Central Intelligence Agency Director John Brennan is facing calls to resign after admitting CIA officials spied on a Senate panel probing the agency’s torture and rendition program. The allegations surfaced in March when members of the Senate Intelligence Committee openly accused CIA officials of illegally monitoring their staffers’ computers. At the time, John Brennan denied the spying allegations and said, “Those who make them will be proved wrong.”
JOHN BRENNAN: As far as the allegations of, you know, the CIA hacking into, you know, Senate computers, nothing could be further from the truth. I mean, we wouldn’t do that. I mean, that’s—that’s—that’s just beyond the—you know, the scope of reason in terms of what we would do. … When the facts come out on this, I think a lot of people who are claiming that there has been this tremendous sort of spying and monitoring and hacking will be proved wrong.
CIA Director John Brennan reversed his stance this week after an internal CIA inquiry found the spying indeed took place, with the involvement of 10 agency employees. Brennan apologized to lawmakers in a briefing earlier this week. The CIA has also retracted counter-allegations that Senate staffers illegally removed classified information from a top-secret facility. The White House is standing by Brennan, citing President Obama’s, quote, “great confidence” in his leadership. But at least two members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Democrats Mark Udall of Colorado and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, are calling for Brennan’s resignation.
Jonathan Landay talking:
what had been this behind-the-scenes battle, unprecedented battle, between the CIA and its Senate overseers, apparently John Brennan asked his inspector general, David Buckley, to look into Senator Feinstein’s allegations that the CIA had in fact, without authorization, and in breach of an agreement with the Senate staff, had intruded into a database that was for the use by the Senate staff only. Apparently, David Buckley came back with his findings that a number of CIA IT specialists, three IT specialists, five CIA officers, and I believe it was two attorneys, had in fact either, without permission, breached the Senate committee’s database or caused it to be breached. We also find out that the complaint that the CIA referred to the Justice Department, containing allegations that the Senate staff had, without permission, without authorization, removed top-secret classified documents from the secret CIA facility in which they were doing their work, was apparently made on—with incorrect information, that it was not factually based.
So that’s gone away, although the Justice Department in fact had dropped the case at the beginning of last month, although, very interestingly, the Justice Department said that it had found no reason to proceed with a criminal investigation, or insufficient evidence to proceed with a criminal investigation at this time. So, it’s possible that the Justice Department could take a new look at all of this. We have to wait and see. There have been calls by some members of Congress and civil rights organizations that the Justice Department ought to take a new look at what went on. And, you know, the thing about all of this is that I think President Obama, the White House staff, the CIA, a lot of people on Capitol Hill had hoped to put this issue behind them once the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report is issued, and I don’t think this is going to go away anytime soon.
when she got on the Senate floor, she said—you know, it’s an extraordinary speech, where she said the CIA may have broken the law, may have violated the constitutional separation of powers between the executive branch and its congressional overseers. In her statement yesterday, she referred to the breach of the constitutional separation of powers, but there was no reference at all in her statement to the potential breach of law by the CIA, nor did she repeat her charge that she made in August—I mean, sorry, in March, that the CIA had sought to thwart her investigation into the CIA’s use of waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques on suspected terrorists or terrorist suspects who were detained in secret CIA prisons overseas under the Bush administration. It appeared that at that point, you know, there was perhaps an air of wanting to try and soothe the roiled waters with the CIA. The relationship between the CIA and the committee have been very, very bad.
But I think that following the briefing yesterday—there was a three-hour briefing to members of the committee, both Republicans and Democrats, by David Buckley, the CIA IG. You know, the senators came out of there, and they were pretty angry. A lot of them were pretty angry. It was an unusual unity and bipartisan fury, because there was a number of Republican senators, who in the past have been defenders of the CIA, who joined the Democrats in expressing outrage at what happened. And again, one of the main questions that all of them were asking was: Who authorized this? When did—and also, when did senior CIA managers, when did the leadership of the CIA find out about what happened? That is not—those points are not discussed in the IG report, and I think we’re going to see today more of those questions.
the spying on Senate staffers appears to be a separate issue from the report itself. And we obtained the classified—20 classified conclusions of the report a couple of months ago, and in them, what basically they say is, A, that the use of waterboarding and other interrogation methods that many people view as torture had produced no valuable intelligence, or at least intelligence that couldn’t have been obtained through normal interrogation procedures; that the CIA misled the Bush administration, that included the Justice Department and the White House, the Congress and the American people, about the efficacy of the use of these methods. There are a variety of other findings that planted misleading information in the press, and that it indeed questioned the entire legal foundation that was produced by the Justice Department that allowed them to proceed with these procedures, that indeed the Justice Department’s legal findings may have been based on misleading information, as well.
The director of national intelligence, James Clapper, has been leading this effort to crack down on unauthorized disclosures of information, classified information, but also unclassified information, under what’s known as the Obama administration’s Insider Threat program. As part of that, he has talked about doing what they call continuous evaluation of the communications of U.S. officials who have—who carry top-secret clearances. Now, that includes watching their emails, and apparently in doing so, they have not been able to discriminate, in setting up this system, between emails, regular emails, and what are supposed to be confidential emails from officials in the intelligence community involved in supporting whistleblowers and their communications with people on Capitol Hill, who also take a great interest in protecting whistleblowers.
And a whistleblower official’s email concerning someone who was tangentially involved in the CIA’s interrogation program ended up in the hands of the CIA inspector general, David Buckley. And it so happens that the allegations contained in this email was that Buckley himself had failed to pursue diligently an investigation into this whistleblower’s complaint that the CIA had retaliated against officers who had in fact cooperated in the Senate committee’s investigation, had in fact retaliated by withholding the payment of attorneys’ fees that they had promised to pay on behalf of these officers. This email ended up in the hands of the man who was at the center of this complaint. And that provoked—this was an email from a whistleblower official about this allegation to people on Capitol Hill. This provoked deep fears on Capitol Hill that all such communications involving whistleblowers that are supposed to be confidential are ending up in the hands of people who shouldn’t have them, people who are the subject of these allegations.
