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."

Comments

it's a dupe.

[strstr]

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...

Re:it's a dupe.

[meglon]

I'd argue that you don't have a basic understanding of tyranny. I'd also argue that you need to spend a few bucks on a dictionary and look up words before you use them. I'd also argue you need to go back to a 10th grade US History and Government class, and actually pay attention this time around.

Conservatives like to often bring up that we are a republican, not a democracy. Part of the reason is they never met a poly sci class they could pass, but the other reason i'm sure is they somehow want to equate the name of their party, "republican," as somehow innately better because it's named after what our founders called our form of government. They also like to point out that our founders, in various writings, explicitly talk about the negatives of "democracy," and did not want one in this country. This is where the lack of being able to understand the basics of government seem to drag them into intentional ignorance.

The only form of "democracy" around when our founding fathers set up the Constitution was what we now call "direct democracy." It's basically what Switzerland has, where everyone gets to vote on whether people, or smaller groups of people, have the same rights as everyone else.... which was a bad thing from our founding fathers viewpoint; they called this the "tyranny of the majority," because after a vote of all the people, there were no safeguards for any minorities rights. This "tyranny of the majority," it should be noted, is exactly what conservatives try to invoke when the ask to put same-sex marriage up for a vote so the voters can decide. THAT is tyranny.

Because of the way the world of politics and government has evolved, there are multiple types of democracy now. One of those types is a "representative democracy," which is what we have. It is the same thing as a "constitutional republic." We vote for representatives, who then are stewards of the country until they're out of office. They in turn vote for the various laws, rules, and regulations to govern our country. BECAUSE they pass a law you don't like, doesn't mean jack shit. If it passes constitutional muster (which the ACA HAS), it is not "tyranny of the majority," it is simply a law YOU don't agree with.

Now... my advice to you is, buy that dictionary, and go on back to high school and learn something.

Re:I smell a dupe

[shentino]

This isn't a dupe, it's an escalation of the same story that happened after the original was already posted.

Rather like how they broke news of TEPCO's reactors as a separate story from the tsunami.

Re:Elitist America

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't remember who said it but it went something like:

"Yes, there is a club. No, you(*) are not a member."

George Carlin

It's from his American Dream speech.

From ArsTechnica's coverage...

[SternisheFan]

Remote delete

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...

Re:Dupe, really?

[SternisheFan]

I submitted this story, and yes I now see it was already posted ( http://yro.slashdot.org/story/... ). I guess I've been too busy with things in my little 'busy' life to notice that it was already submitted, and for this I apologize. I don't blame Timothy, perhaps he's been having a busy life also, and remember, this did get upvoted through the /. system.

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".

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Just think, in a 100 years, all new people!