Dianne Feinstein launches scathing attack on CIA over torture cover up

[Paul Rigby]

Is Feinstein trying to divert attention from the NSA scandals ? I really can't figure her out, she has been a staunch defender of the American Security State and a foreign policy hawk.

Snowden, Feinstein, CIA, NSA: the internal war

by Jon Rappoport

March 11, 2014

http://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2014/0...ernal-war/

Senator Dianne Feinstein, head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, blows up.

She claims the CIA made efforts to sabotage her Committee's investigation of illegal CIA interrogation/torture of detainees.

The CIA vehemently denies it did anything wrong.

So a new front in the internal war opens up.

The key fact here is: Feinstein's Committee has been carrying on this investigation of the CIA for SEVERAL YEARS. It is preparing a 6000-page report.

For several years, the CIA has been aware of the coming storm.

The damage to its reputation will be large.

What does an agency like the CIA do when faced with such a problem? It tries to mount a major distraction.

Here is one hypothesis to consider:

The distraction was Edward Snowden.

Yesterday, I wrote a piece titled, "Is Edward Snowden lying?" It laid out a case that Snowden was actually still working for his former employer, the CIA, when he was handed a treasure trove of NSA documents by CIA pros.

Thus, casting a very bright light of blame on a different intell agency, the NSA.

The CIA wasn't hoping to get away clean on its torture program. But it was hoping to maintain a degree of parity with the NSA, within the US intelligence complex.

The CIA didn't want to be the odd man out with a scandal of enormous proportions on its hands. It wanted company.

For decades, the turf war over federal funding and importance has been going on, between CIA and NSA. At the CIA, for the past several years, the prospect of taking a dagger, for its torture program, and suffering the consequences, has been grim.

Absorbing public shame as the dirty little brother in the US intell nexus, while big brother, the NSA, appeared relatively clean, was too horrible to contemplate.

So the Snowden operation was launched.

Dianne Feinstein has now shown which side she's onand for whom she might be operating as a surrogate. She excoriates Snowden as a traitor, defends the NSA, and blasts the CIA with a charge of trying to torpedo her Committee's investigation.

The NSA stays silent, while privately rejoicing that the CIA is taking the heat recently reserved for it, the NSA.

In this war, there are no real winners. There is only the shifting of blame, and the hope that the enemy takes more hits. If not, then each side can console itself with the knowledge that everyone's hands are shown to be dirty.

Nothing about these events minimizes the importance of the documents Snowden's press surrogates have released, or the importance of true findings about the CIA's torture program.

But this internal war does highlight how destructive and amoral agencies and operatives of the federal government can be, even toward each other, and how low they will go.

Also highlighting the enormous rotting superstructure called the federal government, which continues to move further along in controlling our lives, while it claims to be only concerned about "the greatest good for the greatest number."

[Tracy Riddle]

Maybe 50 years from now the American public will be allowed to know part of the true story.

[Kenneth Kapel]

Paul Rigby,
Thank you for the Rapapport article. I need to add his site to my online stops.

[Paul Rigby]

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 22.53 GMT

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree...-feinstein

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.

The Guardian, it should be noted, has a long history of subvention by the CIA, starting in the early 1950s, when the Agency used bogus mass-subscriptions, just as it did with Encounter, to sustain the paper.

[Peter Lemkin]

