CIA Accidentally Releases Apology Letter It Wrote, but Never Sent to the Senate for Illegally Spying

[Octafish]

Hmm.

CIA Accidentally Releases Apology Letter It Wrote, but Never Sent to the Senate for Illegally Spying on It

from the sorry-not-sorry dept

Jason Leopold -- terrorizer of FOIA staffers throughout the US government -- has again obtained documents many would have expected to remain out of reach for years to come. Certainly, the CIA thought one of the documents would remain its little secret for the rest of whatever.

On July 28, 2014, the CIA director wrote a letter to senators Dianne Feinstein and Saxby Chambliss — the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee (SSCI) and the panel's ranking Republican, respectively. In it, he admitted that the CIA's penetration of the computer network used by committee staffers reviewing the agency's torture program — a breach for which Feinstein and Chambliss had long demanded accountability — was improper and violated agreements the Intelligence Committee had made with the CIA.

The letter was never sent. Instead of an apology, the Senate received accusations of impropriety after the CIA threw out its Inspector General's report on the breach and performed an in-house "investigation" clearing the CIA of wrongdoing.

The letter was never signed by Brennan or sent. It was filed away somewhere in the CIA's archives, hopefully never to be seen again. But it was mistakenly handed over to Jason Leopold much to the CIA's chagrin. Additional chagrinment ensued.

SNIP...

In short, it appears that while some in the CIA knew what it did was clearly wrong (and potentially illegal), top management so insisted on denying it, that it wouldn't even send an apology letter -- and that would have stayed completely secret if someone hadn't slipped up and handed over the unsigned letter accidentally in a FOIA response dump.

SOURCE w/links etc....

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150813/06585331930/cia-accidentally-releases-apology-letter-it-wrote-never-sent-to-senate-illegally-spying-it.shtml

[DirkGently]

1. Lying liars lie.

"I recently received a briefing on the [OIG's] findings, and want to inform you that the investigation found support for your concern that CIA staff had improperly accessed the [Intelligence Committee] shared drive on the RDINet [an acronym for rendition, detention, and interrogation] when conducting a limited search for CIA privileged documents," Brennan wrote. "In particular, the [OIG] judged that Agency officers' access to the… shared drive was inconsistent with the common understanding reached in 2009 between the Committee and the Agency regarding access to RDINet. Consequently, I apologize for the actions of CIA officers…. I am committed to correcting the shortcomings that this report has revealed."

https://news.vice.com/article/the-google-search-that-made-the-cia-spy-on-the-us-senate

?output-quality=75

[Octafish]

2. Amazing, wot Frank Church warned us in 1975 about the secret government and secret power.

Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho) was a patriot, a hero and a statesman, truly a great American.

The guy also led the last real investigation of CIA, NSA and FBI. When it came to NSA Tech circa 1975, he definitely knew what he was talking about:

[font color="green"]“That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide. If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back, because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology.

I don’t want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capability that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.”[/font color]

-- Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho) FDR New Deal, Liberal, Progressive, World War II combat veteran. A brave man, the NSA was turned on him. Coincidentally, he narrowly lost re-election the next cycle.

And what happened to Church, for his trouble to preserve Democracy?

In 1980, Church will lose re-election to the Senate in part because of accusations of his committee’s responsibility for Welch’s death by his Republican opponent, Jim McClure.

SOURCE: http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=frank_church_1

Like Henry Kissinger was wont to say, "The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer."

From GWU's National Security Archives:

"Disreputable if Not Outright Illegal": The National Security Agency versus Martin Luther King, Muhammad Ali, Art Buchwald, Frank Church, et al.

Newly Declassified History Divulges Names of Prominent Americans Targeted by NSA during Vietnam Era

Declassification Decision by Interagency Panel Releases New Information on the Berlin Crisis, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Panama Canal Negotiations

National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 441
Posted – September 25, 2013
Originally Posted - November 14, 2008
Edited by Matthew M. Aid and William Burr

Washington, D.C., September 25, 2013 – During the height of the Vietnam War protest movements in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the National Security Agency tapped the overseas communications of selected prominent Americans, most of whom were critics of the war, according to a recently declassified NSA history. For years those names on the NSA's watch list were secret, but thanks to the decision of an interagency panel, in response to an appeal by the National Security Archive, the NSA has released them for the first time. The names of the NSA's targets are eye-popping. Civil rights leaders Dr. Martin Luther King and Whitney Young were on the watch list, as were the boxer Muhammad Ali, New York Times journalist Tom Wicker, and veteran Washington Post humor columnist Art Buchwald. Also startling is that the NSA was tasked with monitoring the overseas telephone calls and cable traffic of two prominent members of Congress, Senators Frank Church (D-Idaho) and Howard Baker (R-Tennessee).

