John Brennan
A CIA admission Thursday that its agents had sneaked into computers set up for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence to compile a report on the agency's torture program has brought calls for an investigation by an independent counsel from Democratic Sen. Mark Udall of Colorado and angry comments from other senators.
One came from Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon who said in a statement:
“The CIA Inspector General has confirmed what Senators have been saying all along: The CIA conducted an unauthorized search of Senate files, and attempted to have Senate staff prosecuted for doing their jobs,” Wyden said. “Director Brennan’s claims to the contrary were simply not true.
“What’s needed now is a public apology from Director Brennan to staff and the committee, a full accounting of how this occurred and a commitment there will be no further attempts to undermine Congressional oversight of CIA activities.”
CIA Director John Brennan apologized Thursday for the agency's actions. That marked a sharp turnaround from his comments in March when the select committee's chairwoman, Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, accused the CIA of spying on the Senate panel's investigation via computers set up to access some six million pages of documents related to the torture program. Then he
said: "When the facts come out on this, I think a lot of people who are claiming that there has been this tremendous sort of spying and monitoring and hacking will be proved wrong."
The news of the CIA's internal investigation was first reported by Jonathan S. Landay and Ali Watkins at McClatchy :
Findings of the investigation by the CIA Inspector General’s Office “include a judgment that some CIA employees acted in a manner inconsistent with the common understanding reached between SSCI (Senate Select Committee on Intelligence) and the CIA in 2009,” CIA spokesman Dean Boyd said in a statement.
The statement represented an admission to charges by the panel’s chairwoman, Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., that the CIA intruded into the computers her staff used to compile the soon-to-be released report on the agency’s use of harsh interrogation methods on suspected terrorists in secret overseas prisons during the Bush administration.
As this was being written, Feinstein had not yet made a statement. But Udall
had:
“From the unprecedented hacking of congressional staff computers and continued leaks undermining the Senate intelligence committee’s investigation of the CIA’s detention and interrogation program to his abject failure to acknowledge any wrongdoing by the agency, I have lost confidence in John Brennan,” Udall said.
“I also believe the administration should appoint an independent counsel to look into what I believe could be the violation of multiple provisions of the Constitution as well as federal criminal statutes and executive order 12333,” he added, referring to a Reagan-era presidential directive defining the roles of the intelligence agencies.
The committee's 6,300-page torture report, completed 19 months ago, may never see the light of day. A condensed version is now being reviewed by the White House after being reviewed (and no doubt redacted) by the CIA. That is supposed to be released sometime soon.