If you were preaching to the choir, that tangential distraction might work. But not with me, and not with most of this audience. Unless you're trying to push moral relativism, the fact that members of the House and Senate Intelligence committees were briefed in 2002 does nothing to excuse the destruction of the interrogation videos in 2005.

If they'd leaked the information from the briefing, you'd have screamed bloody murder about that. In reality, every member of those committees was gagged by the national security classification. Are you saying now that they were wrong to honor their pledge to secrecy? From the article you linked:

Congressional officials say the groups' ability to challenge the practices was hampered by strict rules of secrecy that prohibited them from being able to take notes or consult legal experts or members of their own staffs.

And don't count on me losing track of the chronology. In 2002 Democrats were in a minority in Congress and being thoroughly kept down by the majority. All this was amidst a national mood in which daring to say anything critical of Bush's "war on terror" was guaranteed to bring down shrieks of "treason!" from the harpies of the Right. Or, again, as the article put it:

"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.' "

Only after information about the practice began to leak in news accounts in 2005 -- by which time the CIA had already abandoned waterboarding -- did doubts about its legality among individual lawmakers evolve into more widespread dissent

Bottom line, acquiscence by Democratic (and Republican) Congresspeople does nothing to make Bush and his CIA look better, it only tarnishes those who acquisced. I'm not buying the moral relativism excuse.