SNIP...

Another NSA target was Senator Frank Church, who started out as a moderate Vietnam War critic. A member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee even before the Tonkin Gulf incident, Church worried about U.S. intervention in a "political war" that was militarily unwinnable. While Church voted for the Tonkin Gulf resolution, he later saw his vote as a grave error. In 1965, as Lyndon Johnson made decisions to escalate the war, Church argued that the United States was doing "too much," criticisms that one White House official said were "irresponsible." Church had been one of Johnson's Senate allies but the President was angry with Church and other Senate critics and later suggested that they were under Moscow's influence because of their meetings with Soviet diplomats. In the fall of 1967, Johnson declared that "the major threat we have is from the doves" and ordered FBI security checks on "individuals who wrote letters and telegrams critical of a speech he had recently delivered." In that political climate, it is not surprising that some government officials eventually nominated Church for the watch list.[10]

SOURCE: http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB441/

I wonder if Sen. Richard Schweiker (R-CT), a liberal Republican, also got the treatment from the Spooks? He did bring up the Unmentionable.

“I think that the report, to those who have studied it closely, has collapsed like a house of cards, and I think the people who read it in the long run future will see that. I frankly believe that we have shown that the [investigation of the] John F. Kennedy assassination was snuffed out before it even began, and that the fatal mistake the Warren Commission made was not to use its own investigators, but instead to rely on the CIA and FBI personnel, which played directly into the hands of senior intelligence officials who directed the cover-up.” — Senator Richard Schweiker on “Face the Nation” in 1976.

Lost to History NOT, thanks to people who care. Thank you, infinitely, DirkGently.

[nadinbrzezinski]

11. I swer some of the shit I save on my HD

but it is important.

And yes, what you said.

[SidDithers]

3. Jason Leopold. LOL...nt

Sid

[friendly_iconoclast]

4. Do you have a comment upon the article, rather than the source?

Seeing as Vice and Leopold actually came up with the goods, I'd venture to say no...

[SidDithers]

5. I'll comment in 24 business hours...nt

Sid

[friendly_iconoclast]

15. He's having a 'stopped clock' moment with this story, apparently

Even screwups can get something right on occasion...

[Octafish]

7. Leopold got set up by Karl Rove's people.

Have you ever been set up by Karl Rove's people, SidDithers of DU?

After Valerie Plame: Obama Makes "Fair Game" of Today's Whistleblowers

By Art Levine
Friday, 05 November 2010, t r u t h o u t | News Analysis

EXCERPT...

As Jesselyn Radack of the Government Accountability Project (GAP) told Truthout about the Bush approach compared to now:

"It's the same or worse: the politics of personal destruction, vengefulness, is still there. Obama (i.e., the administration) has indicted four people for leaking, more than the last three administrations (George Bush's and Clinton's terms) combined. 'No Drama' Obama is driven to distraction by leaks, he seethes and is tormented by it." As she pointed out in a blog post recently: "The reality is, Obama - not Bush - has criminalized whistleblowing."

At the same time, the administration ostensibly supports reforms that aim to tighten the near toothless safeguards for whistleblowers - including those involved in the intelligence community, who have virtually no protection for exposing wrongdoing - that are now stalled in the Senate. As Angela Canterbury, the policy director of the Project on Government Oversight, which co-sponsored the film's screening, points out, "There are no more protections now than when Wilson spoke out." Worse, the prosecutions are "deeply disappointing" to her group that has helped organize a coalition of over 400 organizations supporting passage; indeed, Obama's prosecutions aim to send a clear message: "Be silent - or look out."

In retelling the story of Plame and Wilson, the movie emphasizes an element of getting caught in an orchestrated attack campaign that's never been made so clear before: the destructive impact on family life, marriages and on one's career when the smear machine goes into overdrive. While the real-life Wilson and Plame watched from the rear of the theater, Naomi Watts and Sean Penn re-enacted the nightmare of being hounded by the press and the toll it took on their marriage for a while when Wilson chose to fight back publicly. In a question period after the screening, the blunt-spoken Wilson, joined by Plame, director Douglas Liman and NPR's Neal Conan, said of the smear campaign: "It's real important to understand what happened in that period: it's a real assault on democracy."

Those scenes had a special resonance for Thomas Drake, the former National Security Agency (NSA) officer who was indicted in April, 2010 for allegedly retaining classified information and obstructing justice. That's because, in 2006, he and others leaked to the Baltimore Sun - after he sought to alert superiors, Congress and the inspector general - about the waste, ineffectiveness and potential illegality of a $5 billion digital monitoring program, Trailblazer, that never actually launched. Essentially, the Defense Department's inspector general and the Baltimore Sun confirmed that Trailblazer became what Radack calls a "cash cow" used, in part, to pay for various off-the-books and privacy-invading surveillance programs.

