CIA Clears OWN Staff of Snooping Senate Computers
Senate intelligence committee chairwoman Dianne Feinstein said she was disappointed with the outcome
BBC 15 January 2015
A CIA internal watchdog has cleared agency officers of improperly accessing the computers of members of the US Senate intelligence committee.
It said CIA officers acted reasonably in searching computers after concerns they contained classified material.
Central Intelligence Agency headquarters in Langley, Va. Senate investigators have delivered a damning indictment of CIA interrogation practices after the 9/11 attacks, accusing the agency of inflicting pain and suffering on prisoners with tactics that went well beyond legal limits. The torture report released Tuesday by the Senate Intelligence Committee says the CIA deceived the nation with its insistence that the harsh interrogation tactics had saved lives. It says those claims are unsubstantiated by the CIA's own records.
The finding contradicts allegations from lawmakers and an admission from the agency's own inspector general.
The allegations came during the intelligence committee's investigation into claims of torture by the CIA.
'Inappropriate access'
An internal board launched an inquiry after the CIA appealed against findings by David Buckley, the agency's inspector general, that employees had "improperly" gained access to computers used by Senate staff.
It concluded that although there had been some "inappropriate access" to a secured network being used by Senate workers, there had been no wrongdoing and no law violated.
Dianne Feinstein, the chair of the Senate intelligence committee, who has clashed with the CIA over the issue, rejected the board's findings.
"I'm disappointed that no-one at the CIA will be held accountable," she said in a statement.
"The decision was made to search committee computers, and someone should be found responsible for those actions," she added.
The board's conclusion comes a week after Mr Buckley said he was stepping down from his post, but officials said his resignation was unrelated to anything he had investigated.
The Senate staff had been using computers at a CIA facility to examine documents related to the agency's interrogation practices following the 9/11 attacks on the US.
Those documents formed the basis of a damning report, released in December 2014, which found the CIA had carried out "brutal" interrogations of al-Qaeda suspects.
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Guantanamo Bay camp, where many interrogations were carried out
The US Senate Intelligence Committee has released a summary of a report into the CIA interrogation program established by US spy chiefs after the terror attacks of 11 September 2001.
The full report is 6,000 pages long and the unclassified summary is 525 pages - but it highlights 20 key findings:
What did the Senate committee find out?
1) The CIA's use of "enhanced interrogation techniques" was not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining co-operation from detainees.
2)The CIA's justification for the use of its enhanced interrogation techniques rested on inaccurate claims of their effectiveness.
3) The interrogations of CIA detainees were brutal and far worse than the CIA represented to policymakers and others.
4) The conditions of confinement for CIA detainees were harsher than the CIA had represented to policymakers and others.
5) The CIA repeatedly provided inaccurate information to the Department of Justice, impeding a proper legal analysis of the CIA's Detention and Interrogation Program.
6) The CIA has actively avoided or impeded congressional oversight of the programme.
7) The CIA impeded effective White House oversight and decision-making.
8) The CIA's operation and management of the programme complicated, and in some cases impeded, the national security missions of other executive branch agencies.
9) The CIA impeded oversight by the CIA's Office of Inspector General.
10) The CIA co-ordinated the release of classified information to the media, including inaccurate information concerning the effectiveness of the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques.
11) The CIA was unprepared as it began operating its Detention and Interrogation Program more than six months after being granted detention authorities.
12) The CIA's management and operation of its Detention and Interrogation Program was deeply flawed throughout the programme's duration, particularly so in 2002 and early 2003.
13) Two contract psychologists devised the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques and played a central role in the operation, assessments, and management of the CIA's Detention and Interrogation Program. By 2005, the CIA had overwhelmingly outsourced operations related to the programme.
14) CIA detainees were subjected to coercive interrogation techniques that had not been approved by the Department of Justice or had not been authorised by CIA headquarters.
15) The CIA did not conduct a comprehensive or accurate accounting of the number of individuals it detained, and held individuals who did not meet the legal standard for detention. The CIA's claims about the number of detainees held and subjected to its enhanced interrogation techniques were inaccurate.
16) The CIA failed to adequately evaluate the effectiveness of its enhanced interrogation techniques.
17) The CIA rarely reprimanded or held personnel accountable for serious and significant violations, inappropriate activities, and systemic and individual management failures.
18) The CIA marginalised and ignored numerous internal critiques, criticisms, and objections concerning the operation and management of the CIA's Detention and Interrogation Program.
19) The CIA's Detention and Interrogation Program was inherently unsustainable and had effectively ended by 2006 due to unauthorised press disclosures, reduced cooperation from other nations, and legal and oversight concerns.
20) The CIA's Detention and Interrogation Program damaged the United States' standing in the world, and resulted in other significant monetary and non-monetary costs
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Protestors demonstrate against US torture policy.
Press/Media Reaction:
With the Senate report on US interrogation of al-Qaeda suspects now in the public record, debate has shifted from hypothetical to the concrete.
