So for the past few months, the GOP has been hammering Nancy Pelosi for her assertion that the CIA misled Congress in a series of briefings on torture -- the CIA's notes on the briefing didn't actually settle the matter conclusively. Still, the GOP has been relentless in asserting that Pelosi was "attacking" the CIA, even though the CIA has in fact previously lied to Congress, and that it wasn't so long ago that the GOP itself was accusing the CIA of lying about Iran's nuclear weapons program to undermine then-President Bush.
Today, Michael Scherer at TIME reports that Sen. John McCain claims, contrary to a July 2007 OLC memo from Steven Bradbury, that he objected to the use of coercive interrogation techniques in intelligence briefings with the CIA. Bradbury wrote, based on the CIA accounts of those briefings, that "in those classified and private conversations, none of the Members expressed the view that the CIA detention and interrogation program should be stopped, or that the techniques at issue were inappropriate." McCain says that's not true, that he spoke up forcefully, particularly against sleep deprivation.
The uproar over whether Pelosi knew about waterboarding, and her assertion that the CIA lied, became more important than the actual lawbreaking involved in the use of torture -- things may be different now that McCain, a media darling, is making a similar claim. But this story has larger implications than simply making it more difficult for the GOP to portray criticism of the CIA as an issue of recklessness or lack of patriotism. As Scherer explains, Bradbury based the legal reasoning approving of sleep deprivation for use by the CIA partially on the the alleged response of members of Congress -- because no one objected, Bradbury argued that the methods did not "shock the conscience."
UPDATE: Marcy Wheeler points out that McCain himself suggested Pelosi could have objected to the methods in those CIA briefings and therefore prevented torture from occurring. Of course, now he's in the awkward position of explaining that he did object, but the CIA ignored him.
-- A. Serwer
