David Ignatius points out a "glaring weakness" of the Senate Intelligence Committee's torture report--that of self-accountability:
A CIA review of "contemporaneous records" shows that [a 2002] briefing to Sens. Bob Graham and Richard Shelby and Reps. Porter Goss and Nancy Pelosi included "a history of the Zubaydah interrogation, an overview of the material acquired, the resistance techniques Zubaydah had employed, and the reason for deciding to use the enhanced measures," along with a description of "the enhanced techniques that had been employed."
Did the members of Congress push back hard, as we now realize they should have? Did they demand more information and set stricter limits? Did they question details about the interrogation techniques that were being used? It appears that, with rare exceptions, they did not.... They were silently complicit. They just don’t own up to that fact.
Taken alone, Ignatius' criticism (corroborated, he notes, by a passel of former CIA officials) appears incontestable. In the sewer of congressional incompetence, members of Congress are somehow always clean. They are hardnosed, infinitely courageous soldiers of investigative virtue whenever they get something right, but innocent babes in the woods whenever they get that something terribly wrong.
Still, my question is this. The CIA's "covert" torture program was by definition top secret. Had, for instance, Nancy Pelosi strenuously objected to the gruesome details she was hearing in the CIA's briefings, just what, precisely, could she have done about it? She possessed no legal authority to go to the press and certainly none to effectively commit treason by blaring her horrified knowledge from the floor of the House*--and taking complaints to the war-criminal Bush administration would have been like exposing unsavory extortion rackets to the Gambino family.
So Ignatius raises a clear and rather interesting point. Ultimately, pragmatically and realistically, though, it becomes a muddled one.
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* Update: See comment section.