Charles Pierce: Obama, The CIA, And The Limits Of Conciliation

[ProSense]

10. Eugene Robinson: The CIA is out of line

The CIA is out of line

By Eugene Robinson

We now have even more proof that our burgeoning intelligence agencies, which were given unprecedented latitude to wage war against terrorists, are dangerously out of control...Months of stunning revelations about the National Security Agency’s massive domestic surveillance, thanks to fugitive whistle-blower Edward Snowden, should have been more than enough. But this week, one of the intelligence community’s staunchest defenders in Congress took to the Senate floor to announce that even she has had it up to here.

Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who heads the Senate intelligence committee, trained her fury on the CIA, which has waged a five-year campaign of bureaucratic guerrilla warfare to keep the committee from doing a crucial job: fully investigating the torture, secret detention and other appalling excesses committed under President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.

<...>

President Obama, to his credit, took immediate measures at the beginning of his first term to outlaw torture, secret overseas detention and other outrageous practices sanctioned by Bush and Cheney. But Obama decided to take a forward-looking approach — and showed no enthusiasm, frankly, for a comprehensive public accounting of past excesses.

<...>

Feinstein’s committee properly decided that the torture and harsh detention had been egregious enough to warrant “an expansive and full review.” The CIA had already destroyed the only video recordings of its waterboarding sessions, but there were “literally millions of pages” of cables, e-mails, memos and other documents that the committee wanted to examine...Obama’s first CIA director, Leon Panetta, insisted that the committee’s staff examine the documents — after they had been redacted — at a secure location in Virginia. Feinstein alleges that the CIA improperly searched the committee’s computers at this secure site. Files on those computers, she charges, have mysteriously disappeared.

- more -

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/eugene-robinson-the-cia-is-out-of-line/2014/03/13/f40b10f0-aae7-11e3-adbc-888c8010c799_story.html