Feinstein has always been a strong supporter of the NSA and surveillance as well as covert operations by the intelligence agencies, generally. She well may be the point-person on the Committee for the NSA [with others the point person for CIA, etc.]...we simply don't know at this point. I can't remember her ever being upset at CIA's other activities - many of which she must know are heinous, illegal and unconstitutional. Something is happening beneath the surface we are not privy to...yet, I think. Perhaps she really is upset about CIA torture or CIA attempts to cover it up by [it seems] taking documents out of the Committee's computers [which, if I understand correctly, are provided by the CIA itself] - and thus compromising their ability to report on the activities. And perhaps not, really...other than that they pulled a dirty trick on her [dirty tricks on the rest of the Planet being just fine]. Perhaps this is about turf wars or more likely about something we don't know about and don't have the clearances to even hear about. Sadly, a committee to monitor the Intelligence Subcommittee would be needed - but I'm not suggesting it...as we have a dysfunctional Congress and Government and adding another layer of clowns, puppets, and apologists for the broken system is doomed to failure. The Intelligence Agencies individually and collectively have long been out of control and semi-autonomous. They certainly don't represent the will [or interests] of the People. I've always seen them as the spies and 'muscle' for the elites - the armies for the Ruling Class against all others - internal or external. In some as yet undefined way we are seeing part of an internecine war; somehow, I don't think the outcome will be to the benefit of the American or World Public. If Feinstein is really going to take on the CIA, she had best hire some very good bodyguards and make sure her will is in order. The bottom line is that she, and others on the Committee, still support the National Security State we have long had, and in its growth [which is very fast now]. When they are willing to reverse that, I'll start to pay them some kudos. The subtext is that this is the first or worst 'bad' thing CIA has done....so far from the truth as to be laughable. Where are the reports [or outrage on withheld documents/disappeared documents/lies] on CIA's [and other intelligence agencies] complicity or incompetence in 9-11, Dallas, Iran-Contra, Nugan-Hand, BCCI, various and sundry assassinations and government overthrows, dirty tricks up the yazoo, black ops galore - and all before, in between, and after these few mentioned?! In some as yet unclear way this is theater and very bad theater, at that. Bottom line - this Committee has never really provided any 'oversight' of the intelligence community ['overlooking' their crimes and misdeeds/lies and protecting them/securing their funding and growth is perhaps closer to the truth]. I don't see this as the first attempt to correct that. It is, of course, interesting....but i fear, sadly, not going to provide any major or minor changes in the way things are done.

[Peter Lemkin]

"Giving Hypocrisy a Bad Name": NSA-Backing Senate Intel Chair Blasts CIA for Spying on Torture Probe

The spat between the CIA and its congressional overseers has intensified after Senator Dianne Feinstein took to the Senate floor to directly accuse the CIA of spying in an effort to undermine a probe of the agency's torture and rendition program. The Senate Intelligence Committee's report has yet to be released but reportedly documents extensive abuses and a cover-up by CIA officials. Feinstein says the CIA broke the law in secretly removing more than 900 documents from computers used by panel investigators. She also accused the CIA of intimidation in requesting an FBI inquiry of the panel's conduct. CIA Director John Brennan has rejected Feinstein's allegations. Meanwhile, former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden has weighed in by accusing Feinstein of hypocrisy for criticizing alleged CIA spying on U.S. senators while condoning government surveillance of private citizens. We host a roundtable discussion with three guests: former FBI agent Mike German, former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, and Pulitzer-winning journalist Julia Angwin, author of the new book, "Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance."

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: The head of the Senate Intelligence Committee harshly criticized the Central Intelligence Agency Tuesday for attempting to obstruct its investigation into the CIA's use of torture following the 9/11 attacks. The report has yet to be released but allegedly documents extensive abuses and a cover-up by CIA officials to Congress. Senator Dianne Feinstein took to the Senate floor on Tuesday to accuse the CIA of accessing computers used by Senate staff.

SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN: I have grave concerns that the CIA's search may well have violated the separation-of-powers principles 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.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Feinstein also accused the CIA of secretly removing more than 900 documents from computers used by the Senate Intelligence Committee, and said it tried to intimidate congressional investigators by requesting an FBI inquiry of their conduct. At a public event nearby in Washington, CIA Director John Brennan rejected Feinstein's allegations.

