CIA finds no wrongdoing in search of computers used by Senate investigators
Source: Washington Post
By Greg Miller January 14 at 5:31 PM
An internal CIA review concluded that agency employees committed no wrongdoing when they surreptitiously searched a computer system used by Senate investigators in a multiyear probe of the agencys brutal interrogations of terrorism suspects.
The CIA panel found that no disciplinary actions are warranted for agency lawyers and computer experts who were involved in the incident, which led to an extraordinary public rupture between the CIA and the Senate Intelligence Committee last year.
<snip>
The dispute centers on the committees discovery in 2010 of an internal CIA report commissioned by then-director Leon E. Panetta that in many aspects agreed with the Senate committees damning conclusions about how the interrogation program was run. A senior aide on the Senate panel secretly made a copy of the document and took it to Capitol Hill without informing the agency.
<snip>
The determination that no employees should face discipline is also likely to anger lawmakers and critics who have repeatedly chastised the agency for a seeming unwillingness to hold its employees accountable, even in cases of botched counterterrorism operations and egregious abuse.
The conflict over computer snooping was in many ways a proxy for a higher-stakes fight over the Senate committees long-running investigation of the CIAs use of torture on terrorism suspects.
Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/cia-finds-no-wrongdoing-in-search-of-computers-used-by-senate-investigators/2015/01/14/df049b6e-9c08-11e4-96cc-e858eba91ced_story.html?wprss=rss_homepage
elias49
(4,259 posts)Less and less are we a country of laws.
This is outrageous.
mopinko
(70,226 posts)sheesh.
bemildred
(90,061 posts)BrotherIvan
(9,126 posts)MannyGoldstein
(34,589 posts)Why does that sound absolutely nuts to me?
cstanleytech
(26,319 posts)Xipe Totec
(43,890 posts)The CIA crawls inside it's own head and finds nothing.
24601
(3,962 posts)report by an internal CIA personnel panel led by former U.S. senator Evan Bayh (D-Ind.)."
Scuba
(53,475 posts)rocktivity
(44,577 posts)and it's absolutely nuts the CIA is in the BUSINESS of wrongdoing.
rocktivity
WilliamPitt
(58,179 posts)Your winnings, sir.
Oh, thank you very much.
Autumn
(45,120 posts)arcane1
(38,613 posts)Jack Rabbit
(45,984 posts)In other news, St. Louis County, Missouri DA Robert McColluch says that former police officer Darren Wilson in innocent any wrongdoing in the death of Ferguson resident Mike Brown and that critics of the justice system should "just get over it" and accept that he proved Wilson's innocence before a grand jury in November.
grasswire
(50,130 posts)Open the doors, shine the light.
sakabatou
(42,176 posts)TwilightGardener
(46,416 posts)Why did Panetta have the review done in the first place--and why did he intend to only keep it for internal use, away from Congress--and then why later did he claim publicly that torture did indeed help in getting OBL (basically contradicting his own review results)? Who released the report into Senate-accessed computers? It had to be CIA, either whistleblower or lazy document dumper, unless someone OUTSIDE the agency had access to it, recognized its importance, and made sure the Senate staffers saw it. And why is John Brennan still head of CIA after ordering his agency to go after the Senate computers, and then lying about it, and then admitting and apologizing for it?
Kelvin Mace
(17,469 posts)when you ask pertinent questions.
TwilightGardener
(46,416 posts)just throwing 'em out there for shits and giggles.
Gman
(24,780 posts)2naSalit
(86,794 posts)Ramses
(721 posts)"....and concluded the American people can fuck off"
Rogue criminals and sociopaths infest our government.
Ford_Prefect
(7,921 posts)We measured what we could find and discovered nothing there...ergo nothing really happened and we didn't find it.
No harm - No foul
or in the ineffable words of Pogo: "We met the enemy and he is (not) us!"
easychoice
(1,043 posts)Excellent summation,BRAVO!!!!!
deutsey
(20,166 posts)Hekate
(90,827 posts)Mnemosyne
(21,363 posts)easychoice
(1,043 posts)we are ruled by random chaos...
herding cats
(19,568 posts)No one will be reprimanded, there's nothing to see here America. Move along now.
Agnosticsherbet
(11,619 posts)And as to the piles of bodies he left behind, Forget about it!
sendero
(28,552 posts)... of police departments. They never find any fault with one of their own.
Seriously, why is the CIA even investigating this? It's beyond ridiculous.
WillyT
(72,631 posts)That's Precious.
DeSwiss
(27,137 posts)Even if they found wrongdoing, I'm sure they wouldn't tell us about it.
- For security reasons, of course.
K&R
[center]
I enjoy talking to you. Your mind appeals to me.
It resembles my own mind except that you happen to be insane.[/center]
dawn frenzy adams
(429 posts)What do you expect when lawless investigates the lawless?
Trillo
(9,154 posts)A criminal can't investigate themselves!
Midnight Writer
(21,802 posts)The message? "We can do what we want, and even the people elected to control us are not immune to our power. We control the Government, we control foreign policy, and we control you, and if you stand against us, we will hack your computers, expose your personal lives and destroy your political future, and we will get away with it."
Two weeks after the JFK assassination Harry Truman wrote an Op-Ed in the Washington Post saying that his biggest regret as President was creating the CIA. Wonder what he was thinking?
