More Partisan Hackery

Late Friday afternoon, Silvestre Reyes, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, announced that his panel would be undertaking a formal investigation of the CIA. The ostensible subject of the probe is a highly classified program that targeted al Qaeda leaders for assassination and which CIA director Leon Panetta briefed the committee about on June 24.

"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."