CIA Spies and Tortured Lies

By Amy Goodman, TruthDig

14 March 14

hat keeps me up at night, candidly, is another attack against the United States,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein said last month in what was, then, her routine defense of the mass global surveillance being conducted by the National Security Agency and other U.S. intelligence agencies. All that has changed now that she believes that the staff of the committee she chairs, the powerful, secretive Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, was spied on and lied to by the CIA. The committee was formed after the Watergate scandal engulfed the Nixon administration. The Church Committee, led by Idaho Democratic Sen. Frank Church, conducted a comprehensive investigation of abuses by U.S. intelligence agencies, of everything from spying on anti-war protesters to the assassination of foreign leaders. Thus began the modern era of congressional and judicial oversight of U.S. intelligence.

This week’s public spat between CIA-loyalist Feinstein and that agency might briefly upset the status quo, but they will make up. Sadly, it obscures a graver problem: the untold story of the United States’ secret policy of torture and rendition (the latter is White House lingo for “kidnapping”).

The conflict surrounds the mammoth, classified Intelligence Committee report on this notorious U.S. government program. Feinstein and other senators have sought the declassification of the 6,300-page document. We have now learned from press reports and from a speech Feinstein made on the Senate floor this week that Intelligence Committee staffers were given access to CIA documents at a secure CIA facility, somewhere outside of CIA headquarters. Feinstein described the scene: “The CIA started making documents available electronically to the committee staff at the CIA leased facility in mid-2009. The number of pages ran quickly to the thousands, tens of thousands, the hundreds of thousands, and then into the millions. The documents that were provided came without any index, without organizational structure. It was a true ‘document dump’ that our committee staff had to go through and make sense of.”

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