These are people who are in the inspector generals’ offices of all of the 17 U.S. intelligence agencies, as well as—well, and who are overseen by a man who works under James Clapper in the inspector general’s office for the intelligence community. Their job is to receive whistleblower complaints, evaluate them and, in instances where they find legitimacy to these complaints, pursue these complaints, including keeping people on Capitol Hill in the loop about what these complaints involve. And it’s a job that requires a great deal of confidentiality, because obviously you don’t—they don’t want the whistleblowers’—the subject of the whistleblowers’ allegations to learn about these allegations, because what you have then is retaliation against these whistleblowers for complaining about—for filing their complaints. And there are numerous instances where we know people who have blown the whistle legitimately on waste, fraud and abuse have in fact been retaliated against.
what it does is it raises questions about whether the entire whistleblower—the so-called whistleblower system, the avenues by which whistleblowers can bring complaints of waste, fraud and abuse to the ears of Congress, to law enforcement officials, whether that works at all. People who have tried that system—we know that Edward Snowden claims that he had to go outside the government and leak all of the classified information that he did, because the whistleblower system doesn’t work. There are other people we know of who have done the same.
So it raises a great deal of questions about this system, which in fact, aside from monitoring computer use, communications of people with clearances, also depends on federal employees basically keeping watch on other co-workers for unusual behaviors, like, you know, if they suddenly come into a bunch of money, or they’re undergoing—or they exhibit emotional problems, that they have to report those to the Insider Threat—people who run the Insider Threat programs, because this could be indications that these people in the future could leak classified information. Outside of the intelligence community and outside of the government, that’s called profiling. And that’s not—it’s something that has been proven to not work. And yet this is what’s going on with the expansion of the Insider Threat program.
Every government agency that has access to classified computer networks is covered by this. But the interesting thing is that the directive that came out from—the very broad directive that came out from President Obama on implementing this program—and this is not just about—doesn’t follow just the Snowden leaks, but also the WikiLeaks leaks—leaves it to the discretion of individual departments. And what these departments have done is apply this program not just to unauthorized leaks of classified information, but unauthorized leaks of information generally. And so, what it seeks to do is clamp down on any effort by people within the bureaucracies of the federal government perhaps to just explain to a reporter like me the ins and outs of policy, not to leak classified information and not to give me scoops, but to try and put in context the thinking behind policy decisions, whether it has to do with foreign policy or the healthcare system, the “Obamacare” program. Whatever it is, this Insider Threat program, the crackdown applies—goes beyond classified information.
at least as far as our reporting on the Insider Threat program, there are a lot of documents within these agencies that are not classified, that—some of them may be official use only, but they’re not classified—that give the broad outlines of what they intend to do or what they are implementing within the bureaucracies. For instance, I’ll give you an example: The document that we obtained on how the Department of Defense is implementing its Insider Threat program describes leaks of classified information to journalists as being the same as espionage, i.e. they’re accusing me, as a journalist and a loyal American citizen, of being a spy, essentially. And that’s not what I do as a job, and in fact I resent that description entirely. What I do is, hopefully, enhance the quality of our democracy by exposing to the American people the decisions that are made on their behalf inside the government, and not just in the unclassified realm, but in the classified realm, as well. And if I can’t do that, if I can’t educate the American people about the decisions that are made on their behalf, in their name, by their government, that really does have an impact on the quality of our democracy, because they don’t have the information—all the information they perhaps need to make informed judgments when they walk into a voting booth, when they turn up at a hearing, a congressional hearing, you know, or even as simple as going to a town hall meeting to talk about decisions affecting local transportation systems, for instance. They need information in order to make sound judgments about what their government is doing.
Brennan was responding to a specific question, and that specific question was: Did the CIA hack into the Senate staff’s computers, and in an effort to thwart their investigation into the detention and interrogation program? Now, I think if you were to ask somebody at the CIA, including John Brennan, whether they hacked into this database used by Senate staffers, they would say, “Absolutely not, because that was our system, that was our network, that was our database. Yes, we had an agreement that we weren’t going to go in there, but we can’t hack into our own system.” And, in fact, the people who did this thought that there was a security violation going on and did what they thought they were empowered to do. Now, a lot of other people will say, “Wait a minute, you’re splitting hairs here. You hacked into a database. In fact, what you did was hack, because you weren’t supposed to go in there. You weren’t supposed to have access to that, and you did.”
they’re saying that the fact that they went in there in violation of this agreement—they went in to look at what the Senate staff had in there—was a violation of the constitutional separation of powers and may also have been a violation of a federal computer fraud act, as well. We didn’t hear Senator Feinstein repeat that charge yesterday, but there are senators who believe that may well have been the case and that the Justice Department needs to investigate that. But not only do we know, according to Senator Feinstein, that they went in to see what the Senate staff—what her staff had in that database, but they also removed documents. There are two occasions, she said, in 2010 when that happened, and that they also in fact blocked the staffers access to documents that are already in that database that they had already seen, and then suddenly they were no longer able to access. So it goes beyond this idea that they had gone into the database to see what was in there.
— source democracynow.org
Jonathan Landay, senior national security and intelligence correspondent for McClatchy Newspapers. His most recent article, co-authored with Ali Watkins, is called “CIA Admits It Broke into Senate Computers; Senators Call for Spy Chief’s Ouster.”