More Partisan Hackery

“After careful consideration and consultation with the Ranking Minority Member and other members of the Committee, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence will conduct an investigation into possible violations of federal law, including the National Security Act of 1947,” Reyes said in a statement.

Let us offer to save the distinguished chairman some time, and the taxpayers some money: Forget it. There were no violations of federal law. Dennis Blair, Barack Obama’s director of national intelligence, told the Washington Post that the CIA was not required to brief Congress about a program that appears never to have been implemented. In either case, the statute that governs these matters leaves such notification to the discretion of the executive branch. And within minutes of the announcement of the investigation, and despite Reyes’s claim of having consulted him, Representative Pete Hoekstra, the ranking minority member, blasted the probe as “partisan” hackery.

Reyes is undertaking the investigation for two obvious reasons. One, House Democrats believe that exposing details of the planned program will embarrass the Bush administration (and still-serving Republicans). But more important, Democrats want to provide cover for Nancy Pelosi, who made reckless claims about the CIA months ago and has been unable to back them up. In short, it’s all political.

First, the program itself: On June 23, officials from the CIA’s counterterrorism center told Panetta they wanted to activate a dormant program that was intended to use U.S. assets–including military contractors, sources tell THE WEEKLY STANDARD–to assassinate al Qaeda leaders. It was the first Panetta had learned of the program. He didn’t like it, cancelled it, and hastily arranged to brief Congress.

The next day, Panetta told the House Intelligence Committee that former Vice President Dick Cheney had instructed the CIA not to brief Congress on the program. Sources tell us that Cheney’s actual instruction was not to brief Congress on the program until it “crossed a certain threshold”–that is, until it was activated. The program in fact was an “on-again, off-again” plan that received some funding but never became fully operational. “No one ever pulled a trigger,” one source explained, so Cheney’s threshold was never crossed. Cheney worried about the possibility of leaks–a concern that seems well-founded given the number of details revealed publicly within days of the program being explained by Panetta in a classified session.

Second, the investigation: Nancy Pelosi made her friend Reyes chairman of the House Intelligence panel. She has been battling the CIA for months about whether she was told–in a briefing on September 4, 2002–that the CIA was waterboarding terrorists. Porter Goss, then chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, attended the briefing and confirmed the CIA’s account. Indeed, he says Pelosi joined him in asking whether the CIA was doing enough to obtain information from detainees.

Pelosi has repeatedly denied all of this. “We were not–I repeat–were not told that waterboarding or any of these other enhanced interrogation methods were used,” she said in April. The CIA, she claimed, “did not tell us they were using that, flat out. And any, any contention to the contrary is simply not true.”

On May 5, in the face of Pelosi’s denials, the CIA released a contemporaneous account of the briefing Pelosi attended that directly contradicts her account. “Briefing on EITs [Enhanced Interrogation Techniques] including use of EITs on Abu Zubaydah, background on [legal] authorities, and a description of the particular EITs that had been employed.”

On May 14, Pelosi used her weekly press conference to accuse CIA officials of lying. This remarkable claim prompted follow-up questions from reporters unsure whether they’d heard her correctly. They had. “Yes,” Pelosi reiterated, “I am saying the CIA was misleading the Congress.”

The next day, Panetta decried Pelosi’s allegations in a letter to the CIA workforce. “Let me be clear: It is not our policy or practice to mislead Congress. It is against our laws and our values.”

The story had largely disappeared from the front pages until early this month, when House Democrats leaked to the press a letter they had written Panetta demanding that the CIA director “correct” his claim–in effect, asking him to acknowledge that the CIA did routinely lie to Congress. On June 26, they wrote:

The CIA denied that Panetta said any such thing in his testimony, and Panetta, not surprisingly, declined the invitation to insult his agency. “Director Panetta stands by his May 15 statement. It is not the policy or practice of the CIA to mislead Congress,” said CIA spokesman George Little.

Some Democrats say that their interest in proving that the CIA misleads Congress is separate and apart from Nancy Pelosi’s claim that the CIA misleads Congress. -Others are more candid: On Saturday, July 12, Politico published an article under the headline: “Jan Schakowsky: Dick Cheney’s Program Validates Nancy Pelosi.”

“It certainly confirms her characterization of the level of openness the intelligence community and the CIA have given to Congress,” said Schakowsky, the Illinois Democrat who chairs the House Intelligence Committee’s subcommittee on investigations and oversight and has taken the lead in pressing for the investigation. Asked if the revelation of the program on June 24 validates Pelosi’s claim that the CIA misleads Congress, Schakowsky said: “Absolutely.”

So what about that June 24 briefing, where Panetta apparently tried to deflect attention from his fight with Pelosi by making an issue of Cheney’s reluctance to brief Congress about the planned assassination program? Presumably the administration and congressional Democrats are relieved to be able to unite (more or less–Dennis Blair apparently didn’t get the memo) against a man they love to attack.

Of course, last time they went after Cheney–in the controversy over the Justice Department memos on enhanced interrogation techniques–Cheney fought back effectively. He demanded the release of CIA memos which he said would show that the techniques worked. Similarly House Republicans have asked for all documentation related to Pelosi’s briefings on enhanced interrogation techniques (which are said to include a slide show presented to her on September 4, 2002). The Obama administration, the self-proclaimed “most-transparent administration in history,” continues to stonewall on the release of the Cheney memos and the Pelosi documents.

So the Democrats’ position seems to be:

One: We in the Obama administration get to choose to release only what is politically opportune to release.

Two: We in Congress investigate only what and when it’s politically opportune to investigate.

Three: As a matter of policy, we apparently shouldn’t try too hard to kill al Qaeda leaders (except if it can be done by aerial attacks).

And four: We in Congress don’t need to keep classified programs secret once we’re briefed on them.

In the forthcoming debate between President Obama and the Democratic Congress, on the one hand, and Dick Cheney on the other, we’ll be betting again on Cheney.

–Stephen F. Hayes and William Kristol