JOHN BRENNAN: As far as the allegations of, you know, the CIA hacking into, you know, Senate computers, nothing could be further from the truth. I mean, we wouldn't do that. I mean, that'sthat'sthat's just beyond theyou know, the scope of reason in terms of what we would do.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Meanwhile, former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden accused Feinstein of hypocrisy for criticizing alleged CIA spying on U.S. senators while condoning government surveillance of private citizens. In a statement to NBC News, he said, quote, "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. But it's equally if not more concerning that we're seeing another [quote] '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." Snowden was apparently referring to German Chancellor Angela Merkel's failure to condemn the NSA for mass surveillance of communications of German citizens and her indignation at reports that the U.S. had listened in on her personal conversations.
AMY GOODMAN: For more, we host a roundtable discussion with three guests.
Mike German is with us, fellow at NYU's Brennan Center for Justice. From 1988 to 2004, he served as an FBI agent specializing in domestic counterterrorism. He left after reporting deficiencies in the FBI's counterterrorism operations to Congress. His recent piece in The Guardian is "The NSA Won't Shut Up About Snowden, But What About the Spy Who Stole More?"
Ray McGovern is with us again, a former CIA analyst whose duties included chairing National Intelligence Estimates and preparing the President's Daily Brief for then-President George H.W. Bush. He briefed one on one to President Ronald Reagan's most senior national security advisers from '81 to '85. In January 2003, McGovern helped create Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity to expose the way intelligence was being falsified to justify the war in Iraq.
And we're joined by Julia Angwin, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist, currently at ProPublica, formerly with The Wall Street Journal. She has a new book out called Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance.
Well, there's a lot to take on right now. Ray McGovern, let's begin with you. As a former CIA analyst, explain what this conflict is about. Two things, the CIAhow did the CIA spy on the Senate Intelligence staffers, and what was the report that the Senate Intelligence Committee is trying to put out?
RAY McGOVERN: Well, this goes back to the key question of supervising the intelligence community. In the '70s, there was the Church Committee, looking into abuses of all kindsillegal wiretapping, assassinations and that kind of thingand it was recognized that you needed congressional oversight. Now, that meant congressional oversight, not congressional overlook, which is what we've had over the last couple years.
And if you fast-forward here, 9/11, people always say, "After 9/11, everything changed." Well, it did change. You know, after 9/11, the presidentactually, on the evening of 9/11said, "I don't care what the international lawyers say. We're going to kick some ass." Now, how do I know that? Because Richard Clarke was there, and he reported that in his book. What was the next step? Well, they took some prisoners in Afghanistan, and the first person tortured was John Walker Lindh, an American citizen, OK? Now, who was told about this, in terms of oversight? Well, the two patsies, the two patsy senators on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Pat Roberts and Jay Rockefeller, who had the habit of taking notes and then putting it in his own safe, because it was classified, right? OK.
Four yearsfour years later, September 6, 2006, a big day. First off, General Hayden, General Michael Hayden, who was the head of NSA when he decided to violate his oath to the Constitution and allow illegal warrantless wiretapping of American citizens, he had earned his spurs, and he had become head of the CIA. OK? And so, when the president, President Bush at the time, decided that he would make a clean breast of things, OK, and defend what he called "an alternative method of procedures," which now have become EITsEITs, enhanced interrogation techniques, meaning torturehe was going before the cameras in the afternoon of September 6, 2006. What happened in the morning? General Hayden hustled down and told the rest of the senators on the Senate Intelligence Committee what was going onfour-and-a-half years late about torture, OK?
What's the other thing that happened? This is very significant. The head of Army intelligence, John Kimmons, lieutenant general, who made his career on interrogation, OK?very proud of him, because I'm aI was an Army officer. He got up and pre-empted the president, right across the river in the Pentagon. And what he said wasand I quote"No good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices. I think history tells us that. I think the empirical evidence of the last five years,"this is '06, OK"hard years, tells us that."
So, what's the point here? The point here is that the Army and everybody else knew, number one, that torture was going on; number two, that it was ineffectual if you wanted reliable information.
Last thing I'll say is that if you want unreliable information, man, torture works like a charm. And that's what they wanted. They wanted somebody to be tortured into saying there were links, operational links, between Iraq and al-Qaeda. And guess what? With the help of the Egyptian service, al-Libi did that. The president quoted him the next day, and Congress voted to authorize the Iraq War. It was that bad, OK?
So, what we're hearing now is Senator Feinstein playing catch-up ball. She's very, very upset, at least ostensibly, that her people are being monitored. And, actually, there's a crimes report out there. But, you know, I think my colleague Mike German had it right this morning. I said, "What do you think is going to happen, Mike?" He said, "There will probably be a beer summit, and it'll be smoothed over."
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, during her remarks on the Senate floor on Tuesday, Senator Dianne Feinstein also indicated that the source of some of the CIA documents may have been a whistleblower. The internal Panetta review refers to an internal review initiated by then-CIA Director Leon Panetta of the detention and interrogation program.

SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN: 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 whistleblower.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Mike German, could you explain what the significance is of Dianne Feinstein indicating that the source may have been a whistleblower from within the CIA?
MIKE GERMAN: Sure. So part of the issue is how the Senate staffers got this document. And to a certain extent, what CIA Director John Brennan said is correct: They didn't hack into a Senate computer, because they didn't have to. In fact, they created a CIA computer for the Senate staffers to use. But then, over the course of 2010, the CIA staffers found out the documents they had reviewed on this system were disappearing from the system, and there was a dust-up over that bureaucratically behind closed doors. But then theyin June of 2013, the CIA issued a rebuttal to the Senate Intelligence report, and later they found out that there was this internal document that conflicted with the rebuttal. So, when that was discovered, that the Senate had that, the CIA apparently went back into theiragain, their own computer that was being used by the Senate, and apparently was trying to find out how it was that they got this document.
And that Senator Feinstein is indicating now it may have been a whistleblower, I think, raises serious concerns, because her committee has been very unresponsive to requests to provide protections for intelligence community whistleblowers. Right now they aren't very well protected. And it's the Intelligence Committees in both the House and Senate that have been resistant to allowing legal protections for intelligence community whistleblowers. So this whistleblower who may have given the Senate this report is basically unprotected.
AMY GOODMAN: And explain how it works. I mean, for people to understand, when the Senate Intelligence staffers are doing their research, they go to the CIA, and the CIA provides them with computers and then spies on what they look at in the computers.
MIKE GERMAN: Right. I mean, this is really an extraordinary situation that I think goes to what Ray said about, you know, this is supposed to be oversight of the CIA that the Senate is doing, not, you know, allowing the CIA to set the terms for the oversight of their own work. And this is an extraordinary situation where, through agreement, rather than giving the CIA documents to the committee as asked, they required the committee staff to come to a facility in Virginia, where they had access to apparently a stand-alone system that was created for this purpose, that they then put some six million documents in. But then there was some dispute about who controlled the documents, what the Senate could do with the documents. And this document apparently was printed off and taken back to the Senate, which is what the CIA's competing crimes report is about, that there was something inappropriate with that, and that was the defense that Senator Feinstein was making.
AMY GOODMAN: And you worked for the FBI. They were also accusing the CIA of bringing in the FBI to thwart their investigation to investigate Senate staffers.
MIKE GERMAN: Right. It's basically intimidation of the overseers, right? If I, as a staffer, know that if I become too aggressive in my oversight, I might be charged with a crime in this heavily classified area, that might, you know, make me be a little less robust in my inquiry.
AMY GOODMAN: And let's not let this whole conflict obscure what it is that's being investigated: the whole issue of torture and what the White House calls rendition, which is White House for kidnapping.
MIKE GERMAN: Right, and another example of the failure of oversight. This Senate reportit's supposedly over 6,000 pageswas finished almost over a year ago, and yet it's the CIA that's holding up the publication of this report, so we can't see what it is, rather than the Senate just saying, "It's our report. We can vote and put it out and, you know, give the CIA a chance to redact what they think is necessary. But if they won't do that, we're just going to publish it." And, you know, that is, again, astonishing that the overseers are being prevented by the people they're supposed to oversee.
AMY GOODMAN: And what about, Ray McGovern, what Edward Snowden just said to NBC? I mean, you went to Russia. You gave Edward Snowden an award. You have Senator Feinstein now taking on the CIA, who has been rather vicious in taking on Edward Snowden. She is considered one of the greatest apologists for the Central Intelligence Agency. So for her to take on this agency, the agency might be in big trouble. But what about how Snowden's documents fit into this story?
RAY McGOVERN: Well, how much of what Senator Feinstein did yesterday was posturing, we'll know in the next couple of weeks. But, you know, on the face of it, for Senator Feinstein in her speech yesterday to decry the violation of the Fourth Amendment, when she has sat by
AMY GOODMAN: Search and seizure.
RAY McGOVERN: and whereyeah, the one that says no one shall be deprived of, you know, the right to have privacy. She has blessed that by the NSA. She has defended it. She's approved it. And now, all of a sudden, she's against the NSA or anybody else kind of invading the Senate's privacy. So, you know, in a way, it struck me as giving hypocrisy a bad name. I think the beer summit is probably the likely outcome. The president's a lawyer. He'll get them all together and say, "Well, now, can't we smooth this over?" But maybe not. Maybe John Brennan has overreached himself now. His record for truth is not very good. And it may be that Senator Feinstein and the president will face up to the fact that this is not the right person to be head of the CIA.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Julia Angwin, can you talk about how this will affect future whistleblowers and the journalists and publications who cover them?
JULIA ANGWIN: Well, already, journalists and whistleblowers are in a difficult situation. As a journalist myself, you know, it's very hard to assure a confidential source that you could keep your communications confidential. If the Senate Intelligence Committee can't keep its investigation confidential, you know, it's very difficult for me out there to say I will be able to do it. And not all sources are willing to go live in Russia. And so, we're in a difficult time for whistleblowers. And Ithis is why I wrote this book, Dragnet Nation, because I feel that we're in a world where ubiquitous surveillance is really chilling our speech. You know, people are afraid to talk to the press. And it looks like maybe the Senate is afraid to publish its report on the CIA. And this is the result of this surveillance.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Mike German, can you say what some of the initiatives are, the mechanisms that are being considered to protect whistleblowersof course, they haven't been passedin the intelligence community?
MIKE GERMAN: Right. So, where the situation sits now, in 2012 the Senate passed the Whistlebloweror the Congress passed the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act, but cut out a section that would have given intelligence community whistleblowers some better protections. The president issued a directive that ordered the agencies to create an internal process, but so far that has been delayed. And we haven'tI'm not aware of any whistleblowers using that process, if it even exists at this point.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: There's also a threat of retaliation, or it doesn't protect whistleblowers from retaliation?
MIKE GERMAN: Well, and that's the thing. This administration has been more aggressive against whistleblowers than any previous administration, charging them even with very serious charges like Espionage Act. And there's an Insider Threat Program that they're initiating, which encourages government employees to report on one another when they see conduct that they think is suspicious. So it's this sort of competing values that they're doing, on the one hand saying they care about whistleblowers and want whistleblowers, on the other hand persecuting and prosecuting them, persecuting them inside the agencies and then prosecuting them if they report out.
AMY GOODMAN: NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden gave a rare public speech Monday at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas. It was the first time Snowden has directly addressed a U.S. audience since he left the country last May. He spoke via video stream from Russia, where he has been granted temporary political asylum.

