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CIA Accused: Sen. Feinstein Sees Torture Probe Meddling
SternisheFan writes with this news from the Washington Post: "In an extraordinary public accusation, the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee declared on Tuesday that the CIA interfered with and then tried to intimidate a congressional investigation into the agency's possible use of torture in terror probes during the Bush administration. The CIA clandestinely removed documents and searched a computer network set up for lawmakers, said Sen. Dianne Feinstein in a long and biting speech on the Senate floor. In an escalating dispute with an agency she has long supported, she said the CIA may well have violated criminal laws and the U.S. Constitution."
And I'm not referring to the people who keep voting for Feinstein, either.
Thread, topic, whatever. I think my meaning was clear.
In any case, as I mentioned in that other topic, I think this is hilariously ironic.
Way to be a world-class hypocrite, Dianne!
The NSA hates the CIA
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Feinstein is the Chairperson for the Senate Select Committee for Intelligence. So what she asleep all this time? Sounds like Casablanca again.
CIA hiding torture of Americans....
CIA operating all over American soil. The surveillance game allows them to control Senators, Congressman, citizens, police, and others alike, although I personally believe the Senators and police are in on it.
NSA is in on it.
Details on CIA/NSA surveillance abuses beyond Snowden, including space and satellite capability: http://www.oregonstatehospital...
We will see who is more power, Congress or the CIA. The answer will be the CIA.
They are of the same kind, not dupes.
On one side we got scumbags.
On the other side we got assholes.
In other words, it's a showdown between the scumbags and the assholes.
Assholes accusing scumbags of torturing people, but in the meantime it was the assholes who defended the scumbags when they violated the Constitutions, ignoring the Bill of Rights, invading the privacy of Hundreds of Millions of the American Citizens, and billions more people outside of America.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
...for Feinstien, of all people, to get in a hissy about somebody breaking laws and violating the Constitution.
She doesn't even get out of bed in the morning without trying to think up five new ways to break laws and violate the Constitution.
Maybe we can send her and the CIA agents responsible to the same remote, desert island.
The dupe
is on
the main
page
- Head Asplode -
I'm shocked I tell ya! What next? Will the NSA start tracking the web browsing habits of congress critters, so they can blackmail them to increasing their authority and budget?
She calls US paranoid for thinking that the government would ever trample our rights.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
How's your own medicine taste now?
PS: DIAF.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
How quickly we forget. The CIA erased all the torture (interrogation!) interviews, and was pardoned.
No, the assholes that should be hung by balls will never see a jail.
If you are not a member of one of various elites, you have no expectation of privacy, protection under the law, or economic security.
If you are a wealthy investor, top tier business executive, elected to a nationwide office, or famous and rich for any reason, your wealth and position will be protected by the economic, political, and military might of the US. Note: entertainers, particularly pro-athletes and popular musicians, can be dropped at any time. Heavily right wing affiliation will keep you in good standing. See Steven Seagal and Ted Nugent for examples.
The only real crime is interfering with a member of the elite. You can have every economic transaction, phone call, medical record, license plate tracking data and email in a secret database, but if anyone spies on a Member of Congress heads will roll, bureaucrats will loose their jobs and institutional budgets will be slashed.
Suck it up. You count for nothing.
Why is Snark Required?
I keep getting hacked into some beta sight that is real slow. Is this happening to anyone else?
So has the Senate being doing something wrong, that they need to hide? Or does no privacy only apply to the little people?
There are times when I sincerely believe we, as a nation, don't deserve the Constitution we were given.
Personally, I find it unlikely that the CIA would do something so ham handed and transparent. And yet, since the War on Terror and the idea that anything goes when the people you're drowning don't wear matching hats, the CIA and the entire IC has lost all credibility, that I can't dismiss the allegation.
That said, Feinstein is a out of touch 80 year-old that thinks mass surveillance is cool, but at the same time gets upset when the IC spies on allies (like everyone else does), and when spy on her.
As a Democrat and a Californian, I say Fuck Feinstein.
I do not like Feinstein much, but I do not think that people here are getting just what a big deal this is.
Senator Dianne Feinstein just went nuclear on the CIA.
Just savor that for a minute.
Why does Sen Feinstein have a torture probe? Does she also have nipple clamps and candle wax?
It's to be expected. After all, she is from San Francisco.
Assholes accusing scumbags of torturing people, but in the meantime it was the assholes who defended the scumbags when they violated the Constitutions, ignoring the Bill of Rights, invading the privacy of Hundreds of Millions of the American Citizens, and billions more people outside of America. thiet ke web
thiet ke website
If you create a mean and vicious pit bull, do not be surprised when it turns around and bites you. D'oh!
