CIA agents impersonated Senate staffers in order to gain access to Senate communications & drafts

[kpete]

According to sources familiar with the CIA inspector general report that details the alleged abuses by agency officials, CIA agents impersonated Senate staffers in order to gain access to Senate communications and drafts of the Intelligence Committee investigation. These sources requested anonymity because the details of the agency's inspector general report remain classified.

"If people knew the details of what they actually did to hack into the Senate computers to go search for the torture document, jaws would drop. It's straight out of a movie," said one Senate source familiar with the document.


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/21/white-house-cia-torture_n_6018488.html?1413918152

[The Magistrate]

1. Sounds Awfully Like Laws Were Broken, Ma'am....

[Bandit]

4. Laws, what the Hell are those things?

If they exist at all it is only for the peons.... Certainly not the CIA or Republican Thugs like Clive Bundy...

[KingCharlemagne]

53. Laws are so 20th Century - nt

[Mnemosyne]

2. Shocking...

NOT

[Faux pas]

3. The CIA needs

to be disbanded. Poof! Be gone!

[Octafish]

5. Ha ha. It is to laugh. At treason.

We the People are supposed to be in charge, not the GESTAPO.

[Rex]

7. Looks like the CIA is winning the war over control of the nation.

It is depressing how few people care, just look at this thread - it should be huge with 100s of recs.

[Octafish]

12. What was it that Plato said about politics?

"The heaviest penalty for declining to rule is to be ruled by someone inferior to yourself."

We're talking, basically, Republicans.

Regarding Unrestricted STASI USA: It is what Michael Parenti called "The Gangster Nature of the State," what Sen. Frank Church termed the "abyss from which there is no return."

[Rex]

34. In decades past, the CIA spying on Congress would have been a major issue.

However we live in a Foxnews nation, where real issues are never discussed. America has such low expectations about their sources of information.

Bush/Cheney machine made sure to desensitize us as much as possible to things that cause outrage - war - remember how the M$M thumped it's nose at protesters? And now we have Chuck Toad as Americas news anchor - inferior to even the worst.

How does it come to this? We let it.

[ChairmanAgnostic]

49. Painfully true, and truly painful.

[burrowowl]

39. YUP!

[joshcryer]

18. Absolutely.

Someone needs to go to jail, for life, over this. It's unacceptable and a message must be sent.

[Rex]

6. Wow, yet I wonder why this thread is mostly ignored?

This should have hundreds of replies and recs...because despite some people here saying it is not, this IS that important. The CIA is an out of control - rogue agency.

[grasswire]

9. because CIA is an executive branch agency.

that's why.

[Vattel]

11. Are you seriously suggesting that those loyal to the President will shy away from

criticizing the CIA because it is part of the executive branch?

[Aerows]

27. Uh

Did you just read what you typed?

[Vattel]

28. lol, I hope that is what grasswire was suggesting because it is clearly true.

[Aerows]

29. I think it is safe to say

that grasswire, you Vattel, and me all believe there is WAY WAY WAY too much overreach.

So, I think our friend is being cynical because there is a contingent on DU that will defend anything that President Obama does.

[Vattel]

31. I knew that was grasswire's intent. My question was sort of tongue-in-cheek.

[Aerows]

32. Okay, didn't get it :D

Oops, and thank you for clarification

[grasswire]

43. wink

[grasswire]

44. yes

[Aerows]

45. Octafish

What on earth would we do without him? He's stalwart.

[Number23]

15. FYI "Both the Congress and the Executive Branch oversee the CIA’s activities."

You missed one

https://www.cia.gov/mobile/about-cia/faqs.html#oversees

[grasswire]

20. count 'em out

Congress is critical of CIA

Executive branch (WH) is in thrall to CIA

[Number23]

23. I'm sure that made sense in your head

Just as I'm sure it was just an oversight that you put the full weight of CIA oversight on the White House. Yeah.

[LeftyMom]

37. Are you saying the Congress is responsible for the CIA spying on the Congress?

I'm sure you think you've got a gotcha going on, but that doesn't make any fucking sense.

[Number23]

40. I'm saying exactly what I said. Congress and the White House oversee the CIA

And I'm sure you think you've got a good "gotcha" too but your question made no fucking sense at all because what I wrote is simple enough for a two year old to understand. That is, if you don't have some agenda.