In the hours after the Senate Foreign Relations Committee document was posted on the internet, journalists and interested parties began poring over the 500-page executive summary, highlighting its most controversial findings and drawing conclusions about its relevance.
"The core narrative that describes a barbarous, calculated, and sustained corruption of both our national values and our most fundamental moral principles is simple," writes Kevin Drum of Mother Jones. "We tortured prisoners, and then we lied about it. That's it."
The report is brutal, write the Daily Beast's Shane Harris and Tim Mak: "Interrogations that lasted for days on end. Detainees forced to stand on broken legs, or go 180 hours in a row without sleep. A prison so cold, one suspect essentially froze to death."
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The CIA could not borrow methods from a torture programme that was successful at eliciting factual information because no such programme exists”
Max Fisher Vox
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Rolling Stone's Tim Dickinson says the "rectal rehydration, without evidence of medical necessity" that some detainees underwent was "sexual assault, plus water".
Beyond the moral repugnancy of the specific examples cited, writes Vox's Max Fisher, the report shows that there was a "disastrous flaw" in the CIA's interrogation programme.
Many observers have noted with shock that the US government paid $81m (£52m) to two Air Force survival school psychologists who knew little about interrogation techniques or al-Qaeda. It's what they did know, Fisher writes, that's the most disturbing, however.
The two trained pilots on how to survive interrogation at the hands of brutal captors - which meant their interrogation programme was, in effect, a recreation of these cruel tactics.
"It was based on copying Chinese torture methods designed not to elicit truth but to force false confessions," he writes.
"The CIA could not borrow methods from a torture programme that was successful at eliciting factual information because no such programme exists, nor will it ever," he continues.
Does the Senate report on interrogations tarnish the CIA's image?
Other journalists took particular exception to the portion of the report that detailed how the CIA's public affairs department attempted to shape media coverage of the agency's practices.
"The government hates leaks of classified information. Except when it doesn't," writes the New York Times's Matt Apuzzo.
"The Senate report describes a CIA effort to reveal favourable classified information as a way to bolster support for its interrogation and detention programme," he continues. "Unlike other, unfavourable, stories that prompted leak investigations, reporter subpoenas and prison sentences, these disclosures led everyone to look the other way."
The Intercept's Dan Froomkin says the report shows that many of the reporters covering the CIA story weren't misled, they were willing participants in a deception.
"Many of the same news organisations you are trusting today to accurately inform you about the torture report were either naive or knowing dupes in a CIA misinformation campaign orchestrated by top CIA officials, that included leaks of information that was amazingly enough both classified and inaccurate at the same time," he writes.
Conservatives and former George W Bush Administration officials have countered the flood of criticism in part by noting that the report is the product of Senate Democrats who did not interview the CIA officials responsible for designing and implementing the interrogation programme (why those interviews didn't happen is an open question).
"There are two sides to every story, including this one," tweets former Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer.
"Would a congressional report written almost exclusively by GOP staff ever be treated as 'the Senate report' on anything?" asks the Weekly Standard's Stephen Hayes.
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The committee has given us instead a one-sided study marred by errors of fact and interpretation”
Former CIA officials The Wall Street Journal
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A little over an hour after the report's release, the Wall Street Journal's website published an opinion piece in which former CIA Directors George Tenet, Porter Goss and Michael Hayden and Deputy Directors John E McLaughlin, Albert Calland and Stephen R. Kappe defend their agency's record.
They call the report "a missed opportunity to deliver a serious and balanced study of an important public policy question".
"The committee has given us instead a one-sided study marred by errors of fact and interpretation - essentially a poorly done and partisan attack on the agency that has done the most to protect America after the 9/11 attacks," they write.
They contend, contrary to the report's findings, that the interrogation programme "helped us disrupt, capture or kill terrorists". Its legality was clearly established by the US Justice Department, they continue, and the allegation that CIA representatives misled Congress and administration officials is "flat-out wrong".
The authors of the Senate report forget the sense of urgency that existed in the days after the 9/11 attacks, they write.
"In this atmosphere, time was of the essence and the CIA felt a deep responsibility to ensure that an attack like 9/11 would never happen again," they say. "CIA officers knew that many would later question their decisions - as we now see - but they also believed that they would be morally culpable for the deaths of fellow citizens if they failed to gain information that could stop the next attacks."
For further information, the article directs readers to CIA Saved Lives. The website, run by "a group of former CIA officials with hundreds of years of combined service", further builds on the criticisms of the Senate Committee laid out in the Wall Street Journal.
"The committee selectively used documents to try to substantiate a point of view where ample and contrary evidence existed," they write. "Over five years and at a cost of $40m [£25m], the staff "cherry picked" through 6 million pages of documents to produce an answer they knew the majority wanted. In the intelligence profession, that is called politicisation."
In addition both the Senate committee's Republican minority and the CIA itself have now released competing reports.
As has become typical of Washington political debates, there's a "truth" out there for every opinion.......
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