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
After all, she is from San Francisco
Dunno how many gazillion times I've heard that "...be sure to wear a flower in your hair" thingy and I always thought you only need to wear flowers in your hair and nothing else when you go to San Francisco.
You mean you can't do that anymore ?
The Guardian:
Once you have told operatives to take their gloves off and fight dirty on the road they don't just start playing by Queensbury rules at home.
Those openly called on to flout international law in the interests of a higher good do not then suddenly submit that goal to domestic law once they've gone through customs. Once the state has deliberately created space for power to be exercised without accountability those who occupy that space will protect it against enemies domestic and foreign. When your war is global and unending it inevitably comes home and keeps going. The monster the US has unleashed on the rest of the world is steadily devouring its own.
Finally someone in Congress speaks up about the overreach of the executive branch. What boggles my mind is why Congress talks so much about it but does so little. These executive agencies exist only because Congress allow them to. If Congress wants them to stop then they should make it stop. One sure way to make it stop is to dissolve the agency responsible.
The issue of government spying is, IMHO, a symptom of professional politicians. Senator Feinstein has spent her entire life in government. She knows nothing about living a life outside of the privileges of a government paycheck. She must think she's "better" than those that voted her into office. That she's "more equal" than the other animals.
I used to think that no one should be able to serve more than two terms in the same office. Now I think that no one should be able to serve more than one. The terms "re-election" and "incumbent" should be foreign to us. There are more than 300 million people in this country, it's nearly statistically impossible that we cannot find someone better for the job than her. She's 80 years old and has served as a Senator for 22 years, it's time she retired.
So, Senator, you don't like the government spying on you? Welcome to the party, there's a lot of us that don't like the government spying on us. The difference between you, Senator, and me is that you can make it all go away with a vote. As a Senator you can have anyone you deem responsible fired, including the President of the United States.
I know you won't though, Senator, because the people that are spying on you work for the same entity that you work for. I don't mean the federal government, I mean the Democrat Party. If there was a Republican POTUS right now you wouldn't be talking to reporters right now, you'd be hauling people in front of a Senate committee and have them answering uncomfortable questions under oath.
Senator, you allowed this beast to be created, now you and I have to live with it. You are the reason we need term limits, you just don't know when to quit. I suspect that you will be like many of your predecessors, the only way you will leave office is feet first. So, FOAD already.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
How did this get voted up? Check the link, I have never seen such rabid lunicy!
Why oh why art my dearest shill nowhere to be seen?
I love that you qualify that the torture of Americans is a bad thing.
... and has been very actively posting from that other account.
And he has been posting a lot under the AC moniker too.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
In May of 2010, as the documents continued to stream in, some of the committee staffers realized documents they had looked at earlier had disappeared. As it turned out, in two separate incidents, CIA employees had accessed the network without committee approval and had deleted approximately 920 documents from the network’s storage.
Sen. Feinstein said that “CIA staff first denied they had removed the documents, then they blamed IT support personnel and then said removal of the documents was ordered by the White House.” Feinstein went to White House counsel about the removal, and the complaint was rapidly escalated. The CIA apologized for the removal and gave assurances that it wouldn’t happen again.
But it would happen again, later in 2010, according to Feinstein, after the discovery of draft documents within the shared data that were part of an internal review ordered by Leon Panetta. The so-called Panetta review documents were actually summaries of the same documents that made up the majority of what the committee staff was reviewing for its report, but they included “analysis and acknowledgement of signs of wrongdoing,” Feinstein said.
The documents were marked as “deliberative” and “privileged”—meaning that they were intended not to be shared with the Senate under claims of executive privilege. But since they had been shared as part of the data dump, Feinstein said, there was no legal reason for the staff to not review the documents.
It is not known whether the CIA inadvertently shared the documents that somehow made it through the contractor’s screening process or if they were deliberately added to the data dump by the CIA or possibly by an internal whistleblower. Regardless, shortly after the draft documents were discovered, they started disappearing from the document store—so staffers copied the ones that remained to their local hard drives and printed out copies to preserve them. Staffers also made their own redacted copies of the documents—removing CIA non-executive employee names and locations, as the CIA would have done with other documents—and transported them back to the Hart SCIF for safekeeping.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...
Though it is a heck of an admission by a politician in today's world that a government entity has purposely deleted many files from another government entity's computers. This story would never have gotten any play in the U.S. news 10 or 20 years back. The internet has changed how news is reported, and that is 'a good thing'.
Will it change anything, or is it a story that will just blow away with the next Kardashian disclosure? Is Feinstein rightously mad over this, or is she just acting up the part for possible future re-election? I don't know the answer to those questions, but I do know that "evil triumphs when good men and women do nothing".
