CIA's Brennan: I Think We've Had Enough Transparency For The Time Being

from the oh-really? dept

The CIA's Director John Brennan spoke out about this week's release of the Senate Intelligence Committee's CIA Torture Report -- and to say he wasn't pleased about the report would be an understatement. Rather amazingly, in real-time as Brennan spoke, Senator Dianne Feinstein's staffers did a real time rebuttal/fact-check to his speech via Twitter, with each statement punctuated with the hashtag #ReadTheReport. Brennan's tap dancing concerning the report included a number of jaw dropping statements, but I wanted to focus on two specific ones. First, Brennan claimed that he's had enough transparency and he thinks this goes too far:

When asked if he supported the release of the Senate report, Brennan said he would keep his views to himself. But could he share them with the public, “in the interest of transparency?” a Wall Street Journal reporter asked. “I think there is more than enough transparency that has happened over the last couple days,” said the man who was chosen for the job by President Obama. “I think it’s over the top.”

Over the top? It's "over the top" to have the Senate Intelligence Committee -- the body designed to do oversight over the intelligence community to prevent abuse of power -- to spend years researching these issues, and then agree to only release a heavily redacted executive summary that basically details widespread and systematic practices that clearly amount to torture without naming any names or placing any direct blame? And that's "over the top"?

Second, is that after all of this, Brennan won't admit that the CIA won't go back into the torture game. Rather, he notes that if ordered to do the same thing again, he'd go right along with it:

"We are not contemplating at all getting back into the interrogation program," Brennan said.

As for the future, he said, “I defer to future policymakers.”

We've been told for a while -- including by the President himself -- that one of the reasons why they wanted this report out was to make sure that such things never happened again. It does not appear to be working.

Filed Under: cia, cia torture report, john brennan, torture, torture report, transparency

Mark Udall Wants To Release CIA Internal Review Of Torture Program

from the dropping-the-mic dept

Outgoing Senator Mark Udall has been a key player in trying to hold the intelligence community's feet to the fire concerning their unconstitutional and illegal activities -- and that includes both the NSA and CIA. He was a key player in making sure that the CIA torture report was actually released -- and there was pressure on him, if the report wasn't released, to read it into the record to force it out. Even with the release on Tuesday, some were asking for Udall to at least release an unredacted version or even more sections from the full ~7,000 page report, rather than just the 500 page exec summary. In fact, in Udall's final floor speech on Wednesday (link to a video that is about 50 minutes), the Senator instead chose to reveal more information related to the so-called "Panetta Review" on the CIA's torture program.

The Panetta Review is the internal CIA report, analyzing the same information that the Senate Intelligence Committee (SSCI) staff analyzed for the torture report, and came to the same basic conclusions about the CIA's torture practices, its lying to Congress and other bad activities. But here's the interesting bit: the CIA never intended anyone to see the Panetta Review. But it came out last year when CIA staffers accidentally handed it over to the Senate staffers as part of the investigation. That resulted in Udall questioning CIA bosses about the report during an open Senate hearing about a year ago -- which was followed up by the CIA infamously spying on the Senate staffers' computers. The CIA defended the spying by claiming that no one in the CIA had officially handed over that document (even though they had...) and thus they assumed that their own computers had a security breach. Or so they claimed.

The CIA has done everything it can to try to bury the Panetta Report. But Udall actually discussed it in depth. A big chunk of his speech is actually discussing some of the details in the Panetta Review, going beyond the CIA torture report. Following his speech, Senator Richard Burr -- who is a known buddy of the intelligence community, and soon to take over the Senate Intelligence Committee -- ridiculously claimed that Udall disclosed a bunch of "very classified" material. What it actually shows, however is that the CIA's response to the torture report is simply more lies from the CIA. As Udall noted in his speech, since the Panetta Review was supposed to be internal, it was a lot more open and honest, and it agreed with the Senate staffers. He first points out that the official CIA response to the terror report, from current Director John Brennan, shows the CIA's "flippant" attitude towards oversight and the fact that it knows the Obama administration will let the CIA get away with anything. However, the Panetta Review shows the true story.

In my view, the Panetta Review is a smoking gun. It raises fundamental questions about why a review of the CIA conducted internally years ago and never provided to the committee is so different from the official Brennan response and so different from the public statements of former CIA officials.

In other words, when discussing things in private, the CIA will readily admit to everything that's in the torture report. It's just when they're talking to the public that they try to spin the story.

The Panetta review is refreshingly free of excuses, qualifications or caveats.... The Panetta review found that the CIA repeatedly provided inaccurate information to the Congress, the president and the public on the efficacy of its coercive techniques.

He further notes that where the Brennan response tries to downplay or completely reject the findings of the Senate's report, the Panetta Review confirms all of them. From that, he notes that Senate staffers became concerned that the CIA was further lying to them, based on the claims of Director John Brennan.

Udall claims that the full Panetta Review should be released as well, since it is the CIA discussing the same issues in their own words, thus proving the claims by former CIA officials and their defenders that the SSCI report is nothing more than a "partisan hack job" are false. Furthermore, it shows that the CIA is lying in its response.

The refusal to provide the full Panetta Review and the refusal to acknowledge facts detailed in both the committee study and the Panetta Review lead to one disturbing finding: Director Brennan and the CIA today are continuing to willfully provide inaccurate information and misrepresent the efficacy of torture. In other words: The CIA is lying.

Of course, with Udall leaving the Senate, the Panetta Review is unlikely to see the light of day. Burr not only said that Udall's statements revealed classified materials, but also flat out lied, and claimed that "this is a document that was removed from the CIA against the law." Except that's not true. The DOJ investigated and didn't find anything wrong with what the Senate staffers did.

As the Politico article above notes, Jason Leopold has a FOIA lawsuit trying to get access to the Panetta Review, but that seems unlikely to get very far. In the end, it looks like the Panetta Review is likely to be locked up for many, many years, if it's ever released at all.

Filed Under: cia, cia torture report, mark udall, panetta review, torture report