Alright, we can't prosecute the torturers, because they were just following Bush-Cheney orders. I don't agree, but I understand. But why the Hell can't we prosecute the criminals who hacked into Senate computers and destroyed evidence in an Oversight investigation"
jakeXT
(10,575 posts)Octafish
(55,745 posts)Permawar now global 'n' plenty o' good biziness for the cronies connected to Capitalism's Invisible Army.
This got published in the Washington Post and, evidently, a very few other newspapers at the time:
Limit CIA Role To Intelligence
By Harry S Truman
The Washington Post, December 22, 1963 - page A11
INDEPENDENCE, MO., Dec. 21 I think it has become necessary to take another look at the purpose and operations of our Central Intelligence AgencyCIA. At least, I would like to submit here the original reason why I thought it necessary to organize this Agency during my Administration, what I expected it to do and how it was to operate as an arm of the President.
I think it is fairly obvious that by and large a President's performance in office is as effective as the information he has and the information he gets. That is to say, that assuming the President himself possesses a knowledge of our history, a sensitive understanding of our institutions, and an insight into the needs and aspirations of the people, he needs to have available to him the most accurate and up-to-the-minute information on what is going on everywhere in the world, and particularly of the trends and developments in all the danger spots in the contest between East and West. This is an immense task and requires a special kind of an intelligence facility.
Of course, every President has available to him all the information gathered by the many intelligence agencies already in existence. The Departments of State, Defense, Commerce, Interior and others are constantly engaged in extensive information gathering and have done excellent work.
But their collective information reached the President all too frequently in conflicting conclusions. At times, the intelligence reports tended to be slanted to conform to established positions of a given department. This becomes confusing and what's worse, such intelligence is of little use to a President in reaching the right decisions.
Therefore, I decided to set up a special organization charged with the collection of all intelligence reports from every available source, and to have those reports reach me as President without department "treatment" or interpretations.
I wanted and needed the information in its "natural raw" state and in as comprehensive a volume as it was practical for me to make full use of it. But the most important thing about this move was to guard against the chance of intelligence being used to influence or to lead the President into unwise decisionsand I thought it was necessary that the President do his own thinking and evaluating.
Since the responsibility for decision making was histhen he had to be sure that no information is kept from him for whatever reason at the discretion of any one department or agency, or that unpleasant facts be kept from him. There are always those who would want to shield a President from bad news or misjudgments to spare him from being "upset."
For some time I have been disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the Government. This has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas.
I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations. Some of the complications and embarrassment I think we have experienced are in part attributable to the fact that this quiet intelligence arm of the President has been so removed from its intended role that it is being interpreted as a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigueand a subject for cold war enemy propaganda.
With all the nonsense put out by Communist propaganda about "Yankee imperialism," "exploitive capitalism," "war-mongering," "monopolists," in their name-calling assault on the West, the last thing we needed was for the CIA to be seized upon as something akin to a subverting influence in the affairs of other people.
I well knew the first temporary director of the CIA, Adm. Souers, and the later permanent directors of the CIA, Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg and Allen Dulles. These were men of the highest character, patriotism and integrityand I assume this is true of all those who continue in charge.
But there are now some searching questions that need to be answered. I, therefore, would like to see the CIA be restored to its original assignment as the intelligence arm of the President, and that whatever else it can properly perform in that special fieldand that its operational duties be terminated or properly used elsewhere.
We have grown up as a nation, respected for our free institutions and for our ability to maintain a free and open society. There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position and I feel that we need to correct it.
SOURCE: http://www.maebrussell.com/Prouty/Harry%20Truman's%20CIA%20article.html
So. One month after the assassination, President Truman expressed public concern CIA had strayed off the reservation from intelligence gathering of foreign news sources to cloak-and-dagger operations. Time -- and the Church Committee -- has since shown CIA operated, illegally, domestically.
Allen Dulles, on behalf of CIA, even asked Truman to retract it. From the ConsortiumNews piece by Ray McGovern...
Fox Guarding Hen House
The well-connected Dulles got himself appointed to the Warren Commission and took the lead in shaping the investigation of JFKs assassination.
Documents in the Truman Library show that he then mounted a small domestic covert action of his own to neutralize any future airing of Trumans and Souerss warnings about covert action.
So important was this to Dulles that he invented a pretext to get himself invited to visit Truman in Independence, Missouri. On the afternoon of April 17, 1964, Dulles spent a half-hour trying to get the former President to retract what he had said in his op-ed. No dice, said Truman.
No problem, thought Dulles. Four days later, in a formal memo for his old buddy Lawrence Houston, CIA General Counsel from 1947 to 1973, Dulles fabricated a private retraction, claiming that Truman told him the Washington Post article was all wrong, and that Truman seemed quite astounded at it.
No doubt Dulles thought it might be handy to have such a memo in CIA files, just in case.
A fabricated retraction? It certainly seems so, because Truman did not change his tune. Far from it.
In a June 10, 1964, letter to the managing editor of Look magazine, for example, Truman restated his critique of covert action, emphasizing that he never intended the CIA to get involved in strange activities.
CONTINUED...
SOURCE: http://www.consortiumnews.com/2009/122909b.html
Democracy.
OnyxCollie
(9,958 posts)deminks
(11,017 posts)nilesobek
(1,423 posts)I got clear to the bottom of the sack and have concluded that I'm innocent of any wrongdoing.
rocktivity
(44,577 posts)The "Chris Christie Memorial Self-Exoneration" category.
rocktivity
Jefferson23
(30,099 posts)believes them?
We did not do anything wrong because we say so and have a long documented history
of being above board.
Shit.