EDWARD SNOWDEN: The NSA, the sort of global mass surveillance that's occurring in all of these countries, not just the U.S.and it's important to remember that this is a global issuethey're setting fire to the future of the Internet. And the people who are in this room now, you guys are all the firefighters. If data is being clandestinely acquired, and the public doesn't have any way to review it, and it's not legislatively authorized, it's not reviewed by courts, it's not consonant with our Constitution, that's a problem.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Snowden speaking through a whole number of proxies, a little hard to understand. He added he believes his whistleblowing has improved U.S. security and that he wouldn't hesitate to leak the same NSA files again. Journalist Glenn Greenwald also addressed the festival later in the day. Julian Assange addressed the festival on Saturday via video stream from the Ecuadorean embassy in London, where he has political asylum. The significance of all of this? Julia, you are a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. What this means for your work and your own quest for privacy, as you went online to document how you could protect yourself?
JULIA ANGWIN: Yeah, it's an incredibly difficult task these days. I mean, Edward Snowden mentioned some of the tools that he uses to protect himself when he goes online, and they're incredibly cumbersome. And I, in my book, tried to see if I could use all these tools and still live in the modern world. And I have to say, it wasn't the easiest task. One of the hardest things was actually trying to convince my sources, my journalistic sources, to use these really cumbersome encryption programs to communicate securely. And honestly, I started to think that maybe we should just all go back to the postal mail, because it actually has very good legal protections: They need a warrant to open it, unlike your email.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, why are they cumbersome? Because it just takes longer? Or they're difficult to master? Or...
JULIA ANGWIN: Well, the encryption programs, in particular, are often built by sort of open source communities. Some of the tools are not that well maintained, because the people who built them are not actually paid. It's like their second job. And so, one thing I have been thinking about a lot is that we need to pay for our tools. You know, we have this idea that we want alleverything for free in life. And that's one of the reasons we've gotten into this state of ubiquitous surveillance, is that we are paying with our data.

[Peter Lemkin]

Sen. Feinstein Finally Goes after the CIA, but not for Lying to and Spying on Us

Thu, 03/13/2014 - 11:43

Beware a woman scorned:


by:
Dave Lindorff



Of all the people to come to the rescue of the Constitution, who would have thought it would be Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-CA).
Feinstein, after all, as head of the Senate Intelligence Committee since 2009, has yet to see an NSA violation of the Constitution, an invasive spying program or a creative "re-interpretation" of the law that she hasn't applauded as being lawful and "needed" to "keep people safe."
Feinstein, too, was one of the first to fly into paroxysms of outrage at National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden, absurdly condemning him for being a "traitor," though she surely knows that the Constitution very narrowly defines treason as "levying war" against the US, or providing "aid and comfort to the enemy," and as Snowden surely did not "levy war" against anyone but perhaps the NSA, and even according to the government did not provide any information to America's "enemies" (whoever that may be in today's unipolar world).
Feinstein, lastly, in her position as chair of the Senate Military Construction and Appropriations Subcommittee, grew fat and rich thanks to military contracts made to her husband [1], private equity and real-estate tycoon Richard Blum.
That is to say, this is a woman who clearly puts herself and her need for money (she's reportedly worth over $80 million, though for most of her life she has done nothing but work as a salaried politician) first and the needs of her country somewhere way down near her designer shoes.
And yet after years of CIA criminality, including torture of terror suspects, even those against whom there was no evidence, lying to Congress, and manufacturing of evidence that led to the disastrous and criminal invasion of Iraq -- for all which there were no consequences in the Congress or in her Senate committee -- it was Sen. Feinstein who finally called out the CIA for spying and lying.
Sen. Feinstein, busy using her political position to enrich herself, has been a spy agency apologist, but now she's attacking the CIA (Roots Action photo)

We'd be excused for pointing out that there is an element of self-interest here, or at least of wounded ego. While her surprise speech in the well of the Senate earlier this week denouncing the Agency did speak in high-minded terms of the CIA's having "possibly" violated the Fourth Amendment with its proscription against warrantless searches and seizures, and of its having trashed the concept of Congressional oversight and the sacred concept of tripartite government, it is really that her own ego that was stepped on that set her off.
Feinstein, after all, has never complained about the many other times, particularly over the last 14 years or so, that the CIA has trashed the 4th Amendment or the law of the land. Only now, when she learns that the Agency's spooks raided her own Intelligence Committee's computers and deleted incriminating files about its torture program, and then asked the Justice Department to bring criminal charges against her staff members for removing files from a CIA-provided "safe room" at its headquarters to a real safe room in the Senate Office building, did the Agency's actions in her view rise to the level of a Constitutional crisis.
But there it is. The senator who, as the main person responsible for oversight of the National Security State has been a rank apologist for its abuses, and an advocate for the NSA's wholesale program of spying on the American people, is now concerned that the CIA has been spying on her and her committee.
John Stewart put it best [2], when, channeling the late George Carlin, he said, "I see, our stuff is just s**t, but her stuff is ... stuff!"
The irony is rich, but I doubt that much will come of this dust-up.
Sen. Feinstein and her husband Blum, already one of the wealthiest power couples of the Senate, still have much money to earn by leveraging her committee positions in Congress.
Clearly, she has an ego though, and is at the moment a woman scorned.
I suppose if CIA Director William Brennan continues to act like the wronged partner, implying that Sen. Feinstein is off her nut, she could escalate her rage and drag him into a Senate hearing room under oath to humiliate him, which would be truly entertaining. But she's unlikely, judging by her record, to do anything serious, like lock the bastard up for lying to, or hiding evidence from Congress, which is what should happen, and what her committee should have done long ago to Brennan's boss, National Intelligence Director James Clapper, who famously stated under oath to her committee, in response to a direct question from committee member Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) that the NSA was "not spying on American citizens."
The only hope at this point is that California voters will finally decide, when she comes up for re-election again way off in 2018, that they've had enough of this wretched and hypocritical woman, and that they'll drag her and her oligarch husband away from the trough where they've been feeding for far too long.
Meanwhile, maybe a few of the less corrupt members of the Senate could pick up where her bruised ego left off, and demand a serious investigation into the CIA's and NSA's many crimes against the people of the US and the world.

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Source URL: http://thiscantbehappening.net/node/2189
Links:
[1] http://act.rootsaction.org/p/dia/action/...n_KEY=7309
[2] http://www.thedailyshow.com/

[Albert Doyle]

What she is suggesting is like saying really enjoyable sexual rape is bad manners.

[Peter Lemkin]

The scandal started quietly last week when Sen. Mark Udall wrote a letter to President Obama, alleging that the CIA had taken "unprecedented action" against investigators who wrote the Senate Intelligence Committee's still-classified report on the U.S. torture program.
Then McClatchy News reported that the CIA monitored a Senate computer system after staffers allegedly removed records from agency's headquarters without authorization.
When Intelligence Committee Chair Diane Feinstein went public with more of the details on Tuesday the story mushroomed into a quasi-constitutional confrontation.
Sen. Feinstein to CIA: back off

