Somewhere in my past childhood, I read a little book that showed an owlish
looking bird. It said, "This is a watch bird, watching you".
Later in the book was another bird with the heading, "This is a watch bird,
watching the watch bird".
I do believe that the good senator has found herself being watched by her
own birds.
As we all are.
Carl
> Subject: What Took Dianne Feinstein So Long to Get Fed Up with CIA
> Spying?
>
>
>>
>> Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
>> What Took Dianne Feinstein So Long to Get Fed Up with CIA Spying?
>> ________________________________________
>> Truthdig [1] / By Robert Scheer [2]
>>
>> What Took Dianne Feinstein So Long to Get Fed Up with CIA Spying?
>>
>>
>> March 12, 2014 |
>> It was a truly historic moment on Tuesday when Senate Intelligence
>> Committee
>> Chair Dianne Feinstein took to the Senate floor to warn that the CIA's
>> continuing cover-up of its torture program is threatening our
>> Constitutional
>> division of power. By blatantly concealing what Feinstein condemned
>> as "the
>> horrible details of a CIA program that never, never, never should have
>> existed," the spy agency now acts as a power unto itself, and the
>> agency's
>> outrages have finally aroused the senator's umbrage.
>> As Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, chair of the Judiciary Committee that will be
>> investigating Feinstein's charges noted, "in 40 years here, it was
>> one of
>> the best speeches I'd ever heard and one of the most important." That
>> was
>> particularly so, given that Feinstein's searing indictment of the CIA's
>> decade-long subversion of congressional oversight of its torture program
>> comes from a senator who previously has worked overtime to justify the
>> subversion of democratic governance by the CIA and other spy agencies.
>> But clearly the lady has by now had enough, given the CIA's recent
>> hacking
>> of her Senate committee's computers in an effort to suppress a key
>> piece of
>> evidence supporting the veracity of the committee's completed but
>> still not
>> released 6,300- page study that the CIA is bent on suppressing.
>> The Senate's investigation began in earnest with the Dec. 7, 2007
>> revelation
>> in the New York Times that the CIA had destroyed videotapes of its
>> "enhanced
>> interrogation techniques," despite objections from then-President Bush's
>> director of National Security and the White House counsel. At that time,
>> then-committee chair Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., sent staffers to begin
>> the
>> painstaking process of reviewing the limited material that the CIA was
>> willing to make available; their preliminary report wasn't issued until
>> early 2009.
>> By then, Feinstein had assumed the chairmanship and, as she recalled
>> in her
>> Tuesday speech, "The resulting staff report was chilling. The
>> interrogations
>> and the conditions of confinement at the CIA detention sites were far
>> different and far more harsh than the way the CIA had described them
>> to us."
>> Feinstein, ostensibly backed by new President Barack Obama, who had
>> campaigned as an opponent of the CIA's methods, obtained the committee's
>> bipartisan backing for an expanded investigation. But the CIA, led at
>> the
>> time by Obama appointee Leon Panetta, the former democratic
>> congressman, put
>> numerous logistical obstacles in the way of the Senate investigation.
>> As Feinstein pointed out, "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."
>> It was so slow that the committee's investigation has only now been
>> completed. Along the way, documents that Senate staffers found
>> interesting
>> would then mysteriously disappear from the system. One such set of
>> disappeared documents, referred to as the "Internal Panetta Review,"
>> is now
>> at the center of the CIA hacking scandal.
>> The Panetta Review became relevant last June, when the CIA offered its
>> critique of the Senate study. But as Feinstein points out, "Some of
>> those
>> 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?"
>> Relations between the Senate committee responsible for oversight of
>> the CIA
>> and the agency were so poor that, as Feinstein states, "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."
>> Feinstein defended the committee staff's spiriting information away
>> from the
>> CIA:
>> "As I have detailed, the CIA has previously withheld and destroyed
>> information about its Detention and Interrogation Program ... there
>> was a
>> need to preserve and protect the Internal Panetta Review in the
>> committee's
>> own secure spaces."
>> The response of the CIA was to hack the computers that Senate
>> staffers had
>> been using at the CIA off-site location, and the agency's acting general
>> counsel filed a crimes report with the Department of Justice against the
>> Senate committee's staff.
>> That was too much for Feinstein, who outed the CIA's counsel:
>> "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
>> Justice Department about the program."
>> Enough said, except that White House spokesman Jay Carney put the
>> president
>> on the side of those like current CIA Director John Brennan covering up
>> torture: "The president has great confidence in John Brennan and
>> confidence
>> in our intelligence community and in our professionals at the CIA." It's
>> something that George W. Bush would have said.
>>
>>
>> See more stories tagged with:
>> dianne feinstein [3],
>> cia [4],
>> Senator Patrick Leahy [5],
>> leon panetta [6],
>> CIA Detention and Interrogation Program [7]
>> ________________________________________
>> Source URL:
>> http://www.alternet.org/what-took-dianne-feinstein-so-long-get-fed-cia-spyin
>>
>> g
>> Links:
>> [1] http://www.truthdig.com/
>> [2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/robert-scheer
>> [3] http://www.alternet.org/tags/dianne-feinstein-0
>> [4] http://www.alternet.org/tags/cia-0
>> [5] http://www.alternet.org/tags/senator-patrick-leahy
>> [6] http://www.alternet.org/tags/leon-panetta-0
>> [7] http://www.alternet.org/tags/cia-detention-and-interrogation-program
>> [8] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
>>
>> Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
>> Home > What Took Dianne Feinstein So Long to Get Fed Up with CIA Spying?
