Original title: 'A constitutional crisis': the CIA turns on the Senate
Sorry for editorializing the title,
but I think more people would pay attention to it this way fuck, it didn't work. Plus, I don't think I'm misrepresenting the article with this title.
It's a
huge article, and I think it's my favorite Guardian article. I suggest you guys read it completely. It's the second part of a series of 3 articles.
I hope that people will remember how spineless the Obama administration has been towards the CIA and other intelligence agencies with all their fiascos.
During the winter of early 2014 Daniel Jones’s only chance for serenity was these late hours. The CIA was demanding his boss, Senate intelligence committee chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, fire him. Feinstein’s Republican colleagues, once supportive of Jones, were demanding he testify.
Testimony was treacherous. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island senator and former federal prosecutor, warned Jones that asserting his rights against self-incrimination or seeking a lawyer’s counsel could give committee Republicans a political lever against his highly controversial work. The CIA would soon formally insist that the US justice department actually prosecute Jones, the Senate staffer who had devoted over six years of his life to investigating the CIA’s infamous post-9/11 torture program.
The CIA had pushed him past the point where he could back down. Its lies, documented in a 6,700-page secret report which Jones was constantly rewriting that winter, were compounding: to Congress, to Barack Obama, to George W Bush, to the press, to the public. The lies were not random misstatements. They were directional, in the service of covering up the brutality of what it did to at least 119 terrorist suspects – some clearly innocent – it held in a global network of secret prisons. Jones was on the verge of exposing the coverup. As he saw it, the personalized intensity of the CIA’s attacks on him, and the unprecedented steps they were taking, validated the account he had compiled after combing through over 6m classified CIA documents.
Just before Thanksgiving, Feinstein formally wrote to CIA director John Brennan requesting the entire 1,000-plus page Panetta Review. Jones had not taken the full document back from the satellite location, only the sections necessary to show busy senators that the agency concluded it had misled its political masters about the futility of its torture. The CIA said it would not provide it. This time, it would be Feinstein’s allies on the committee who escalated.
Jones was visible on the staff dias behind Udall. Hostetler walked out of the hearing.
“Then things totally went to hell,” Jones said.
Unbeknownst to Jones, Udall or Feinstein, the public reference to the Panetta Review so alarmed the CIA as to prompt a milestone event in its history. Since 2009, the CIA had maintained a firewalled network on which the Senate could view internal documents relevant to its torture inquiry. It was known as RDINet, for “rendition, detention and interrogation.” By mutual agreement, the CIA was not supposed to access the Senate’s side of the network for any reason aside from picayune IT help. But at least five agency officials would surreptitiously transgress the network firewalls, view the Senate investigators’ work, and reconstruct Jones’s emails. Their rationale, established in a subsequent internal investigation, was to determine if the Senate deliberately exploited an evident flaw in the architecture of the network to digitally acquire the Panetta Review – which they did not want the Senate to have.
It was an extreme step. After Congress overhauled the CIA in the 1970s, the agency was not supposed to spy on Americans domestically except in extremely circumscribed circumstances. Now it was turning its spywork onto the elected officials tasked with overseeing it.
On 15 January 2014, [CIA Director] Brennan called an emergency discussion with Feinstein and top committee Republican Saxby Chambliss. They met in a secured room on the Hill. Brennan had brought the acting top CIA lawyer, Robert Eatinger, whom Jones had discovered had provided legal advice to the agency’s Counterterrorist Center, which was deeply involved in the torture. If Brennan was worried, he did not convey that to the senators.
Brennan read a statement. He revealed that the agency had conducted a “search” of the computer network it had set up for the Senate – unlike every previous investigation at the agency, the CIA had demanded it only produce documentation on torture at a facility it controlled – and discovered that the Senate investigators had inappropriate access to the Panetta Review. The staffers, he said, had to be “disciplined”.
Jones understood Brennan’s statement to be a demand for the senators to fire him. Brennan didn’t use his name, but Jones was the chief investigator, the one constantly and most consistently working at the CIA facility. On multiple levels, Jones was shocked. Not only was the director of the CIA telling his legislative overseers that their choice to conduct oversight was unacceptable, he was revealing that the network operated in a manner that the Senate thought “was impossible”, with the CIA able to access the Senate’s investigative work.
Even more startling: although someone at the CIA in 2010 had placed the Panetta Review on the Senate side of the network, Brennan was suggesting that Jones was a master hacker, able to force his way into the CIA’s classified files. In truth, Jones was barely tech-literate: “I am really good at Microsoft Word. That’s it.”
