Former U.S. Senator Says CIA Lied To Him

Posted by | May 14, 2009 21:15 | Filed under: Top Stories


Nancy Pelosi is not alone in claiming that the CIA misled lawmakers.


Former Sen. Bob Graham (D-FL) tells the Huffington Post that just one month ago, the CIA lied to him about when he was briefed on enhanced interrogations.


“When this issue started to resurface I called the appropriate people in the agency and said I would like to know the dates from your records that briefings were held,” Graham recalled. “And they contacted me and gave me four dates — two in April ’02 and two in September ’02. Now, one of the things I do, and for which I have taken some flack, is keep a spiral notebook of what I do throughout the day. And so I went through my records and through a combination of my daily schedule, which I keep, and my notebooks, I confirmed and the CIA agreed that my notes were accurate; that three of those four dates there had been no briefing. There was only one day that I had been briefed, which was September the 27th of 2002.”

 

As for the one briefing he did attend, the Florida Democrat said that he had “no recollection that issues such as waterboarding were discussed.”


Graham calls the CIA’s records of interrogation briefings “suspect,” and notes that at the time he was briefed, “the whole credibility of the intelligence committee, particularly the CIA, was pretty much in question.”


“The irony,” said Graham, “is that the whole series of events in late September of ’02 were concurrent with the CIA’s release of the first classified version of the National Intelligence Estimate, which was one of the key factors that led me to vote against the war in Iraq because I thought that their case was so weak. And they were making to the public these very bold statements about how we were in extreme danger if we didn’t move quickly to eradicate Saddam Hussein. The whole, ‘a smoking gun may appear in the form of a mushroom cloud’ kind of argument.”

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By: Joel

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