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CIA Watchdog 'Mistakenly' Destroyed Its Only Copy Of A Senate Torture Report (yahoo.com)
An anonymous reader writes: According to Yahoo News, the CIA inspector general's office "mistakenly" destroyed its only copy of a mammoth Senate torture report at the same time lawyers for the Justice Department were assuring a federal judge that copies of the document were being preserved. Agency officials described the deletion of the document to Senate investigators as an "inadvertent" foul-up by the inspector general. "CIA inspector general officials deleted an uploaded computer file with the report and then accidentally destroyed a disk that also contained the document, filled with thousands of secret files about the CIA's use of 'enhanced' interrogation methods," reports Yahoo News. The Senate Intelligence Committee and Justice Department knew about the incident last summer, sources said. However, the destruction of a copy of the sensitive report was never made public, nor was it reported to the federal judge at the time who was overseeing a lawsuit seeking access to the still classified document under the Freedom of Information Act. Despite this incident, a CIA spokesperson has said another unopened computer disk with the full report is still locked in a vault at agency headquarters. "I can assure you that the CIA has retained a copy," wrote Dean Boyd, the agency's chief of public affairs, in an email. Feinstein is calling for the CIA inspector general to obtain a new copy of the report to replace the one that disappeared. A 500-page summary was released in 2014, and concluded that the CIA misled Americans on the effectiveness of "enhanced interrogation." Specifically, the interrogations were poorly managed and unreliable.
Whatever you call them they're not uniformed combatants and won't receive the protections the Geneva Conventions afford.
"CIA inspector general officials deleted an uploaded computer file with the report and then accidentally destroyed a disk that also contained the document. Then, while carrying the computer from which the file was deleted, officials tripped and dropped it into an MRI scanner's powerful magnet. In an effort to free the computer it was struck repeatedly with a rubber mallet. Once freed, being alarmingly warm, the computer was submerged in water to cool. Later, the computer fell from the horse that was transporting it and it was trampled to pieces. The pieces were cast into the volcano."
No they don't. That's the entire point. Because of it's classified nature there are very few copies of this report. The copy that was destroyed was the Senate's "copy" (they didn't really have a copy because the entire document was classified to protect the torturers). You may hate Feinman, and I do because she's happy to go along with Jack Booted Thugery, but when she stood on the Senate floor and claimed the CIA was subverting government she was telling the truth. The CIA was hiding and deleting documents the Senate committee had already seen. The CIA was deliberately obstructing the Senate and all "civilian" oversight.
But you know what? No one even cared. I've believed for a long time that the only way to fix the FBI and CIA and the abuses they commit is to destroy them and create new agencies from the ground up to take over their responsibilities. Both agencies have been unelected, corrupt, unchecked little boys clubs that wield influence and power over our democracy.
Disband them both and reassign their responsibilities, because when they reach the point they have the only solution is to burn them down and rebuild them from the ground up.
The Church committee had a good chance, and the Pike committee in the house as well, back in the Ford administration. Donald Rumsfeld was a part of the administration back then and worked very hard to prevent the Church Committee from dismantling the CIA, and the administration did seem very worried that the this could have happened. The Church committee were called traitors by some hardliners at the time. Since that time, the executive has amassed even more power relative to congress.
What will they be replaced with?
Maybe a Construction Industrial Complex. Fix all these roads, bridges, subways, water and sewer lines, etc. that are crumbling apart all over our own country instead of dropping a trillion dollars worth of bombs on someone else's country.
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
THIS. x1000. The really shitty part is the reason why: back during ww2, Roosevelt and congress got a law passed against undue profiteering from war time contracts by large corporations.
Everything since then has been a "police action" or "in an advisory capacity". such as VietNam. This is so that large corporations can make whatever profits they want without being bound by the wartime law.
Youknow how it works, lobbyists, Red Scare, Blackwater and Haliburton, etc.... and meanwhile people die. Thats a big bloody pile of loot on a lot of people's hands.
C|N>K