From Mother Jones:
A former Democratic senator who chaired the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence at the start of the US government’s campaign against Al Qaeda tells Mother Jones he cannot fathom why his Republican replacement squashed his request for an independent review of the interrogation techniques then being used by the CIA. That onetime senator, Bob Graham of Florida, says he believes Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) neglected his obligations as head of the intel panel by smothering Graham’s proposal for a committee assessment of so-called enhanced interrogation practices.
On February 4, 2003, according to a CIA memo released last week, senior CIA officials—including Stanley Moskowitz, the agency’s head of congressional liaison; Scott Muller, the agency’s top lawyer; and James Pavitt, the deputy director for operations—presented a classified briefing in a Capitol Hill office to Roberts and an aide to Sen. Jay Rockefeller, the senior Democrat on the committee. Over the course of nearly two hours, the briefers covered the CIA’s brutal interrogation (or torture)—including waterboarding—of two detained terrorist suspects, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, and told Roberts of the agency’s plan to destroy videotapes of the Zubaydah sessions. The memo noted that Roberts “posed no objection to what he had heard” and “supported the interrogation effort.”
During the meeting, a Roberts aide asked Moskowitz if he had “taken up the line” a request Graham had made in late November 2002 for an independent committee inquiry into the CIA’s interrogation program. (At that time, Graham had been chairing the intelligence committee, but he left the committee in January 2003, as Republicans took over the Senate.)
[Read more at Mother Jones]
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