The not-so-top-secret CIA

Eight years, other follies. Really STUPID follies.

The head of the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday publicly accused the CIA of secretly removing documents from computers used by her panel to investigate the agency's controversial interrogation program and said that an internal agency investigation of the action has been referred to the Justice Department for possible criminal prosecution.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said the activities of agency officials "May have undermined the constitutional framework" of congressional oversight.
The situation amounted to an attempted intimidation of congressional investigators, she said, adding: "I am not taking it lightly."
Besides possible constitutional violations, Feinstein said the CIA may also have violated the Fourth Amendment, various federal laws and a presidential executive order that bars the agency from conducting domestic searches and surveillance. She said she has asked for an apology and recognition that the CIA search of the committee's computers was inappropriate, but "I have received neither."

The CIA had been pushing an argument that the Senate investigators had wrongly taken CIA docs, and that the CIA, by their search of the Senate investigators computers at the CIA location, was just trying to find out how the Senate investigators had wrongly taken the docs but Feinstein, normally a CIA defender said:

Feinstein confirmed that committee investigators had received and reviewed documents detailing the interrogation policy but said she didn’t know whether they were provided intentionally or unintentionally by CIA officials or by agency whistleblowers.

“The staff had asked the CIA about documents made available for our investigation. At times, the CIA has simply been unaware that these specific documents were provided to the committee,” she said. “And while this is alarming, it is important to know that more than 6.2 million pages of documents have been provided. This is simply a massive amount of records.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/feinstein-cia-searched-intelligence-committee-computers/2014/03/11/982cbc2c-a923-11e3-8599-ce7295b6851c_story.html?hpid=z1

Curious how this will play out with CIA's Brennan denying Feinstein accusations.

Even inside the beltway columnist Millbank is perturbed:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/dana-milbank-allegations-of-cia-spying-on-the-senate-deserve-investigation/2014/03/11/96105150-a95b-11e3-8d62-419db477a0e6_story.html?hpid=z3

"we created this monster and now it's acting like a monster! Let's blame the monster"

White House is not appearing concerned:

White House spokesman Jay Carney declined to weigh in Tuesday on the accuracy of allegations that the CIA may have illegally spied on Senate staff members, but he said that the president has “great confidence” in the CIA director and agrees with his call to “get to the bottom” of the claim if inappropriate activity occurred.

http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/cia-senate-snooping/white-house-obama-has-great-confidence-cias-brennan-n50021

that's not how you talk about Dianne Feinstein!

xpost

The C.I.A.’s acting general counsel has referred the matter to the Justice Department as a possible criminal offense, a move Ms. Feinstein called a strong-arm tactic by someone with a conflict of interest in the case. She said that that official had previously been a lawyer in the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorism Center — the section of the spy agency that was running the detention and interrogation program — and that his name is mentioned more than 1,600 times in the committee’s report.

Ms. Feinstein did not name the lawyer, but she appeared to be referring to Robert Eatinger, the C.I.A.’s senior deputy general counsel. In 2007, The New York Times reported that when a top C.I.A. official in 2005 destroyed videotapes of brutal interrogations of Al Qaeda detainees, Mr. Eatinger had been one of two lawyers to approve their destruction.

From the NY Times

She's my monster I'll call her what I like lol

xxp

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/cia-misled-on-interrogation-program-senate-report-says/2014/03/31/eb75a82a-b8dd-11e3-96ae-f2c36d2b1245_story.html

Report is still not available but the Washington post has more of the scoop. But it appears that no matter how harsh the report is on the CIA, they are gonna just rationalize their behavior with this below slant:

The report’s release also could resurrect a long-standing feud between the CIA and the FBI, where many officials were dismayed by the agency’s use of methods that Obama and others later labeled torture.

CIA veterans have expressed concern that the report reflects FBI biases. One of its principal authors is a former FBI analyst, and the panel relied in part on bureau documents as well as notes from former FBI agent Ali Soufan. Soufan was the first to interrogate Zayn al-Abidin Muhammed Hussein, the suspected al-Qaeda operative better known as Abu Zubaida, after his capture in Pakistan in 2002 and has condemned the CIA for water­boarding a prisoner he considered cooperative.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2014_04/senate_intel_committees_findin049861.php

Report leaked. CIA and torture supporters will just continue to claim the report is slanted and biased and wrong.

White House will continue to say it is looking forward and not backwards, and that the CIA and its Director have their full support.

looking forward to Feinstein's waffling.

Picking through their latest documents dump!

Michael Morell, later acting head of the CIA, provides a minute-by-minute account of standing at George W. Bush’s side during the 9/11 attacks. He notes that he and Bush strategist Karl Rove often joked about the president’s daily briefing, for which Morell was then responsible. “You don’t have anything in that briefcase that CNN doesn’t have,” Rove once said to him....

In another article, undated, a CIA man in Havana recounts his time “trying to counter Castro” from 1958 until the 1970s. He had some troubles with an informant…

https://prod01-cdn03.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-uploads/sites/1/2014/09/Screen-Shot-2014-09-18-at-12.09.02-PM2.png

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/09/18/cia-secret-journal/

@mehdirhasan
US should kill Russians "covertly, so you don’t tell the world about it" says ex-CIA chief. In public. Not covertly!

https://theintercept.com/2016/08/09/ex-cia-chief-who-endorsed-clinton-calls-for-killing-iranians-and-russians-in-syria/

old school proxy warfare, making a comeback!

Come on, give the guy a break. You get used to talking shop candidly with your colleagues, then you retire and forget who your audience is, find yourself garotting random strangers in the supermarket, etc. You know how it is.

maybe it's a double-bluff so when russians start getting publically assassinated the cia can claim it's not their style

He's fabulously unhinged. It's not even particularly strategic - we must smite the perfidious Shia as payback for '04!

gouge away

About 13 million pages of declassified documents from the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have been released online.
The records include UFO sightings and psychic experiments from the Stargate programme, which has long been of interest to conspiracy theorists.

The move came after lengthy efforts from freedom of information advocates and a lawsuit against the CIA.

The full archive is made up of almost 800,000 files.

They had previously only been accessible at the National Archives in Maryland.

The trove includes the papers of Henry Kissinger, who served as secretary of state under presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, as well as several hundred thousand pages of intelligence analysis and science research and development.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-38663522

https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/collection/crest-25-year-program-archive

Russian jokes, too (really).

the search isn't working for me :/

finally, the truth about obama's youthful journeys to mars can be told