Now lawmakers from both parties are debating whether those members-only briefings provided a sufficient basis for oversight of an activity that is only now coming under intense Congressional scrutiny.
It is no secret that when a pope delivers an address to a group of Catholic bishops he draws upon briefings provided by the local hierarchy and his papal nuncio for the country in question.
But in interviews, Mr. Hoekstra, Mr. Graham and aides to Mr. Rockefeller and Mr. Reid all said they understood that while the briefings provided by Mr. Cheney might have been accompanied by charts, they did not constitute written reports.
(see 3.32pm) Other ministers accepted what they were told in a series of special briefings provided by John Scarlett, but Cook - perhaps because, as a former foreign secretary, he was used to dealing with MI6, was more sceptical.
At a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing last month, Mr. Goss turned aside questions about the detention program on grounds that the C.I.A. had already answered them, through the briefings provided to the leaders of the intelligence panel.
Before the news accounts of the program were published this weekend, to the extent that the Pentagon had informed Congress at all about the effort, it did so in briefings provided to committee staff members, including sessions held earlier this month, Congressional officials said.
WASHINGTON, Dec. 20 - The limited oral briefings provided by the White House to a handful of lawmakers about the domestic eavesdropping program may not have fulfilled a legal requirement under the National Security Act that calls for such reports to be in written form, Congressional officials from both parties said on Tuesday.
Even more troubling, members of Congress are left to wonder why the prior briefings provided by the Executive Branch did not cover the material contained in these articles.
This, he notes dryly, means that Congress is left to decipher why "prior briefings provided by the Executive Branch did not cover the material contained in these articles".
Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee sent the president a letter, complaining that briefings provided to Congress were "limited" and did not provide "a fulsome accounting of the totality of surveillance activities conducted by the federal government, and in particular, by the NSA".
