With McClatchy just reporting that the CIA has acknowledged that they hacked the computers of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in 2009, perhaps something will be done--due to the inevitable groundswell of public opinion that may ensue—to actually put a saddle on our country’s 17+ foreign and domestic intelligence services’ (i.e.: the CIA, NSA, FBI, DEA, etc., etc.) total disregard for U.S. citizens’ basic rights to privacy?
Then again, with the U.S. Department of Justice continually running interference for the managers of our country’s inconvenient, Orwellian realities—which may have something to do with the even greater, heavily-obfuscated truth that it’s the White House that directly funds and runs our nation’s largest surveillance operations—even now, with this past week’s news that this egregious behavior by the CIA has been ongoing, through this year, the unfortunate truth is: based upon the past, and even current, “response” of our government, nothing much will happen when everything’s said and not done. Especially, when bogusly glaring loopholes in bills drafted by Democratic leaders in the U.S. Senate are heralded by the press and public as “sweeping curbs” to government surveillance.
As award-winning journalist, author, blogger and Netroots Nation seminar leader Marcy Wheeler continually reminds us, Thomas Pynchon’s words regularly apply to much of what we read, see and hear in the press:
“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.”
–– Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow
(I hope readers will make an effort to click upon the many links in the previous two paragraphs.)
Meanwhile, as the cacaphony of cognitive dissonance (look no further than the comments to this post, below) and propaganda gets turned up a few notches, the details of these travesties just keep coming (even if they're about events that transpired five years ago)…
CIA improperly accessed Senate computers, agency finds
By Jonathan S. Landay and Ali Watkins
McClatchy Washington Bureau
July 31, 2014
WASHINGTON — CIA employees improperly accessed computers used by the Senate Intelligence Committee to compile a report on the agency’s now defunct detention and interrogation program, an internal CIA investigation has determined.
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.
CIA Director John Brennan briefed Feinstein and the committee’s vice chairman, Saxby Chambliss, R-GA, on the CIA inspector general’s findings and apologized to them during a meeting on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, Boyd said…
So, never mind 2009, maybe in 2019 we’ll read about an apology from the CIA, or the NSA, or the FBI, or the State Department, etc., etc., regarding
their reported transgressions from just these past two or three days?
Kind of reminds me of the ongoing, Wall-Street-serial-crime-government-wrist-slap kabuki we’ve been witnessing since the markets crashed in September of ’08. As Atrios notes farther down, at this point, only a truly naive chump, or a paid government stenographer would believe a word of this bullshit.
What part of: “Just like Wall Street, the status quo is fully complicit when it comes to their enabling of this blatantly illegal behavior of our surveillance state” don’t most Americans understand?
Atrios speaks for me, today…
And, yes, combined with the inconvenient truths noted above, especially in the links of the second and third paragraphs of this post, the greater truth is the DoJ’s lip service and inaction serves as a tacit reminder to the public that the CIA’s ongoing actions are a clear indicator that this is a mentality that’s pervasive throughout our status-quo-owned government…
Wrist-slaps, traffic tickets and government kabuki—despite the self-evident courage recently exhibited by those few, remaining citizens and increasingly oppressed members of our country’s fourth estate--have absolutely nothing to do with any “change” this diarist “can believe in.”
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Kossack Richard Lyon first reported this story here, a couple of hours ago: “CIA Confesses To Spying On Senate Committee.”
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