What a farce.
WASHINGTON — A panel investigating the Central Intelligence Agency’s search of a computer network used by staff members of the Senate Intelligence Committee who were looking into the C.I.A.’s use of torture will recommend against punishing anyone involved in the episode, according to current and former government officials.
The panel will make that recommendation after the five C.I.A. officials who were singled out by the agency’s inspector general this year for improperly ordering and carrying out the computer searches staunchly defended their actions, saying that they were lawful and in some cases done at the behest of John O. Brennan, the C.I.A. director.
The "panel," which included former Senator Evan Bayh, three CIA officers, and former White Couse Counsel Robert Bauer was appointed by noted
liar and
torture apologist John Brennan, the agency's current director, to investigate the CIA's hacking and spying on U.S. Senators' staff computers to determine what they knew about the CIA's practice of torturing and experimenting on human beings, many of whom happened to be
innocent of any wrongdoing. The Senate's inquiry was actually prompted by another cover-up, involving the CIA's
destruction of videotapes it made of its torture practices.
Three "CIA Technology Officers" as well as two CIA "lawyers" faced possible punishment. Their defense was that they were "just following [Brennan's] orders."
The CIA secretly monitored and investigated the Senate Intelligence Committee as it finished up what turned out to be an explosive report about the agency's torture practices during the Bush Administration. Aside from its apparently ingrained propensity to spy on people in general, the CIA had a specific reason to be concerned: the Senate Committee had found something the CIA had hoped would stay hidden. It was called the "Panetta Review:"
[A]gency officials had already suspected that committee investigators had found the internal review, which was ordered in 2009 by Leon E. Panetta, then the C.I.A. director, and has come to be known as the “Panetta review.” Working for years from the basement of a C.I.A. facility in North Virginia, Senate investigators reviewed millions of digital files related to the interrogation program. But the Panetta review was not supposed to be one of them, and agency officials suspected that Senate investigators had somehow gained access to parts of the C.I.A.’s computer network they had been prohibited from searching.
The
"Panetta review" was a series of memoranda reviewing thousands of pages and five years worth of Bush-Era torture records. It vividly shot down all of the lies the CIA (and people like Dick Cheney) had previously been telling the American public about the efficacy of their torture program:
[P]eople who have read the review memos said that parts of them were particularly scorching in their analysis of extreme interrogation methods like waterboarding, which the memos described as providing little intelligence of any value.
The CIA's excuse for not providing the Panetta review to the Senate Committee in the first place was that it was merely a "draft document," protected by "Executive privilege." Or that it was outside the time scope of the documents it had previously agreed to provide. These are all lawyerly objections, but the reality was that the Panetta review painted a starkly different picture of torture than the CIA wanted revealed. That's why the Senate was never supposed to access it. And when the CIA found out that it had been accessed, all Hell broke loose:
C.I.A. officers searched their logs to see if they had inadvertently given the Panetta review to the Senate. When they determined they had not, officials brought the matter to Mr. Brennan, who authorized what he has called “a limited review” to figure out if Senate staff members had obtained the documents.
Brennan called one of the CIA lawyers and told him he had "to get to the bottom of this." The lawyer's solution was
apparently to hack through a firewall that had been put in place to allow the Senate to conduct its investigation. CIA "technicians" were then tasked with using used key words and phrases (like "rectal feeding" no doubt) to search through Senate Committee staff emails. According to the CIA's own investigation of the incident, prepared by its Inspector General after the spying was discovered, the "technicians" then lied about it:
According to an unclassified summary of the CIA inspector general’s findings released late on Thursday, two agency attorneys and three technical staff members “improperly accessed or caused access” to the firewalled portions of the network that the committee staffers used. None was named. The three technicians “demonstrated a lack of candor about their activities during interviews.”
Among other measures, the agency officials “conducted a keyword search of all and and a review of some of the emails” that committee staffers sent over the CIA-established network.
Of course, the CIA's own internal investigation exonerated Brennan, saying that he knew nothing about this (which seems, I don't know..
.preposterous?). And Brennan himself offered this babbling response when the spying first came to light:
“As far as the allegations of, you know, CIA hacking into, you know, Senate computers, nothing could be further from the truth. I mean we wouldn’t do that. I mean, that’s just beyond the – you know, the scope of reason in terms of what we would do,” Brennan said on the day of Feinstein’s accusation.
So now what we have are
five CIA employees admittedly spying on our elected officials on orders from John Brennan, investigated by a panel largely made of CIA officials appointed by John Brennan, now totally exonerated by the same panel on the basis that they were acting under the orders of John Brennan. Meanwhile, John Brennan denies even knowing about the spying.
It's kind of easy to figure out who's lying, isn't it?