As the Bush administration sought to cast Graham and other Democrats as being less than truthful, a document was disclosed to the Congress that purported to show Democrats in attendance at briefings where domestic spying had been discussed.
The scene then is identical to one being played out in Congress now as a similar document was turned over to Congress about briefings top Democrats received about the Bush administration's torture program.
In May 2006, at the request of Pelosi, a four-page memo prepared by then-Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte was turned over to House Speaker Dennis Hastert. Congress had been holding hearings into the legality and scope of the administrations surveillance activities. The memo contained the dates lawmakers were briefed on the program.
The memo contained four dates that alleged Graham, along with Nancy Pelosi, then ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, the panel's Republican members, Rep. Porter Goss and Sen. Richard Shelby, were briefed: Oct. 25, 2001, Nov. 14, 2001, April 10, 2002, and July 8, 2002. A cover letter accompanying Negroponte's letter said the briefings took place at the White House.
But Graham, who famously keeps a detailed journal of his daily schedule, said he checked those dates against his own records and determined that there were no briefings on Oct. 25, 2001 and April 10, 2002. The memo claimed Graham was the only lawmaker briefed on April 10, 2002. On July 8, 2002, the document said Graham and Shelby were briefed.
"When I got those dates, I went back to my notebooks and checked and found that on most of the dates there were no meetings held," Graham said in September 2007. "In fact, in several of them, I wasn't in Washington when the meetings were supposed to have taken place. So I stand by what I said."
Graham said he did attend briefings on the two other dates but he told the Washington Post "there was no discussion of anything [about spying on Americans' telephone calls] in the meeting with Cheney."
"I came out of the room with the full sense that we were dealing with a change in technology but not policy," Graham said.
According to a Dec. 23, 2005 report in the New York Times, Pelosi also "expressed written concern about" the surveillance program in a letter to the Bush administration after one of her briefings. Her letter is still classified.
Two weeks ago, after Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair turned over the intelligence document to Rep. Pete Hoekstra that contained the dates and a summary of the briefings given to a select group of Republican and Democratic Congressional leaders about "enhanced interrogation techniques...employed" on one high-value detainee, Graham revealed that three of the four dates in which the CIA had said he received briefings never occurred.
"When I asked the CIA when was I briefed, they gave me four dates, two in April and two in September of '02. On three of the four occasions, when I consulted my schedule and my notes, it was clear that no briefing had taken place, and the CIA eventually concurred in that. So their record keeping is a little bit suspect," Graham said in an interview with WNYC radio.
Moreover, Graham said he was not told about the torture techniques used that the CIA claimed it had briefed him and Sen. Richard Shelby on, echoing the statements he made back in 2005 about being kept in the dark regarding the domestic surveillance program.
The document also alleged that Pelosi was given a full accounting of the torture program during in 2002 and 2003. But Pelosi said last week she was mislead by the CIA and that she was not immediately told that the CIA had already been waterboarding and using other torture techniques against high-value prisoners during her initial briefings as the CIA has claimed.
Last Updated on Wednesday, 20 May 2009 08:10
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