CIA asks Justice Dept. to investigate spying on Senate

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CIA asks Justice Dept. to investigate spying on Senate

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Mar 05, 2014 7:35 am

C.I.A. Employees Face New Inquiry Amid Clashes on Detention Program
By MARK MAZZETTIMARCH 4, 2014
Image
WASHINGTON — The Central Intelligence Agency’s attempt to keep secret the details of a defunct detention and interrogation program has escalated a battle between the agency and members of Congress and led to an investigation by the C.I.A.’s internal watchdog into the conduct of agency employees.

The agency’s inspector general began the inquiry partly as a response to complaints from members of Congress that C.I.A. employees were improperly monitoring the work of staff members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, according to government officials with knowledge of the investigation.

The committee has spent several years working on a voluminous report about the detention and interrogation program, and according to one official interviewed in recent days, C.I.A. officers went as far as gaining access to computer networks used by the committee to carry out its investigation.

The events have elevated the protracted battle — which began as a fight over who writes the history of the program, perhaps the most controversial aspect of the American government’s response to the Sept. 11 attacks — into a bitter standoff that in essence is a dispute over the separation of powers and congressional oversight of spy agencies.

The specifics of the inspector general’s investigation are unclear. But several officials interviewed in recent days — all of whom insisted on anonymity, citing a continuing inquiry — said it began after the C.I.A. took what Senator Mark Udall, Democrat of Colorado, on Tuesday called an “unprecedented action” against the committee.

The action, which Mr. Udall did not describe, took place after C.I.A. officials came to suspect that congressional staff members had gained unauthorized access to agency documents during the course of the Intelligence Committee’s years-long investigation into the detention and interrogation program.

It is not known what the agency’s inspector general, David B. Buckley, has found in the investigation or whether Mr. Buckley has referred any cases to the Justice Department for further investigation. Spokesmen for the agency and the Justice Department declined to comment.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California and chairwoman of the Intelligence Committee, gave few details about the dispute on Tuesday as she left a closed committee hearing on the crisis in Ukraine, but she did confirm that the C.I.A. had begun an internal review.

“There is an I.G. investigation,” she said.

Asked about the tension between the committee and the spy agency it oversees, Ms. Feinstein said, “Our oversight role will prevail.”

The episode is a rare moment of public rancor between the intelligence agencies and Ms. Feinstein’s committee, which has been criticized in some quarters for its muscular defense of many controversial intelligence programs — from the surveillance operations exposed by the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden to the Obama administration’s targeted killing program using armed drones.

The origins of the current dispute date back more than a year, when the committee completed its work on a 6,000-page report about the Bush administration’s detention and interrogation program. People who have read the study said it is a withering indictment of the program and details many instances when C.I.A. officials misled Congress, the White House and the public about the value of the agency’s brutal interrogation methods, including waterboarding.

The report has yet to be declassified, but last June, John O. Brennan, the C.I.A. director, responded to the Senate report with a 122-page rebuttal challenging specific facts in the report as well as the investigation’s overarching conclusion — that the agency’s interrogation methods yielded little valuable intelligence.

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Then, in December, Mr. Udall revealed that the Intelligence Committee had become aware of an internal C.I.A. study that he said was “consistent with the Intelligence Committee’s report” and “conflicts with the official C.I.A. response to the committee’s report.”

It appears that Mr. Udall’s revelation is what set off the current fight, with C.I.A. officials accusing the Intelligence Committee of learning about the internal review by gaining unauthorized access to agency databases.

In a letter to President Obama on Tuesday, Mr. Udall made a vague reference to the dispute over the C.I.A.’s internal report.

“As you are aware, the C.I.A. has recently taken unprecedented action against the committee in relation to the internal C.I.A. review, and I find these actions to be incredibly troubling for the committee’s oversight responsibilities and for our democracy,” he wrote.

The letter gave no details about the “unprecedented action,” but Mr. Udall said that it was important for the committee to “be able to do its oversight work — consistent with our constitutional principle of the separation of powers — without the C.I.A. posing impediments or obstacles as it is today.”

Mr. Obama ended the C.I.A.’s detention program in one of his first acts in the Oval Office, and he has denounced the interrogation methods as illegal torture.

Mr. Udall and Mr. Brennan had a testy exchange about the internal C.I.A. document in January, during one of the committee’s rare open hearings.

“Were you aware of this C.I.A. internal review when you provided the C.I.A.’s official response to this committee in June of last year?” Mr. Udall asked.

“It wasn’t a review, Senator, it was a summary,” Mr. Brennan responded. “And at the time, no, I had not gone through it.”

Mr. Brennan, who was a senior C.I.A. official at the beginning of the Bush administration when the interrogations were first begun, has found himself in an awkward position.

During his confirmation hearing last year to become C.I.A. director, he said that he had always been opposed to the techniques and that he had voiced his opposition to other agency officials. He did not say to whom he had expressed these misgivings, and former C.I.A. officials at the time said they could not recall Mr. Brennan’s having opposed the program.

In a statement last year, Mr. Brennan said that the interrogation methods once used by the C.I.A. “are not an appropriate method to obtain intelligence” and that “their use impairs our ability to play a leadership role in the world.” But he has sparred frequently behind closed doors with Senator Feinstein about the committee’s voluminous report.

The Senate’s investigation into the C.I.A. program took four years to complete and cost more than $40 million, in part because the C.I.A. insisted that committee staff members be allowed to review classified cables only at a secure facility in Northern Virginia. And only after a group of outside contractors had reviewed the documents first.
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Re: CIA asks Justice Dept. to investigate spying on Senate

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Mar 05, 2014 10:40 pm

C.I.A. Employees Face New Inquiry Amid Clashes on Detention Program
By MARK MAZZETTIMARCH 4, 2014

On Capitol Hill, Directors James Comey of the F.B.I., John O. Brennan of the C.I.A. and James R. Clapper Jr. of national intelligence. Credit Alex Wong/Getty Images

WASHINGTON — The Central Intelligence Agency’s attempt to keep secret the details of a defunct detention and interrogation program has escalated a battle between the agency and members of Congress and led to an investigation by the C.I.A.’s internal watchdog into the conduct of agency employees.

The agency’s inspector general began the inquiry partly as a response to complaints from members of Congress that C.I.A. employees were improperly monitoring the work of staff members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, according to government officials with knowledge of the investigation.

The committee has spent several years working on a voluminous report about the detention and interrogation program, and according to one official interviewed in recent days, C.I.A. officers went as far as gaining access to computer networks used by the committee to carry out its investigation.

The events have elevated the protracted battle — which began as a fight over who writes the history of the program, perhaps the most controversial aspect of the American government’s response to the Sept. 11 attacks — into a bitter standoff that in essence is a dispute over the separation of powers and congressional oversight of spy agencies.

The specifics of the inspector general’s investigation are unclear. But several officials interviewed in recent days — all of whom insisted on anonymity, citing a continuing inquiry — said it began after the C.I.A. took what Senator Mark Udall, Democrat of Colorado, on Tuesday called an “unprecedented action” against the committee.

The action, which Mr. Udall did not describe, took place after C.I.A. officials came to suspect that congressional staff members had gained unauthorized access to agency documents during the course of the Intelligence Committee’s years-long investigation into the detention and interrogation program.

It is not known what the agency’s inspector general, David B. Buckley, has found in the investigation or whether Mr. Buckley has referred any cases to the Justice Department for further investigation. Spokesmen for the agency and the Justice Department declined to comment.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California and chairwoman of the Intelligence Committee, gave few details about the dispute on Tuesday as she left a closed committee hearing on the crisis in Ukraine, but she did confirm that the C.I.A. had begun an internal review.

“There is an I.G. investigation,” she said.

Asked about the tension between the committee and the spy agency it oversees, Ms. Feinstein said, “Our oversight role will prevail.”

The episode is a rare moment of public rancor between the intelligence agencies and Ms. Feinstein’s committee, which has been criticized in some quarters for its muscular defense of many controversial intelligence programs — from the surveillance operations exposed by the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden to the Obama administration’s targeted killing program using armed drones.

The origins of the current dispute date back more than a year, when the committee completed its work on a 6,000-page report about the Bush administration’s detention and interrogation program. People who have read the study said it is a withering indictment of the program and details many instances when C.I.A. officials misled Congress, the White House and the public about the value of the agency’s brutal interrogation methods, including waterboarding.

The report has yet to be declassified, but last June, John O. Brennan, the C.I.A. director, responded to the Senate report with a 122-page rebuttal challenging specific facts in the report as well as the investigation’s overarching conclusion — that the agency’s interrogation methods yielded little valuable intelligence.

Then, in December, Mr. Udall revealed that the Intelligence Committee had become aware of an internal C.I.A. study that he said was “consistent with the Intelligence Committee’s report” and “conflicts with the official C.I.A. response to the committee’s report.”

It appears that Mr. Udall’s revelation is what set off the current fight, with C.I.A. officials accusing the Intelligence Committee of learning about the internal review by gaining unauthorized access to agency databases.

In a letter to President Obama on Tuesday, Mr. Udall made a vague reference to the dispute over the C.I.A.’s internal report.

“As you are aware, the C.I.A. has recently taken unprecedented action against the committee in relation to the internal C.I.A. review, and I find these actions to be incredibly troubling for the committee’s oversight responsibilities and for our democracy,” he wrote.

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The letter gave no details about the “unprecedented action,” but Mr. Udall said that it was important for the committee to “be able to do its oversight work — consistent with our constitutional principle of the separation of powers — without the C.I.A. posing impediments or obstacles as it is today.”

Mr. Obama ended the C.I.A.’s detention program in one of his first acts in the Oval Office, and he has denounced the interrogation methods as illegal torture.

Mr. Udall and Mr. Brennan had a testy exchange about the internal C.I.A. document in January, during one of the committee’s rare open hearings.

“Were you aware of this C.I.A. internal review when you provided the C.I.A.’s official response to this committee in June of last year?” Mr. Udall asked.

“It wasn’t a review, Senator, it was a summary,” Mr. Brennan responded. “And at the time, no, I had not gone through it.”

Mr. Brennan, who was a senior C.I.A. official at the beginning of the Bush administration when the interrogations were first begun, has found himself in an awkward position.

During his confirmation hearing last year to become C.I.A. director, he said that he had always been opposed to the techniques and that he had voiced his opposition to other agency officials. He did not say to whom he had expressed these misgivings, and former C.I.A. officials at the time said they could not recall Mr. Brennan’s having opposed the program.

In a statement last year, Mr. Brennan said that the interrogation methods once used by the C.I.A. “are not an appropriate method to obtain intelligence” and that “their use impairs our ability to play a leadership role in the world.” But he has sparred frequently behind closed doors with Senator Feinstein about the committee’s voluminous report.

The Senate’s investigation into the C.I.A. program took four years to complete and cost more than $40 million, in part because the C.I.A. insisted that committee staff members be allowed to review classified cables only at a secure facility in Northern Virginia. And only after a group of outside contractors had reviewed the documents first.


Did the CIA Spy on Senate Investigators?
By Niels Lesniewski
Posted at 8:12 a.m. on March 5, 2014
Comments in post: Did the CIA Spy on Senate Investigators?1
heinrich udall wyden 142 012914 1 445x296 Did the CIA Spy on Senate Investigators?
(Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call File Photo)

When Sen. Mark Udall alleged interference by the Central Intelligence Agency into Intelligence Committee affairs Tuesday, it wasn’t immediately clear what he meant.

The Colorado Democrat appeared to choose his words carefully in a letter to President Barack Obama announcing opposition to moving on the nomination of Caroline Krass to be CIA general counsel without “significant progress” in responding to his inquires about CIA detention and torture programs. Udall referred to “unprecedented action against the Committee” in the letter sent Tuesday, but it wasn’t immediately clear to what he might be referring.

A bombshell report published late Tuesday gives a clue. McClatchy reported the Justice Department may have been asked by the CIA inspector general to investigate CIA monitoring of computers used by the Senate Intelligence Committee while preparing a report on torture.


McClatchy cited sources and documents indicating that the CIA may have improperly monitored computers used by Senate staff working out of Langley, Va., to investigate the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” during the George W. Bush administration.That work led to the production of a 6,300-page Intelligence Committee report on detention and interrogation that remains classified.

“As you are aware, the CIA has recently taken unprecedented action against the Committee in relation to the internal CIA review, and I find these actions to be incredibly troubling for the Committee’s oversight responsibilities and for our democracy,” Udall wrote. “It is essential that the Committee be able to do its oversight work — consistent with our constitutional principle of the separation of powers — without the CIA posing impediments or obstacles as it is today.”

The McClatchy report suggests that Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., may have been referring to the same CIA conduct when he questioned Director John Brennan at an open hearing in late January about the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Wyden and Udall have been among the foremost Democratic critics of the intelligence community.

The full letter from Udall to Obama about the CIA conduct and the Krass nomination is posted here.
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Re: CIA asks Justice Dept. to investigate spying on Senate

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Mar 06, 2014 7:51 pm

Obama knew CIA secretly monitored intelligence committee, senator claims
White House declines to comment after Mark Udall says agency spied on staffers preparing scathing report into CIA torture after 9/11

Spencer Ackerman in Washington
The Guardian, Wednesday 5 March 2014 12.06 EST

Barack Obama. Udall wants the president to help declassify the 6,300-page inquiry by the committee into CIA torture. Photograph: Charles Dharapak/AP
A leading US senator has said that President Obama knew of an “unprecedented action” taken by the CIA against the Senate intelligence committee, which has apparently prompted an inspector general’s inquiry at Langley.

The subtle reference in a Tuesday letter from Senator Mark Udall to Obama, seeking to enlist the president’s help in declassifying a 6,300-page inquiry by the committee into torture carried out by CIA interrogators after 9/11, threatens to plunge the White House into a battle between the agency and its Senate overseers.

McClatchy and the New York Times reported Wednesday that the CIA had secretly monitored computers used by committee staffers preparing the inquiry report, which is said to be scathing not only about the brutality and ineffectiveness of the agency’s interrogation techniques but deception by the CIA to Congress and policymakers about it. The CIA sharply disputes the committee’s findings.

Udall, a Colorado Democrat and one of the CIA’s leading pursuers on the committee, appeared to reference that surreptitious spying on Congress, which Udall said undermined democratic principles.

“As you are aware, the CIA has recently taken unprecedented action against the committee in relation to the internal CIA review and I find these actions to be incredibly troubling for the Committee’s oversight powers and for our democracy,” Udall wrote to Obama on Tuesday.

Independent observers were unaware of a precedent for the CIA spying on the congressional committees established in the 1970s to check abuses by the intelligence agencies.

“In the worst case, it would be a subversion of independent oversight, and a violation of separation of powers,” said Steven Aftergood, an intelligence analyst at the Federation of American Scientists. “It’s potentially very serious.”

The White House declined to comment, but National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said Obama supported making the major findings of the torture report public.

“For some time, the White House has made clear to the chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that a summary of the findings and conclusions of the final report should be declassified, with any appropriate redactions necessary to protect national security,” Hayden said.

McClatchy reported that the CIA inspector general has made a criminal referral to the Justice Department, a threshold procedure for opening a criminal investigation.

