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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.
The NSA hates the CIA
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
God would not have revealed the constitution to the Pilgrims on Thanksgiving if we didn't deserve it!
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...