senate investigators, the same theme continues to emerge: Whenever a prisoner believed to possess any knowledge of al-Qaida's operations or Iraqi intelligence came into American custody, CIA interrogators felt intense pressure from the Bush White House to produce evidence of an Iraq-Qaida relationship (which contradicted everything that U.S. intelligence and other experts knew about the enmity between Saddam's Baath Party and Osama bin Laden's jihadists). Indeed, the futile quest for proof of that connection is the common thread running through the gruesome stories of torture from the Guantánamo detainee camp to Egyptian prisons to the CIA's black sites in Thailand and elsewhere.

Perhaps the sharpest rebuke to Cheney's assertions has come from Lawrence Wilkerson, the retired Army colonel and former senior State Department aide to Colin Powell, who says bluntly that when the administration first authorized "harsh interrogation" during the spring of 2002, "its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qaida."

In an essay that first appeared on the Washington Note blog, Wilkerson says that even when the interrogators of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the Libyan al-Qaida operative, reported that he had become "compliant" -- in other words, cooperative after sufficient abuse -- the vice-president's office ordered further torture of the Libyan by his hosts at an Egyptian prison because he had not yet implicated Saddam with al-Qaida. So his interrogators put al-Libi into a tiny coffin until he said what Cheney wanted to hear. Nobody in the U.S. intelligence community actually believed this nonsense. But now, al-Libi has reportedly and very conveniently "committed suicide" in a prison cell in Libya, where he was dispatched to the tender mercies of the Bush administration's newfound friends in the Qaddafi regime several years ago. So the deceased man won't be able to discuss what actually happened to him and why.

Wilkerson's essay was followed swiftly by an investigative report in the Daily Beast, authored by former NBC News producer Robert Windrem, who interviewed two former senior intelligence officers who told him a similar story about a different prisoner. In April 2003, U.S. forces captured an Iraqi official named Muhammed Khudayr al-Dulaymi, who had served in Saddam's secret police, the Mukhabarat. Those unnamed officials said that upon learning of Dulaymi's capture, the vice-president's office proposed that CIA agents in Baghdad commence waterboarding him, in order to elicit information about a link between al-Qaida and Saddam. Evidently that suggestion was not enforced by Charles Duelfer, the head of the Iraq Study Group who controlled Dulaymi's interrogation.

The same kind of demands were directed toward interrogators in Guantánamo, according to the testimony of former Army psychiatrist Charles Burney, who testified that he and his colleagues interrogating prisoners at the detention camp felt "pressure" to produce proof of the mythical link.

"While we were there, a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between al Qaida and Iraq and we were not successful in establishing a link between al Qaida and Iraq," he told the Army inspector general. "The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish that link ... there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results." In other words, they were instructed to use abusive techniques, as recounted in the investigation of torture by the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Looking back, we now know that coerced confessions -- and in particular the questionable assertions by al-Libi -- were highlighted by administration officials promoting the case for war with Iraq, in the landmark Cincinnati speech by President Bush in October 2002 and in Colin Powell's crucial presentation to the U.N. Security Council in February 2003, the eve of the war.

Whether Bush, Cheney and their associates were seeking real or fabricated intelligence, they knowingly employed methods that were certain to produce the latter -- as American officials well knew because those same techniques, especially water torture, had been used to elicit false confessions from captured Americans as long ago as World War II and the Korean conflict.

Cheney now claims that he preserved the country from terrorism and saved thousands and perhaps hundreds of thousands of lives. We need a serious investigation, with witnesses including the former vice-president under oath, to determine what he and his associates actually did with the brutal powers they arrogated to themselves -- because instead their actions cost thousands upon thousands of American and Iraqi lives, all in the service of a political lie.
© 2009 Salon.com

ABC report on interrogation hearing left out testimony on non-harsh methods' success

ABC report on interrogation hearing left out testimony on non-harsh methods' success

SUMMARY: Reporting on the testimony of a former FBI agent who "told Congress today that he witnessed CIA interrogation methods on terror suspects that were, in his words, 'borderline torture' " and "called the methods 'ineffective,' 'unreliable,' and 'harmful,' " ABC's Charles Gibson did not mention that the agent also testified about the success of non-harsh interrogation methods.

