Sen. Wyden: Bush admin didn't comply with law on intel briefings

http://briefingroom.thehill.com/2009/05/15/wyden-bush-admin-didnt-comply-with-law-on-intel-briefings/

Wyden: Bush admin didn't comply with law on intel briefings
@ 2:36 pm by Michael O'Brien


The Bush administration consistently violated the law requiring the White House to keep the intelligence committees in Congress fully informed, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) insinuated Friday.

Wyden appeared on MSNBC to defend House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's (D-Calif.) claims that the CIA had misled Congress in its intelligence briefings, and alleged that the previous administration had failed to comply with laws on briefings.

"I can't speculate on what Nancy Pelosi was told at that time," Wyden said. "What I can tell you is there is a 1947 law that says all the members of the Intelligence Committee must be kept currently and fully informed, and the Bush administration consistently didn't comply with that law."

(A background on that law and congressinal briefings can be found at link.)

Wyden sought to redirect some of the heat now on Pelosi against the Bush administration, accusing them of falling short in their obligation to members of Congress, including Pelosi.

Wyden said that some lawmakers had actually written the Bush administration as early as 2006 to register their displeasure in U.S. interrogation tactics, a letter which he said they hope to declassify.

The Oregon Democrat also said he agreed with former Vice President Cheney's demands that Bush-era memos on interrogation programs should be declassified.

"I will tell you, I find it hard to believe why the vice president is so convinced that those documents support his position," Wyden said. "But as far as I'm concerned, most of that information ought to be declassified so we can get beyond this 'he said, she said' business."

I love my senator!

forward in Pelosi's defense today. Props for that!

I remember when the Bush administration went into turtle mode, and I suspected right then that there was bound to be at least some and probably a whole lot of skullduggery going on. But all us dirty fuckin' hippies were a bunch of tin-foil hat conspiracists! See, the Bush administration had to do all these things away from the public eye because otherwise the terrorists might get the wind up and stop doing terrorist stuff for fear of getting caught. But don't you dirty fuckin' hippies worry about it for a minute, we were told. There were going to be scads (scads, I tell you!) of reports to various congressional committees. Why, every 60 days, just like clockwork, the proper people would be informed on everything that was going on, and the U.S. of A. would be saved from the scourge of terrorism. So stick that in your pipe and smoke it, you dirty fuckin’ hippies.

I knew for a fact that every last one of those promises was going to be broken, and broken in ways that I couldn’t even imagine. And so it was. I’m glad to see that Sen. Wyden has noticed this now, too. The question is, as always:

What are you going to do about it, elected Democratic representatives and senators? We didn’t vote you into office and hand you the keys to the government to sweep war crimes under the rug.