Neither the CIA nor the Justice Department would comment for this story.

In 2012, the Justice Department closed an inquiry into prosecuting low-level CIA practitioners of torture without bringing any charges. But the prospect of the agency spying on its Senate overseers who prepared their own inquiry potentially places the agency right back into the legal morass it has labored for years to avoid.

In February, the CIA confirmed to the Guardian that it is subject to the Federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which makes it a crime to access government computer networks without authorization. The issue arose after Udall’s partner on the committee, Oregon Democrat Ron Wyden, asked CIA Director John Brennan at a January hearing, without elaboration, if the statute applied.

Overshadowed by the CIA inspector general’s inquiry is the future of the report itself.

The committee is pushing for a declassification that the Justice Department, in a letter responding to a lawsuit by journalist Jason Leopold, said is a decision that rests with the committee itself.

But the president of the United States possesses wide latitude to order the report released, as the White House says it supports. “The classification system is based on executive order, not on statute, and the president has absolute authority to declassify executive branch records at will,” said Aftergood.

“In this case, he could order declassification of the Senate intelligence committee report today.”

Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat and ex officio member of the intelligence committee, said the alleged monitoring was potentially “extremely serious.”

“If, as alleged in the media, CIA accessed without permission or authority a computer network dedicated for use by a Senate committee, it would be an extremely serious matter. Such activity, if it occurred as alleged, would impede Congress’ ability to carry out its constitutional oversight responsibilities and could violate federal law,” Levin said in a statement on Wednesday.
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Re: CIA asks Justice Dept. to investigate spying on Senate

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Mar 09, 2014 1:52 pm

CIA: We Spied on Senate Intelligence Committee Only Because Classified Documents Proved We’re Liars

Earlier this week, we wrote about the accusations that the CIA was spying on Senate staffers on the Senate Intelligence Committee as they were working on a massive $40 million, 6,300-page report condemning the CIA's torture program. The DOJ is apparently already investigating if the CIA violated computer hacking laws in spying on the Senate Intelligence Committee computers. The issue revolved around a draft of an internal review by the CIA, which apparently corroborates many of the Senate report's findings -- but which the CIA did not hand over to the Senate. This internal report not only supports the Senate report's findings, but also shows that the CIA has been lying in response to questions about the terror program.

In response to all of this, it appears that the CIA is attempting, weakly, to spin this as being the Senate staffers' fault, arguing that the real breach was the fact that the Senate staffers somehow broke the rules in obtaining that internal review. CIA boss John Brennan's statement hints at the fact that he thinks the real problem was with the way the staffers acted, suggesting that an investigation would fault "the legislative" branch (the Senate) rather than the executive (the CIA).

In his statement on Wednesday Brennan hit back in unusually strong terms. “I am deeply dismayed that some members of the Senate have decided to make spurious allegations about CIA actions that are wholly unsupported by the facts,” Brennan said.
“I am very confident that the appropriate authorities reviewing this matter will determine where wrongdoing, if any, occurred in either the executive branch or legislative branch,” Brennan continued, raising a suggestion that the Senate committee itself might have acted improperly.

A further report detailed what he's talking about. Reporters at McClatchy have revealed that the Senate staffers working on this came across the document, printed it out, and simply walked out of the CIA and over to the Senate with it, and the CIA is furious about that. Then, in a moment of pure stupidity, the CIA appears to have confronted the Senate Intelligence Committee about all of this... directly revealing that they were spying on the Committee staffers.

Several months after the CIA submitted its official response to the committee report, aides discovered in the database of top-secret documents at CIA headquarters a draft of an internal review ordered by former CIA Director Leon Panetta of the materials released to the panel, said the knowledgeable person.
They determined that it showed that the CIA leadership disputed report findings that they knew were corroborated by the so-called Panetta review, said the knowledgeable person.

The aides printed the material, walked out of CIA headquarters with it and took it to Capitol Hill, said the knowledgeable person.

“All this goes back to what is the technical structure here,” said the U.S. official who confirmed the unauthorized removal. “If I was a Senate staffer and I was given access to documents on the system, I would have a laptop that’s cleared. I would be allowed to look at these documents. But with these sorts of things, there’s generally an agreement that you can’t download or take them.”

The CIA discovered the security breach and brought it to the committee’s attention in January, leading to a determination that the agency recorded the staffers’ use of the computers in the high-security research room, and then confirmed the breach by reviewing the usage data, said the knowledgeable person.

There are many more details in the McClatchy report, which I highly recommend reading. And, yes, perhaps there's an argument that Senate staffers weren't supposed to take such documents, but the CIA trying to spin this by saying it was those staffers who were engaged in "wrongdoing" is almost certainly going to fall flat with Congress. After all, the intelligence committee is charged with oversight of the CIA, not the other way around. "You stole the documents we were hiding from you which proved we were lying, so we spied on you to find out how you did that" is not, exactly, the kind of argument that too many people are going to find compelling.

Still, the latest is that the CIA has successfully convinced the DOJ to have the FBI kick off an investigation of the Senate staffers, rather than of the CIA breaking the law and spying on their overseers.

Of course, the CIA may still have one advantage on its side: there are still some in Congress who are so supportive of the intelligence community itself that even they will make excuses for the CIA spying on their own staff. At least that seems to be the response from Senate Intelligence vice chair Senator Saxby Chambliss, one of the most ardent defenders of the intelligence community he's supposed to be watching over. When asked about all of this, he seemed to be a lot more concerned about the staffers supposedly taking "classified" documents than about the CIA spying on those staffers:

“I have no comment. You should talk to those folks that are giving away classified information and get their opinion,” Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) said when asked about the alleged intrusions.
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Re: CIA asks Justice Dept. to investigate spying on Senate

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Mar 11, 2014 11:36 am

spying...not so much fun when they do it to you Dianne...huh?

Feinstein publicly accuses CIA of spying on Senate computers

By Ken Dilianian
March 11, 2014, 7:51 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, escalated a behind-the-scenes dispute with the CIA by publicly accusing the spy agency of secretly searching a Senate computer system, an act she said undermines congressional intelligence oversight and may have violated the law.

The expanding dispute has opened a rift between the CIA and the Senate committee that oversees it and often has defended it. Already, some CIA officers could face criminal prosecution as a result of a Justice Department investigation of the incident.

"I have grave concerns that the CIA search may well have violated the separation of powers principles," Feinstein said on the Senate floor. "I am not taking it lightly."

CIA Director John Brennan is also expected to speak publicly Tuesday, and he and his agency see the situation much differently. They believe the CIA acted appropriately in response to Senate staffers who improperly gained access to documents they were not supposed to have.

The clash grew out of a long-running Intelligence Committee study of the CIA's interrogation and detention practices under the George W. Bush administration. As part of that inquiry, the CIA set up a special facility in Virginia where committee staff members could review millions of secret documents.

At some point during their work, Senate staff members gained access to the draft of an internal review the CIA had done of the interrogations. Senators say that internal review, which remains classified, was far more critical of the CIA than the agency’s official responses to their questions had been.

CIA officials say the Senate aides were never supposed to have access to the draft, which they claim is covered by executive privilege. They began to investigate how the committee staff members had gained access to it.

In January, the CIA informed the committee it had conducted what the agency called an "audit" to determine how the staff members got the study.

The CIA has referred the conduct of its own officers -- and also that of Senate aides -- to the Justice Department for possible criminal investigation, officials said.

Feinstein said CIA action may have violated the Constitution, various federal laws and a presidential executive order that prohibits the agency from conducting domestic surveillance.

She asked for an apology and an acknowledgment from the CIA that its search of the committee's computers was inappropriate, but "I have received neither."

In a statement last week, Brennan said the CIA acted appropriately.

Feinstein’s comments raise the stakes of the dispute that has surrounded the committee's study of the CIA's actions. The committee report on interrogation practices has not been made public, but people who have read it say it amounts to a blistering indictment of the CIA program that many consider to have involved torture.

Little useful intelligence was gained from the tactics, the report concludes, and it says CIA officials lied to their superiors and Congress about what was happening.

In a written response that it also still classified, the CIA disputes those conclusions.




http://www.latimes.com/nation/politics/ ... z2vfUQMglZ
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Re: CIA asks Justice Dept. to investigate spying on Senate

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Mar 11, 2014 9:51 pm

Robert Eatinger



This is an historic day in the Senate

Conflict Erupts in Public Rebuke on C.I.A. Inquiry
By MARK MAZZETTI and JONATHAN WEISMANMARCH 11, 2014
Photo

Senator Dianne Feinstein, the chairwoman of the Senate intelligence committee. Credit Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

WASHINGTON — A festering conflict between the Central Intelligence Agency and its congressional overseers broke into the open Tuesday when Senator Dianne Feinstein, chairman of the intelligence committee and one of the C.I.A.’s staunchest defenders, delivered an extraordinary denunciation of the agency, accusing it of withholding information about its treatment of prisoners and trying to intimidate committee staff members investigating the detention program.

Describing what she called a “defining moment” for the oversight of American spy agencies, Ms. Feinstein said the C.I.A. had removed documents from computers used by Senate Intelligence Committee staff members working on a report about the agency’s detention program, searched the computers after the committee completed its report and referred a criminal case to the Justice Department in an attempt to thwart their investigation.


Senator Dianne Feinstein with Leon E. Panetta in January 2009, before he became director of Central Intelligence.Behind Clash Between C.I.A. and Congress, a Secret Report on InterrogationsMARCH 7, 2014
John O. Brennan, the director of the C.I.A., said he was “dismayed” that some lawmakers had “decided to make spurious allegations about C.I.A. actions that are wholly unsupported.”Computer Searches at Center of Dispute on C.I.A. DetentionsMARCH 5, 2014
The 6,300-page report has been at the center of a bitter dispute between the committee and the agency, which says it contains many inaccuracies and wants them to be corrected before it is released.

VIDEO|1:05Credit J. Scott Applewhite/Associated PressFeinstein Questions C.I.A. Search Senator Dianne Feinstein states on the Senate floor that the Central Intelligence Agency has accessed the computers of the Senate intelligence committee.
Ms. Feinstein’s disclosures came a week after it was first reported that the C.I.A. last year had monitored computers used by her staff in an effort to learn how the committee may have gained access to the agency’s own internal agency review of the detention and interrogation program that became perhaps the most criticized part of the American government’s response to the Sept. 11 attacks.

Ms. Feinstein said the internal review bolstered the conclusions of the committee’s still-classified report on the program, which President Obama officially ended in January 2009 after sharply criticizing it during the 2008 presidential campaign.

For an intelligence community already buffeted by controversies over electronic surveillance and armed drone strikes, the rupture with Ms. Feinstein, one of its closest congressional allies, could have broad ramifications for the entire American intelligence apparatus.

Ms. Feinstein has proved to be a bulwark for intelligence agencies in recent years: publicly defending the National Security Agency’s telephone and Internet surveillance activities, the C.I.A.’s authority over drone strikes and the F.B.I.’s actions under the Patriot Act against a growing bipartisan chorus of critics.

“Feinstein has always pushed the agency in private and defended it in public,” said Amy B. Zegart, who studies intelligence issues at Stanford University. “Now she is skewering the C.I.A. in public. This is a whole new world for the C.I.A.”

Ms. Feinstein, who had refused to comment on the dispute between the C.I.A. and her committee, took the Senate floor on Tuesday morning to say the agency’s actions had breached constitutional provisions for the separation of powers and “were a potential effort to intimidate.”

“How this will be resolved will show whether the Intelligence Committee can be effective in monitoring and investigating our nation’s intelligence activities, or whether our work can be thwarted by those we oversee,” she said.

Hours later, John O. Brennan, the C.I.A. director, forcefully denied Ms. Feinstein’s assertions that the agency had carried out a broad effort to spy on the committee’s work.

“Nothing could be further from the truth,” Mr. Brennan said in response to questions during an appearance at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington.”

Referring to Justice Department inquiries now underway, Mr. Brennan urged Senate critics to await the results of those reviews before leveling accusations against the C.I.A.

“When the facts come out on this, I think a lot of people who are claiming that there has been this tremendous sort of spying and monitoring and hacking will be proved wrong,” he said.

Jay Carney, the White House spokesman, declined to say whether Mr. Obama had spoken to Mr. Brennan, who served as a White House adviser during the president’s first term, about the C.I.A. controversy. “Well, let me just say, folks here and in the administration have been in regular consultation with Chairman Feinstein about the broader issues here,” Mr. Carney said. “We’ve made clear that we want to see the report’s findings declassified.”

In her 45-minute speech Ms. Feinstein gave the fullest public account of the years of back-room jousting between her committee and the C.I.A. over the agency’s detention program, and its use of secret prisons and brutal interrogation techniques like waterboarding that critics described as torture.


Ann Los Angeles
Now she knows how we feel. I hope this will moderate her defense of N.S.A. spying.
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The dispute came to a head in mid-January, when Mr. Brennan told members of the committee that the agency had carried out a search of computers used by committee investigators at a C.I.A. facility in Northern Virginia, where the committee was examining documents the agency had made available for its report.

Ms. Feinstein said on Tuesday that during the meeting, Mr. Brennan told her that the C.I.A. had searched a “walled-off committee network drive containing the committee’s own internal work product and communications” and that he was going to “order further forensic evidence of the committee network to learn more about activities of the committee’s oversight staff.”

The C.I.A. had carried out the search to determine whether committee investigators may have gained unauthorized access to the internal review of the detention program that the agency had carried out without informing the committee. Ms. Feinstein on Tuesday vigorously disputed this allegation, saying that the document had been included — intentionally or not — as part of a dump of millions of pages the C.I.A. had provided for the intelligence committee.

Mr. Brennan, in a January letter to Ms. Feinstein that a government official who did not want to be identified released on Tuesday, said that the committee had not been entitled to the internal review because it contained “sensitive, deliberative, pre-decisional C.I.A. material”— and therefore was protected under executive privilege considerations.

The C.I.A.’s acting general counsel has referred to the matter to the Justice Department as a possible criminal offense, a move Ms. Feinstein called a strong-arm tactic by someone with a conflict of interest in the case.

She said that official had previously been a lawyer in the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorism Center — the section of the spy agency that was running the detention and interrogation program — and that his name is mentioned more than 1,600 times in the committee’s report.

Ms. Feinstein did not name the lawyer, but she appeared to be referring to Robert Eatinger, the C.I.A.’s senior deputy general counsel. In 2007, The New York Times reported that when a top C.I.A. official in 2005 destroyed videotapes of brutal interrogations of Al Qaeda detainees, Mr. Eatinger had been one of two lawyers to approve their destruction.


harriet 30 minutes ago
Why does Congress always think it is exempt from the laws it passes. Get use to the fact that NSA is spying on everyone thanks to the laws...
SW 31 minutes ago
Bravo Senator Feinstein. All of a sudden the CIA / NSA is too intrusive when it involves .. you? Well, you reap what you sow! Try turning...
John 45 minutes ago
Well done, Senator Feinstein. By calling the CIA to account, you offer hope that Congressional oversight will restore balance between the...
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Ms. Feinstein specifically mentioned the destruction of the tapes as justification for her staff’s removal of copies of parts of the internal C.I.A. review from the Northern Virginia facility and brought the documents to the committee’s offices on Capitol Hill.


