Senate and C.I.A. Spar Over Secret Report on Interrogation Program

[think]

Source: The New York Times


By MARK MAZZETTI and SCOTT SHANE
Published: July 19, 2013

WASHINGTON — The chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee says she is planning a push to declassify hundreds of pages of a secret committee report that accuses the Central Intelligence Agency of misleading Congress and the White House about the agency’s detention and interrogation program, which is now defunct.

The 6,000-page report, which took years to complete and cost more than $40 million, is the only detailed account to date of a program that set off a national debate about torture. The report has been the subject of a fierce partisan fight and a vigorous effort by the C.I.A. to challenge its conclusions, and last month, the agency’s director, John O. Brennan, delivered a lengthy rebuttal to the report to committee leaders.

But the committee’s chairwoman, Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, said in a statement this week that the report was on “firm ground” and that she planned to ask the White House and C.I.A. to declassify its 300-page executive summary after “making any factual changes to our report that are warranted after the C.I.A.’s response.”

The committee’s top Republican, Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, said he believed the report was deeply flawed and agreed with the intelligence agency’s critique. But he said he believed that a summary of the report could be made public, as long as it was accompanied by a summary of the agency’s response and a dissenting statement from committee Republicans...

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/20/us/politics/senate-and-cia-spar-over-secret-report-on-interrogation-program.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

[mbperrin]

1. I paid for it. I want my copy to see what they are doing

in my name.

Otherwise, I might as well get a vanity car tag that says "Good German."

[Solly Mack]

2. K&R

Snort (I read the article)

[delrem]

3. It's clear to all, and has been for some time,

that an open inquiry into the CIA's detention and interrogation program would, in fact, convict the US of criminal behavior.

I'm curious, was/is the CIA's detention and interrogation program constitutional?
But that, too, would require an open inquiry to decide.

That's not unlike Obama's problem with NSA spying. How can one decide whether a gov't program is constitutional if one doesn't know what it is? In lieu of knowing what the NSA spying is, of knowing what secret "interpretations of the law" are being enacted to enable the spying, or of being given an executive level explanation of what is going on, people are right to assume the worst in this sudden new age of total information awareness, and access.

The last point, 'access', is the critical issue.
These databases don't just clock real-time digital connections, in order to clock them they *collect* them so, in a few decades, the total digital life of every citizen will be available for discovery.

No wonder politicians, even the best of them, are seduced by the thought of that level of social control - not just for them, of course, but for their clique.

How can we trust government with the right to access such total information databases, if gov't doesn't trust us with a comprehensive explanation of what those databases and meta-software are, and what purpose they serve?

[AnotherMcIntosh]

4. She wants something. I wonder what it is.

[bemildred]

5. She wants to "fix" the program so that the surveillance can continue.

That is pretty much what they all (with some few exceptions) want.

[AnotherMcIntosh]

6. I think you're right.

[bemildred]

7. I've been watching them for a long time.

If you stop listening to what they say and just watch what they do, they become predictable. We will get some reassurances and concessions, and business will continue as usual. Only if their are obvious electoral consequences will anything more be done, and even then it will be reluctant.