[grasswire]

42. why so insulting?

The CIA reports directly to the DNI, who reports to the President.

[Number23]

51. Just responding in kind

And I'll stick with my information and link that comes directly from the CIA about who oversees them, thanks.

Particularly as the link I posted says the CIA advises the DNI and nothing about reporting to them as you said.

[lovuian]

8. Yes our CIA agents are spying on the Senate

pretty crazy stuff

NSA spying on allies like Merkel

Looks like a "shadow government" at work

[Aerows]

26. The CIA has been WAY

out of control for too long.

[grasswire]

10. must read the whole article

Stunning stuff. It reportedly is the WH itself protecting the CIA and Brennan.

"Over the span of just a few days, McDonough [chief of staff for WH], who makes infrequent trips down Pennsylvania Avenue, was a regular fixture, according to people with knowledge of his visits. Sources said he pleaded with key Senate figures not to go after CIA Director John Brennan in the expected furor that would follow the release of the report’s 500-page executive summary."

Sickening stuff there.

[Octafish]

13. ''Coziness'' between White House Chief of Staff and CIA Director. Nice.

Excerpt from the OP article:

McDonough's personal involvement in the decisions around which parts of the torture report to redact illustrates how in the national security realm, differences between the two parties often dissolve when one takes control of the executive branch. The report itself, meanwhile, sidesteps the role of Bush administration officials in ordering or approving torture, focusing instead only on the agency, McClatchy Newspapers has reported.

The relationship between the CIA, its chief congressional overseers and the White House -- underscored by the widely known coziness between McDonough and Brennan -- has been tense over plans to release the report's executive summary. Lawmakers voted to declassify the document over six months ago, but its public reveal has been stalled indefinitely due to negotiations over what the White House and the agency wish to keep secret.

[woo me with science]

58. +10000 And this is where Third Way feigned concern stops.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

14. "A lot of those folks were working hard under enormous pressure and are real patriots."

[Vattel]

30. that was telling

[Marr]

16. Our intelligence complex is out of control. /nt

[Aerows]

25. So out of control

that they don't even know the difference between right and wrong anymore.

My father sat me down one day and told me "Do you know how to tell if you are a good person?" I said no. He said "When you feel bad about doing the wrong thing, even if you might think it is for the right reason."

"When you do the wrong thing, and don't feel anything, that is when you are on a bad road. Lose your conscience, and you lose your humanity."

[KingCharlemagne]

54. At Abu Ghraib, if not earlier at Iran-Contra, this nation lost what little was left of

its soul. It's an empty husk now, observing the outward forms of a democratic republic but in reality nothing but the tawdry and decadent rotting husk of an empire. Sort of a Roman Empire without the beautiful art and architecture or a British Empire without the tradition of parliamentary democracy.

Read Charlie Pierce's take. It will blow you away.

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/obama-cia-john-brennan-031414

[johnnyreb]

17. Shucks, we let 'em keep The 28 Pages, then it's party time.

Give 'em a mile and they'll take the country. http://28pages.org/

song: Act American.mp3

[noise]

50. Journalists like James Risen

have dropped the ball on this story. His contention has been that the Bush administration overreacted to 9/11 and in doing so opened the floodgates for war on terror profiteering. The redacted 28 pages deal with foreign support for the hijackers. How does Risen (and anyone else making an overreaction case) reconcile the cover up of direct leads to the hijackers with a so called last resort torture program?

If the 9/11 Joint Inquiry 28 pages are released the public will likely conclude that the torture program was a "tough on terror" public relations campaign implemented by corrupt officials in the US government.

[msanthrope]

19. Prosecute every last one of them. nt

[grasswire]

21. who are you talking about? nt

[Aerows]

24. I hope she is talking about those in the CIA

that routinely break the law.

[msanthrope]

55. Was the object of my sentence not clear? nt

[Aerows]

22. CIA

Creeps In America.

[Solly Mack]

33. K&R

[grasswire]

35. please read the comments section at huffpost.

Those are the kind of comments one might expect to find at DU. But no. Mostly crickets here.

[Aerows]

46. I'm here

I like you grasswire, you pull no punches, but do it in a classy understated manner.

[grasswire]

62. thank you aerows

I hope to live up to your characterization.