She said that it was necessary to “preserve and protect” a copy of the review, which she said “corroborates critical information” of the committee’s own investigation.

Ms. Feinstein said that on two occasions in 2010, the C.I.A. had removed documents totaling hundreds of pages from the computer server used by her staff at the Northern Virginia facility. She did not provide any details about the documents, but said that when committee investigators confronted the C.I.A. they received a number of answers — first a denial that the documents had been removed, then an explanation that they had been removed by contractors working at the facility, then an explanation that the removal of documents was ordered by the White House.

When the committee approached the White House, she said, it denied giving such an order.

Ms. Feinstein’s broadside rallied Senate Democrats, but divided Republicans.

Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, said he supported Ms. Feinstein “unequivocally” and said he was “disappointed” in the C.I.A.’s conduct. When Mr. Reid brought up the speech at a closed-door lunch of Senate Democrats, Ms. Feinstein received a standing ovation.

Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, who for years has done battle with the C.I.A. over the agency’s detention and interrogation program, which is now defunct, called the allegations “very disturbing” and suggested an independent investigative body might need to be empaneled to get to the bottom of the dispute.

Most Republicans on the Intelligence Committee, however, either refused to comment on the chairwoman’s charges or said she had no right to air such grievances in public.

“You have to understand, as a longtime member of both the House and Senate intelligence committees, I personally don’t believe anything that goes on in the intelligence committee should be discussed publicly,” said Senator Richard M. Burr, Republican of North Carolina.

But such conflicts with the executive branch tend to unite congressional Republicans and Democrats like little else. In 2006, when the F.B.I. searched the Capitol Hill office of Representative William J. Jefferson, Democrat of Louisiana, for evidence of corruption, his most vocal defender was the Republican speaker of the House, J. Dennis Hastert, who said the raid was a violation of the Constitution’s protection of congressional speech and debate.

“The Senate is bigger than any one senator,” Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said trying to rally lawmakers behind Ms. Feinstein.

“The members of the Senate must stand up in defense of this institution, the Constitution and the values upon which this nation was founded,” he said.



TUESDAY, MAR 11, 2014 05:15 PM CDT
CIA accused: Senator sees torture probe meddling
DONNA CASSATA, ASSOCIATED PRESS

CIA accused: Senator sees torture probe meddling
This video framegrab from Senate Television shows Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif. speaking on the floor of the Senate on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, March 11, 2014. Feinstein said the CIA improperly searched a stand-alone computer network established for Congress as part of its investigation into allegations of CIA abuse in a Bush-era detention and interrogation program. (AP Photo/Senate Television)(Credit: AP)
WASHINGTON (AP) — In an extraordinary public accusation, the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee declared on Tuesday that the CIA interfered with and then tried to intimidate a congressional investigation into the agency’s possible use of torture in terror probes during the Bush administration.

The CIA clandestinely removed documents and searched a computer network set up for lawmakers, said Sen. Dianne Feinstein in a long and biting speech on the Senate floor. In an escalating dispute with an agency she has long supported, she said the CIA may well have violated criminal laws and the U.S. Constitution.

At odds on major contentions, both sides have involved the Justice Department. The CIA’s inspector general, David Buckley, has referred the matter to Justice, and the CIA’s acting counsel responded by filing a criminal report about the intelligence committee staff.

“I am not taking it lightly,” Feinstein said of the tit-for-tat investigations. “I view the acting counsel general’s referral as a potential effort to intimidate this staff” in the interrogation investigation.

The dispute between the CIA and senators, which has been going on privately for more than five years, exploded into a public clash as Feinstein offered a detailed account of the Senate’s secretive dealings with the CIA in an investigation of post-Sept. 11 interrogation and detention practices.

More broadly, all U.S. spy agencies have drawn intense scrutiny since revelations last summer about surveillance of Americans by the National Security Agency. The Obama administration has struggled to rebuild public trust since former analyst Edward Snowden made the disclosures. Feinstein has been one of the intelligence community’s most ardent advocates, arguing that the wide surveillance of people’s electronic and telephone communications was a necessary counterterrorism tool.

In the current matter, CIA Director John Brennan rejected Feinstein’s accusations, insisting that the agency was not trying to thwart the committee’s work and denying that it had been spying on the panel or the Senate. He said the appropriate authorities would look at the matter further and “I defer to them to determine whether or not there was any violation of law or principle.”

Brennan said if he did “something wrong, I would go to the president and he would be the one to ask me to stay or go.”
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
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Don’t forget that.
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Re: CIA asks Justice Dept. to investigate spying on Senate

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Mar 12, 2014 7:57 am

The Senate-CIA Blowup Threatens a Constitutional Crisis
The allegations of CIA snooping on congressional investigators isn't just a scandal—the whole premise of secret government is in question.
—By David Corn | Tue Mar. 11, 2014 10:01 AM GMT


Feinstein: Arno Burgi/DPA/ZUMA; CIA flag: CIA/Wikimedia Commons
This morning, on C-SPAN, the foundation of the national security state exploded.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the chair of the Senate intelligence committee, took to the Senate floor and accused the CIA of spying on committee investigators tasked with probing the agency's past use of harsh interrogation techniques (a.k.a. torture) and detention. Feinstein was responding to recent media stories reporting that the CIA had accessed computers used by intelligence committee staffers working on the committee's investigation. The computers were set up by the CIA in a locked room in a secure facility separate from its headquarters, and CIA documents relevant to the inquiry were placed on these computers for the Senate investigators. But, it turns out, the Senate sleuths had also uncovered an internal CIA memo reviewing the interrogation program that had not been turned over by the agency. This document was far more critical of the interrogation program than the CIA's official rebuttal to a still-classified, 6,300-page Senate intelligence committee report that slams it, and the CIA wanted to find out how the Senate investigators had gotten their mitts on this damaging memo.

The CIA's infiltration of the Senate's torture probe was a possible constitutional violation and perhaps a criminal one, too. The agency's inspector general and the Justice Department have begun inquiries. And as the story recently broke, CIA sources—no names, please—told reporters that the real issue was whether the Senate investigators had hacked the CIA to obtain the internal review. Readers of the few newspaper stories on all this did not have to peer too far between the lines to discern a classic Washington battle was under way between Langley and Capitol Hill.

Then Feinstein went nuclear. For more than a half hour this morning, she gave what she called a "full accounting." She began by noting her reluctance to go public:

Let me say up front that I come to the Senate floor reluctantly. Since January 15, 2014, when I was informed of the CIA search of this committee’s network, I've been trying to resolve this dispute in a discreet and respectful way. I have not commented in response to media requests for additional information on this matter; however, the increasing amount of inaccurate information circulating now cannot be allowed to stand unanswered.

In other words, she felt that the spies were leaking false information to nail her and her staffers. So she was upping the ante by taking this dispute out of the shadows.

Feinstein said that the CIA appeared to have violated the Fourth Amendment barring unreasonable searches and seizures—and perhaps other federal laws and a presidential executive order prohibiting the CIA from domestic searches and surveillance. She confirmed that the Justice Department was on the case. She said she has demanded an apology from the CIA and an admission that the agency's search of the intelligence committee’s computers was wrong. "I have received neither," she declared.

This unprecedented speech by Feinstein has ramifications beyond the immediate controversy over the CIA search. It undermines the basis for secret government.

The United States is a republic, and elected officials in all three branches are supposed to be held accountable by those famous checks and balances that school kids learn about in civics classes. When it comes to the clandestine activities of the US government—the operations of the CIA, the other intelligence outfits, and the covert arms of the military—the theory is straightforward: These activities are permitted only because there is congressional oversight. The citizenry is not told about such actions because doing so would endanger national security and render these activities moot. But such secret doings of the executive branch are permissible because elected representatives of the people in the legislative branch monitor these activities and are in a position to impose accountability.

That's how it's supposed to work. But since the founding of the national security state in the years after World War II, there have been numerous occasions when the spies, snoops, and secret warriors of the US government have not informed the busybodies on Capitol Hill about all of their actions. In the 1970s, after revelations of CIA assassination programs and other outrageous intelligence agency misdeeds, Congress created what was supposed to be a tighter system of congressional oversight. But following that, the CIA and other undercover government agencies still mounted operations without telling Congress. (See the Iran-Contra scandal.) Often the spies went to imaginative lengths to keep Congress in the dark. More recently, members of the intelligence community have said they were not fully in the know about the NSA's extensive surveillance programs. Of course, there was a countervailing complaint from the spies. Often when a secret program becomes public knowledge, members of Congress proclaim their shock, even though they had been told about it.

Overall, the system of congressional oversight has hardly (as far as the public can tell) been stellar. And it has raised doubts about the ability of a democratic government to mount secret ops and wage secret wars in a manner consistent with the values of accountability and transparency. What was essential to decent governance on this front was the delicate relationship between congressional overseers and the intelligence agencies. The intelligence committees have to be forceful and fierce in monitoring the spooks (a responsibility often not met), and the spies have to be cooperative and forthcoming (again, a responsibility often not met). There has to be trust. The committees have to hold faith that the agencies are indeed coming clean, for there is no way a handful of congressional investigators can fully track all the operations of the massive intelligence establishment, and the agencies have to be assured that secrets they shared with the investigators will not be leaked for political purposes. And at the end of the day, elected representatives have to be able to come to the public and say, "We're keeping a close eye on all this secret stuff, and we are satisfied that we know what is happening and that these activities are being conducted in an appropriate manner." If such credible assurances cannot be delivered, the system doesn't work—and the justification for allowing secret government within an open democracy is in tatters.

Which is where we are today. Feinstein, no firebrand, is in open war with the CIA. Her speech outlined plenty of trouble she had reviewing the CIA interrogation and detention program—before the computer search imbroglio. She decried "CIA interference in our investigation." And she maintained that her investigators had not hacked the CIA to get the internal review. "We don't know whether the documents were provided intentionally by the CIA, unintentionally by the CIA, or intentionally by a whistle-blower," she said, raising the possibility that the CIA itself had failed to maintain a cover-up. And she noted that this internal review—unlike the CIA's direct response to the intelligence committee's report—contained "acknowledgement of significant CIA wrongdoing." She reported that the CIA has refused to answer questions she has submitted about the agency's search of the committee's computers.

So here we have the person assigned the duty of guaranteeing that the intelligence establishment functions effectively and appropriately, and she cannot get information about how the CIA meddled in one of her own investigations. This is a serious breakdown. And by the way, Feinstein has still not succeeded in forcing the CIA to declassify her committee's massive report on the interrogation and detention program.

Here is how she summed up the current state of play:

If the Senate can declassify this report, we will be able to ensure that an un-American, brutal program of detention and interrogation will never again be considered or permitted. But, Mr. President, the recent actions that I have just laid out make this a defining moment for the oversight of our intelligence committee. How Congress and how this will be resolved will show whether the intelligence committee can be effective in monitoring and investigating our nation's intelligence activities or whether our work can be thwarted by those we oversee.

What Feinstein didn't say—but it's surely implied—is that without effective monitoring, secret government cannot be justified in a democracy. This is indeed a defining moment. It's a big deal for President Barack Obama, who, as is often noted in these situations, once upon a time taught constitutional law. Feinstein has ripped open a scab to reveal a deep wound that has been festering for decades. The president needs to respond in a way that demonstrates he is serious about making the system work and restoring faith in the oversight of the intelligence establishment. This is more than a spies-versus-pols DC turf battle. It is a constitutional crisis.


Did the CIA Chief Just Dare Obama to Fire Him?

Image
Under a sudden avalanche of criticism, CIA director John Brennan said President Obama can ‘ask me to go.’ Will he?
The normally cool and calm director of the CIA, John Brennan, may have flinched Tuesday. After a scathing speech from Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the chair of the committee that oversees his agency, Brennan largely defended the CIA from charges that it illegally spied on Senate staffers poring through documents related to the agency’s black site program.

But the CIA chief also left open the prospect that he may have been wrong. “If I did something wrong,” Brennan said. “I will go to the president and I will explain to him what I did and what the findings were. And he is the one who can ask me to stay or to go.”

In Washington, where politicians have mastered the art of the mea culpa, those words would not normally warrant much attention. But for John Brennan, a man entrusted with secrets on everything from Obama’s drone war to his cyber espionage campaign against Iran, Brennan’s talk amounts to a kind of dare.

“I don’t know if Brennan can survive at this point,” said Pete Hoekstra, a former Republican chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

Throughout Obama’s presidency, Brennan is a bridge between the intelligence community and the White House. While he was never part of the president’s inner circle during the 2008 campaign, Obama began receiving briefings from Brennan as he prepared for the presidency after the 2008 election. He liked Brennan so much that he initially wanted to make him CIA director in 2009, but that nomination was scuttled after progressives in his own party objected that Brennan was too close to the program to harshly interrogate suspected terrorists in “black site” secret prisons all over the world.

That black site program is once again at the center of controversy for the CIA. But this time, Brennan is the agency’s director and it’s the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that is trying to declassify its own report that is expected to show the rendition, detention and interrogation practices during the last administration were far more brutal than the CIA has previously acknowledged. The documents the CIA said the Senate was not supposed to receive comprised an internal review by the CIA, according to Feinstein, and its conclusions bolster her committee’s own harsh assessment of the agency’s black site program.

At the moment, there appears to be no danger that the White House will throw Brennan under the bus. On Tuesday, White House spokesman Jay Carney said the president had full confidence in his CIA director.

Nonetheless, the investigations into the incident are far from over. The Justice Department is now probing both whether Senate staff members illegally acquired CIA documents they were not allowed to access and whether the CIA violated the law by searching through computers it established for those Senate staffers to review millions of pages of documents relating the agency’s black site program.

“I don’t know if Brennan can survive at this point.”
Then there is the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report itself. While a draft of that document was finished at the end of 2012, the committee and the CIA have gone back and forth for nearly a year and a half over that report.

Feinstein’s floor speech Tuesday was bruising. She accused the CIA’s acting general counsel, who was the lead lawyer for the agency division responsible for the black site program, of trying to intimidate professional senate staffers by referring a frivolous crime report to the Justice Department for the stealing of classified documents. Feinstein also directly contradicted what she said CIA officials had told her committee, saying that at no point were the records sought by her staff off limits to Congress.

“I have asked for an apology and a recognition that this CIA search of computers used by its oversight committee was inappropriate,” Feinstein said. “I have received neither.”

Congressional staffers and intelligence officials told Foreign Policy that relations between the agency and its Senate overseers haven’t been this bad in decades. Hoekstra said Feinstein is right to raise the alarm: “If I were chairman I would be doing exactly what Feinstein is doing. I applaud her.”

For his part, Brennan defended the CIA’s actions. “When the facts come out on this, I think a lot of people who are claiming that there has been this tremendous sort of spying and monitoring and hacking will be proved wrong,” Brennan said.



It’s possible the investigations will vindicate Brennan. But Feinstein has a very different view of the facts and that could put pressure on Obama to let one of his closest advisers go. If Obama decides to do that, though, he could face the same kind of political problems that many observers believe besieged the George W. Bush administration after the invasion of Iraq. During the 2004 election, many of Bush’s closest allies suspected the CIA was orchestrating a leak campaign to discredit the war in Iraq in protest of what they saw as a politicized decision-making process to invade.

