Remember when Nancy Pelosi said she wasn’t briefed about the C.I.A.’s use of waterboarding and other forms of torture, and C.I.A. officials provided documentation that she had been briefed, and there was this whole huge back and forth about what she knew and when, and whether she should have gone public with her knowledge? Remember how Republicans in Congress at the time buttressed their argument that there should be no legal investigation or trials of Bush administration officials involved in the C.I.A. interrogation program by pointing out that if that program was illegal, Nancy Pelosi and the rest of the Democrats in Congress were complicit in it because they knew it was going on and did nothing to stop it?
Well, it appears that Republicans are going to have to drop their insistence that Abdulmutallab be designated an enemy combatant and interrogated in a military court where there is no due process and torture can be used. Because it now looks very much like Republicans leaders in Congress may be complicit in the legal, constitutional handling of Abdulmutallab’s arrest and interrogation:
White House counterterrorism chief John Brennan revealed Sunday that he briefed four Republican congressional leaders on Christmas night about the arrest and subsequent handling of the suspect in an attempted sky bombing.
“None of those individuals raised any concerns with me, at that point,” Brennan said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “They didn’t say, ‘Is he going into military custody? Is he going to be Mirandized?’ They were very appreciative of the information. We told them we’d keep them informed. And that’s what we did.”
The revelation could undermine Republican complaints about the reading of Miranda rights to the Nigerian suspect, Umar Farouk Abdulmatallab.
Brennan, assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism, told David Gregory: “I explained to them that he was in FBI custody. That Mr. Abdulmatallab was in fact talking, that he was cooperating at that point. They knew that ‘in FBI custody’ means that there’s a process then you follow as far as Mirandizing and presenting him in front of the magistrate.”
Of course, the Gang of Four (Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Christopher Bond, and Pete Hoekstra) are insisting now that Brennan “never told [them] about any plans to Mirandize the Christmas Day bomber” and that “the Administration did not even consult our intelligence chiefs.” Well, the first excuse sounds very similar to Nancy Pelosi’s insistence that she was told waterboarding might be used, but not that it was used. And the second is flatly untrue.
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