Feinstein, in a letter sent two days later, refused.
The CIA’s move against the Senate committee quickly showed signs of backfiring. In late January, Buckley, the CIA’s inspector general, confronted Brennan about the on-network searches of the Senate investigators. He told Brennan that he needed to open an investigation – and Brennan responded by ordering Buckley to investigate. But Buckley went further than Brennan apparently calculated, and referred the matter to the US justice department. Suddenly, the CIA was back in a position its leaders thought it had escaped – in the crosshairs of potential prosecution.
Agency attorney Eatinger launched what the CIA considered a response necessitated by a theft concern and the committee considered a counter-gambit. On 7 February, the senior lawyer made his own criminal referral to the justice department: this one on Jones, ostensibly for improper network access. Eatinger had a conflict: Jones’s narrative referred to his role in the torture program 1,600 times. It took mere weeks for an account of Senate staff taking the Panetta Review from the CIA offsite location to leak to reporters. To Jones, the whole thing validated the apocryphal credo of spywork: deny everything, admit nothing, make counter-accusations.
Everything had escalated past the point of no return. Jones had finished his edits and rewrites to the committee report. It awaited a Senate vote on declassification. But now all of that was overshadowed by a fight with the CIA that had moved into the realm of back and forth criminal accusation.
[Senate Democrat Majority Leader] Reid, a pivotal ally for the White House on Capitol Hill, did not want to be backed into a corner. After the criminal referral, Reid spoke to McDonough and conveyed that if Brennan was unwilling to apologize, he was not willing to defend Brennan should the episode become public. McDonough was noncommittal. A week later, Reid received a phone call from Barack Obama.
To Reid’s surprise, the president defended the CIA’s actions. Obama rattled off the CIA’s side of the story: the Senate staff had taken CIA documents and the agency had no choice but to handle the matter as it did.
“Mr President,” Reid said, “I wish you could hear yourself.”
the episode stiffened Reid’s inclination to defend Feinstein to the hilt. In early March, Reid contacted Feinstein, who was considering exposing the episode, and assured her of his full support in the battle to come. “We gave them ample opportunity” to settle the issue, he told her.
On 11 March, Jones got word that Feinstein was going to say something on the Senate floor. He had written her a speech detailing the origins and developments of the oversight battle with Langley, but he didn’t know if Feinstein would actually deliver it. Feinstein got along well with Brennan on other matters, and taking on Brennan carried the risk of taking on Obama, the president Brennan had cultivated since Obama’s first campaign.
Instead, Feinstein laid into the CIA with an intensity unseen since the 1970s Church Committee, where legislators described an unbridled agency that spied on Americans as eagerly as they spied on foreign adversaries. The agency searches “may have undermined the constitutional framework essential to effective congressional oversight of intelligence activities or any other government function,” Feinstein charged.
Feinstein’s speech had another impact, this one intentional. On 3 April, the committee voted 11-3 to authorize a declassified version of the torture report. Senate Republicans who had long rejected the report’s findings joined Democrats who embraced them. Even Chambliss voted in favor of declassification, saying : “We need to get this behind us.”
Yet the CIA had an ally Feinstein may not have appreciated: the Oval Office. The White House announced that same day that the CIA itself would lead the declassification review. Formally, a White House official told the Guardian, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper spearheaded it. The intelligence community would effectively choose which of its embarrassments to spare the public from learning.
That's just snippets of the first
half. I really suggest you guys read it. No wonder why presidents like Kennedy did not trust the CIA.
EDIT: TL;DR:
Senate gets a guy (called Daniel Jones) to do a report on CIA torture
CIA gives parts of the Panetta Review (its own report on torture) to Jones
Dem senator asks the CIA to make said Panetta Review public
CIA enters panic mode and thinks Senate investigation committee hacked them (fact check: they didn't)
CIA spies on said Senate committee through a shared network
CIA formally accuses Jones of hacking them (ironically bringing the Panetta Review into further public light)
Senate tells CIA to ask for forgiveness for ridiculous claim
CIA: Lol nop
President Obama calls Dem Senate Majority Leader and tells him that Senate is in the wrong here
Said majority leader essentially says: Wtf is wrong with you Bams
Senate exposes the report
Obama administration makes the CIA the organization to review what details to declassify
Rest of the world: Fucking lol