“Any agency can undermine just about anyone,” said Hoekstra, who served as chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence during the first two years of Bush’s second term. “We saw that under the Bush administration, there were leaks coming out all over the place. You never knew where they were coming from and some of them were coming from the intelligence community and the objective was to embarrass President Bush.”

If the CIA and the broader intelligence community come to feel the same way about Obama, the White House could find itself as under siege as Bush was in his second term. Then Obama would not only have to face opposition to his foreign policy from Republicans in Congress, but also the bureaucracy of spies that know many of his darkest secrets.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: CIA asks Justice Dept. to investigate spying on Senate

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Mar 12, 2014 8:13 am

How CIA snooped on Senate Intel Committee’s files
It's easy to search someone's network when you hired the IT department.

by Sean Gallagher - Mar 11 2014, 4:40pm CDT
GOVERNMENT NATIONAL SECURITY

CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia. The CIA gave Senate Intelligence Committee staffers access to its data offsite—in a leased facility the CIA controlled.
It sounds like something out of Homeland: at a secret location somewhere off the campus of the CIA, the agency leases a space and hires contractors to run a top-secret network, which it fills with millions of pages of documents dumped from the agency’s internal network. But that’s apparently exactly what the CIA did for more than three years as part of an agreement to share data with the staff of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on its controversial detention and interrogation program.

And it’s also how the agency was able to gain access to the computers and shared network drive used by committee staffers in a search that Senator Diane Feinstein contended today crossed multiple legal and constitutional boundaries. In a speech on the Senate floor this morning, Feinstein detailed the strange arrangement and accused the CIA of breaking its agreement with the committee on multiple occasions. She also accused the agency of reportedly filing a criminal report against committee staffers with the Justice Department in “a potential effort to intimidate this staff.”

The details shared by Feinstein show the length to which the CIA went to try to control the scope of the data that was shared with Senate staffers—and still managed to give them more than some officials in the agency wanted to. Even with multiple levels of oversight, the CIA managed to hand over the data along with an internal review of that very data, which included the agency’s own damning assessment of the interrogation program.

Rent-a-SCIF

The Senate Intelligence Committee maintains its own sensitive compartmented information facility (SCIF) at the Hart Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill. And in most cases, documents related to Senate investigations of the intelligence community are held by the committee there, largely to prevent agencies from trying to cover for themselves.

But when the committee launched a full investigation into the CIA’s interrogation program in 2009, then-CIA Director Leon Panetta agreed to give access to documents, but he said he would only give access to all of them at a facility controlled by the CIA.

The documents would have to go through “a multi-layer screening process,” Feinstein said, before being turned over—a task which the CIA hired an army of contractors to perform. Panetta agreed the facility would have a stand-alone network not connected to the CIA’s that could only be accessed by CIA personnel with the permission of the Senate staff. To that end, the CIA leased a special facility in Northern Virginia and hired contractors to run its network.

There were reasons for the Senate committee to be concerned about CIA access to the data. The investigation had been kicked off as a result of a review of transcripts from video tapes of “enhanced” interrogations made by the CIA—videos that had been destroyed by the agency despite opposition from the Bush White House counsel and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. So the committee staff was keen to preserve whatever it found rather than have the CIA make something conveniently disappear.

Because documents were provided in a giant data dump without any supporting index, or even a directory structure, committee staffers often saved copies of documents they found using a CIA-provided search engine to a local drive on their computers in the facility or to a shared network drive, or printed them out to save in a safe onsite. The staffers would then be allowed to remove documents they had printed out to bring them back to the SCIF at Hart Office Building—but only after a CIA official redacted the names of non-executive CIA employees and information about the foreign locations where prisoners were held and subjected to “enhanced” interrogation techniques such as water-boarding.

That’s how it was supposed to work. But soon after the CIA started to push data over to the Senate facility, it became apparent that the agency reserved the right to recall documents after the fact—by removing them from the network.

Remote delete

In May of 2010, as the documents continued to stream in, some of the committee staffers realized documents they had looked at earlier had disappeared. As it turned out, in two separate incidents, CIA employees had accessed the network without committee approval and had deleted approximately 920 documents from the network’s storage.

Sen. Feinstein said that “CIA staff first denied they had removed the documents, then they blamed IT support personnel and then said removal of the documents was ordered by the White House.” Feinstein went to White House counsel about the removal, and the complaint was rapidly escalated. The CIA apologized for the removal and gave assurances that it wouldn’t happen again.

But it would happen again, later in 2010, according to Feinstein, after the discovery of draft documents within the shared data that were part of an internal review ordered by Leon Panetta. The so-called Panetta review documents were actually summaries of the same documents that made up the majority of what the committee staff was reviewing for its report, but they included “analysis and acknowledgement of signs of wrongdoing,” Feinstein said.

The documents were marked as “deliberative” and “privileged”—meaning that they were intended not to be shared with the Senate under claims of executive privilege. But since they had been shared as part of the data dump, Feinstein said, there was no legal reason for the staff to not review the documents.

It is not known whether the CIA inadvertently shared the documents that somehow made it through the contractor’s screening process or if they were deliberately added to the data dump by the CIA or possibly by an internal whistleblower. Regardless, shortly after the draft documents were discovered, they started disappearing from the document store—so staffers copied the ones that remained to their local hard drives and printed out copies to preserve them. Staffers also made their own redacted copies of the documents—removing CIA non-executive employee names and locations, as the CIA would have done with other documents—and transported them back to the Hart SCIF for safekeeping.

Closing the barn door after the horse redaction

All of this came to a head when the committee produced its final 6,300-page study on detention and interrogation late last year. The CIA contested some of the findings of the report—findings that were supported by the CIA’s own draft internal review. In a number of communications with CIA Director John Brennan and other agency officials, Feinstein and committee members requested the final copy of the review. Brennan refused.

Colorado Sen. Mark Udall publicly pointed this out during the confirmation hearing for CIA General Counsel Caroline Krass in December and asked why the CIA would not turn over the Panetta review. Krass has not been confirmed for the job, and a career CIA lawyer is still acting general counsel.

A month later, Feinstein said, Brennan called for an “emergency meeting” with the committee and informed the committee leadership “that CIA personnel had conducted a search of the (secure) facility... of not just the documents, but the walled-off network drive containing the committee's own work documents and communications.” That search, she said, was followed by the allegation that the committee staff had “obtained documents through illegal means,” she said.

According to Feinstein, Brennan told the committee he was going to order further forensic analysis of the committee’s network at the CIA-leased facility. Feinstein objected and sent a barrage of letters asking for explanation of the legal justifications for the search—none of which Brennan responded to.

The search was the subject of a CIA inspector general investigation of an official. That investigation has now been forwarded to the Justice Department for possible criminal prosecution. At the same time, the CIA’s acting general counsel has reportedly filed a complaint with the Justice Department, claiming Senate staffers acted criminally in obtaining the documents.

Feinstein all but accused the CIA’s acting general counsel, Robert Eatinger, of instigating the search and filing of a criminal complaint against Senate staff as part of a cover-up.

Eatinger, whom Feinstein mentioned by title only, may have a personal reason to be concerned with the committee’s report—the lawyer was previously chief attorney for the CIA’s interrogations division, and Feinstein said he is “mentioned by name 1,600 times in our study.”


Transcript: Sen. Dianne Feinstein says CIA searched Intelligence Committee computers

Sen. Dianne Feinstein on Tuesday morning accused the CIA of violating federal law, detailing how the agency secretly removed documents from computers used by the Senate Intelligence Committee. The following is a complete transcript of Feinstein’s speech, courtesy of Federal News Service.

Read more about what she said here.


Video
<caption> Senate Intelligence Chair Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) accused the CIA of breaking the law by searching her committee's computers. The Post's Karen Tumulty, Scott Wilson, Terence Samuel and Adam Goldman explain the impact in Washington. </caption>
Senate Intelligence Chair Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) accused the CIA of breaking the law by searching her committee's computers. The Post's Karen Tumulty, Scott Wilson, Terence Samuel and Adam Goldman explain the impact in Washington.

Greg Miller, Ed O’Keefe and Adam Goldman MAR 11
The head of the intelligence panel says the agency appears to have violated the Constitution and federal laws.
Why the CIA and lawmakers are feuding
.
Senators praise Feinstein speech, want answers from CIA

If true, “this is Richard Nixon stuff,” one senator says.


Good morning. Over the past week, there have been numerous press articles written about the Intelligence Committee’s oversight review of the detention and interrogation program of the CIA. Specifically, press attention has focused on the CIA’s intrusion and search of the Senate Select Committee’s computers, as well as the committee’s acquisition of a certain internal CIA document known as the “Panetta Review.” I rise today to set the record straight and to provide a full accounting of the facts and history.

Let me say up front that I come to the Senate floor reluctantly. Since January 15th, 2014, when I was informed of the CIA search of this committee’s network, I’ve been trying to resolve this dispute in a discreet and respectful way.

I have not commented in response to media requests for additional information on this matter, however the increasing amount of inaccurate information circulating now cannot be allowed to stand unanswered.

The origin of this study, the CIA’s detention and interrogation program, began operations in 2002, though it was not until September, 2006 that members of the intelligence committee, other than the chairman and the vice chairman were briefed. In fact, we were briefed by then-CIA Director Hayden only hours before President Bush disclosed the program to the public.

A little more than a year later, on December 6th, 2007, a New York Times article revealed the troubling fact that the CIA had destroyed video tapes of some of the CIA’s first interrogations using so-called enhanced techniques. We learned that this destruction was over the objections of President Bush’s White House counsel and the director of national intelligence.


After we read -- excuse me -- read about the tapes of the destruction in the newspapers, Director Hayden briefed the Senate Intelligence Committee. He assured us that this was not destruction of evidence, as detailed records of the interrogations existed on paper in the form of CIA operational tables describing the detention conditions and the day-to-day CIA interrogations.

The CIA director stated that these cables were, quote, a more than adequate representation, end quote, of what would have been on the destroyed tapes. Director Hayden offered at that time, during Senator Jay Rockefeller’s chairmanship of the committee, to allow members or staff review these sensitive CIA operational cables, that the videotapes -- given that the videotapes had been destroyed.

Chairman Rockefeller sent two of his committee staffers out to the CIA on nights and weekends to review thousands of these cables, which took many months. By the time the two staffers completed their review into the CIA’s early interrogations in early 2009, I had become chairman of the committee and President Obama had been sworn into office.

The resulting staff report was chilling. The interrogations and the conditions of confinement at the CIA detentions sites were far different and far more harsh than the way the CIA had described them to us.

As a result of the staff initial report, I proposed and then-Vice Chairman Bond agreed and the committee overwhelmingly approved that the committee conduct an expansive and full review of the CIA’s detention and interrogation program.

On March 5th, 2009, the committee voted 14-1 to initiate a comprehensive review of the CIA detention and interrogation program.

Immediately, we sent a request for documents to all relevant executive branch agencies, chiefly among them the CIA. The committee's preference was for the CIA to turn over all responsive documents to the committee's office, as had been done in previous committee investigations.

Director Panetta proposed an alternative arrangement, to provide literally millions of pages of operational cables, internal emails, memos and other documents pursuant to a committee's document request at a secure location in northern Virginia. We agreed, but insisted on several conditions and protections to ensure the integrity of this congressional investigation.

Per an exchange of letters in 2009, then-Vice Chairman Bond, then-Director Panetta and I agreed in an exchange of letters that the CIA was to provide a, quote, stand-alone computer system, end quote, with a, quote, network drive segregated from CIA networks, end quote, for the committee that would only be accessed by information technology personnel at the CIA who would, quote, not be permitted to share information from the system with other CIA personnel, except as otherwise authorized by the committee, end quote.

It was this computer network that notwithstanding our agreement with Director Panetta was searched by the CIA this past January -- and once before, which I will later describe.

In addition to demanding that the documents produced for the committee be reviewed at a CIA facility, the CIA also insisted on conducting a multi-layered review of every responsive document before providing the document to the committee. This was to ensure the CIA did not mistakenly provide documents unrelated to the CIA's detention and interrogation program or provide documents that the president could potentially claim to be covered by executive privilege.


While we viewed this as unnecessary, and raised concerns that it would delay our investigation, the CIA hired a team of outside contractors who otherwise would not have had access to these sensitive documents to read multiple times each of the 6.2 million pages of documents produced before providing them to fully cleared committee staff conducting the committee's oversight work. This proved to be a slow and very expensive process.

The CIA started making documents available electronically to the committee's staff at the CIA leased facility in mid-2009. The number of pages ran quickly to the thousands, tens of thousands, the hundreds of thousands and then into the millions. The documents that were provided came without any index, without any organizational structure. It was a true document dump that our committee staff had to go through and make sense of.

In order to piece together the story of the CIA's detention and interrogation program, the committee staff did two things that will be important as I go on. First, they asked the CIA to provide an electronic search tool so they could locate specific relevant documents for their search among the CIA-produced documents, just like you would use a search tool on the Internet to locate information.

Second, when the staff found a document that was particularly important or that might be referenced in our file report, they would often print it or make a copy of the file on their computer so they could easily find it again. There are thousands of such documents in the committee's secure spaces at the CIA facility.

Now, prior removal of documents by CIA. In early 2010, the CIA was continuing to provide documents and the committee staff was gaining familiarity with the information it had already received. In May of 2010, the committee staff noticed that the documents had been provided for the committee -- that had been provided for the committee's review were no longer accessible.

Staff approached the CIA personnel at the off-site location, who initially denied that documents had been removed. CIA personnel then blamed information technology personnel, who were almost all contractors, for removing the documents themselves without direction or authority.


And then the CIA stated that the removal of the documents was ordered by the White House. When the White -- when the committee approached the White House, the White House denied giving the CIA any such order.

After a series of meetings, I learned that on two occasions CIA personnel electronically removed committee access to CIA documents after providing them to the committee. This included roughly 870 documents or page of documents that were removed in February 2010; and secondly, roughly another 50 that were removed in mid-May 2010. This was done without the knowledge or approval of committee members or staff, and in violation of our written agreements. Further, this type of behavior would not have been possible had the CIA allowed the committee to conduct the review of documents here in the Senate. In short, this was the exact sort of CIA interference in our investigation that we sought to avoid at the outset.

I went up to the White House to raise the issue with the then- White House counsel. In May 2010, he recognized the severity of the situation and the great implications of executive branch personnel interfering with an official congressional investigation. The matter was resolved with a renewed commitment from the White House counsel and the CIA that there would be no further unauthorized access to the committee's network or removal of access to CIA documents already provided to the committee.

On May 17th, 2010, the CIA's then-director of congressional affairs apologized on behalf of the CIA for removing the documents. And that as far as I was concerned put the incidents aside. This event was separate from the documents provided that were part of the internal Panetta review, which occurred later and which I will describe next.

