1 Boring Old Man

Democrats say CIA may have misled Congress on interrogations 5 times
The Hill
By Jared Allen
10/27/09

The CIA may have misled Congress at least five times since 2001, two Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee said Tuesday. Intelligence subcommittee Chairwomen Jan Schakowsky [D-Ill] and Anna Eshoo [D-Calif] are leading an investigation into what they described as a practice of incomplete and often misleading intelligence briefings, which arose in the wake of CIA Director Leon Panetta’s June 24 admission that intelligence officials failed to notify Congress about a top-secret program to assassinate al Qaeda leaders.

“That is an example of a failure to notify but we think a symptom of a larger disease,” Schakowsky said on Tuesday. “There have been many instances where we’ve come to a committee hearing, after having read in the paper of something that should have been notified to us, where it’s followed up my mea culpas by the intelligence community,” Schakowsky said. “And examples where the committee actually has been lied to.” “You can understand that the committee has felt very frustrated that the executive branch has not notified us of intelligence activity,” she said. “We’re in the process of reviewing several instances where the executive branch may have violated the [notification] requirements that are in the National Security Act.”

One of the instances being closely examined by the two Democrats is the September 2002 briefing on enhanced interrogation techniques that became the basis for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s [D-Calif] claim that the CIA lied to her. Findings on this point could bolster Pelosi’s case. The Speaker came under fire after she said at a testy press conference in May that the CIA had lied to her and other members during a 2002 briefing about its use of waterboarding on detainees. Pelosi was the ranking member of the Intelligence panel at the time.

 

“We were told explicitly that waterboarding was not being used,” she said at the May press conference. “They [the CIA] misled us all the time”…

The argument for certain things being secret is in opposition to our basic principles of government. We say that our government is a government of, by, and for the people – ergo, the people should know what’s going on. We grant exceptions for matters where transparency would be detrimental to  our National Security. But even in those situations, we always tag on some mechanism for outside "oversight." So in the area of domestic surveillance, we have a very specific court to review requests for any "invasion of privacy" for cause. With the C.I.A., we have Congressional Committees that are specifically tasked to review their programs to make sure they stay within the bounds of our laws and our "meaning."

We already know that the Bush Administration abused oversight at every turn. They "skipped" the F.I.S.A. Court. Cheney closed his records to all scrutiny. And the C.I.A. did a lot of stuff that was unseen outside of Langley’s borders. The Administration "classified" anything they didn’t want us to know rather than following the  National Security rule. We know all about that already. This  C.I.A. investigation is a big deal. We need a C.I.A. and we need for it to be monitored. If the C.I.A. is operating on its own, it’s probably too dangerous to have operating at all.