Pat Dollard

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POLITICO: Democrats on the House intelligence committee said Thursday that CIA officers broke the law in 2002 if they told Nancy Pelosi then that they had not yet engaged in waterboarding.

“If they make a false report, absolutely it’s illegal,” said Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. “If they fail to make a report when they’re obligated to that is also illegal — a violation of the National Security Act.”

Said CIA Spokesman George Little: “It is not the policy of the CIA to mislead the United States Congress.”

Schiff said that the “question of recourse [against the CIA] has come up actually a number of times — not just in this context.” But he said it’s “very difficult because for one thing you can’t publicly disclose the information and to actually bring perjury charges or bring an action under the National Security Act without making it public is probably not possible.”

The act provides little in the way of recourse, but the committee is seriously looking at revising the law so that there are ramifications for failing to brief Congress on critical intelligence matters, aides said.

At a press briefing Thursday, Pelosi denied that the CIA told her in Sept. 2002 that the United States had waterboarded al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah.

Pelosi was the ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee at the time of the 2002 briefing. The current chairman, Silvestre Reyes (D-Texas), acknowledged Thursday that the “committee does not keep any records” about briefings that leaders of the committee and Congress receive.

She can’t even get a complete sentence out without stuttering…

Reyers and other Democrats currently on the committee told reporters Thursday that the GOP is waging a politically motivated attack on the speaker — and that she has received an unfair ride in the press.

“I tell you who you need to get — that’s Hoekstra, who is running for governor with irresponsible undertakings, and you tell him I said so,” said Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-Fla.), referring to Rep. Pete Hoekstra, the ranking Republican on the committee and a leading Pelosi critic.

“The Democrats just don’t get it,” said Jamal Ware, a spokesman for Hoekstra. “They think this is personal or political when all along Congressman Hoekstra has said this is about congressional oversight. The Democrats have no real answers on this.”

The Democrats also defended Pelosi’s decision not to raise objections to waterboarding in 2003, when she says she first learned of the practice secondhand from an aide who attended a briefing with Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.), then the ranking Democrat on the intelligence committee. Harman wrote a letter of protest — a letter with which Pelosi has said she “concurred,” although she is not mentioned in it.

“She’s away from Intel now, she’s not focused on it, it’s not her priority,” Rep. C.A. Ruppersberger (D-Md.) said of Pelosi in 2003. “We have all these committees we go to, we get briefed on hundreds and hundreds of things. The specialist, though, was the chairman, or the ranking at the time, Jane Harman. And she did what she had to do, and we couldn’t get a response back.”

In fact, Harman did receive a response from CIA General Counsel Scott W. Muller; it just wasn’t the one she wanted. In a February 2003 letter, Miller wrote: “As we informed both you and the leadership of the intelligence committees last September, a number of executive branch lawyers including lawyers from the Department of Justice participated in the determination that, in the appropriate circumstances, use of these techniques is fully consistent with U.S. law.”