At some point in 2010, committee staff searching the documents that had been made available found draft versions of what is now called the internal Panetta review. We believe these documents were written by CIA personnel to summarize and analyze the materials that had been provided to the committee for its review. The Panetta review documents were no more highly classified than other information we had received for our investigation. In fact, the documents appeared based on the same information already provided to the committee. What was unique and interesting about the internal documents was not their classification level but rather their analysis and acknowledgement of significant CIA wrongdoing.

To be clear, the committee staff did not hack into CIA computers to obtain these documents, as has been suggested in the press.


The documents were identified using the search tool provided by the CIA to search the documents provided to the committee. We have no way to determine who made the internal Panetta review documents available to the committee. Further, we don't know whether the documents were provided intentionally by the CIA, unintentionally by the CIA or intentionally by a whistle-blower.

In fact, we know that over the years, on multiple occasions, the staff have asked the CIA about documents made available for our investigation. At times the CIA has simply been unaware that these specific documents were provided to the committee. And while this is alarming, it is also important to note that more than 6.2 million pages of documents have been provided. This is simply a massive amount of records.

As I described earlier, as part of its standard process for reviewing records the committee staff printed copies of the internal Panetta review and made electronic copies of the committee's computers at the facility. The staff did not rely on these internal Panetta review documents when drafting the final 6,300-page committee study. But it was significant that the internal Panetta review had documented at least some of the very same troubling matters already uncovered by the committee staff, which is not surprising in that they were looking at the same information.

There is a claim in the press and elsewhere that the markings on these documents should have caused the staff to stop reading them and turn them over to the CIA. I reject that claim completely. As with many other documents provided to the committee at the CIA facility, some of the internal Panetta-reviewed documents -- some -- contained markings indicating that they were, quote, "deliberative," end quote, and/or, quote, "privileged," end quote.

This was not especially noteworthy to staff. In fact, CIA has provided thousands of internal documents to include CIA legal guidance and talking points prepared for the CIA director, some of which were marked as being deliberative or privileged. Moreover, the CIA has officially provided such documents to the committee here in the Senate. In fact, the CIA's official June 27, 2013 response to the committee's study, which Director Brennan delivered to me personally, is labeled, quote, "deliberative, processed, privileged document," end quote.

We have discussed this with the Senate legal counsel who have confirmed that Congress does not recognize these claims of privilege when it comes to documents provided to Congress for our oversight duties. These were documents provided by the executive branch pursuant to an authorized congressional oversight investigation. So we believe we had every right to review and keep the documents.


There are also claims in the press that the Panetta internal review documents, having been created in 2009 and 2010, were outside the date range of the committee's document request or the terms of the committee study. This too is inaccurate. The committee's document requests were not limited in time. In fact, as I have previously announced, the committee study includes significant information on the May, 2011 Osama bin Laden operation, which obviously post-dated the detention and interrogation program.

At some time after the committee staff identified and reviewed the internal Panetta review documents, access to the vast majority of them was removed by the CIA. We believe this happened in 2010, but we have no way of knowing the specifics. Nor do we know why the documents were removed. The staff was focused on reviewing the tens of thousands of new documents that continued to arrive on a regular basis.

Our work continued until December 2012, when the Intelligence Committee approved a 6,300-page committee study of the CIA's detention and interrogation program, and sent the executive report to the executive branch for comment. The CIA provided its response to the study on June 27th, 2013. As CIA Director Brennan has stated, the CIA officially agrees with some of our study, but has been reported the CIA disagrees and disputes important parts of it.

And this is important. Some of these important parts that the CIA now disputes in our committee study are clearly acknowledged in the CIA's own internal Panetta review. To say the least, this is puzzling. How can the CIA's official response to our study stand factually in conflict with its own internal review?

Now, after noting the disparity between the official CIA response to the committee study and the internal Panetta review, the committee staff securely transported a printed portion of the draft internal Panetta review from the committee's secure room at the CIA-leased facility to the secure committee spaces in the Hart Senate office building. And let me be clear about this: I mentioned earlier the exchange of letters that Senator Bond and I had with Director Panetta in 2009 over the handling of information for this review. The letters set out a process whereby the committee would provide specific CIA documents to CIA reviewers before bringing them back to our secure offices here on Capitol Hill. The CIA review was designed specifically to make sure that committee documents available to all staff and members did not include certain kinds of information -- most importantly, the true names of nonsupervisory CIA personnel and the names of specific countries in which the CIA operated detention sites.

We had agreed up front that our report didn't need to include this information and so we agreed to redact it from materials leaving the CIA's facility. Keeping with the spirit of the agreement, the portion of the internal Panetta review at the Hart Building in our safe has been redacted. It does not contain names of nonsupervisory CIA personnel or information identifying detention site locations. In other words, our staff did just what the CIA personnel would have done had they reviewed the document.


There are several reasons why the draft summary of the Panetta review was brought to our secure spaces at the Hart Building. Let me list them: One, the significance of the internal review, given disparities between it and the June 2013 CIA response to the committee study. The internal Panetta review summary, now at the secure committee office in Hart, is an especially significant document as it corroborates critical information in the -- in the committee's 6,300- page study, that the CIA's official response either objects to, denies, minimizes or ignores.

Unlike the official response, these Panetta review documents were in agreement with the committee's findings.

That's what makes them so significant and important to protect.

When the internal Panetta Review documents disappeared from the committee's computer system, this suggested once again that the CIA had removed documents already provided to the committee, in violation of CIA agreements and White House assurances that the CIA would cease such activities. As I have detailed, the CIA has previously withheld and destroyed information about its detention and interrogation program, including its decision in 2005 to destroy interrogation videotapes over the objections of the Bush White House and the director of national intelligence. Based on the above, there was a need to preserve and protect the internal Panetta Review in the committee's own secure spaces.

Now, the relocation of the internal Panetta Review was lawful and handled in a manner consistent with its classification. No law prevents the relocation of a document in the committee's possession from a CIA facility to secure committee offices on Capitol Hill. As I mentioned before, the document was handled and transported in a manner consistent with its classification, redacted appropriately, and it remains secured, with restricted access in committee spaces.

Now, the January 15th 2014 meeting with Director John Brennan. In late 2013, I requested in writing that the CIA provide a final and complete version of the internal Panetta review to the committee as opposed to the partial document the committee currently possesses.


In December, during an open committee hearing, Senator Mark Udall echoed this request. In early January 2014, the CIA informed the committee it would not provide the internal Panetta review to the committee, citing the deliberative nature of the document. Shortly thereafter, on January 15th, 2014, CIA Director Brennan requested an emergency meeting to inform me and Vice Chairman Chambliss that without prior notification or approval, CIA personnel had conducted a search -- that was John Brennan's word -- of the committee computers at the off-site facility.

This search involved not only a search of documents provided by the committee by the CIA, but also a search of the standalone and walled-off committee network drive containing the committee's own internal work product and communications. According to Brennan, the computer search was conducted in response to indications that some members of the committee staff might already have had access to the internal Panetta review.

The CIA did not ask the committee or its staff if the committee had access to the internal review or we obtained it.

Instead the CIA just went and searched the committee's computers. The CIA has still not asked the committee any questions about how the committee acquired the Panetta review.

In place of asking any questions, the CIA's unauthorized search of the committee computers was followed by an allegation, which we now have seen repeated anonymously in the press, that the committee staff had somehow obtained the document through unauthorized or criminal means, perhaps to include hacking into the CIA's computer network.

As I have described, this is not true. The document was made available to the staff at the off-site facility, and it was located using a CIA-provided search tool running a query of the information provided to the committee pursuant to its investigation. Director Brennan stated that the CIA search had determined that the committee staff had copies of the internal Panetta review on the committee staff shared drive and had accessed them numerous times. He indicated at the meeting that he was going to order further forensic investigation of the committee network to loan -- to learn more about activities of the committee's oversight staff.


Two days after the meeting, on January 17th, I wrote a letter to Director Brennan objecting to any further CIA investigation, due to the separation of powers constitutional issues that the search raised.

I followed this with a second letter on January 23rd to the director asking 12 specific questions about the CIA's actions -- questions that the CIA has refused to answer. Some of the questions in my letter related to the full scope of the CIA's search of our computer network. Other questions related to who had authorized and conducted the search and what legal basis the CIA claimed gave it authority to conduct the search. Again, the CIA has not provided answers to any of my questions.

My letter also laid out my concern about the legal and constitutional implications of the CIA's actions. Based on what Director Brennan has informed us, I have grave concerns that the CIA's search may well have violated the separation of powers principle embodied in the United States Constitution, including the speech and debate clause. It may have undermined the constitutional framework essential to effective congressional oversight of intelligence activities or any other government function.

I have asked for an apology and a recognition that this CIA search of computers used by its oversight committee was inappropriate. I have received neither.

Besides the constitutional implications, the CIA search may also have violated the Fourth Amendment, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, as well as Executive Order 12333, which prohibits the CIA from conducting domestic searches or surveillance.

Days after the meeting with Director Brennan, the CIA inspector general, David Buckley, learned of the CIA's search and began an investigation into CIA's activities. I have been informed that Mr. Buckley has referred the matter to the Department of Justice, given the possibility of a criminal violation by CIA personnel.

Let me note because the CIA has refused to answer the questions in my January 23rd letter and the CIA inspector general is ongoing, I have limited information about exactly what the CIA did in conducting its search.


Weeks later, I was also told that after the inspector general reviewed the CIA's activities to the Department of Justice -- excuse me, referred the CIA's activities to the Department of Justice, the acting counsel general of the CIA filed a crimes report with the Department of Justice concerning the committee staff's actions. I have not been provided the specifics of these allegations, or been told whether the department has initiated a criminal investigation based on the allegations of the CIA's acting general counsel.

As I mentioned before, our staff involved in this matter have the appropriate clearances, handled this sensitive material according to established procedures and practice to protect classified information, and were provided access to the Panetta Review by the CIA itself.

As a result, there is no legitimate reason to allege to the Justice Department that Senate staff may have committed a crime. I view the acting counsel general's referral as a potential effort to intimidate this staff, and I am not taking this lightly.

I should note that for most if not all of the CIA's detention and interrogation program, the now-acting general counsel was a lawyer in the CIA's counterterrorism center, the unit within which the CIA managed and carried out this program. From mid-2004 until the official termination of the detention and interrogation program in January 2009, he was the unit's chief lawyer. He is mentioned by name more than 1,600 times in our study.

And now, this individual is sending a crimes report to the Department of Justice on the actions of Congressional staff -- the same Congressional staff who researched and drafted a report that details how CIA officers, including the acting general counsel himself, provided inaccurate information to the Department of Justice about the program.

Mr. President, let me say this: All senators rely on their staff to be their eyes and ears and to carry out our duties. The staff members of the intelligence committee are dedicated professionals who are motivated to do what is best for our nation. The staff members who have been working on this study and this report have devoted years of their lives to it, wading through the horrible details of a CIA program that never, never, never should have existed.


They have worked long hours and produced a report unprecedented in its comprehensive attention to detail in the history of the Senate. They are now being threatened with legal jeopardy just as final revisions to the report and being made so that parts of it can be declassified and released to the American people.

Mr. President, I felt that I needed to come to the floor today to correct the public record and to give the American people the facts about what the dedicated committee staff have been working so hard for the last several years as part of the committee's investigation.

I also want to reiterate to my colleagues my desire to have all updates to the committee report completed this month and approved for declassification. We're not going to stop. I intend to move to have the findings, conclusions and the executive summary of the report sent to the president for declassification as release to the American people. The White House has indicated publicly and to me personally that it supports declassification and release.

If the Senate can declassify this report, we will be able to ensure that an un-American, brutal program of detention and interrogation will never again be considered or permitted. But, Mr. President, the recent actions that I have just laid out make this a defining moment for the oversight of our Intelligence Committee. How Congress and how this will be resolved will show whether the Intelligence Committee can be effective in monitoring and investigating our nation's intelligence activities or whether our work can be thwarted by those we oversee.

I believe it is critical that the committee and the Senate reaffirm our oversight role and our independence under the Constitution of the United States.

Mr. President, I thank you very much for your patience, and I yield the floor.
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Re: CIA asks Justice Dept. to investigate spying on Senate

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Mar 12, 2014 8:34 am

Robert Eatinger


The CIA: the double life of Dianne Feinstein
The exasperation with the Democratic senator from California is that she hasn't also directed her outrage at the NSA

Editorial
The Guardian, Tuesday 11 March 2014 18.53 EDT

Senator Dianne Feinstein is frequently exasperating. The Democratic senator from California is one day ultra-liberal, in the lead in calling for gun reform. The next she is ultra-conservative, one of the staunchest defenders of the embattled National Security Agency.

The senator's contradictory nature was on show for all to see on Tuesday, when she delivered an extraordinary speech from the Senate floor. It amounted to the biggest and most public rift between Congress and the spy community since the 9/11 attacks. Ms Feinstein, who chairs the Senate intelligence committee, which has oversight of America's myriad spy agencies, accused the CIA of breaking into the committee's computers. It is an extremely serious charge: a breach of the constitution, the executive branch tampering with the elected branch. She described it as "a defining moment for the oversight of our intelligence community".

She is on strong ground. The row dates back to the CIA's programme of torture in the aftermath of 9/11. The CIA and the Bush administration, which presided over the programme, preferred to describe it euphemistically as "enhanced interrogation techniques" but torture it was. Members of the Senate and House intelligence committee only learned about it late, in 2006. A year later the New York Times revealed that the CIA had destroyed videotapes of these early interrogations.

After Barack Obama became president in 2009 and Ms Feinstein became head of the intelligence committee, she started an exhaustive inquiry into the torture, and this is at the centre of the current rift. She claims that the CIA, headed by John Brennan, recently conducted searches of the committee's computers. Mr Brennan, in response, denied that the CIA had hacked into the Senate computers.

It is right that Ms Feinstein should raise this. It is a huge issue, one that at the very least will see calls for Mr Brennan's resignation. Her pursuit of the CIA is the fulfilment of her role as chair of the intelligence committee. It is what she should be doing, the monitoring of the spy agencies.

The exasperation with Ms Feinstein is that she directs her sense of outrage only at the CIA. It seems restricted to issues that impact on her. She is outraged when the CIA allegedly hacked into her committee's computers. She is upset over the alleged intrusion into the privacy of her own staff. And yet this is the same senator who could not empathise with Americans upset at the revelations in the Snowden documents of millions of citizens whose personal data has been accessed by the NSA. It is the same senator who could not share American anger over the revelation of the co-operation in surveillance of the giant tech companies, whether wittingly or unwittingly.

Ms Feinstein not only failed to investigate the NSA with a smidgen of the aggression she has shown towards the CIA but has gone out of her way to be the NSA's most prominent defender. The day after Edward Snowden revealed himself as a whistleblower last June, she was among the first to brand him a traitor. In the face of revelation after revelation, she praised the professionalism of the NSA. She defended mass data collection as a necessity, arguing that the NSA had to have access to the whole "haystack" to find the one needle, the terrorist. All this dismayed many of her Democratic supporters in liberal California and elsewhere in the US. She proposed a bill supposedly aimed at NSA reform, but it was a spoiler, one that in fact would have done little to curb the agency's powers. The one time she wobbled was in the autumn after the disclosure of US spying on German chancellor Angela Merkel. But this proved to be only brief.

