Kenneth Kapel Wrote:Is Feinstein trying to divert attention from the NSA scandals ? I really can't figure her out, she has been a staunch defender of the American Security State and a foreign policy hawk.

Quote:Senator Dianne Feinstein, head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, blows up.

She claims the CIA made efforts to sabotage her Committee's investigation of illegal CIA interrogation/torture of detainees.

The CIA vehemently denies it did anything wrong.

So a new front in the internal war opens up.

The key fact here is: Feinstein's Committee has been carrying on this investigation of the CIA for SEVERAL YEARS. It is preparing a 6000-page report.

For several years, the CIA has been aware of the coming storm.

The damage to its reputation will be large.

What does an agency like the CIA do when faced with such a problem? It tries to mount a major distraction.

Here is one hypothesis to consider:

The distraction was Edward Snowden.

Yesterday, I wrote a piece titled, "Is Edward Snowden lying?" It laid out a case that Snowden was actually still working for his former employer, the CIA, when he was handed a treasure trove of NSA documents by CIA pros.

Thus, casting a very bright light of blame on a different intell agency, the NSA.

The CIA wasn't hoping to get away clean on its torture program. But it was hoping to maintain a degree of parity with the NSA, within the US intelligence complex.

The CIA didn't want to be the odd man out with a scandal of enormous proportions on its hands. It wanted company.

For decades, the turf war over federal funding and importance has been going on, between CIA and NSA. At the CIA, for the past several years, the prospect of taking a dagger, for its torture program, and suffering the consequences, has been grim.

Absorbing public shame as the dirty little brother in the US intell nexus, while big brother, the NSA, appeared relatively clean, was too horrible to contemplate.

So the Snowden operation was launched.

Dianne Feinstein has now shown which side she's onand for whom she might be operating as a surrogate. She excoriates Snowden as a traitor, defends the NSA, and blasts the CIA with a charge of trying to torpedo her Committee's investigation.

The NSA stays silent, while privately rejoicing that the CIA is taking the heat recently reserved for it, the NSA.

In this war, there are no real winners. There is only the shifting of blame, and the hope that the enemy takes more hits. If not, then each side can console itself with the knowledge that everyone's hands are shown to be dirty.

Nothing about these events minimizes the importance of the documents Snowden's press surrogates have released, or the importance of true findings about the CIA's torture program.

But this internal war does highlight how destructive and amoral agencies and operatives of the federal government can be, even toward each other, and how low they will go.

Also highlighting the enormous rotting superstructure called the federal government, which continues to move further along in controlling our lives, while it claims to be only concerned about "the greatest good for the greatest number."

Quote:Senator Dianne Feinstein is frequently exasperating. The Democratic senator from California is one day ultra-liberal, in the lead in calling for gun reform. The next she is ultra-conservative, one of the staunchest defenders of the embattled National Security Agency.

The senator's contradictory nature was on show for all to see on Tuesday, when she delivered an extraordinary speech from the Senate floor. It amounted to the biggest and most public rift between Congress and the spy community since the 9/11 attacks. Ms Feinstein, who chairs the Senate intelligence committee, which has oversight of America's myriad spy agencies, accused the CIA of breaking into the committee's computers. It is an extremely serious charge: a breach of the constitution, the executive branch tampering with the elected branch. She described it as "a defining moment for the oversight of our intelligence community".

She is on strong ground. The row dates back to the CIA's programme of torture in the aftermath of 9/11. The CIA and the Bush administration, which presided over the programme, preferred to describe it euphemistically as "enhanced interrogation techniques" but torture it was. Members of the Senate and House intelligence committee only learned about it late, in 2006. A year later the New York Times revealed that the CIA had destroyed videotapes of these early interrogations.

After Barack Obama became president in 2009 and Ms Feinstein became head of the intelligence committee, she started an exhaustive inquiry into the torture, and this is at the centre of the current rift. She claims that the CIA, headed by John Brennan, recently conducted searches of the committee's computers. Mr Brennan, in response, denied that the CIA had hacked into the Senate computers.

It is right that Ms Feinstein should raise this. It is a huge issue, one that at the very least will see calls for Mr Brennan's resignation. Her pursuit of the CIA is the fulfilment of her role as chair of the intelligence committee. It is what she should be doing, the monitoring of the spy agencies.

The exasperation with Ms Feinstein is that she directs her sense of outrage only at the CIA. It seems restricted to issues that impact on her. She is outraged when the CIA allegedly hacked into her committee's computers. She is upset over the alleged intrusion into the privacy of her own staff. And yet this is the same senator who could not empathise with Americans upset at the revelations in the Snowden documents of millions of citizens whose personal data has been accessed by the NSA. It is the same senator who could not share American anger over the revelation of the co-operation in surveillance of the giant tech companies, whether wittingly or unwittingly.

