Ashley Acord's summaries derived from "Democracy Now!" for week 3/10-3/16

Ashley Acord

SOC Movements Mon. /Wed. 3:30-4:45pm

Dr. Kubal

Summaries derived from “Democracy Now!” for week 3/10-3/16

This week I read two articles on the “Democracy Now!” website that are related, and therefore correlated, to the CIA spy scandal. The first titled "CIA Spies and Tortured Lies" was mostly just informing of the accused action of the CIA, and the other article titled “Obama Backs Release of CIA Torture Report, But Stays Clear of Senate Row” was about our president Barrack Obama’s stance and reaction to the allegations.

The National Security Agency and other U.S. intelligence agencies have been conducting a mass global surveillance. The main target of the surveillance was and is the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The committee was fashioned after the Watergate scandal immersed the Nixon administration. The Committee, led by Idaho Democratic Sen. Frank Church, conducted a comprehensive investigation of abuses by U.S. intelligence agencies, of everything from spying on anti-war protesters to the assassination of foreign leaders. Thus began the modern era of congressional and judicial oversight of U.S. intelligence.

 The recent conflict being circulated through the news and tabloids surrounds the Intelligence Committee report on this notorious U.S. government program. Panel chair Senator Dianne Feinstein has amenably alleged the CIA of spying on Senate staffers and taking material from their computers as part of an effort to undercut the extensive report on the agency’s torture and rendition program. The report has yet to be relinquished but purportedly documents far-reaching mistreatments and a cover-up by CIA executives. At the White House, Obama said he will push for declassifying the report. He has responded to this situation by announcing that he has worked with the Senate committee so that the report that they are putting forward is well informed. He stated in an interview that, “I am absolutely committed to declassifying that report as soon as the report is completed. In fact, I would urge them to go ahead and complete the report, send it to us. We will declassify those findings so that the American people can understand what happened in the past, and that can help guide us as we move forward."

This week’s public quarrel between CIA-loyalist Feinstein and that agency might briefly upset the existing state of affairs, but they will make up. Sadly, it disguises a graver problem: the untold story of the United States’ secret policy of torture and kidnapping. Feinstein and other senators have pursued the open access of the 6,300-page document. Press reports and a speech Feinstein made on the Senate floor this week brought awareness that Intelligence Committee staffers were given access to CIA documents at a secure CIA facility, somewhere outside of CIA headquarters. Feinstein described the scene: “The CIA started making documents available electronically to the committee staff at the CIA leased facility in mid-2009. The number of pages ran quickly to the thousands, tens of thousands, the hundreds of thousands, and then into the millions. The documents that were provided came without any index, without organizational structure. It was a true ‘document dump’ that our committee staff had to go through and make sense of.”

                The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence does not yet know if these documents were provided to the Intelligence Committee staff from a CIA whistle-blower, we do not yet know—but a key document surfaced, called the “Internal Panetta Review,” presumably named after Leon Panetta, the director of the CIA at the time. Feinstein said in her floor speech, “What was unique and interesting about the internal documents was ... their analysis and acknowledgement of significant CIA wrongdoing.” This “Internal Panetta Review” specifically contradicts the CIA’s own written testimony to the Intelligence Committee. Yes, the CIA was caught in a lie.

"CIA Spies and Tortured Lies"

http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2014/3/13/cia_spies_and_tortured_lies

 

“Obama Backs Release of CIA Torture Report, But Stays Clear of Senate Row”

http://www.democracynow.org/2014/3/13/headlines#3132