>>
>> Truthdig [1] / By Robert Scheer [2]
>>
>> What Took Dianne Feinstein So Long to Get Fed Up with CIA Spying?
>> March 12, 2014 |
>> It was a truly historic moment on Tuesday when Senate Intelligence
>> Committee
>> Chair Dianne Feinstein took to the Senate floor to warn that the CIA's
>> continuing cover-up of its torture program is threatening our
>> Constitutional
>> division of power. By blatantly concealing what Feinstein condemned
>> as "the
>> horrible details of a CIA program that never, never, never should have
>> existed," the spy agency now acts as a power unto itself, and the
>> agency's
>> outrages have finally aroused the senator's umbrage.
>> As Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, chair of the Judiciary Committee that will be
>> investigating Feinstein's charges noted, "in 40 years here, it was
>> one of
>> the best speeches I'd ever heard and one of the most important." That
>> was
>> particularly so, given that Feinstein's searing indictment of the CIA's
>> decade-long subversion of congressional oversight of its torture program
>> comes from a senator who previously has worked overtime to justify the
>> subversion of democratic governance by the CIA and other spy agencies.
>> But clearly the lady has by now had enough, given the CIA's recent
>> hacking
>> of her Senate committee's computers in an effort to suppress a key
>> piece of
>> evidence supporting the veracity of the committee's completed but
>> still not
>> released 6,300- page study that the CIA is bent on suppressing.
>> The Senate's investigation began in earnest with the Dec. 7, 2007
>> revelation
>> in the New York Times that the CIA had destroyed videotapes of its
>> "enhanced
>> interrogation techniques," despite objections from then-President Bush's
>> director of National Security and the White House counsel. At that time,
>> then-committee chair Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., sent staffers to begin
>> the
>> painstaking process of reviewing the limited material that the CIA was
>> willing to make available; their preliminary report wasn't issued until
>> early 2009.
>> By then, Feinstein had assumed the chairmanship and, as she recalled
>> in her
>> Tuesday speech, "The resulting staff report was chilling. The
>> interrogations
>> and the conditions of confinement at the CIA detention sites were far
>> different and far more harsh than the way the CIA had described them
>> to us."
>> Feinstein, ostensibly backed by new President Barack Obama, who had
>> campaigned as an opponent of the CIA's methods, obtained the committee's
>> bipartisan backing for an expanded investigation. But the CIA, led at
>> the
>> time by Obama appointee Leon Panetta, the former democratic
>> congressman, put
>> numerous logistical obstacles in the way of the Senate investigation.
>> As Feinstein pointed out, "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."
>> It was so slow that the committee's investigation has only now been
>> completed. Along the way, documents that Senate staffers found
>> interesting
>> would then mysteriously disappear from the system. One such set of
>> disappeared documents, referred to as the "Internal Panetta Review,"
>> is now
>> at the center of the CIA hacking scandal.
>> The Panetta Review became relevant last June, when the CIA offered its
>> critique of the Senate study. But as Feinstein points out, "Some of
>> those
>> 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?"
>> Relations between the Senate committee responsible for oversight of
>> the CIA
>> and the agency were so poor that, as Feinstein states, "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."
>> Feinstein defended the committee staff's spiriting information away
>> from the
>> CIA:
>> "As I have detailed, the CIA has previously withheld and destroyed
>> information about its Detention and Interrogation Program ... there
>> was a
>> need to preserve and protect the Internal Panetta Review in the
>> committee's
>> own secure spaces."
>> The response of the CIA was to hack the computers that Senate
>> staffers had
>> been using at the CIA off-site location, and the agency's acting general
>> counsel filed a crimes report with the Department of Justice against the
>> Senate committee's staff.
>> That was too much for Feinstein, who outed the CIA's counsel:
>> "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
>> Justice Department about the program."
>> Enough said, except that White House spokesman Jay Carney put the
>> president
>> on the side of those like current CIA Director John Brennan covering up
>> torture: "The president has great confidence in John Brennan and
>> confidence
>> in our intelligence community and in our professionals at the CIA." It's
>> something that George W. Bush would have said.
>> See more stories tagged with:
>> dianne feinstein [3],
>> cia [4],
>> Senator Patrick Leahy [5],
>> leon panetta [6],
>> CIA Detention and Interrogation Program [7]
>>
>> Source URL:
>> http://www.alternet.org/what-took-dianne-feinstein-so-long-get-fed-cia-spyin
>>
>> g
>> Links:
>> [1] http://www.truthdig.com/
>> [2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/robert-scheer
>> [3] http://www.alternet.org/tags/dianne-feinstein-0
>> [4] http://www.alternet.org/tags/cia-0
>> [5] http://www.alternet.org/tags/senator-patrick-leahy
>> [6] http://www.alternet.org/tags/leon-panetta-0
>> [7] http://www.alternet.org/tags/cia-detention-and-interrogation-program
>> [8] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Blind-Democracy mailing list
>> Blind-Democracy@octothorp.org
>> http://www.octothorp.org/mailman/listinfo/blind-democracy
>
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> Blind-Democracy@octothorp.org
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