CIA Lied for 8 Years To Congress

[FOTD]

CIA's Lies About Secret Program Should Have Congress In Open Revolt
Fri, 07/10/2009 - 16:52 — dlindorff
http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/?q=node/336

"If this were the democracy that the Founding Fathers thought they were creating, word from CIA Director Leon Panetta that his agency had lied to Congress and specifically that it had lied repeatedly from 9-11-2001 through the end of 2008 concerning an as-yet undisclosed secret program, would have virtually every member of Congress in a state of rebellion, demanding answers."

"Given that we have learned, courtesy of the excellent reporting by New Yorker writer Seymour Hersh, is that Vice President Cheney personally oversaw the operation of a secret death squad operation, called the Joint Special Operations Command, allegedly led by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, now head of US operations in Afghanistan."

"When it comes to exposing the crimes and abuses of the Bush/Cheney years, the Obama administration has decided it likes what it saw, and wants to continue with the new executive powers and secrecy that it inherited."


Totally illegal.  It is the obligation of the CIA to be truthful with congress. Let the long overdue house cleaning now begin in earnest, indicting, trying and jailing both guilty neocons and their enablers in the democratic party, of which there are far too many.

[we vs us]

In the interest of verisimilitude, here's an actual news article talking about what you're talking about: 


WASHINGTON – CIA Director Leon Panetta has terminated a "very serious" covert program the spy agency kept secret from Congress for eight years, Rep. Jan Schakowsky, a House Intelligence subcommittee chairwoman, said Friday.

Schakowsky is pressing for an immediate committee investigation of the classified program, which has not been described publicly. Rep. Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, has said he is considering an investigation.

"The program is a very, very serious program and certainly deserved a serious debate at the time and through the years," Schakowsky told The Associated Press in an interview. "But now it's over."

Snip

"Schakowsky, D-Ill., said Friday that the CIA and Bush administration consciously decided not to tell Congress.

"It's not as if this was an oversight and over the years it just got buried. There was a decision under several directors of the CIA and administration not to tell the Congress," she said.

Schakowsky, who chairs the Intelligence subcommittee on oversight and investigations, said in a Thursday letter to Reyes that the CIA's lying was systematic and inexcusable. The letter was obtained by The Associated Press on Friday."

So:  the CIA has been lying to Congress since 2001 about the existence of an on again off again "covert spying program" that is "very very serious."  Panetta only recently found out about the program, cancelled it, and told the Congressional oversight committee about it. 

I assume this is something we haven't heard of up till now.  Not warrantless wiretapping, not extraordinary rendition, not our black prison system, etc.  Panetta is running an internal audit, but Schakowsky is calling for a congressional investigation.  I think that about catches us up. 

There are all kinds of rumors floating around about what the program might be.  One of the best i've seen is based on comment dropped by Seymour Hersh at a talk he was giving a couple of year back at the University of Minnesota.  Said Hersh: 

"Right now, today, there was a story in the New York Times that if you read it carefully mentioned something known as the Joint Special Operations Command -- JSOC it's called. It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently. They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. They did not report to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff or to Mr. [Robert] Gates, the secretary of defense. They reported directly to him. ...

"Congress has no oversight of it. It's an executive assassination ring essentially, and it's been going on and on and on. Just today in the Times there was a story that its leaders, a three star admiral named [William H.] McRaven, ordered a stop to it because there were so many collateral deaths."

"Under President Bush's authority, they've been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That's been going on, in the name of all of us.

So if we're talking about a super secret CIA assassination ring operating internationally and without any sort of oversight whatsoever . . . some's got a lot of 'splainin' to do. 

[waterboy]

Perhaps "operating internationally" included the US of A?

So, if the CIA lied to Congress, is it such a stretch to think they lied to or misled its leaders? Such as, oh, I dunno, maybe the leader of the Senate? That Pelosi woman the conservatives call a liar?

[FOTD]

Perhaps "operating internationally" included the US of A?

