The Agency has a long history of manipulating Congress and others to support its programs. That this was posed as an actual question reveals the media’s historical illiteracy in this matter.
In fact, when a House select committee investigated the CIA in the 1970s, the CIA convinced the House to suppress its own report, begging the question of who was overseeing whom. Nevertheless, a copy of the House report was leaked, via Daniel Schorr, to the Village Voice. The report opened with this disturbing sentence:
“If this Committee’s recent experience is any test, intelligence agencies that are to be controlled by Congressional lawmaking are, today, beyond the lawmakers’ scrutiny.”
In the wake of revelations that CIA Director Leon Panetta just recently learned of an eight-year CIA operation that had never been revealed to, much less approved by, Congress, Reps. Anna Eshoo, D-California, and Rush Holt, D-New Jersey, echoed similar sentiments.
On Andrea Mitchell’s show on MSNBC Thursday, Eshoo and Holt stated that Panetta’s revelation challenged his earlier statement that the CIA did not mislead Congress.
Eshoo made clear that, contrary to accusations from some Republicans, the charge has nothing to do with protecting House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who earlier claimed the CIA lied to and misled Congress regarding its use of waterboarding and other brutal interrogation methods.
“This isn’t anything personal,” Eshoo said emphatically. “This is strictly about business, and this is deadly serious business, if I might characterize it that way.
“The issue here is the national security of our nation. There are very few members of Congress that [sic] are chosen to serve on the House Intelligence Committee. And in that role, we are reliant upon the intelligence community to inform us – in fact, they are obligated, under the National Security Act of 1947 – to fully and completely inform the Congress.
“So this is about accountability. If in fact we do not get the proper information, how can we conduct our oversight which we are responsible for in the oath that we take, as well as shaping policy based on that information?”
Rep. Rush Holt focused the key issue for Andrea Mitchell:
“A moment ago, [you] said the relationship between Speaker Pelosi and Director Panetta and who told what [to] whom when is the bigger issue. No, that’s the smaller issue. The bigger issue is, how well-examined are the activities of the CIA? Is the CIA doing things that are not in the best national interest? Who knows, if you don’t have the oversight and the examination? So that’s what this is about.”
As the only full-scale House investigation focused on the CIA – the one led by Rep. Otis Pike in the mid-1970s determined – overseeing the CIA is a challenging task, at best, and one at which government had repeatedly failed...
If we study history, we’ll find rather quickly that the CIA has repeatedly, systematically, misled Congress.
Miles Copeland, one of the founding fathers of the CIA, talked of the use of “Byzantine intrigues” designed to keep Congress off its back.
Tom Braden noted that CIA Director Allen Dulles and CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton used to discuss each morning, in the guise of fishing talk, the “take” from the night before, i.e., intelligence gathered on prominent denizens of Capitol Hill from CIA taps sprinkled throughout the community.
(Braden, who died recently, is famously cited for writing an article titled “Why I’m Glad the CIA is Immoral.” Few commentators note that, in a later article, penned in the wake of disclosures about the Agency’s wrongdoings, Braden advocated the abolition of the CIA.)
Angleton said at one point that if the CIA couldn’t find out its own future from tapping the Hill, it had no business being in intelligence.
It should go without saying that “gossip” could easily become blackmail material, especially where illicit sexual liaisons were involved.
E. Howard Hunt, the notorious figure who at the time of Watergate was on his ostensible third retirement from the CIA, described how, during the 1960s, he penned a series of spy novels to aid the CIA, but “quit” the agency when his pen name became linked to his real name.
After he “quit,” he was instantly rehired as a contract agent, answerable solely to the CIA director’s deputy Thomas Karamessines. In his own words, Hunt explained he did this as a “cautionary” move “in the event some Congressman might raise a question.” In other words, he “quit” to hide a CIA media operation from congressional scrutiny...
And nowhere is the CIA’s deception and independent action more evident than in the Castro assassination plots.
When Congress first got a whiff of these plots thanks to a couple of articles by Jack Anderson and others, what did the CIA tell Congress?
“[W]ith the exception of one case which is under review by the Committee staff, there is no substance to the charges that CIA directed agents to assassinate Castro.” (Letter from Walter Elder to the Staff Director of the Church Committee, dated Aug. 21, 1975.)
As both Elder and the Church Committee later learned, the CIA of course had directed numerous agents to assassinate Castro in a variety of ways. But, the CIA suggested publicly, they were acting under presidential authority.
Privately, however, according to the CIA’s own Inspector General Report, the CIA never informed President John F. Kennedy of the Phase I Castro plots until they had ended, and never informed Kennedy of the ongoing Phase II plots at all.