It is about time Ms Feinstein used her powers as the democratically elected head of the intelligence committee to question the NSA with the same vigour – or even a small part of it – that she is displaying towards the CIA. That would, indeed, be a defining moment for the oversight of the US intelligence community: all of it.



Snowden On CIA: 'Suddenly It's A Scandal' When Congress Is Listened In On

IGOR BOBIC – MARCH 11, 2014, 11:55 AM EDT1283
Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden released a statement Tuesday after Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-CA), the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, accused the Central Intelligence Agency of violating the 4th Amendment by improperly searching a computer network established for Congress in its investigation of alleged CIA abuse during the Bush administration.

Snowden, who leaked extensive NSA surveillance programs to multiple media outlets, compared Feinstein's protest to that of German Chancellor Angela Merkel. The German government utilized similar methods to the NSA, and Merkel expressed outrage after documents leaked by Snowden revealed the U.S. had tapped her personal phone conversations.

"It's clear the CIA was trying to play 'keep away' with documents relevant to an investigation by their overseers in Congress, and that's a serious constitutional concern,” Snowden said in a statement to NBC News. “But it's equally if not more concerning that we're seeing another 'Merkel Effect,' where an elected official does not care at all that the rights of millions of ordinary citizens are violated by our spies, but suddenly it's a scandal when a politician finds out the same thing happens to them."

CIA Director John Brennan on Tuesday called allegations made Feinstein "beyond the scope of reason."

"Nothing could be further from the truth," Brennan told NBC's Andrea Mitchell.
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Re: CIA asks Justice Dept. to investigate spying on Senate

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Mar 12, 2014 3:16 pm

How ‘Looking Forward’ Tripped Up Obama
March 12, 2014

Exclusive: President Obama has stumbled into a constitutional firefight between the CIA and Senate Intelligence Committee over the spy agency’s attempted cover-up of its Bush-era torture practices, a clash he could have averted by wielding a declassification stamp, reports Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry

When historians set off to write the story of Barack Obama’s administration, they will have to struggle with why the 44th President chose not to hold his predecessor accountable for grave crimes of state and why he failed to take control of his own foreign policy.

This failure, which began with Obama’s early decision to “look forward, not backward” and to retain much of George W. Bush’s national security bureaucracy, has now led Obama into a scandal over the CIA’s resistance to the Senate Intelligence Committee drafting of a long-delayed report on the Bush-era policy of torturing “war on terror” detainees.

This clash surfaced publicly on Tuesday when Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein delivered an extraordinary speech on the Senate floor accusing the CIA of sabotaging the panel’s oversight work through subterfuge and legal threats.

But the biggest mystery may be why the Obama White House has been so solicitous of the CIA’s desire to keep secret the history of a torture program authorized by President George W. Bush and overseen by Vice President Dick Cheney. As Commander in Chief, President Obama has the ultimate say over what stays classified and what gets declassified.

Yet, as the CIA has dragged its feet about declassifying what are now historical records – by claiming factual inaccuracies – the Obama White House has adopted a posture of powerless supplicant. “We’ve made clear that we want to see the report’s findings declassified,” said White House spokesman Jay Carney, as if the President has no power over this process.

Obama could simply issue a declassification order that would allow the release of both the Senate’s 6,300-page report and an internal CIA review (with whatever redactions would be appropriate). If the CIA wishes to dispute some of the Senate’s findings, it could issue a rebuttal, which is how such disputes have been handled throughout U.S. history.

If every government report required that the party being criticized agree to every detail of the allegations, no report would ever be issued. This idea that secretive CIA officials, who have already obstructed the investigation by destroying videotape of the torture sessions, should now have the right to block the report’s release indefinitely grants the spy agency what amounts to blanket immunity for whatever it does.

So, the question is why. Why does President Obama continue letting holdovers from the Bush administration, including current CIA Director John Brennan, control U.S. national security policies more than five years after President Bush and Vice President Cheney left office?

The Ukraine Crisis

A similar question arises over the Ukraine crisis in which neoconservative holdovers, such as Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, and the U.S.-funded National Endowment for Democracy were allowed to spur on the violent coup that overthrew democratically elected President Viktor Yanukovych and precipitated a dangerous confrontation with Russia.

This Ukraine “regime change” served neocon interests by driving a wedge between President Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin, disrupting their behind-the-scenes relationship that has proved useful in averting U.S. wars in Syria and Iran, conflicts that the neocons have long wanted as part of their grand plan for remaking the Middle East.

Nuland’s husband, former Reagan administration official Robert Kagan, was a co-founder of the Project for the New American Century, which in 1998 called for the first step in this “regime change” strategy by seeking a U.S. invasion of Iraq. After the neocons gained control of U.S. foreign policy under President Bush, the Iraq invasion went ahead in 2003, but the occupation proved disastrous and put off the next stages, “regime change” in Syria and Iran.

Barack Obama’s election in 2008 was, in part, driven by public revulsion over the bloody conflict in Iraq and revelations about the torture of detainees and other crimes that surrounded Bush’s post-9/11 “war on terror.” Yet, after winning the White House, Obama shied away from a clean break from Bush’s policies.

Obama was persuaded to staff much of his national security team with “a team of rivals,” which meant retaining Bush’s Defense Secretary Robert Gates (something no previous president had ever done), appointing hawkish Sen. Hillary Clinton to be Secretary of State, and ordering no shake-up of Bush’s military high command, including media-favorite Gen. David Petraeus.

Longtime CIA apparatchik Brennan, who was implicated in some of Bush’s most controversial actions, was named Obama’s White House counterterrorism adviser. As former CIA analyst Ray McGovern wrote, Brennan was “a senior CIA official during President George W. Bush’s ‘dark side’ days of waterboarding detainees, renditioning suspects to Mideast torture centers and making up intelligence to invade Iraq.”

Part of the reason for Obama’s timidity may have been his lack of experience and his fear that any missteps would be seized on by his opponents to question his fitness for the job. By surrounding himself with Bush’s advisers and Democratic adversaries, he may have thought that he was keeping them safely inside his tent.

The Democratic Party also has a very thin bench of national security experts. Official Washington has been so dominated by foreign policy “tough-guy-ism” for decades – at least since Ronald Reagan crushed Jimmy Carter in 1980 – that most Democrats who could survive a congressional confirmation hearing have had to bow to this prevailing sentiment.

There’s also the U.S. news media, which readily joins any war-fevered stampede. Obama may have calculated that his presidency would have been trampled by endless recriminations if he had fully repudiated Bush’s legacy.

Getting Sucked In

But the consequences of these trade-offs have been severe. For instance, Gates wrote in his memoir Duty that he was persuaded to support an Afghan War “surge” of 30,000 troops by neocon theorist Frederick Kagan (Robert’s brother and Victoria Nuland’s brother-in-law). Though Obama was skeptical, the plan was backed by Petraeus (and other Bush-promoted generals) and Secretary of State Clinton. Ultimately, Obama acquiesced, to his later regret.

Arguably, there were similarities between Obama’s predicament and what confronted a young President John F. Kennedy when he took office in 1961 with the “red scares” of the McCarthy era still fresh in the minds of badly scarred Democrats. Kennedy was persuaded by holdovers from the Eisenhower administration, such as CIA Director Allen Dulles and some of the Pentagon’s high command, to press ahead with the Bay of Pigs invasion against Cuba.

After that disaster, Kennedy ousted Dulles and developed his own informal circle of foreign policy advisers, including his brother Attorney General Robert Kennedy. During the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, President Kennedy relied on these close advisers to counter the pressure from senior generals to escalate this nuclear Cold War confrontation.

Kennedy appeared ready to chart a course toward greater cooperation with Soviet leaders and to disengage from Vietnam at the time of his assassination on Nov. 22, 1963, though it will never be known how Kennedy would have ultimately addressed those challenges if he had won reelection in 1964.

However, after Kennedy’s death, President Lyndon Johnson agreed to Pentagon calls for sending combat troops to Vietnam. The historical record shows that Johnson’s decisions were influenced by his fears that otherwise Democrats would be accused of “losing” Indochina, much as Sen. Joe McCarthy and other right-wingers had accused them of “losing” China.

Despite some parallels between the Kennedy-Johnson era and the present, Obama’s secretive conduct of his foreign policy – without offering a thorough explication to the public – may be unprecedented. While displaying a surface “tough-guy-ism” of counterterrorism, including drone strikes and Special Forces raids, such as killing Osama bin Laden, Obama has maneuvered quietly toward a slow and steady pullback from America’s war footing.

To continue that process – often in the face of belligerent rhetoric from key members of Congress and prominent U.S. pundits – Obama has relied not only on an inner circle at the White House (buttressed by some sympathetic CIA analysts), but on cooperation from President Putin and other Russian leaders.

Not Taking Command

Though the original “team of rivals” is gone (Gates in mid-2011, Petraeus after a sex scandal in late 2012, and Clinton in early 2013), Obama still has not grabbed control of his national security apparatus. Secretary of State John Kerry often behaves as if he thinks he’s President John McCain’s top diplomat – or a captive of the hawkish State Department bureaucracy, the likes of Nuland and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power.

For example, amid murky evidence regarding a chemical weapons attack in Syria, Kerry delivered what sounded like a declaration of war on Aug. 30, 2013, only to have Obama walk the U.S. bombing threats back over the next few weeks and finally put them to rest with the help of Putin who got the Syrian regime to agree to surrender all of its chemical weapons.

Similarly, Obama and Putin oversaw the hammering out of a framework to resolve the Iran nuclear dispute last November. Kerry was supposed to go to Geneva and sign the deal, but instead inserted some last-minute poison-pill language advocated by the French (who were carrying water for the Saudis), causing a breakdown of the talks. I’m told that White House officials then instructed Kerry to return and sign the deal, which he finally did.

But Obama’s back-pocket foreign policy – and the extra energy that such an indirect management style requires – have allowed for some serious mischief-making by neocons in the government and their sympathizers in the media, especially in areas of the world where Obama has not directed his personal attention.

The crisis in Ukraine apparently caught the President off-guard, even though elements of the U.S. government were stoking the fires of political unrest on Russia’s border. Assistant Secretary Nuland was openly advocating for Ukraine’s “European aspirations” and literally passing out cookies to anti-government protesters.

Meanwhile, the U.S.-funded National Endowment for Democracy (essentially a three-decade-old neocon-controlled slush fund that pours money into “democracy building” or destabilization campaigns depending on your point of view), was running 65 projects in Ukraine. Last September, NED’s president Carl Gershman called Ukraine “the biggest prize” and expressed hope that “Putin may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself.”

In other words, even as Obama leaned on Putin to avert more wars in the Middle East, the U.S. government was seeking to embarrass and undermine Putin at home. Not surprisingly, this double-dealing has provoked the Russian government’s suspicion and confusion, made worse because the latest U.S. media swagger in support of the coup regime in Kiev has forced Obama to puff out his own chest and do some breast-beating at Putin’s expense.

One Putin adviser compared Obama’s treatment of Putin to a married man with a mistress who – when things get touchy – pretends not to know the mistress.

Now, Obama’s reluctance to confront the CIA over its Bush-era crimes has created another controversy. CIA Director John Brennan is resisting release of investigative reports critical of the CIA’s torture policies, a standoff that, in turn, has led to alleged CIA efforts to intimidate and spy on staff members of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank has dubbed the public clash between Sen. Feinstein, defending the committee’s investigation, and Director Brennan, defending the CIA’s reaction to the investigation, “a true Obama scandal.” Milbank noted the seriousness of the controversy as Feinstein accuses “Obama’s CIA of illegal and unconstitutional actions violating the separation of powers by searching the committee’s computers and intimidating congressional staffers with bogus legal threats.”

At the heart of this “scandal” is Obama’s decision to let Brennan have control over an investigation that threatened to embarrass if not directly implicate Brennan in Bush’s torture of detainees. The problem could have been avoided if Obama had simply asserted his presidential authority to declassify the torture reports in a timely fashion.

But Obama seems to feel that even though he’s been Commander in Chief for half a decade he still must tread softly to avoid upsetting the Bush holdovers and their many influential friends in Official Washington. It’s an attitude that historians may find puzzling.


Sen. Feinstein: Accidental ‘Whistleblower’
March 12, 2014

President Obama has stumbled into a scandal created by his determination to protect dirty secrets on torture and other CIA crimes committed by the Bush-43 administration. The unlikely “whistleblower” is another Democratic defender of CIA abuses, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, notes Norman Solomon.

By Norman Solomon

Who knows, soon we might see headlines and cable TV shows asking: “Is Dianne Feinstein a whistleblower or a traitor?” A truthful answer to that question could not possibly be “whistleblower.”

It may already be a historic fact that Sen. Feinstein’s speech on March 11, 2014, blew a whistle on CIA surveillance of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which she chairs. But if that makes her a whistleblower, then Colonel Sanders is a vegetarian evangelist.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-California.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-California.
In her blockbuster Tuesday speech on the Senate floor, Feinstein charged that the CIA’s intrusions on her committee’s computers quite possibly “violated the Fourth Amendment.” You know, that’s the precious amendment that Feinstein — more than any other senator — has powerfully treated like dirt, worthy only of sweeping under the congressional rug.

A tidy defender of the NSA’s Orwellian programs, Feinstein went on the attack against Edward Snowden from the outset of his revelations last June. Within days, she denounced his brave whistleblowing as “an act of treason” — a position she has maintained.

Snowden and other genuine whistleblowers actually take risks to defend the civil liberties and human rights of others, including the most vulnerable among us. Real whistleblowers choose to expose serious wrongdoing. And, if applicable, they renounce their own past complicity in doing those wrongs.

Dianne Feinstein remains in a very different place. She’s 180 degrees from a whistleblower orientation; her moral compass is magnetized with solipsism as a leading guardian of the surveillance state. This week, Feinstein stepped forward to tweak her tap dance — insisting that intrusive surveillance, so vile when directed at her and colleagues with august stature, must only be directed at others.

A huge problem is that for the USA’s top movers and shakers in media and politics, nothing rises to the level of constitutional crisis unless their noble oxen start to get gored. It doesn’t seem to dawn on the likes of Sen. Feinstein that Fourth Amendment protections for the few are not Fourth Amendment protections at all.

More than 40 years ago, under the Nixon administration — when the U.S. government was breaking into the offices of the Socialist Workers Party, busting into the homes of members of the Black Panther Party in the middle of night with guns firing, and widely shredding the civil liberties of anti-war activists — few among ruling elites seemed to give a damn. But when news emerged that one of the two big political parties had severely transgressed against the other with a break-in at the Watergate office of the Democratic National Committee on June 17, 1972, the Republican White House had gone too far.

As spring 2014 gets underway, we might be nearing a pivotal moment when major sectors of the establishment feel compelled to recognize the arrival of a constitutional crisis. Consider how the New York Times editorialized in its Wednesday edition, declaring that Feinstein “has provided stark and convincing evidence that the CIA may have committed crimes to prevent the exposure of interrogations that she said were ‘far different and far more harsh’ than anything the agency had described to Congress.”

In the euphemism lexicon of Official Washington, “far different and far more harsh” refers to outright torture by the U.S. government.