So, if the CIA lied to Congress, is it such a stretch to think they lied to or misled its leaders? Such as, oh, I dunno, maybe the leader of the Senate? That Pelosi woman the conservatives call a liar?

She be head o da house....

The CIA was manhandled by the fetish neo-cons.

[waterboy]

sorry, little slip. Must be the heat. Cool story. Its so secret, that even if it is illegal, you can't prosecute us cause we can't tell you about it.

[FOTD]

MORE! BREAKING NEWS! (Typical  government weekend "under the radar" journalism)



Bombshell: Cheney Ordered Information About CIA Programming Withheld from Congress
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/12/us/politics/12intel.html?_r=1&hp


Cheney Is Linked to Concealment of C.I.A. Project
By SCOTT SHANE
Published: July 11, 2009

"The Central Intelligence Agency withheld information about a secret counterterrorism program from Congress for eight years on direct orders from former Vice President Dick Cheney, the agency's director, Leon E. Panetta, has told the Senate and House intelligence committees, two people with direct knowledge of the matter said Saturday.

The report that Mr. Cheney was behind the decision to conceal the still-unidentified program from Congress deepened the mystery surrounding it, suggesting that the Bush administration had put a high priority on the program and its secrecy.

Mr. Panetta, who ended the program when he first learned of its existence from subordinates on June 23, briefed the two intelligence committees about it in separate closed sessions the next day.

Efforts to reach Mr. Cheney through relatives and associates were unsuccessful.

The question of how completely the C.I.A. informed Congress about sensitive programs has been hotly disputed by Democrats and Republicans since May, when Speaker Nancy Pelosi accused the agency of failing to reveal in 2002 that it was waterboarding a terrorism suspect, a claim Mr. Panetta rejected.

The law requires the president to make sure the intelligence committees "are kept fully and currently informed of the intelligence activities of the United States, including any significant anticipated intelligence activity." But the language of the statute, the amended National Security Act of 1947, leaves some leeway for judgment, saying such briefings should be done "to the extent consistent with due regard for the protection from unauthorized disclosure of classified information relating to sensitive intelligence sources and methods or other exceptionally sensitive matters."

In addition, for covert action programs, a particularly secret category in which the role of the United States is hidden, the law says that briefings can be limited to the so-called Gang of Eight, consisting of the Republican and Democratic leaders of both houses of Congress and of their intelligence committees.

The disclosure about Mr. Cheney's role in the unidentified C.I.A. program comes a day after an inspector general's report underscored the central role of the former vice president's office in restricting to a small circle of officials knowledge of the National Security Agency's program of eavesdropping without warrants, a degree of secrecy that the report concluded had hurt the effectiveness of the counterterrorism surveillance effort.

An intelligence agency spokesman, Paul Gimigliano, declined on Saturday to comment on the report of Mr. Cheney's role.

"It's not agency practice to discuss what may or may not have been said in a classified briefing," Mr. Gimigliano said. "When a C.I.A. unit brought this matter to Director Panetta's attention, it was with the recommendation that it be shared appropriately with Congress. That was also his view, and he took swift, decisive action to put it into effect."

Members of Congress have differed on the significance of the program, whose details remained secret and which even some Democrats have said was properly classified. Most of those interviewed, however, have said that it was an important activity that should have been disclosed to the intelligence committees.

Intelligence and Congressional officials have said the unidentified program did not involve the C.I.A. interrogation program and did not involve domestic intelligence activities. They have said the program was started by the counterterrorism center at the C.I.A. shortly after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, but never became fully operational, involving planning and some training that took place off and on from 2001 until this year.

In the tense months after 9/11, when Bush administration officials believed new Qaeda attacks could occur at any moment, intelligence officials brainstormed about radical countermeasures. It was in that atmosphere that the unidentified program was devised and deliberately concealed from Congress, officials said.

Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, the top Republican on the House intelligence committee, said last week that he believed Congress would have approved of the program only in the angry and panicky days after 9/11, on 9/12, he said, but not later, after fears and tempers had begun to cool.

