WASHINGTON — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Thursday accused the Bush administration and the CIA of misleading Congress about waterboarding prisoners, escalating a political fight with Republicans over her knowledge of the treatment of detainees suspected of terrorism.
Separately on Thursday, the CIA rejected a request from former Vice President Dick Cheney to declassify memos that Cheney has said show the agency’s severe interrogation methods were critical to getting information from detainees that helped disrupt terror plots.
The two developments underscore how the classified details of the CIA’s interrogation operations are fueling political skirmishes months after the program was shut down by President Barack Obama.
In her most detailed account to date, Pelosi said that she was told during a classified briefing in September 2002 that the CIA was not engaged in waterboarding, even though records now indicate that the agency had employed the method dozens of times on an al-Qaeda suspect a month earlier.
“The CIA was misleading the Congress” as part of a broader Bush administration pattern of deception about its activities, said the California Democrat.
“The only mention of waterboarding at that briefing was that it was not being employed,” she said, adding: “We now know that earlier, they were.”
Pelosi’s comments amount to an allegation that the CIA violated its legal obligation to keep congressional leaders accurately informed.
Republicans responded by ratcheting up their criticism of Pelosi.
House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, said that given the briefings that were provided to Pelosi and other Democrats, their recent criticism, following their initial silence, is an attempt “to have it both ways.”
“It’s pretty clear that they were well aware of what these enhanced interrogation techniques were,” he said.
Sen. Christopher Bond, R-Mo., the ranking Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said it was “outrageous that a member of Congress would call our terror-fighters liars.”
The controversy has become a political sideshow to the broader debate over CIA interrogation methods that Obama banned in his first week in office — which Cheney and other Republicans warned will make the nation less safe.
In a separate matter, Cheney on Thursday lost — at least for now — his effort to have the government declassify memos describing the success of the CIA program. He had requested their release in March.
In a letter to the National Archives, where the records are kept, the CIA said it could not declassify the documents because they are subject to an ongoing Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.
The civil liberties groups that filed the suit criticized the CIA’s decision, noting the irony that the agency was citing a suit seeking the documents’ release as justification for not doing so.
“It is unusual for Amnesty International to find itself on the same side . . . as Cheney,” said Tom Parker, a counterterrorism expert at the organization. “But we welcome his late conversion to the value of transparency in government.”
