 |
         
|
Wednesday's headlines concerned President Barack Obama and abuses of prisoners by military guards. Thursday the focus moved to Speaker Nancy Pelosi and abuses of prisoners by CIA interrogators. "Madame Speaker, just to be clear," inquired ABC's Jonathan Karl (no link), "you are accusing the CIA of lying to you in September of 2002?" "Yes, misleading the Congress of the United States."
Pelosi, at the time, was a member of the House Intelligence Committee receiving top-secret briefings from spooks about which torture methods--"enhanced interrogation techniques," in the bureaucratic lingo--were being used on suspected members of al-Qaeda. At issue was just one practice, the drowning torture known as waterboarding. NBC's Kelly O'Donnell reminded us: "The Speaker has long been an opponent of waterboarding." It turns out that the torture had already been tried scores of times on prisoner abu-Zubaydah when Pelosi was briefed yet, she asserted, "the only mention of waterboarding at that briefing was that it was not being employed." CBS' Bob Orr softened the starkness of Pelosi's charge against the spies, calling it an accusation of "skirting the truth."
ABC's Karl checked with a pair of other members of Congress who were given the same secret briefings. He quoted Porter Goss, a Republican who later became Director of Central Intelligence: "We understood what the CIA was doing. We gave the CIA our bipartisan support." Bob Graham, then a Democratic Senator, recalled the opposite: "The topic of waterboarding did not come up…It would have been a term that I would have had to have asked them to define."
Both NBC's O'Donnell and CBS' Orr quoted from the CIA's own declassified minutes of the September 2002 briefing. They said it included "a description of particular EITs that had been deployed" on abu-Zubaydah. CBS' Orr noted, however, that "the word waterboarding was not used."
On the vocabulary watch: CBS substitute anchor Jeff Glor referred to "harsh interrogation techniques like waterboarding." ABC anchor Charles Gibson, as usual, refuses to let the T-word pass his lips; he could manage nothing more menacing than "the controversy over interrogation techniques." Contrast that to NBC's Brian Williams: "The subject here is torture."
You must be logged in to this website to leave a comment. Please click here to log in so you can participate in the discussion.