"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," said the Guardian.
In fact, there is a precedent. While electronic surveillance may be new, the CIA has used its espionage techniques to thwart Hill scrutiny before. In 1978, the CIA went so far as to plant a spy in Congress' inquiry into the murder of a sitting president.
The proof emerged in 2010 when a top CIA official stated in a sworn affidavit that the agency planted an "undercover" officer into the House of Representatives investigation of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
The House investigators came away feeling much like the Senate Intelligence Committee does today: deceived and manipulated. Then as now, it seems the threat of exposure and embarrassment on a sensational issue of the day be it torture or assassination prompted senior CIA officials to subvert Congress's efforts to hold the agency accountable for its actions.
Now Washington is asking why agency officials thought they had the right to spy on a congressional investigation. The answer is that history has shown they can get away with it.
Undercover lawyer
Just as the National Security Agency feels under siege today, so the Central Intelligence Agency felt in the mid-1970s. A string of revelations coming out of the Watergate scandal showed senior agency officials had supported the Watergate burglars as well as engaged in assassination of foreign leaders, torture, and mind-control experiments. Particularly appalling to the public and the Congress was the revelation that senior CIA officials had been plotting to assassinate Cuban president Fidel Castro at the very moment JFK was gunned down in Dallas.
In 1978, the House of Representatives reopened the investigation of Kennedy's assassination. Soon investigators from the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) were aggressively asking for specific records held in CIA files.
Retired CIA officer George Joannides (left) received the Career Intelligence Medal in 1981, two years after misleading House investigators about what he knew about Lee Oswald. (Photo credit: CIA)

In response, the CIA General Counsel Office assigned George Joannides, a dapper lawyer from New York City who had spent 28 years in the clandestine service, to serve as liaison to the investigators. Unbeknownst to Congress, Joannides "served undercover" when acting as the agency's representative to the HSCA, according to a sworn affidavit (p. 10) from Information Coordinator Delores Nelson, filed in Washington federal court in 2010.
Joannides was, in essence, a spy. To the Congress, he presented himself as a staff attorney who would facilitate the investigation by retrieving documents and arranging interviews with former CIA personnel.
In fact, Joannides was a former undercover operations officer who had run Cuban agents in 1963 while living in Miami and New Orleans. Indeed, he had a connection to the JFK story. Some of his agents had taken an interest in accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald in the summer of 1963.
The CIA never told Congress about Joannides's role in the events of 1963.
Perfect man for the job'
When the agency's deception was revealed in 2003, G. Robert Blakey, the former organized crime prosecutor who served as General Counsel for the HSCA, repudiated the CIA as a trustworthy partner in government.
Blakey told PBS Frontline:
G. Robert Blakey: Tricked by CIA

"That the Agency would put a material witness' in as a filter' between the committee and its quests for documents was a flat out breach of the understanding the committee had with the Agency that it would co-operate with the investigation."
Blakey said the impact of the CIA's actions on Congress's ability to get at the truth was profound.
"I no longer believe that we were able to conduct an appropriate investigation of the Agency and its relationship to Oswald," he said. "Anything that the Agency told us that incriminated, in some fashion, the Agency may well be reliable as far as it goes, but the truth could well be that it materially understates the matter."
Now retired from teaching law, Blakey told me in a phone call that the latest allegations about CIA spying on Senate staffers "give a whole new dimension to what they were doing with Joannides and our investigation. Were they [the CIA] in our computers too? "
By contrast, the CIA was pleased with the outcome. When Joannides retired in 1979, his boss lauded him as the "perfect man for the job" who deflected the "aggressive harassment" of House investigators. Two years later, Joannides received a CIA medal for career performance. He died in 1990, having never been questioned by JFK investigators.
The issue in 2014
Good luck to investigators trying to figure out how and why the CIA targeted the Congress .
When the Assassination Records Review Board, an independent civilian panel, started asking questions about Joannides, the agency responded with "inaccurate representations," according to ARRB chair, John Tunheim, a federal judge in Minnesota.
Via a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, I have learned that the many records related to Joannides's undercover mission against the HSCA 35 years ago remain classified to this day. Unless Congress responds more effectively, the records of the Agency's actions against the Senate Intelligence Committee may stay secret until 2049.
The JFK assassination story is old news but the issued posed by the CIA spying on the Senate Intelligence Committee is not. What is Congress to do if it cannot count on the CIA to act in good faith when it seeks to hold the agency accountable?
Defenders of the CIA are saying that the Senate investigators did not act in good faith when they removed documents from CIA headquarters without authorization. So Langley will pose its own question: What is the CIA to do if it cannot trust Congress to keep the secrets that is the Agency's duty to keep?
No matter how you answer those questions, though, the CIA's actions in regard to the Senate Intelligence Committee are not unprecedented.' They are all too familiar.

