Nancy Pelosi is still insisting that she knew nothing about the CIA’s use of waterboarding, despite the release of intelligence documents showing that she had been briefed by the Bush Administration on details of its harsh interrogation programme.

The disclosures on Thursday night appear to contradict repeated statements by the House of Representatives Speaker in which she claimed never to have been told that techniques — since described by President Obama as torture — had actually been deployed.

A ten-page memorandum revealed that Ms Pelosi, at the time the most senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, received a secret briefing in September 2002 about the programme, including an interrogation of Abu Zubaydah.

Although the memo makes no specific reference to waterboarding — which simulates the sensation of drowning and has therefore been described by human rights activists as torture — Justice Department documents disclosed last month show that Abu Zubaydah was the first of three prisoners to be subjected to the technique and underwent the procedure at least 83 times in August 2002.

Ms Pelosi’s office reiterated that she had never been briefed about the use of waterboarding — only that it had been approved in abstract terms by Bush Administration lawyers as a technique for interrogations.

“As this document shows, the Speaker was briefed only once, in September 2002. The briefers described these techniques, said they were legal, but said that waterboarding had not yet been used,” Brendan Daly, her spokesman, claimed.

His precisely worded statement did not address whether she had been informed that other harsh techniques were used during the interrogations of Abu Zubaydah.

Even the CIA suggests that its account of the meetings will not settle the debate over who knew what and when.

“In the end, you and the committee will have to determine whether this information is an accurate summary of what actually happened,” the CIA Director, Leon Panetta, said in a letter to Congressman Silvestre Reyes, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.

Republicans have accused Ms Pelosi of knowing for many years precisely the techniques CIA agents were using in interrogations — only objecting to them when they became public and liberal anti-war activists protested.

- President Obama will make a keynote address to the Muslim world during a visit to Egypt on June 4, the White House has announced. A day later he will travel to Germany to visit the city of Dresden and the Buchenwald concentration camp.

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