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malaise

(267,800 posts)
Fri Sep 9, 2016, 08:23 PM Sep 2016

Guardian Report -Inside the fight to reveal the CIA's torture secrets

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/09/cia-insider-daniel-jones-senate-torture-investigation
<snip>
The Panetta Review saga would spur a furious CIA to take an extraordinary step: it would spy on its own legislative overseers – especially Jones. The episode would spill out publicly the following March, when top committee Democrat Dianne Feinstein, who had already taken a huge political risk in pushing the torture inquiry, accused the CIA on the Senate floor of triggering what she called a constitutional crisis. Both sides requested the justice department pursue a criminal investigation on the other. The bitterness would nearly overshadow a landmark report, a fraction of which was released to the public in December 2014, that documented in chilling detail the depravations CIA inflicted on terrorism suspects after 9/11.

The CIA has stopped defending its torture program but not its personnel. While it has reknit its relationship to the committee, thanks to a GOP leadership that has all but disavowed the torture investigation, it continues to maintain that the torture report is inaccurate. Obama, whose trusted aide John Brennan runs the CIA, kept the report at arm’s length, with his administration declining even to read it.

But the CIA has gone beyond successfully suppressing the report. In a grim echo of Jones’s fears, the agency’s inspector general, Langley recently revealed, destroyed its copy – allegedly an accident. Accountability for torture has been the exclusive province of a committee investigation greeted with antipathy by Obama. While Obama prides himself on ending CIA torture, the Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, has vowed if elected to “bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding”. Key CIA leaders defending the agency against the committee, including Brennan and former director Michael Morrell, are reportedly seeking to run Langley under Hillary Clinton.
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Guardian Report -Inside the fight to reveal the CIA's torture secrets (Original Post) malaise Sep 2016 OP
K&R (nt) muriel_volestrangler Sep 2016 #1
K&R Solly Mack Sep 2016 #2
... Solly Mack Sep 2016 #3
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