[woo me with science]

57. [phone]

[Man from Pickens]

36. I call that "sedition"

and that's what it is. The people who participated in this belong in jail a LONG time and those who managed and authorized it belong at the end of a rope.

This is a DIRECT attack on self-governance. Are we free people who make our own decisions in a democratic society? Or are we slaves dancing to the tune of puppet masters?

These should not be difficult questions to answer - and the fact that they are tells me that we are in a genuine state of emergency.

[grasswire]

41. thank you for understanding the import of this

...and welcome to DU.

Well said.

[PorridgeGun]

38. Good lord

I just hope this is treated with the severity it deserves.

[Aerows]

47. It's a rather devastating look

at "Intelligence" agencies.

They might as well call themselves betrayers of our country.

[Aerows]

48. This is so dangerous

If you cook up a secret identity to illegally spy on Senators, your agency just went from bandits to evil.

[KingCharlemagne]

52. As is so often the case, Charlie Pierce of Esquire's "The Politics Blog" nails

Last edited Thu Oct 23, 2014, 01:24 PM - Edit history (1)

the utter rot at the heart of the American experiment:

"The apparent interference with the Senate investigation is a constitutional crime of the first order." (Emphasis added)

It is not too much of an exaggeration to say that, in one very important way, the president has lost control of his own government. The current constitutional crisis between the CIA and the Senate committee tasked with investigating its policies regarding torture during the previous administration has only one real solution that is consonant with the rule of law. Either CIA director John Brennan gets to the bottom of what his people were doing and publicly fires everyone involved, or John Brennan becomes the ex-director of the CIA. By the Constitution, this isn't even a hard call. The Senate has every legal right to investigate what was done in the name of the American people during the previous decade. It has every legal right to every scrap of information relating to its investigation, and the CIA has an affirmative legal obligation to cooperate. Period. The only way this is not true is if we come to accept the intelligence apparatus as an extra-legal, formal fourth branch of the government.

That is the choice that the president should give Brennan. Right now. This morning. Nobody is asking for the release of tracking data regarding the current operatives of al Qaeda. This information is being withheld because, during the late Avignon Presidency, the CIA repeatedly broke the law in its treatment of captives and it did so with the blessing of the highest reaches of the American government. That the president has not done this yet -- indeed, that he seems to have thrown his support behind Brennan -- is not merely a mistake, it is a demonstration of the practical limits of the political appeal that got him elected in the first place.

Increasingly, the election of Barack Obama seems to have functioned more as an anesthetic than as an antidote to the criminality of his predecessor's government. His message of conciliation allowed the American people to forget what they had allowed a cabal of bureaucrats and fantasts to hijack their government in the chaos and terror following the attacks of September 11. The president offered the country, as I wrote at the time, absolution without penance. And he put that philosophy into action by declining right at the outset to prosecute, or even to thoroughly investigate, what had been done. What we are seeing today is the final limit to looking forward, and not back. The CIA, and the rest of the intelligence apparatus of the country, was not reconciled to democracy. They were not brought properly to heal and the American people were not forced to confront the consequences of the terrible abandonment of self-government that, at its worst, the intelligence community represents.

The Senate investigation is really the last chance for even the ghost of a full accounting. (The CIA already destroyed videotapes of the torture sessions ) The apparent interference with the Senate investigation is a constitutional crime of the first order. The president set himself to bring people together. That's a noble goal, and one with which few people would disagree. But it is not the CIA's goal. It never has been. Its long history of crimes and bungling have created a climate within the intelligence community that is anathema to intelligent self-government. The president is the only one who can change that. It's time that he start the job.

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/obama-cia-john-brennan-031414

[grasswire]

61. perfect nt

[nashville_brook]

56. k and r

[woo me with science]

59. Thank you for this thread.

To the Greatest Page.

[Xolodno]

60. And there are some here who think...

....the CIA pisses rainbows and shits unicorns.

The CIA has been the tail that wags the dog ever since JFK refused to do airstrikes in the Bay of Pigs fiasco.

The CIA determines who gets what info and when....and if specific info is requested...know how to bury it in an avalanche of text.

They influence policy by giving the President and Congress "no choice" options...as in, if they don't do what they want...it hurts them politically....and the masses eat it up.

There is no real oversight over the CIA.