[Paul Rigby]

The US Media and the CIA's Spying on Congress

By Patrick Martin

Global Research, March 18, 2014
World Socialist Web Site

http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-us-medi...ss/5373955

Today marks one week since the speech by Dianne Feinstein on the floor of the US Senate in which the California Democrat, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, publicly charged the CIA with cover-up, the withholding of documents, and unconstitutional spying on her committee, which has the legal responsibility to oversee the spy agency.

Feinstein, a longtime rubber-stamp defender of the US intelligence agencies, accused the CIA of attempting to intimidate her committee and charged that the agency "may well have violated the separation-of-powers principle embodied in the United States Constitution," and also "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."

In the days since Feinstein's speech, it has emerged that the White House itself deliberately withheld documents and may well have worked with the CIA and its director, John Brennan, in deleting material initially provided to the committee. These actions were taken in an attempt to cover up one of the greatest crimes of the 21st centurythe systematic torture of prisoners at CIA secret prisons established around the world in the name of the "war on terror."

Top officials in the Obama administration, including the president, are potentially implicated in impeachable offenses.

There is a vast gulf between the significance of the revelations and their treatment in the American media, which is moving as quickly as possible to bury the story. Since Friday, there has not been a single news article on the topic in major daily newspapers such as the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal.

The only major newspaper to publish an editorial on the topic in recent days was the Washington Post, but this was only from the standpoint of obscuring the far-reaching implications of Feinstein's allegations. The editors, clearly concerned about the potentially explosive consequences of the revelations of criminal activity by the CIA, called Monday for quick publication of the Senate Intelligence Committee's 6,300-page report on CIA torture, along with an internal CIA review of the agency's torture program and Brennan's rebuttal to the Senate report. This is, they write, necessary to "maintain the essential confidence of the American people" in the spy agencies.

In the course of the editorial, the Post downplays the spying charges while solidarizing itself with the CIA's arguments, declaring, "In principle, Mr. Brennan is right to argue that certain documents are legitimately excluded from disclosure to Congress."

During the network television interview programs broadcast Sunday morningwhich serve as a round-up of major political developments during the weekthe CIA spying revelations were hardly mentioned. Two of the networks, Fox and CBS, avoided the subject entirely, while NBC and ABC took it up in a perfunctory and hurried fashion.

Among those interviewed prominently were Representative Peter King, the Republican chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee and member of the House Intelligence Committee, and Mike Rogers, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. Neither said anything about Feinstein's Senate speech, nor were they asked.

Along with the media, Senate Republicans and Democrats (including Feinstein herself) and the Obama administration are seeking to minimize the consequences of the exposure of CIA criminality and ensure that there are no serious investigations, no public hearings and no consequences for those implicated.

According to a report by National Public Radio (NPR), the Senate Intelligence Committee held a closed-door meeting last Thursday at which it decided to conduct a secret review of the actions of the CIA and the counter-charges by agency officials that committee staffers obtained unauthorized access to CIA internal documents.

Senator Richard Burr, the second-ranking Republican on the panelset to become its chairman if the Republicans win control of the Senate in Novembermade clear in comments to NPR that the purpose of the review was to impose a blanket of silence on Feinstein's statement.

"We've made a decision that we're going to pursue that as an internal course within the committee," he said, "and hopefully that will end any public review of most of the comments that are being made." Burr is on record declaring that the public should never learn anything of what is discussed in the closed sessions of the intelligence panel.

Senate Democrats and Republicans alike have rejected suggestions that an independent investigation be launched, given the extraordinary seriousness of Feinstein's charges and the clearly unconstitutional character of any executive branch effort to spy on the activities of the legislative branch.

The Obama White House has downplayed the significance of the conflict and sought to present Obama as above the fray, although Brennan is one of his closest aides, having run the drone-missile assassination program from the White House for four years, until Obama nominated him to head the spy agency. Brennan notified the White House before filing a criminal referral with the Justice Department against Senate Intelligence Committee staff members and received a green light for the unprecedented action.

In this political conspiracy, the US media is once again playing its assigned role, not to reveal, but to cover up and obfuscate, a role that it has reprised many times over. In doing so, it is confirming its essential function as an arm of the state and an instrument of the corporate and financial elite and its assault on the democratic rights of the American people.