Dianne Feinstein vs. the CIA

[DonViejo]

The spy agency now acts as a power unto itself, and its outrages have finally aroused the senator's umbrage

ROBERT SCHEER

It was a truly historic moment on Tuesday when Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein took to the Senate floor to warn that the CIA’s continuing cover-up of its torture program is threatening our Constitutional division of power. By blatantly concealing what Feinstein condemned as “the horrible details of a CIA program that never, never, never should have existed,” the spy agency now acts as a power unto itself, and the agency’s outrages have finally aroused the senator’s umbrage.

As Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, chair of the Judiciary Committee that will be investigating Feinstein’s charges noted, “in 40 years here, it was one of the best speeches I’d ever heard and one of the most important.” That was particularly so, given that Feinstein’s searing indictment of the CIA’s decade-long subversion of congressional oversight of its torture program comes from a senator who previously has worked overtime to justify the subversion of democratic governance by the CIA and other spy agencies.

But clearly the lady has by now had enough, given the CIA’s recent hacking of her Senate committee’s computers in an effort to suppress a key piece of evidence supporting the veracity of the committee’s completed but still not released 6,300-page study that the CIA is bent on suppressing.

The Senate’s investigation began in earnest with the Dec. 7, 2007 revelation in the New York Times that the CIA had destroyed videotapes of its “enhanced interrogation techniques,” despite objections from then-President Bush’s director of National Security and the White House counsel. At that time, then-committee chair Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., sent staffers to begin the painstaking process of reviewing the limited material that the CIA was willing to make available; their preliminary report wasn’t issued until early 2009.

more
http://www.salon.com/2014/03/13/diane_feinstein_vs_the_cia_partner/

[Scuba]

1. In Joe's words, the CIA spying on the Senate Intelligence Committee is a 'big fucking deal'.