One intelligence official, who would speak about the classified program only on condition of anonymity, said there was no resistance inside the C.I.A. to Mr. Panetta's decision to end the program last month.

"Because this program never went fully operational and hadn't been briefed as Panetta thought it should have been, his decision to kill it was neither difficult nor controversial," the official said. "That's worth remembering amid all the drama."

Bill Harlow, a spokesman for George J. Tenet, who was the C.I.A. director when the unidentified program began, declined to comment on Saturday, noting that the program remained classified.

In the eight years of his vice presidency, Mr. Cheney was the Bush administration's most vehement defender of the secrecy of government activities, particularly in the intelligence arena. He went to the Supreme Court to keep secret the advisers to his task force on energy, and won.

A report released on Friday by the inspectors general of five agencies about the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance program makes clear that Mr. Cheney's legal adviser, David S. Addington, had to approve personally every government official who was told about the program. The report said "the exceptionally compartmented nature of the program" frustrated F.B.I. agents who were assigned to follow up on tips it had turned up.

High-level N.S.A. officials who were responsible for ensuring that the surveillance program was legal, including the agency's inspector general and general counsel, were not permitted by Mr. Cheney's office to read the Justice Department opinion that found the eavesdropping legal, several officials said.

Mr. Addington could not be reached for comment on Saturday.

Questions over the adequacy and the truthfulness of the C.I.A.'s briefings for Congress date to the creation of the intelligence oversight committees in the 1970s after disclosures of agency assassination and mind-control programs and other abuses. But complaints increased in the Bush years, when the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies took the major role in pursuing Al Qaeda.

The use of harsh interrogation methods, including waterboarding, for instance, was first described to a handful of lawmakers for the first time in September 2002. Ms. Pelosi and the C.I.A. have disagreed about what she was told, but in any case, the briefing occurred only after a terrorism suspect, Abu Zubaydah, had been waterboarded 83 times.

Democrats in Congress, who contend that the Bush administration improperly limited Congressional briefings on intelligence, are seeking to change the National Security Act to permit the full intelligence committees to be briefed on more matters. President Obama, however, has threatened to veto the intelligence authorization bill if the changes go too far, and the proposal is now being negotiated by the White House and the intelligence committees.

Representative Jan Schakowsky, a Democrat of Illinois on the House committee, wrote on Friday to the chairman, Representative Silvestre Reyes, a Democrat of Texas, to demand an investigation of the unidentified program and why Congress was not told of it. Aides said Mr. Reyes was reviewing the matter.

"There's been a history of difficulty in getting the C.I.A. to tell us what they should," said Representative Adam Smith, a Democrat of Washington. "We will absolutely be held accountable for anything the agency does."

Mr. Hoekstra, the intelligence committee's ranking Republican, said he would not judge the agency harshly in the case of the unidentified program, because it was not fully operational. But he said that in general, the agency had not been as forthcoming as the law required.

"We have to pull the information out of them to get what we need," Mr. Hoekstra said.

[Conan71]

We'll see how this plays out.  I seriously doubt this is the only program done by NSA, CIA, or FBI without fully informing Congress what is going on.  If higher-ups in an agency believe that it's a bigger priority to place national security over politicizing (sp?).  I'm not saying it's right or wrong, simply that I don't believe the public has a right to know every single detail of what goes on in national intelligence and defense.  That's why there are classification levels of intelligence.  Legally speaking, I have no idea if Congress is entitled to know every detail of what's happening with the spooks.

If there have been blatant abuses of power and the law, then I hope individuals responsible are prosecuted and punished to the full extent of the law.  Otherwise, this just becomes more partisan pissing and moaning.