At the surveillance-state garrison known as the Washington Post, where cognitive dissonance must be something fierce right now, quickly out of the box was conventional-wisdom columnist Dana Milbank, who portrayed Feinstein as a savvy and angelic force to be reckoned with. The adulatory logic was classic for journalists who like to conflate complicity with credibility.

Noting Feinstein’s record as “an ally of Obama and a staunch defender of the administration during the controversy over the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs,” Milbank wrote: “So her credibility could not be questioned when she went public, reluctantly, to accuse Obama’s CIA of illegal and unconstitutional actions: violating the separation of powers by searching the committee’s computers and intimidating congressional staffers with bogus legal threats.”

News media accounts are filled with such statements right now. On the surface, they make sense — but there’s a pernicious undertow. With the underlying logic, the only time we could become sure that Wall Street malfeasance was a real problem would be if someone with the stature of Bernie Madoff stepped up to condemn it in no uncertain terms.

History tells us that we’d be deluded to depend on entrenched elites to opt for principle rather than continuity of the status quo. With few exceptions, what bonds those at peaks of power routinely trumps what divides them. It takes a massive and sustained uproar to really fracture the perversity of elite cohesion.

Consider the fact that the CIA, under the current Democratic administration, has gone to extraordinary lengths to transgress against a CIA-friendly Democratic-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee, in an effort to prevent anyone from being held accountable for crimes of torture committed under and by the Republican Bush administration.

While Dianne Feinstein has a long and putrid record as an enemy of civil liberties, transparency and accountability, it’s also true that thieves sometimes fall out — and so do violators of the most basic democratic safeguards in the Bill of Rights.

Some powerful “intelligence” scoundrels are now at each other’s throats, even while continuing to brandish daggers at the heart of democracy with their contempt for such ideals as a free press, privacy and due process. The responsibility for all this goes to the very top: President Barack Obama
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Re: CIA asks Justice Dept. to investigate spying on Senate

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Mar 13, 2014 8:31 am

White House withholds thousands of documents from Senate CIA probe, despite vows of help
BY JONATHAN S. LANDAY, ALI WATKINS AND MARISA TAYLOR
McClatchy Washington BureauMarch 12, 2014


The White House in Washington D.C.
TISH WELLS — McClatchy

WASHINGTON — The White House has been withholding for five years more than 9,000 top-secret documents sought by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence for its investigation into the now-defunct CIA detention and interrogation program, even though President Barack Obama hasn’t exercised a claim of executive privilege.

In contrast to public assertions that it supports the committee’s work, the White House has ignored or rejected offers in multiple meetings and in letters to find ways for the committee to review the records, a McClatchy investigation has found.

The significance of the materials couldn’t be learned. But the administration’s refusal to turn them over or to agree to any compromise raises questions about what they would reveal about the CIA’s use of waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques on suspected terrorists in secret overseas prisons.

The dispute indicates that the White House is more involved than it has acknowledged in the unprecedented power struggle between the committee and the CIA, which has triggered charges that the agency searched the panel’s computers without authorization and has led to requests to the Justice Department for criminal investigations of CIA personnel and Senate aides.

“These documents certainly raise the specter that the White House has been involved in stonewalling the investigation,” said Elizabeth Goitein, the co-director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program at the New York University Law School.

The committee and the CIA declined to comment.

In a statement to McClatchy, the White House confirmed that “a small percentage” of the 6.2 million pages of documents provided to the committee were “set aside because they raise executive branch confidentiality interests.”

The White House also said that it had worked closely with the committee “to ensure access to the information necessary to review the CIA’s former program.”

Speaking to reporters earlier during a White House event, Obama said that the administration has worked with the committee to ensure that its study is “well informed” and that he was committed to seeing the report declassified once a final version is completed. He said it wouldn’t be proper for him to comment directly on the battle between the CIA and the committee, except to say that CIA Director John Brennan had referred the issues to the “appropriate authorities and they are looking into it.”

The Democrat-controlled committee has largely kept silent about the tussle with the White House, even as some members have decried what they contend has been the CIA’s refusal to surrender key materials on the agency’s use under the Bush administration of interrogation methods denounced by the panel chairwoman as “un-American” and “brutal.”

The chairwoman, Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, made no mention of the White House documents during a blistering floor speech Tuesday in which she charged that the CIA may have undermined the Constitution and violated the law by searching computers used by her staff to compile the study. Brennan has denied her allegations and the White House has expressed continued confidence in his leadership of the CIA.

In question are some 9,400 documents that came to the committee’s attention in 2009, McClatchy has learned. It’s unclear whether the CIA first gave the committee staff access to the materials before the White House withheld them.

Obama, however, still hasn’t formally decreed that the documents are protected by executive privilege, McClatchy learned. Although the doctrine isn’t mentioned explicitly in the Constitution, the Supreme Court in 1974 recognized a limited power by the White House to withhold certain communications between high officials and close aides who advise and assist them.

The withholding of the documents “may not be a smoking gun” proving White House obstructionism, said Goitein, a former Senate Judiciary Committee legal adviser.

Among the other explanations: The White House might have determined that the documents are not relevant to the inquiry or that they are indeed covered by executive privilege but that the president has not yet been forced to assert the claim, she said.

“The most nefarious explanation is that they are not privileged and the White House simply doesn’t want to hand them over,” Goitein said. “Executive privilege is generally asserted after negotiations and brinksmanship behind the scenes. People put on paper what they want to be formalized, and these negotiations by their very nature are very informal.”

The committee, the CIA and the White House have held periodic talks on the materials since 2009. Their apparent failure to resolve the standoff prompted Feinstein to write several letters last year to Obama’s chief legal adviser, Kathryn Ruemmler, seeking a resolution, McClatchy has learned.

A White House official, who declined to be further identified as a matter of administration policy, said that Ruemmler responded to Feinstein’s letters, although information obtained by McClatchy indicated that she hadn’t.

It was not known if the materials came up during a visit that Ruemmler and White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough paid to Feinstein and the committee’s vice chairman, Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., on Tuesday after Feinstein delivered her speech.

To date, the most explicit public reference to documents being withheld by the White House appears to have been made last August by Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colo., an Intelligence Committee member who has led calls for a full disclosure of the CIA interrogation program.

In written questions that he submitted for the confirmation process of former CIA General Counsel Stephen W. Preston to be the Pentagon’s top lawyer, Udall asked Preston what role he’d played in an agency decision to withdraw documents that initially had been provided to the committee staff.

“During the CIA’s document production of more than six million pages of records, the CIA removed several thousand CIA documents that the CIA believed could be subject to executive privilege claims by the president,” Udall wrote. “While the documents represent an admittedly small percentage of the total number of records produced, the documents – deemed responsive – have nonetheless not been provided to the committee.”

Preston responded that “a small percentage of the total number of documents was set aside for further review. The agency (CIA) has deferred to the White House and has not been substantially involved in subsequent discussions about the disposition of those documents.”

In a related episode in 2010 as described by Feinstein in her speech on Tuesday, the committee staff discovered that it was no longer able to access hundreds of documents that it previously had been able to read.

“This was done without the knowledge or approval of committee members or staff and in violation of our written agreements,” she said.

CIA personnel initially accused computer technicians of removing the documents and then asserted that they were pulled on the White House’s orders, Feinstein said. The White House denied issuing such orders, she said, and “the matter was resolved” with renewed administration and CIA pledges that there would be no further intrusions into the staff’s database.

Feinstein, however, did not say what happened to the documents.

The records being held by the White House are separate from materials generated by an internal CIA review of some 6.2 million pages of operational cables, emails and other top-secret documents made accessible to committee staff in a secret CIA electronic reading room in Northern Virginia. The committee approved a final draft of the $40 million, 6,300-page study in December 2012.

In his first significant comments on the scandal, Chambliss took to the Senate floor late Wednesday afternoon to launch an apparent counterattack on Feinstein’s speech.

“Although people speak as though we know all the pertinent facts surrounding this matter, the truth is, we do not,” said Chambliss, who pointed out that the committee’s Republican staff didn’t participate in investigating the detention and interrogation program.

“We do not have the actual facts concerning the CIA’s alleged actions or all of the specific details about the actions by the committee staff regarding the draft of what is now referred to as the Panetta internal document,” Chambliss said. “Both parties have made allegations against one another, and even speculated (on) each other’s actions, but there are still a lot of unanswered questions that must be addressed.”

“No forensics have been run on the CIA computers . . . at the CIA facility to know what actually happened either regarding the alleged CIA search or the circumstances under which the committee came into possession of the Panetta internal review document.”

LESLEY CLARK AND WILLIAM DOUGLAS OF THE WASHINGTON BUREAU CONTRIBUTED.

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Re: CIA asks Justice Dept. to investigate spying on Senate

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Mar 13, 2014 2:51 pm

MARCH 13, 2014

A Former CIA Analyst's Perspective
Why CIA Director John Brennan Must Resign
by MELVIN A. GOODMAN
CIA director John Brennan has become an embarrassment to President Barack Obama and should resign immediately. Brennan has clearly worn out his welcome with the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI), and recent history tells us that when a CIA director is found in the crosshairs of the committee it is time to go. In the 1980s, CIA director William Casey was found to be lying to the committee on Iran-Contra, and even such Republican members of the committee as Senator Barry Goldwater wanted his resignation. In the 1990s, CIA director Jim Woolsey angered SSCI chairman Dennis DeConcini (D-AZ) and other key members of the committee, and the Clinton administration persuaded Woolsey to resign. Brennan’s resignation would allow the Obama administration to release a sanitized version of the SSCI’s report on CIA detention and rendition policy and thus avoid a prolonged battle with the Congress over this issue.

The fact that Brennan has crossed swords with the chairman of the committee, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), who was an advocate for Brennan and the CIA at his confirmation hearing last year is more than enough reason for Brennan to go. Feinstein has been an advocate for the intelligence committee during her stewardship, defending the massive surveillance of the National Security Agency, the use of the drone and targeted assassinations by the Central Intelligence Agency, and the implementation of the Patriot Act by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. There has never been a chairman of the SSCI more supportive of the intelligence community until now.

Brennan never should have been appointed CIA director in the first place. During his campaign for the presidency in 2007-2008, Barack Obama spoke out against the militarization and politicization of the intelligence community, and indicated that an Obama administration would demand more transparency in the community and an end to intelligence abuses. Even before his election, however, Obama appointed an intelligence advisory staff that was headed by former associates of George Tenet, whose failed stewardship of the CIA included phony intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq War and the cover-up of intelligence failures for 9/11. Tenet’s deputy, John McLaughlin, who supported CIA programs of renditions and detentions, was part of the advisory group.

Immediately after the election, Obama appointed one of Tenet’s proteges, John Brennan, to head the transition team at CIA. Brennan, as Tenet’s chief of staff, was part of the corruption and cover-up at CIA. He was slated to become Obama’s director at CIA, but Brennan removed his name from consideration when it became clear that he would have serious difficulty in the confirmation process because of his support for CIA detentions and renditions. Like Robert Gates, who had to withdraw his nomination in 1987 because of his dissembling over Iran-Contra, but then laundered his credentials to become confirmed four years later, Brennan too laundered his credentials for a successful bid to become CIA director in 2013.

It should not be forgotten that, during the Tenet era at CIA, Brennan was the chief of staff and deputy executive director under George Tenet, and provided no opposition to decisions to conduct torture and abuse of suspected terrorists and to render suspected individuals to foreign intelligence services that conducted their own torture and abuse. Brennan had risen through the analytic ranks at the CIA, and should have been aware that analytic standards were being ignored at the Agency. Brennan was also an active defender of the program of warrantless eavesdropping, implemented at the National Security Agency under the leadership of one of Tenet’s successors, General Michael Hayden, then director of NSA.

President Obama will not be able to change the culture of the intelligence community and restore the moral compass of the CIA unless there is a full understanding and repudiation of the operational crimes of the post-9/11 era. If the president wants to roll back the misdeeds of the Bush administration, restore the rule of law at the CIA, and create the change that Americans want, he should not be relying for advice on the senior officials who endorsed the shameful acts of the past. The resignation of John Brennan and the release of the Senate intelligence committee’s report would be a good place to start.
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Re: CIA asks Justice Dept. to investigate spying on Senate

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Mar 14, 2014 8:39 am

The White House Has Been Covering Up the Presidency’s Role in Torture for Years
By Marcy Wheeler13 Mar 2014, 4:18 PM EDT 132
Brennan and Torture Report
On May 10, 2013, John Brennan presented CIA’s response to the Senate Intelligence Committee Torture Report to the President. Official White House Photo by Pete Souza.

The fight between the CIA and the Senate Intelligence Committee over the Committee’s Torture Report – which Dan Froomkin covered here – has now zeroed in on the White House.

Did the White House order the CIA to withdraw 920 documents from a server made available to Committee staffers, as Senator Dianne Feinstein says the agency claimed in 2010? Were those documents – perhaps thousands of them – pulled in deference to a White House claim of executive privilege, as Senator Mark Udall and then CIA General Counsel Stephen Preston suggested last fall? And is the White House continuing to withhold 9,000 pages of documents without invoking privilege, as McClatchy reported yesterday?

We can be sure about one thing: The Obama White House has covered up the Bush presidency’s role in the torture program for years. Specifically, from 2009 to 2012, the administration went to extraordinary lengths to keep a single short phrase, describing President Bush’s authorization of the torture program, secret.

Some time before October 29, 2009, then National Security Advisor Jim Jones filed an ex parte classified declaration with the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, in response to a FOIA request by the ACLU seeking documents related to the torture program. In it, Jones argued that the CIA should not be forced to disclose the “source of the CIA’s authority,” as referenced in the title of a document providing “Guidelines for Interrogations” and signed by then CIA Director George Tenet. That document was cited in two Justice Department memos at issue in the FOIA. Jones claimed that “source of authority” constituted an intelligence method that needed to be protected.

Redacted phrase describing authorization for torture
The Obama Administration successfully appealed a judge’s ruling to release the redacted part of this title describing under what authorities torture was conducted. Document obtained by ACLU under FOIA.



As other documents and reporting have made clear, the source of authority was a September 17, 2001 Presidential declaration authorizing not just detention and interrogation, but a range of other counterterrorism activities, including targeted killings.

Both former CIA Director Michael Hayden and former CIA Acting General Counsel John Rizzo have made clear that the torture program began as a covert operation. “A few days after the [9/11] attacks, President Bush signed a top-secret directive to CIA authorizing an unprecedented array of covert actions against Al Qaeda and its leadership.” Rizzo explained in 2011. One of those actions, Rizzo went on, was “the capture, incommunicado detention and aggressive interrogation of senior Al Qaeda operatives.”

As Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists Project on Government Secrecy, noted in 2009 – shortly after Hayden revealed that torture started as a covert operation – this means there should be a paper trail implicating President Bush in the torture program. “[T]here should be a Presidential ‘finding’ authorizing the program,” he said, “and [] such a finding should have been provided to Congressional overseers.”

The National Security Act dictates that every covert operation must be supported by a written declaration finding that the action is necessary and important to the national security. The Congressional Intelligence committees – or at least the Chair and Ranking Member – should receive notice of the finding.

