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Senate Is Sitting On A Devastating Report About How The CIA Avoided Oversight Of Unnecessary Torture
The Senate Is Sitting On A Devastating Report About How The CIA Avoided Oversight Of Unnecessary Torture Programfrom the congressional-oversight! dept
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Late last week, the New Yorker's Jane Mayer http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2013/10/a-cia-lawyer-answers-to-the-senate.html?utm_source=www&utm_medium=tw&utm_campaign=20131017 had a fantastic article revealing some details of a still-classified report put together by the Senate Intelligence Committee which apparently rips the CIA to shreds over its torture program, both in how ineffective the program was, but also in how the CIA tried to avoid any real oversight from Congress.
At its core is a bitter disagreement over an apparently devastating, and still secret, report by the Senate Intelligence Committee documenting in detail how the C.I.A.’s brutalization of terror suspects during the Bush years was unnecessary, ineffective, and deceptively sold to Congress, the White House, the Justice Department, and the public. The report threatens to definitively refute former C.I.A. personnel who have defended the program’s integrity. But so far, to the consternation of several members of the Intelligence Committee, the Obama Administration, like Bush’s before it, is keeping the damning details from public view.
The CIA, apparently, has been "defiant and defensive" in response to the massive report (over 6,000 pages, and which apparently cost $40 million to produce). CIA boss John Brennan has apparently been especially aggressive in trying to challenge the report and in blocking it from being declassified.
As Mayer notes, many of the new details came out due to Senator Mark Udall (who, for years, has been a leader in trying to stop the NSA's bad behavior) first blocking the confirmation of Stephen Preston to become General Counsel of the Defense Department (a position formerly held by Jeh Johnson, who was just nominated to run Homeland Security). Preston, prior to this, had been General Counsel for the CIA. Udall used the opportunity to quiz Preston about both the Intelligence Committee's report and the CIA's angry rebuttal, noting that if Preston stood by the rebuttal, he would be very uncomfortable about confirming him for the Pentagon job.
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Furthermore, the report apparently notes that rather than actually briefing the entire Intelligence Committee on what it was doing, the CIA only briefed the chairman and vice-chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. In other words, beyond providing enough misleading information to fill a large book, the CIA also made sure that the Senate Intelligence Committee members (outside of the two top members) weren't even informed of the details of what they did.
MORE:
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20131019/02001424935/senate-is-sitting-devastating-report-about-how-cia-avoided-oversight-unnecessary-torture-program.shtml
9 replies
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war criminals of the Bush junta? 