---------
Just think, in a 100 years, all new people!
Maybe.
Meanwhile, it will get you all riled up and distracted from not having a job and from paying more for your "affordable" health care, if you can even find a doctor in your town anymore.
Proof - the assassination worked. There's no way it was those Bay of Pigs toy soldiers that had one section running guns to Castro while another was trying to kill him. Read some declassified CIA history if you want some laughs about expensive and stupid fuckups.
At the outset, let's look at the moral of the story: You can't trust spies or spy agencies. Especially not the way the Senator has consistently told us we should trust the NSA.
This is not a case where it's ok that Senator Feinstein got hoist by her own petard for info on her own computers. This is a case of her feeling the same overreaching by an intelligence agency she says doesn't and won't happen every day with the NSA. But it's the American people who are getting fucked here, not Diane F.
We went over this in another post.
The "CIA computers" were part of a document production system provided by the CIA pursuant to a Senate Committee subpoena. It contained CIA documents responsive to the Senate subpoena in electronic form instead of paper copies. The document depository was run by private contractors. That's not really that unusual.
Apparently, when the CIA found out they had turned over to the Senate Committee a CIA draft report that was particularly harmful to the CIA's position, the draft report "disappeared" from the computerised document depository. The senior Senator from California believes the CIA caused it to disappear.
It's like erasing portions of White House tapes that had been subpoenaed a la Nixon. Just because it was done by the CIA doesn't mean it was spying, merely criminal tampering with a federal investigation. That's all.
Don't cheer that the asshat Senator got screwed by the CIA. It was us that got screwed by the CIA.
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain with all your metadata.
I don't know the answer to those questions, but I do know that "evil triumphs when good men and women do nothing".
Yes, but we're talking about Dianne Feinstein here. There is no planet on which she would be considered a good woman. She has consistently fought to erode the rights of Americans, she has consistently supported the actions of the CIA spying on American citizens, and defended them as a necessary part of our government even during the CIA Death Squad error (you know, under GHWB.) She's been a blight on American politics literally for as long as I can remember — she took office in California the year after I was born, and she's still with us. She has been a hypocrite throughout. Anyone who cares what she has to say is a bona fide idiot and likely a borderline traitor, unless they're simply keeping tabs on the enemy.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Fienstein talking about violating the constitution is a joke. She has been trying to make guns illegal, violating our 2nd amendment right since ahe has been in office! I believe nothing this woman says.
This is SOP for addressing spillage on government equipment. The Senator knows this, as does anyone who has ever had to deal with GFE. This is simply political grandstanding designed to help repair Feinstein's ailing reputation on the personal liberties vs. security front. It's offensive to anyone with more than two brain cells to rub together, and astounding to watch so many people falling for it.
Whats going on behind the scenes? The exact opposite? What hidden committee is doing something right now while your all going look at the parrot?
That there is no "group" or "control". Once your agency has access, how do you know your 20-something employees aren't going to snoop? So many of the comments here seem to refer to monolithic, organized groups of "assholes", "scumbags" and "sphincters", like it's all planned out. The best case for privacy is chaos and inability of agencies to keep track of what "they" (their employees, contractors, executives, etc.) are accessing.
Gently reply
So we have someone breaking the law. Who goes to jail now? And does this reach to whoever ordered the deletions to be done, or just some poor low level tech who did the work at the behest of a boss?
Alternatively it would be comparably satisfying to see funds for NSA, CIA, and more zeroed....rebuild them from scratch to the extent they do useful things, but with all new people, and with the useful precedent that agencies that become criminal get at least removed.
Feinstein pretty much tops both my lists of un-indicted war criminals, and the enemies of the people.
The watch-word is stability, BTW.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It tells you something is rotten in a political system where the secret police has the balls to piss on parliament like that. Makes you wonder who is running that country.
I thought if you had nothing to hide; you had nothing to fear? If that's good enough for the rest of us, shouldn't that be good enough for Congress?
"Um... seems to me we have some duplication here.
I don't know about anybody else, but I sure thought this is what that other thread was all about."
Isn't it hilarious when people mod you "redundant" without checking the time stamps? That was the second post in this topic. The first was from an AC.
Come on, modders. Get your shit together.
Well, you don't get to the political level Feinstein is at by playing totally a fair game, seems being at least somewhat immoral and bribe-able is all part of the power game. The only hope for us is once you reach that level of power, you use it to do actual good for the country/people. The way the whole game is set up is disgusting to me.
most of the rest of the world would disagree though
She's one of my very unfavorite people as well. Glad I'm not the only one who thinks this way.