All of the usual qualifiers in place, I suspect that this Washington Post story gets the core of the facts right:
[L]ong before “waterboarding” entered the public discourse, the CIA gave key legislative overseers about 30 private briefings, some of which included descriptions of that technique and other harsh interrogation methods, according to interviews with multiple U.S. officials with firsthand knowledge.
With one known exception, no formal objections were raised by the lawmakers briefed about the harsh methods during the two years in which waterboarding was employed, from 2002 to 2003, said Democrats and Republicans with direct knowledge of the matter. The lawmakers who held oversight roles during the period included Pelosi and Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) and Sens. Bob Graham (D-Fla.) and John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), as well as Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.) and Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan).
This Administration may not have asked permission to turn this into a country that tortures, but it did take those steps with the knowledge of both Republicans *and* Democrats who were charged with preventing such a thing. Again, the following quote rings true:
“In fairness, the environment was different then because we were closer to Sept. 11 and people were still in a panic,” said one U.S. official present during the early briefings. “But there was no objecting, no hand-wringing. The attitude was, ‘We don’t care what you do to those guys as long as you get the information you need to protect the American people.’ ”
My particular focus here is on the Democratic lawmakers. They failed in their fundamental responsibility to the Constitution and the American people. They’ve shown their judgment to be lacking when we needed it most, and I think that’s something we should consider closely when supporting them in the future. “What did you know, and when did you know it?” is not just a question for the President.