[FOTD]

We'll see how this plays out.  I seriously doubt this is the only program done by NSA, CIA, or FBI without fully informing Congress what is going on.  If higher-ups in an agency believe that it's a bigger priority to place national security over politicizing (sp?).  I'm not saying it's right or wrong, simply that I don't believe the public has a right to know every single detail of what goes on in national intelligence and defense.  That's why there are classification levels of intelligence.  Legally speaking, I have no idea if Congress is entitled to know every detail of what's happening with the spooks.

If there have been blatant abuses of power and the law, then I hope individuals responsible are prosecuted and punished to the full extent of the law.  Otherwise, this just becomes more partisan pissing and moaning.

CoCo,

You can be a fascist or an anarchist with that reply. But it's not a law abiding response. This is not about the public's right to know. It's simply about reporting confidential material to the system of checks and balances and upholding the American way. The rule of law binds the fabric of this nation.

[Conan71]

CoCo,

You can be a fascist or an anarchist with that reply. But it's not a law abiding response. This is not about the public's right to know. It's simply about reporting confidential material to the system of checks and balances and upholding the American way. The rule of law binds the fabric of this nation.

IMO, information like that does not belong in the hands of people who seek to use it for political ends, like it is now.

[FOTD]

IMO, information like that does not belong in the hands of people who seek to use it for political ends, like it is now.

That would be filed under "Congress breaks the law" in the event the information got out. You really don't understand this because you are a die hard totalitarian.

[we vs us]

We'll see how this plays out.  I seriously doubt this is the only program done by NSA, CIA, or FBI without fully informing Congress what is going on.  If higher-ups in an agency believe that it's a bigger priority to place national security over politicizing (sp?).  I'm not saying it's right or wrong, simply that I don't believe the public has a right to know every single detail of what goes on in national intelligence and defense.  That's why there are classification levels of intelligence.  Legally speaking, I have no idea if Congress is entitled to know every detail of what's happening with the spooks.

If there have been blatant abuses of power and the law, then I hope individuals responsible are prosecuted and punished to the full extent of the law.  Otherwise, this just becomes more partisan pissing and moaning.

I think there's a distinction to be made between telling Congress and telling the general public.  There's an even finer distinction to be made between telling every congressperson in both houses and telling just the intelligence subcommittee, who're all vetted and cleared to hear all levels of classified material. 

Unless I'm mistaken, I think the intelligence subcommitte is tasked with direct oversight of the CIA, and the CIA is bound to report all of its clandestine stuff. 

Now, whether they have always been honest to Congress -- even before 911 -- is an open question.

[Conan71]

A partisan appointee to the CIA or a member or members of the majority party in Congress making this an issue in the media smells a lot like partisan politics to me.  You guys spin it however you like, why go public instead of quietly shutting it down?

[waterboy]

Conan, as a deterrent to future empire builders who use secret agencies to avoid checks and balances, and a balance of powers. Remember, Cheney is still active in criticizing his opponents in an effort to show them as weak and him as a true patriot. He shuts up, probably everyone else will. But they shouldn't.

If a handful of Congressmen decided to effect foreign policy on their own, with unquestioned authority and no oversight from the Judicial or Executive branches of government, wwould you feel the same? How about if a few of the Supreme Court Justices did the same? Its scary when our executive branch is perceived as acting in the same manner as Latin American death squads sanctioned by a despot. Using "need to know" and "national security" in such ways leads to problems.

[we vs us]

A partisan appointee to the CIA or a member or members of the majority party in Congress making this an issue in the media smells a lot like partisan politics to me.  You guys spin it however you like, why go public instead of quietly shutting it down?

I can think of a couple of reasons, some on the up and up and some partisan.  It's likely to be a combo of both, though I know Jan Schakowsky (she was my former Congresswoman) and she's typically not into that whole self-aggrandizement thing.  

By all accounts, this is being reported after the fact.  Panetta reportedly shut it down as soon as he heard about it.

Can you think of a manner in which this makes it out to the media where you WOULDN'T be suspicious, or consider it partisan?  If Lindsay Graham or McCain broke the story to the AP, would it be more trustworthy?

[Conan71]

Two words: Valerie.  Plame.