rsn | In
the wake of an explosive new allegation that the CIA spied on Senate
intelligence committee staffers, one senator felt this morning that he
needed to make something clear.
"The Senate Intelligence Committee oversees the CIA, not the other way around," Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M) said in a press release.
In normal circumstances, that would have been a statement of the obvious. Today, it was more a cry for help.
McClatchy News Service
on Tuesday reported that the CIA's inspector general has asked for a
criminal investigation into CIA monitoring of computers used by Senate
aides who were investigating the agency's prominent role in the Bush-era
torture of detainees.
Specifically, McClatchy reported: "The committee
determined earlier this year that the CIA monitored computers - in
possible violation of an agreement against doing so - that the agency
had provided to intelligence committee staff in a secure room at CIA
headquarters that the agency insisted they use to review millions of
pages of top-secret reports, cables and other documents, according to
people with knowledge."
In a letter to President Obama
on Tuesday, Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) referred to what he called
"unprecedented action against the Committee in relation to the internal
CIA review," and described it as "incredibly troubling for the
Committee's oversight responsibilities and for our democracy."
The allegation comes on the heels of a fruitless quest by members of the House and Senate
to get NSA officials to confirm or deny whether information on phone
calls by members of Congress has been swept up in the agency's metadata
dragnet. (Since it's so indiscriminate, presumably they have, but the
NSA won't say so.)
The Senate report at the heart of this confrontation
took four years to complete, runs 6,000 pages, and was adopted by the
committee in December 2012. It is said to be highly critical of both the
CIA's role in the torture regime and its public protestations of
innocence. But the White House, under ferocious lobbying by the CIA, has
refused to declassify it.
Most recently, controversy has arisen over an internal CIA report that was reportedly critical of the agency's practices, but was withheld from Senate investigators.
Heinrich, in his statement, complained: "Since I
joined the Committee, the CIA has refused to engage in good faith on the
Committee's study of the CIA's detention and interrogation program.
Instead, the CIA has consistently tried to cast doubt on the accuracy
and quality of this report by publicly making false representations
about what is and is not in it."
The resistance to oversight about torture mirrors
similar problems legislators have experienced when it comes to trying to
monitor surveillance programs and other secret activities, with one
huge exception: The torture report was championed and endorsed by Senate
intelligence committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and other
senior members of that committee. By contrast, Feinstein and House
Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) have emerged as
the strongest defenders of surveillance activity, leaving the so-far-losing battle for disclosure to be fought by more rebellious legislators.
The consistent theme is that members of Congress are
finding themselves at an ever-increasing disadvantage when it comes to
even finding out what intelligence agencies are doing - not to mention
reining them in.
