WASHINGTON — After weeks of denials and years of misleading rhetoric, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi admitted for the first time yesterday that she knew about the waterboarding of terror suspects as early as in 2003.
“I wasn’t briefed. I was informed that someone else had been briefed about it,” she said during an intense showdown with reporters, who have been trying for weeks to determine exactly what the speaker knew about the interrogations.
She maintained, however, that she was not formally briefed on the methods by intelligence officers.
“We were told specifically that waterboarding was not being used,” she said in reference to a CIA briefing she received in the fall of 2002.
She claimed that she subsequently was told by other lawmakers that they had been informed that the drowning-simulation technique, in fact, was being used to gather intelligence on terrorist plotters.
House Republican Leader John Boehner said the revelations were damning.
“When you look at the number of briefings that the speaker was in, and other Democrat members of the House and Senate, it’s pretty clear that they were well aware of what these enhanced interrogation techniques were,” said the Ohio lawmaker.
Pelosi’s denials contradicted a memo, recently prepared by the CIA and sent to Congress, outlining the numerous briefings they held for Pelosi and other top-ranking members of Congress.
The chart released by the CIA says Pelosi (D-Calif.) and the top Intelligence Committee Republican, then-Rep. Porter J. Goss of Florida, were given a “description of the particular [enhanced interrogation techniques] that had been employed.”
The chart specifically notes a discussion of waterboarding in 13 briefings between February 2003 and March 2009, most attended by Democrats as well as Republicans.
The revelations undermine four years of political attacks on former President Bush and Republicans in Congress by Democrats who suggested they had clean hands and were morally outraged to discover the techniques had been used on terror suspects.
Caught in the eye of the political storm, Pelosi yesterday hit back, accusing the CIA of lying to Congress.
“They misled us all the time,” she said.
She also suggested that the current Republican criticism marked an attempt to divert attention from the Bush administration’s actions.
“They misrepresented every step of the way, and they don’t want that focus on them, so they try to turn the attention on us,” she said.
Pelosi contended that Democrats did what they could to stop the use of waterboarding.
The senior Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, who received the 2003 briefing on the practice, sent the CIA a formal letter of protest, she said.
With Post Wire Services
churt@nypost.com