In its own report, the CIA asks itself, can we claim executive approval for these plots, and answers its own question, “No.” (This report was not declassified until the late 1990s, and should be considered the final word on the subject.)
The legacy of the investigations of the CIA in the 1970s was the perception, though not the reality, that effective CIA oversight had been implemented.
We’re now seeing that, in reality, almost nothing changed. The troubling insights of the committees that investigated the CIA were all but forgotten. No one went to jail for breaking laws or committing perjury.
(In 1977, former CIA Director Richard Helms was convicted of misleading Congress about the Nixon administration’s covert action to oust Chile’s socialist President Salvador Allende, who died in a 1973 coup. Helms received a two-year suspended sentence and a $2,000 fine, which was paid by friends at the CIA. Until his death in 2002, Helms wore the conviction as a badge of honor, and President Ronald Reagan awarded him the National Security Medal in 1983.)
(In the 1980s, CIA Director William J. Casey delighted in mumbling through his congressional testimony making it nearly impossible for the Intelligence Committee members to understand what he was saying or grasp its import. When the deceptions of the Iran-Contra Affair were exposed in 1986, Casey was accused of misleading Congress but died in May 1987 before any legal action could be taken. Three other implicated CIA officers were pardoned by President George H.W. Bush on Christmas Eve 1992.)
While both the Senate and House have intelligence oversight committees, the CIA is always in control of what Congress knows about its operations, as we were reminded again on Thursday. How can that be changed? Who has the political will to demand true openness?
It appears that President Obama has no desire to demand any change in the current system of intelligence community oversight. That’s unfortunate, and dangerous to our Democracy.
How can there be consent of the governed, as our Constitution demands, if the governed, or at least, their representatives, have no knowledge of what they are consenting to?
Should we then demand a new investigation of the intelligence communities? Of course we should, and regularly. But we should also do so with a genuine desire for change.
We shouldn’t spend the time and money unless there’s a determination to get to the truth and follow through on lessons learned. We shouldn’t start unless we have the stomach to face our past with a view towards protecting our future.
We elect our leaders. We have chosen whom we want to entrust with our secrets. How dare the CIA decide our representatives are unworthy of our trust and keep secrets from them? Is this a government of the people, by the people, and for the people? Or do we live under a government run by covert operators for purposes undisclosed?
We can’t know if we don’t ask the hard questions and perform a serious investigation into all that has been kept from us to date.
The supposed complacency of the American people to the depredations of the Company is a carefully maintained media illusion. As is the indignation of Congress about the lies they've been officially getting. Nobody's fooling anybody, but the liars use the kabuki to advance themselves in the game of the Village.
An amusing facet of the act is that the secret eavesdropping program is now Officially ended.
Trust us now, the Company says, because we're honest about the fact we are liars.
We'd never monitor your every move and statement for a National $ecurity only we are qualified to judge and execute with extreme sanction.
Meanwhile,
Senator Dianne Feinstein, the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said on Sunday that the Bush administration may have broken the law if the Central Intelligence Agency concealed a covert spy program from Congress...
Well, yeah, but the question is whether this is an act leading to a Barry O. squelch before really taking off. A speech from Sy Hersch last spring:
...After 9/11, I haven’t written about this yet, but the Central Intelligence Agency was very deeply involved in domestic activities against people they thought to be enemies of the state. Without any legal authority for it. They haven’t been called on it yet. That does happen.
"Right now, today, there was a story in the New York Times that if you read it carefully mentioned something known as the Joint Special Operations Command -- JSOC it’s called. It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently. They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. They did not report to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff or to Mr. [Robert] Gates, the secretary of defense. They reported directly to him. ...
"Congress has no oversight of it. It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on. Just today in the Times there was a story that its leaders, a three star admiral named [William H.] McRaven, ordered a stop to it because there were so many collateral deaths.
"Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us.
"It’s complicated because the guys doing it are not murderers, and yet they are committing what we would normally call murder. It’s a very complicated issue. Because they are young men that went into the Special Forces. The Delta Forces you’ve heard about. Navy Seal teams. Highly specialized.
"In many cases, they were the best and the brightest. Really, no exaggerations. Really fine guys that went in to do the kind of necessary jobs that they think you need to do to protect America. And then they find themselves torturing people.
"I’ve had people say to me -- five years ago, I had one say: ‘What do you call it when you interrogate somebody and you leave them bleeding and they don’t get any medical committee and two days later he dies. Is that murder? What happens if I get before a committee?’
"But they’re not gonna get before a committee.”
Now that's not likely to get rehashed in Congress- despite being public information. CIA operated assasination rings? If there are, count on Ms. Feinstein to profess totally ignorance of this kind of thing ever occuring, and Mr. Panetta's assurances we'd never do this kind of thing.
Where anybody could see it or survive to report on it anyway.
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