Republicans Dropping Pretext Of Tea Bagging as Grassroots Movements

Dropping Pretext Of A ‘Grassroots Movement,’ GOP Governors Launch ‘Tea Party 2.0’
Today, Politico reports that Republican Govs. Rick Perry of Texas and Mark Sanford of South Carolina are leading the latest development of the anti-tax, anti-Obama tea party protest movement. Dubbed the “Tea Party 2.0,” the Republican Governors Association will host a telephone conference call on Thursday with thousands of right-wing activists to discuss how “our states’ rights are being trampled upon.”

Official Republican Party involvement is nothing new in the tea party movement. The tea party efforts were initially organized by corporate lobbyists and GOP consultants, and later advertised for by Fox News. But by the time of the April 15 protests, hundreds of state and federal Republican office holders headlined events across the country. Eventually, House Republican Leader John Boehner (R-OH) and RNC Chairman Michael Steele all but declared ownership of the protests.

Ironically, the governors who are now using an official apparatus of the Republican Party to coordinate the tea party conference call were the same governors perpetuating the lie that the movement was entirely spontaneous, without any grass-tops involvement:

– Gov. Mark Sanford: “I was struck by the recent Tea Party rallies in Columbia, Charleston, and Greenville, where thousands of South Carolinians turned out in a spontaneous display of protest against reckless government spending.” [Post-Courier, 4/27/09]

– Gov. Rick Perry: “It’s a very organic thing,” he says, “a very powerful moment, I think, in American history.” On Tax Day, he told cheering veterans: “I’m just not real sure you’re a bunch of right-wing extremists. But if you are, we’re with you.” [Daily Press, 4/27/09]

Dropping any pretension that the tea parties are a citizens’ movement rather than a partisan ploy, an official working with the Republican governors said the effort was part of a “springboard” to raise funds for gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia.

Media let GOP change the subject in torture debate

Media let GOP change the subject in torture debate
SUMMARY: Adopting the GOP's emphasis on what Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats knew about the Bush administration's use of harsh interrogation techniques, some in the media have ignored evidence that the Bush administration began using the tactics before briefing Democrats, and that upon learning of them, Rep. Jane Harman unsuccessfully expressed concerns to the CIA.

By focusing on what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and other congressional Democrats knew about the Bush administration's use of harsh interrogation techniques, as the GOP has advocated, some in the media have ignored evidence that the Bush administration began using the tactics before briefing congressional Democrats, and that upon learning of the techniques in 2003, the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee expressed concerns to the CIA, but did not have the authority to force a change. Indeed, according to a May 2005 Bush Justice Department memo, following the Bush administration's authorization of the harsh interrogation techniques, CIA officials used one of the most controversial techniques, waterboarding, on Al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah in August 2002 -- before any congressional Democrats had been briefed on any of the tactics. According to the same Justice Department memo, CIA officials waterboarded Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in March 2003 -- after Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) had reportedly raised concerns to the CIA about the techniques in February 2003.

In the May 30, 2005, Justice Department memo, then-principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Steven Bradbury wrote that "[t]he CIA used the waterboard 'at least 83 times during August 2002' in the interrogation of Zubaydah." Yet, according to a chart of "Member Briefings on Enhanced Interrogation Techniques" (EITs) included in a recently released CIA document, the first briefing on the EITs was not given to members of Congress until the following month, on September 4, 2002. Then-Rep. Porter Goss (R-FL) and Pelosi, at the time the two ranking members on the House Intelligence Committee, were the only two congressional members listed as having been present at the briefing, and the document does not detail which specific EITs were discussed.

The CIA document listed Harman as having been briefed on the EITs on February 5, 2003, when she was the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. According to reports, Harman disclosed in December 2007 that she had sent a classified letter to the CIA on February 10, 2003, raising concerns about the EITs. Upon disclosing the letter, Harman reportedly noted that she had been prohibited from discussing the matter publicly. However, despite Harman reportedly raising concerns to the CIA in February 2003, according to the Bradbury memo, the CIA "used the waterboard" technique "183 times during March 2003 in the interrogation of KSM [Mohammed]."