He was sitting next to Radack, whose cause GAP has championed. She, too, knows something about being targeted for speaking out. After all, she is the former Justice Department attorney who was singled out by Bush officials who then sought to get her disbarred by state bar agencies and fired from her new job after she was forced out of the government because of her warnings about the illegal FBI torture of John Walker Lindh.

CONTINUED...

http://truth-out.org/archive/component/k2/item/92675:after-valerie-plame-obama-makes-fair-game-of-todays-whistleblowers

That's a lot of destruction of freedom of speech and of the press, as the Constitution of the United States calls it. Were it not for Leopold, we wouldn't know a lot of the story of how Karl Rove was involved in leaking CIA Non Official Cover operative Valerie Plame to the press in order to railroad her husband, Iraq invasion opponent Amb. Joseph Wilson. Unfortunately, that story got buried in a Buy Partisan fashion by pretzeldent George W Bush's commutation of Scooter Libby's sentence to prison and a big boost by Congress's inability to investigate anything BFEE.

[yodermon]

9. Was Jason's source every actually revealed?

or is that just an inference (Rove's people)?
It certainly makes the most sense

[Octafish]

16. The trail led to the Oval Office.

23 Administration Officials Involved in Plame Leak

http://thinkprogress.org/report/leak-scandal/

For some reason, Fitzpatrick didn't want to bother the occupant.

[SidDithers]

17. No, it wasn't. Just lots of back pedalling and ass covering from Leopold and truth out...nt

Sid

[gratuitous]

6. The only way anyone would care

The only way anyone would care about this is if it turned up on Secretary Clinton's e-mail server. Instead, we will be treated to studied neglect of the story, but if notice is taken, it will be in the form of groundless ignorant ridicule of the source.

[Octafish]

8. Excellent point.

The thing is, this, along with a buttload more history of the national security state trumpin' the piece of paper Constitution thingy, needs to get traction. And while Brennan did apologize in person, he left nothing in writing. As for the five employees, the MIC's man on K-Street, former Sen. Birch Bayh and friends found them not guilty of anything other than following orders.

But the CIA's Inspector General found that some agency employees had acted inconsistently to agreed upon parameters surrounding access to the information, leading to Brennan issuing an apology for its employees actions and commissioning the accountability board chaired by Bayh.
http://www.cnn.com/2015/01/14/politics/cia-senate-spying-penalty/

Amazing, though, isn't it? Posters on DU now can sound like they're quoting Freepuglicks and it's OK, as long as they are attacking those critical of the national security state, like Jason Leopold or John Hilger and Robert Parry. I'd add Octafish and gratuitous, but, you know, we'd just be paranoid.

[bobthedrummer]

12. I'm another long-standing critic of the national security state brother-K&R n/t

[Octafish]

14. You stood up when DU was new, bobthedrummer.

The crimes hidden behind "national security" must be prosecuted.

International American Products Inc./IAP: A DU investigation thread

A look at 22 defining characteristics of Leo Strauss's philosophy-compare to PNAC and the Decider

Fearless before those OPs, too, and since those OPs, as well, bobthedrummer is.

[jalan48]

10. Do these folks want a Bernie Sanders?

[Octafish]

19. I was hoping more along the lines of Carol Lam.

She prosecuted Congressional pork magnet and defense contractor darling Randall "Duke" Cunningham, who had greased the legislative skids for warmongers. The work led to CIA big wig Dusty Foggo, who got caught with both hands in the cookie jar. For some reason, they stopped with his boss', Operation 40's Porter Goss' resignation. Then, for doing her job prosecuting corruption etc., Carol Lam was terminated.

Why was U.S. Attorney Carol Lam Fired? Here are a Few Political Possibilities.

Tuesday, 20 March 2007 15:21
A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS

We know the fired U.S. Attorneys were booted for political reasons, but at this point there is simply no way to know exactly what those reasons were. For example, several possible explanations are floating around surrounding the ouster of ex-San Diego prosecutor Carol Lam. Here's a few:

Duke Cunningham Conviction
Lam was responsible for the investigation and conviction of disgraced Republican congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham. Cunningham got eight years in federal prison for taking more than $2.4 million in bribes from defense contractors just a few months before the midterm elections, a significant blow to the party.

Kyle Foggo Indictment
Lam didn't stop with Cunningham. Among the other indictments was Kyle Foggo, the third-ranking official in the CIA. Foggo was involved in corruption and bribery with the same defense contractor as Cunningham. The day after Lam notified the Justice Department that search warrants would be issued, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' chief of staff wrote the following in an email:

"The real problem we have right now with Carol Lam ... leads me to conclude that we should have someone ready to be nominated on 11/18, the day her four-year term expires."