Ms Feinstein not only failed to investigate the NSA with a smidgen of the aggression she has shown towards the CIA but has gone out of her way to be the NSA's most prominent defender. The day after Edward Snowden revealed himself as a whistleblower last June, she was among the first to brand him a traitor. In the face of revelation after revelation, she praised the professionalism of the NSA. She defended mass data collection as a necessity, arguing that the NSA had to have access to the whole "haystack" to find the one needle, the terrorist. All this dismayed many of her Democratic supporters in liberal California and elsewhere in the US. She proposed a bill supposedly aimed at NSA reform, but it was a spoiler, one that in fact would have done little to curb the agency's powers. The one time she wobbled was in the autumn after the disclosure of US spying on German chancellor Angela Merkel. But this proved to be only brief.

It is about time Ms Feinstein used her powers as the democratically elected head of the intelligence committee to question the NSA with the same vigour or even a small part of it that she is displaying towards the CIA. That would, indeed, be a defining moment for the oversight of the US intelligence community: all of it.

"Giving Hypocrisy a Bad Name": NSA-Backing Senate Intel Chair Blasts CIA for Spying on Torture Probe

Transcript

Sen. Feinstein Finally Goes after the CIA, but not for Lying to and Spying on Us

Quote:Today marks one week since the speech by Dianne Feinstein on the floor of the US Senate in which the California Democrat, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, publicly charged the CIA with cover-up, the withholding of documents, and unconstitutional spying on her committee, which has the legal responsibility to oversee the spy agency.

Feinstein, a longtime rubber-stamp defender of the US intelligence agencies, accused the CIA of attempting to intimidate her committee and charged that the agency "may well have violated the separation-of-powers principle embodied in the United States Constitution," and also "the Fourth Amendment, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, as well as Executive Order 12333, which prohibits the CIA from conducting domestic searches or surveillance."

In the days since Feinstein's speech, it has emerged that the White House itself deliberately withheld documents and may well have worked with the CIA and its director, John Brennan, in deleting material initially provided to the committee. These actions were taken in an attempt to cover up one of the greatest crimes of the 21st centurythe systematic torture of prisoners at CIA secret prisons established around the world in the name of the "war on terror."

Top officials in the Obama administration, including the president, are potentially implicated in impeachable offenses.

There is a vast gulf between the significance of the revelations and their treatment in the American media, which is moving as quickly as possible to bury the story. Since Friday, there has not been a single news article on the topic in major daily newspapers such as the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal.

The only major newspaper to publish an editorial on the topic in recent days was the Washington Post, but this was only from the standpoint of obscuring the far-reaching implications of Feinstein's allegations. The editors, clearly concerned about the potentially explosive consequences of the revelations of criminal activity by the CIA, called Monday for quick publication of the Senate Intelligence Committee's 6,300-page report on CIA torture, along with an internal CIA review of the agency's torture program and Brennan's rebuttal to the Senate report. This is, they write, necessary to "maintain the essential confidence of the American people" in the spy agencies.

In the course of the editorial, the Post downplays the spying charges while solidarizing itself with the CIA's arguments, declaring, "In principle, Mr. Brennan is right to argue that certain documents are legitimately excluded from disclosure to Congress."

During the network television interview programs broadcast Sunday morningwhich serve as a round-up of major political developments during the weekthe CIA spying revelations were hardly mentioned. Two of the networks, Fox and CBS, avoided the subject entirely, while NBC and ABC took it up in a perfunctory and hurried fashion.

Among those interviewed prominently were Representative Peter King, the Republican chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee and member of the House Intelligence Committee, and Mike Rogers, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. Neither said anything about Feinstein's Senate speech, nor were they asked.

Along with the media, Senate Republicans and Democrats (including Feinstein herself) and the Obama administration are seeking to minimize the consequences of the exposure of CIA criminality and ensure that there are no serious investigations, no public hearings and no consequences for those implicated.

According to a report by National Public Radio (NPR), the Senate Intelligence Committee held a closed-door meeting last Thursday at which it decided to conduct a secret review of the actions of the CIA and the counter-charges by agency officials that committee staffers obtained unauthorized access to CIA internal documents.

Senator Richard Burr, the second-ranking Republican on the panelset to become its chairman if the Republicans win control of the Senate in Novembermade clear in comments to NPR that the purpose of the review was to impose a blanket of silence on Feinstein's statement.

"We've made a decision that we're going to pursue that as an internal course within the committee," he said, "and hopefully that will end any public review of most of the comments that are being made." Burr is on record declaring that the public should never learn anything of what is discussed in the closed sessions of the intelligence panel.

Senate Democrats and Republicans alike have rejected suggestions that an independent investigation be launched, given the extraordinary seriousness of Feinstein's charges and the clearly unconstitutional character of any executive branch effort to spy on the activities of the legislative branch.

The Obama White House has downplayed the significance of the conflict and sought to present Obama as above the fray, although Brennan is one of his closest aides, having run the drone-missile assassination program from the White House for four years, until Obama nominated him to head the spy agency. Brennan notified the White House before filing a criminal referral with the Justice Department against Senate Intelligence Committee staff members and received a green light for the unprecedented action.

In this political conspiracy, the US media is once again playing its assigned role, not to reveal, but to cover up and obfuscate, a role that it has reprised many times over. In doing so, it is confirming its essential function as an arm of the state and an instrument of the corporate and financial elite and its assault on the democratic rights of the American people.