Foreign Policy: Bush era CIA officials push back:

So it's perhaps not surprising that Bush-era intelligence officials might want to push back against a Democratic congresswoman and, by extension, the Democratic Congress as well. After all, even as the Obama administration insists it opposes any legal action against those involved, Democrats on the Hill might feel pressured to step up their investigations and even pursue legal actions. The message of the pushback is loud and clear: Congress and the Democrats weren't innocent in these activities either. ....

A former senior U.S. intelligence officer ... wondered if the timing of this story was about changing the subject, from what Bush-era officials had authorized, to what the Congress was complicit in. "Is this about taking pressure off the revelations of waterboarding and the memos?" he speculated. "And the fact," he added, "that no real intelligence came out of this whole effort?" referring to the enhanced interrogation/torture regime revealed in the memos, which he said produced no actionable intelligence.

(For his part, Stein said in an online chat Monday afternoon that he had had the story for a while, and only decided to move on it now.)

But the former intelligence official familiar with the matter noted that Goss has given only one on-the-record interview on these CIA controversies since leaving the CIA director job. In the December 2007 interview, he said that Congressional leaders including Representatives Pelosi and Harman, Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) and Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS), had been briefed on CIA waterboarding back in 2002. "Among those being briefed, there was a pretty full understanding of what the CIA was doing," Goss told the Washington Post. "And the reaction in the room was not just approval, but encouragement."

Who was the lone person the article identified as objecting to the program?

Jane Harman. ...

Posted by Laura at April 20, 2009 06:02 PM