The CIA is out of line

By Eugene Robinson, WashPost, Published: March 13

We now have even more proof that our burgeoning intelligence agencies, which were given unprecedented latitude to wage war against terrorists, are dangerously out of control.

Not that further evidence was needed: Months of stunning revelations about the National Security Agency’s massive domestic surveillance, thanks to fugitive whistle-blower Edward Snowden, should have been more than enough. But this week, one of the intelligence community’s staunchest defenders in Congress took to the Senate floor to announce that even she has had it up to here.

Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who heads the Senate intelligence committee, trained her fury on the CIA, which has waged a five-year campaign of bureaucratic guerrilla warfare to keep the committee from doing a crucial job: fully investigating the torture, secret detention and other appalling excesses committed under President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.

Feinstein accused the CIA of improperly searching computers that intelligence committee staff members were using to review CIA documents about “enhanced interrogation techniques” such as waterboarding — in plain language, torture.

(More here.)