Americans need to listen to Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, who took to the Senate floor last week to publicly accuse the CIA of secretly poking around and lifting material from committee computers. If true, the remarkable allegations, which are now under Department of Justice review, means the CIA violated the Constitution and federal law against domestic spying.
Feinstein says CIA Director John Brennan conceded that the agency poked into the committee's computers, but only to determine how Senate staffers received documents that he argued they weren't authorized to have.
Feinstein says that's a cover story to a cover-up. According to her, the CIA removed from committee computers internal CIA reports that cast the agency's post-9/11 interrogation tactics in a harsh and negative light. Brennan is pushing back. "As far as the allegations of CIA hacking into Senate computers--nothing could be further from the truth. We wouldn't do that," he says.
Either the agency did or it didn't. Even in the spy world, this isn't an ambiguous question.
Equally distressing is that the committee's separate voluminous report on the CIA's post-9/11 "enhanced interrogation" program--the document at the center of this fight--remains out of public view. The CIA says the report is error-filled; Feinstein says the agency is stalling to avoid embarrassment and legal entanglements. Adding to the mess are news reports that the White House also has withheld secret documents related to the CIA detention program.
The CIA has the right to contest the committee's report or work with Senate staffers to determine whether certain sensitive information should remain behind closed doors. It does not have the right to secretly meddle with the Oversight Committee's work, in effect trampling on the constitutional line between the executive and legislative branches.
Editorial on 03/19/2014