Rep. Jerry Lewis Investigation
The above email did not mention what the "real problem" was. While some stories tie it to Foggo, others tie it to the investigation of Rep. Lewis, the former chairman of the powerful House Appropriations Committee who was also tied by Lam into the Cunningham case. The email was sent the very day the New York Times identified that Lam had begun investigating Lewis.

Dick Cheney Implicated in Scandal
Lam may have been getting close to uncovering a possible role by Dick Cheney himself in the Cunningham case. Mitchell Wade, the convicted defense contractor involved in the scandal, got $140,000 from the White House on July 15, 2002 to provide Cheney with "office furniture and computers." It was his very first federal contract. Just two weeks later Wade bought a yacht for Cunningham for the price of exactly $140,000.

There are also a number of possible Cheney connections to the corrupt GOP types that Lam was prosecuting, including a politically and environmentally charged sewage treatment project in Tijuana to alleviate San Diego's growing need in this area.

Freak coincidence or illegal corruption conspiracy? You decide- Carol Lam can't because she was fired.

She appears to be the woman who loved justice too much for the Busheviks.

CONTINUED w LINKS...

http://www.truth-out.org/buzzflash/commentary/item/1837-why-was-us-attorney-carol-lam-fired-here-are-a-few-political-possibilities-tell-us-what-you-think-the-reason-was

Trillions.

[Rex]

13. Hmmm...I wonder if they just wrote that letter and leaked it on purpose.

For some future CYA they already know they need.

[Octafish]

20. I just saw ''Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation'' and what you said is a distinct possibility.

Tom Cruise was hanging on to the side of a freaking Russian transport plane that was taking off almost vertically without JATO. And it was really freaking Tom Cruise hanging on to the side of the freaking airplane!

http://variety.com/2015/artisans/production/star-safety-during-stunts-on-rogue-nation-1201556620/

When the parts Jim Phelps remembers happen, yeah, they're there with their thing.

[robertpaulsen]

18. Plausible deniability is now implausible.

Thanks Octafish! Sometimes, in spite of all their efforts, the CIA does right.

[Octafish]

22. Crucial fraction will believe anything, take the S&Ls and Neil Bush...

It's almost an ENIGMA, what the rich and powerful say. It's to hide what they do.



Case in point: One Neil Mallon Pierce Bush, son of then-president George Herbert Walker Bush and caught with his hand in a billion-dollar S&L cookie jar called Silverado Savings & Loan. Here's what Poppy did for his Number 3 Son:

How the Elite Talk in Code

EXCERPT...

A perfect example of code talk comes from a true master insider, George H.W. Bush, when his son, Neil, was caught red handed in the middle of the S&L crisis as a director of Sliverado Bank.

Did Bush lay out his cards and call in his operatives and say pull some strings, get my son out of this investigation (Remember Bush was president at the time.) No. Bush is too smooth. In his published collection of letters, All The Best, George Bush, he shows us how the heat is delicately taken off Neil. On page 449, there is this letter to Thomas Ludlow Ashley.

Ashley is a Yale University grad, and member of the secret society Skull and Bones along with Bush. Here's the letter:

The Honorable Thomas Ludlow Ashley
Association of Bank Holding Companies
Washington, D.C. 20005

Dear Lud,

Thank you for your good memo December 8th.

I would appreciate any help you can give Neil. He tells me he never had any insider dealings. He got off the Board early--long before I was elected President. The Denver paper apparently ran a very nice editorial about him on that. He is an outside director, and thus I guess has liability, but I can't believe his name would appear in the paper if it was Jones not Bush. In any event, I know that the guy is totally honest. I saw him in Denver and I think he is worried about the publicity and the "shame". I tell him not to worry about that but any advice you can give as this matter unfolds would be greatly appreciated by me. If it turns out there has been some marginal call, or he has done something wrong, needless to say there will be no intervention from his dad. But, I'm quite confident this is not true...

Warm regards,

George

Notice how smooth. No talk about getting Ashley anything for taking care of the matter. The nice touch about if Neil "has done something wrong", but the clear finish, he didn't.

CONTINUED...

http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2009/07/how-elite-talk-in-code.html

When it comes to money and power, it really is a small world. We'd hear it more often, if only we were privy to the conversation.

When it comes to democracy, justice and freedom, We the People should be in on the discussion. And we should be fully informed. That leads the nation to make sound decisions.

The CIA shouldn't stand for Conspiracies In Action, but it does, using secret actions to benefit secret parties, much to the detriment of democracy.

[Babel_17]

21. That apology is no longer operative

But it is a reminder of the past.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x35321