Nancy Pelosi has accused the CIA of lying to Congress about torture.
In a press conference given amid questions on what she knew and when about the Bush administration’s torture program, Pelosi said that she was explicitly told in her September 2002 briefing that waterboarding was not used. We’ve since learned that Abu Zubaydah had been waterboarded 83 times by then.
She accused the agency of “misleading the Congress of the United States.”
Referring to the CIA, Pelosi said: “Now they’re trying to say: ‘don’t put the spotlight on us, we told the Congress.’ Well, they didn’t tell us everything.”
She continued, referring to the release of the briefings document last week:
This is a diversionary tactic, to take the spotlight off of those who conceived, developed, and implemented these policies, which all of us [Democratic leaders] opposed … Understand — this is their policy, all of them.
Pelosi called on the CIA to release the briefings, so that people can see the evidence for themselves.
And she accused the Bush administration of misleading Congress every step of the way.
Yesterday we told you about a bevy of Democratic senators leveling the charge that the CIA released the document on torture briefings in order to deflect attention from the agency’s own role in carrying out the torture program. But Pelosi certainly took that a step further just now.