parliamentary sissies runnin nothin but they mouth...,

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.