But there is evidence that those Congressional overseers were never told that the finding the president signed on September 17, 2001 authorized torture. For example, a letter from then ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, Jane Harman, to the CIA’s General Counsel following her first briefing on torture asked: “Have enhanced techniques been authorized and approved by the President?” The CIA’s response at the time was simply that “policy as well as legal matters have been addressed within the Executive Branch.”

Nevertheless, the finding does exist. The CIA even disclosed its existence in response to the ACLU FOIA, describing it as “a 14-page memorandum dated 17 September 2001 from President Bush to the Director of the CIA pertaining to the CIA’s authorization to detain terrorists.” In an order in the ACLU suit, Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein confirmed that the declaration was “intertwined with” the administration’s effort to keep the language in the Tenet document hidden. When the administration succeeded in keeping that short phrase secret, all effort to release the declaration also ended.

Enduring confusion about this particular finding surely exists because of its flexible nature. As Bob Woodward described in Bush at War, CIA Director Tenet asked President Bush to sign “a broad intelligence order permitting the CIA to conduct covert operations without having to come back for formal approval for each specific operation.” As Jane Mayer described in The Dark Side, such an order not only gave the CIA flexibility, it also protected the President. “To give the President deniability, and to keep him from getting his hands dirty, the finding called for the President to delegate blanket authority to Tenet to decide on a case-by-case basis whom to kill, whom to kidnap, whom to detain and interrogate, and how.”

When George Tenet signed written guidelines for the CIA’s torture program in 2003, however, he appeared to have deliberately deprived the President of that deniability by including the source of CIA’s authorization – presumably naming the President – in a document interrogators would see. You can’t blame the CIA Director, after all; Tenet signed the Guidelines just as CIA’s Inspector General and DOJ started to review the legality of the torture tactics used against detainees like Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who was threatened with a drill and a gun in violation of DOJ’s ban on mock executions.



Protecting the President?

The White House’s fight to keep the short phrase describing Bush’s authorization of the torture program hidden speaks to its apparent ambivalence over the torture program. Even after President Obama released the DOJ memos authorizing torture – along with a damning CIA Inspector General Report and a wide range of documents revealing bureaucratic discussions within the CIA about torture – the White House still fought the release of the phrase that would have made it clear that the CIA conducted this torture at the order of the president. And it did so with a classified declaration from Jones that would have remained secret had Judge Hellerstein not insisted it be made public.

As Aftergood noted, such White House intervention in a FOIA suit is rare. “The number of times that a national security advisor has filed a declaration in a FOIA lawsuit is vanishingly small,” he said. “It almost never happens.” But as ACLU Deputy Legal Director Jameel Jaffer noted of the finding, “It was the original authority for the CIA’s secret prisons and for the agency’s rendition and torture program, and apparently it was the authority for the targeted killing program as well. It was the urtext. It’s remarkable that after all this time it’s still secret.”

President Obama’s willingness to go to such lengths to hide this short phrase may explain the White House’s curious treatment of potentially privileged documents with the Senate now – describing President Bush’s authorization of the torture program and its seemingly contradictory stance supporting publishing the Torture Report while thwarting its completion by withholding privileged documents. After all, the documents in question, like the reference to the presidential finding, may deprive the President of plausible deniability.

Furthermore, those documents may undermine one of the conclusions of the Torture Report. According to Senator Ron Wyden, the Senate Torture Report found that “the CIA repeatedly provided inaccurate information about its interrogation program to the White House.” Perhaps the documents reportedly withheld by the White House undermine this conclusion, and instead show that the CIA operated with the full consent and knowledge of at least some people within the White House.

Finally, the White House’s sensitivity about documents involved in the torture program may stem from the structure of the finding. As John Rizzo made clear, the finding authorizes not just torturing, but killing, senior al Qaeda figures. Bob Woodward even reported that that CIA would carry out that killing using Predator drones, a program CIA still conducts. And in fact, when the Second Circuit ultimately ruled to let the White House to keep the authorization phrase secret, it did so because the phrase also relates to “a highly classified, active intelligence activity” and “pertains to intelligence activities unrelated to the discontinued [torture] program.” Given what we know about the September 17, 2001 finding, that may well refer to President Obama’s still active drone program.

In any case, the White House’s seemingly contradictory statements about the Torture Report might best be understood by its past treatment of CIA documents. By releasing the DOJ memos and other materials, the White House provided what seemed to be unprecedented transparency about what the CIA had done. But all the while it was secretly hiding language describing what the White House has done.
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Re: CIA asks Justice Dept. to investigate spying on Senate

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Mar 21, 2014 3:12 am

CIA lawyer Robert Eatinger, who was acting general counsel when he filed the criminal referral against Senate staffers. That was after Eatinger was named 1,600 times in the committee's study of the interrogation program.


Congress raises pressure on CIA in torture dispute
Congress and the CIA are battling over who will write the official history of one of the darkest eras in American spying — the waterboarding and brutal interrogations of Al Qaeda prisoners in undeclared prisons overseas.


By Bradley Klapper and Donna Cassata, Associated Press / March 20, 2014


Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D) of California presides over a Senate Transportation subcommittee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, March 13.

Adding heat on the CIA, the Senate will investigate a computer network that contained a still-secret review of US terror interrogations that led to dueling criminal referrals to the Justice Department and a dramatic collapse in relations between the nation's spy agencies and the lawmakers entrusted with their oversight.

In letters to the heads of the CIA and Justice Department, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said the CIA's decision to search the Senate intelligence committee's network and computers without approval was "absolutely indefensible" and carried serious implications for the separation of powers between the executive and legislative branches.

RECOMMENDED: CIA-Senate dispute 101: 9 questions about who's spying on whom

Reid said he had instructed his Senate's chief cop to examine how Senate staffers obtained an internal CIA review, which the agency accused them of improperly copying, although Reid described the CIA's alleged monitoring of Senate computers as more serious.

Meanwhile, legislative aides said the Senate intelligence committee will push soon for declassification of parts or all of its 6,000-page report on the agency's "war on terror" interrogation tactics at secret sites, the starting point of the entire dispute.

The parameters of the sergeant-at-arms's investigation are unclear and it's unknown what cooperation he'll receive from the CIA, which has been locked in a bitter rift with the intelligence committee's chairman, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D) of California. The agency accuses committee staffers of illegally accessing certain documents; Feinstein and other senators say the CIA broke the law by monitoring its computer use and deleting files.

"To my knowledge, the CIA has produced no evidence to support its claims that Senate committee staff who have no technical training somehow hacked into the CIA's highly secure classified networks, an allegation that appears on its face to be patently absurd," Reid said in a letter, dated Wednesday, to CIA Director John Brennan. A previous review, he said, appears to corroborate committee findings and contradict CIA claims.

CIA spokesman Dean Boyd said the agency was committed to resolving its differences with senators. The CIA, he said, "believes in the necessity of effective, strong and bipartisan congressional oversight."

The clash between Congress and the CIA is arcane in its particulars but potentially broad in scope, with the sides battling over who will write the official history of one of the darkest eras in American spying — the waterboarding and brutal interrogations of Al Qaeda prisoners in undeclared "black site" prisons overseas. Feinstein's claim that the CIA has undermined separation of powers makes it a constitutional fight, too.

The disagreement had been kept under wraps until this month and broke out fully into the open after the California Democrat took the Senate floor to outline her case last week. It was an extraordinary intervention for a senator who has been among the staunchest defenders of US intelligence agencies since former National Security Agency systems analyst Edward Snowden's public revelations of massive government collection of telephone and other data.

The CIA has thus far dismissed Feinstein's allegations, and the Justice Department has said only it is reviewing the competing claims of wrongdoing. The White House has refused thus far to weigh in — even if the origins of the dispute focus on the effectiveness of interrogation methods authorized and conducted by the Bush administration in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

Intelligence committee members hope President Barack Obama will help make public the 6,000-page report they are close to completing. Last week, the president said he would declassify the "findings so that the American people can understand what happened in the past, and that can help guide us as we move forward."

Congressional aides said the committee planned a vote next week calling for declassification, though it was unclear if they'd demand that action begin on the full report or a shorter, 400-page summary. They want Obama to ensure the CIA conducts the line-by-line declassification in good faith and to prevent any officials who were part of its interrogation unit from participating in the process.

The aides weren't authorized to speak publicly about the plans and demanded anonymity.

"Getting to the truth about the CIA's brutal and ineffective interrogation and detention program goes to the core of the effectiveness and integrity of the CIA as an institution," Sen. Mark Udall (D) of Colorado wrote in a letter to Obama on Thursday. He urged declassification as soon as possible.

Reid said the sergeant-at-arms would conduct a forensic investigation to determine how the previous review, known as the "Panetta review" because it was ordered by then-CIA Director Leon Panetta, entered the computer network set up for the committee at a northern Virginia site.

Committee staff reportedly took copies of those documents to the Capitol for safekeeping. Reid asked the CIA to grant the appropriate security clearances to the sergeant-at-arms, who oversees security at the Capitol and Senate. Reid said the sergeant-at-arms, Terrance W. Gainer, would step down in the spring after seven years and be replaced by his deputy, Drew Willison.

In his letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, Reid challenged the credibility of Brennan's claims. He echoed Feinstein's conflict-of-interest concerns about the CIA lawyer Robert Eatinger, who was acting general counsel when he filed the criminal referral against Senate staffers. That was after Eatinger was named 1,600 times in the committee's study of the interrogation program.

Troubled by the CIA's actions, Reid wrote to Holder, "Left unchallenged, they call into question Congress' ability to carry out its core constitutional duties and risk the possibility of an unaccountable intelligence community run amok."
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But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: CIA asks Justice Dept. to investigate spying on Senate

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Mar 21, 2014 9:44 am

The CIA impunity challenge
by John Glaser @jwcglaser March 19, 2014
The intelligence agency — and the White House — are holding hostage the truth about torture

The White House and the CIA are currently engaged in an unrelenting battle to cover up the George W. Bush administration’s torture program and to maintain a system of impunity for what are obvious war crimes. Disturbingly, they are even willing to break the law — again — to win that battle.

The historic testimony given by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., on the Senate floor on March 11 laid bare the efforts of the Central Intelligence Agency to block the publication of a 6,300-page investigation by the Senate Intelligence Committee into the Bush-era interrogation program. She accused the CIA of violating both statutory laws and the Constitution.

The committee, chaired by Feinstein, began a comprehensive review of the post-9/11 detention and interrogation program in 2009. As part of the investigation, the CIA was compelled to provide the committee and its staff with all relevant documents.

At some point during the investigation, the CIA quietly hacked into the computer network established specifically for the inquiry and removed about 1,000 pages of documents, including an internal CIA review of the torture program that was conducted while Leon Panetta was its director. When questioned, the CIA claimed the White House ordered the files removed, which the White House denied.

This breech of the computer network indicates not only that the CIA violated its agreement with the Senate committee and then lied about it but also that it acted independently of White House orders, all in an attempt to hide information about the torture and interrogation program.

The still classified Senate study reportedly reveals gruesome details of torture and concludes, contrary to CIA claims, that so-called enhanced interrogation methods did not generate valuable intelligence.

The CIA has maintained that the report cannot be declassified because of significant factual errors and misleading judgments; this is a curious contention, as the internal Panetta review largely conforms to the committee’s conclusions.

“Some of these important parts that the CIA now disputes in our committee study are clearly acknowledged in the CIA’s own internal Panetta review,” Feinstein explained. “To say the least, this is puzzling. How can the CIA's official response to our study stand factually in conflict with its own internal review?”

Feinstein also revealed that the CIA’s general counsel — who played an important part in the torture program and who is “mentioned by name more than 1,600 times” in the committee study — told the Department of Justice that Senate staff committed a crime by reading the Panetta review. Feinstein said she believes this was an attempt to “intimidate” the committee and sabotage the investigation.

While it’s unlikely the CIA will face penalties for this intimidation, Feinstein’s testimony may help tip the balance in favor of declassifying the Senate review.

The CIA shares blame for obstructing the Senate investigation with the White House. Despite repeated statements that he supports the release of the committee’s report, President Barack Obama, in the face of CIA objections, has refused to declassify it.

The shameful effort to intimidate Congress and hide the truth from the American people will, if successful, extend that impunity into the foreseeable future.
In addition, Obama has been unilaterally withholding “more than 9,000 top-secret documents” from the Senate inquiry, McClatchy reported on March 12. These “are separate” from documents that Feinstein referred to. The content of these documents is unknown, but one can only imagine what they reveal. Such unscrupulous secrecy is contrary to the promises of transparency and accountability that drove then-candidate Obama to the White House in 2008.

“These documents certainly raise the specter that the White House has been involved in stonewalling the investigation,” Elizabeth Goitein of NYU Law School’s Brennan Center for Justice told McClatchy.

The coordinated attempts to cover up the controversial program should surprise no one, given what is at stake.

In 2007 the International Committee for the Red Cross concluded (PDF) that the treatment endured by detainees in CIA custody “amounted to torture” and constituted war crimes.

Detainees were subjected to waterboarding, forced nudity, severe beatings, sleep deprivation and exposure to extreme temperatures. The CIA hired a former military psychologist, James Mitchell, to oversee much of this sadistic treatment. He is reported to have advised that a detainee should be treated “like a dog in a cage.”

Many people had their heads smashed into walls; they were shackled in extremely painful stress positions; they were locked in tiny boxes with restricted airflow; they were chained by collars around the neck and beaten. An estimated 100 detainees were tortured to death.

By 2005, approximately 3,000 individuals had been captured by the CIA. Since the program was secret, captured suspects were almost never formally charged and were deprived of due process.

This inevitably led to a glut of what were called erroneous renditions, in which the CIA abducted and tortured innocent people. “They picked up the wrong people, who had no information,” a CIA official told the Washington Post in 2005.

Aside from the hideous details of this inhumane treatment, the torture program has a legacy of consequences that extend far beyond individual detainee abuse.

Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, an Al-Qaeda suspect in the custody of the CIA in 2001, was transferred to Egypt to be brutally tortured. After being locked in a small cage for more than 80 hours and severely beaten by Egyptian authorities, Libi confessed to having knowledge of senior Al-Qaeda leaders meeting with Iraqi officials for training in the development and use of weapons of mass destruction.

The Bush administration used this coerced confession in its propaganda campaign to boost support for invading Iraq. In a 2002 speech, Bush announced, “We’ve learned that Iraq has trained Al-Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and deadly gases.” Then–Secretary of State Colin Powell used this information in his infamously flawed speech at the United Nations.

Libi later recanted his so-called confession. In 2006 the Senate Intelligence Committee released a study, which reported that Libi “lied … to avoid torture.”

Torture produced wildly distorted intelligence that was then used as evidence to justify an unnecessary war that killed half a million Iraqis and almost 5,000 Americans and has cost trillions of dollars.

The people responsible for these crimes, including those in the CIA, have been shielded from investigation and prosecution for too long. The shameful effort to intimidate Congress and hide the truth from the American people will, if successful, extend that impunity into the foreseeable future. Instead, Obama should agree to the full declassification of the Senate inquiry and fully comply with whatever criminal investigations arise out of such disclosures.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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