Bob Graham on Washington Journal May 18, 2009. Graham continues to raise red flags about the CIA's record keeping and whether they can be considered reliable as to when Congressional committee members were briefed. Earlier in the program Graham suggested that the CIA needed to allow members of Congress to see the documents and sign off on them with an opportunity to dissent as to the content before making them part of any official record. His suggestion certainly would put a stop to this he said/she said gamesmanship we're seeing right now.
Q: Sen. Graham I did want to follow up on an interview that you gave to Huffington Post last week. They write "In testimony that could bolster Speaker Nancy Pelosi's claim that the CIA misled her during briefings on detainee interrogations, former Senator Bob Graham insisted on Thursday that he too was kept in the dark about the use of waterboarding, and called the agency's records on these briefings 'suspect.'
In an interview with the Huffington Post, the former Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman said that approximately a month ago, the CIA provided him with false information about how many times and when he was briefed on enhanced interrogations."
What was your reasoning for asking the CIA for this information. What sort of raised red flags for you?
Graham: When this issue started to bubble up after the President released the so called torture memos, allegations were made that all of the leadership of the Intelligence Committee had been fully briefed on this. I knew that was not the case with me. So I called the CIA and asked what were the dates on which I, Bob Graham, was briefed.
They gave me four dates, two in April and two in September of 2002. I had a habit of carrying with me a spiral notebook such as this. I went back to my notebook to those dates and I found that on three of the four dates, there was no briefing held. I presented that information to the CIA and they concurred that their records were in error. That to me raised some question about their general records management process and I already indicated what I thought would be one important step that would make those records more reliable.
