Feinstein Is Right: The CIA’s Out of Control
By TIM WEINER, Politico.com
March 12, 2014
Five years of frustration boiled over when Sen. Dianne Feinstein flayed the CIA on the Senate floor Tuesday. She accused the agency of lying, cheating and stealing to block a 6,300-page report on the CIA’s secret prisons and torture from seeing the light of day. In essence, she said, the CIA was spying on the Senate Intelligence Committee’s staff to cover its own misdeeds.
We need spies. But it’s a devil’s bargain. If you have a standing army projecting power around the world, you also need an intelligence service to help the military understand what’s happening out there. But if you have an intelligence service, you’re going to have secrecy and deception. How much can we tolerate? That’s the issue here.
Blood will out, and three former CIA directors, along with their counterterrorism chiefs and counselors, have stained our national honor with their conduct of the secret prison program and their attempts to shape the accounts of its aftermath. The time is long overdue for public hearings on what went on inside the secret prisons, a program authorized by President George W. Bush shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks and banned by President Barack Obama when he took office in January 2009.
(TM note: Weiner's book "Legacy of Ashes," is excellent. His book on the FBI is also very good.)
(More here.)
March 12, 2014
Five years of frustration boiled over when Sen. Dianne Feinstein flayed the CIA on the Senate floor Tuesday. She accused the agency of lying, cheating and stealing to block a 6,300-page report on the CIA’s secret prisons and torture from seeing the light of day. In essence, she said, the CIA was spying on the Senate Intelligence Committee’s staff to cover its own misdeeds.
We need spies. But it’s a devil’s bargain. If you have a standing army projecting power around the world, you also need an intelligence service to help the military understand what’s happening out there. But if you have an intelligence service, you’re going to have secrecy and deception. How much can we tolerate? That’s the issue here.
Blood will out, and three former CIA directors, along with their counterterrorism chiefs and counselors, have stained our national honor with their conduct of the secret prison program and their attempts to shape the accounts of its aftermath. The time is long overdue for public hearings on what went on inside the secret prisons, a program authorized by President George W. Bush shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks and banned by President Barack Obama when he took office in January 2009.
(TM note: Weiner's book "Legacy of Ashes," is excellent. His book on the FBI is also very good.)
(More here.)
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1 Comments:
Oh, so all of a sudden a prominent Democrat is given the accolades when people like me and in the Tea Party movement have been saying it for years.
Four years ago, Weinerand company called the Tea Party a bunch of crazed anti-government types.
Turns out we were right all along.
Welcome to the Tea Party, Senator Feinstein!
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