The CIA's biggest ally in Congress for its targeted killing program is Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who chairs the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. But there'll be hell to pay at Langley if Feinstein learns the CIA is misrepresenting how many civilians its lethal Predator and Reaper drones kill, she indicated to Danger Room on Friday.

"This is something that I think we would get straight figures [on]," Feinstein told Danger Room after White House aide John Brennan's Thursday confirmation hearing to run the CIA. "If we don't get straight figures, it's a whole new situation."

During the hearing, Feinstein forcefully insisted that the CIA's drone strikes kill only "single digits" of civilians annually, and even ran through a list of accusations against Anwar al-Awlaki, the U.S. citizen and al-Qaida propagandist the U.S. killed in Yemen in 2011, to underscore her belief in the legitimacy of the killing. She suggested that media reports and nongovernmental organization studies claiming larger percentages of civilian deathsfrom the highly classified program are ignorant. Feinstein emphasized that the CIA has hosted committee staff over 30 times to conduct oversight over the drone program.

"It's our belief, based on that, that the intelligence used is very careful and very good," she said. "It's also our belief that the collateral damage spelled out in the papers is wrong. But the only way to correct it is to say what we believe is correct, and we are told we cannot do that."

Yet Feinstein and several other senators during the hearing said the CIA materially misrepresented to Congress key facts about the quality of information it received from its post-9/11 torture and detentions program. That revelation came from the committee's recently completed 6,000-page report into those programs. But since the report is still classified, senators couldn't say outright that the CIA lied to them. Brennan said that the misstatements made by CIA about torture called into question the basis for his public statements years ago that torture extracted valuable information for counterterrorist operations. "I have to determine what the truth is," Brennan said.

But if the CIA misled Congress about torture, how can the committee be confident it's not misleading Congress about civilian deaths from drones?

"That's a good question, actually," Feinstein said when Danger Room asked. "That's a good question." She said she felt the CIA wasn't "defensive" of the drones in the way it was defensive of the torture program, however.

Her colleague on the committee, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), told Danger Room he "had not been familiar with the number Sen. Feinstein talked about" regarding civilian deaths from drones. "What I'm in the business of is picking up the statement Ronald Reagan made years ago: trust but verify."

Wyden and 10 other senators successfully pressured President Obama this week to release secret legal memoranda authorizing the targeted killing of American citizens. While Wyden said that the bipartisan Senate group still haven't received all the memos they've asked for, he saw "an opportunity for bipartisan, fresh power" to reassert "checks and balances" over the targeted killing program.

"I thought one of the better answers was Mr. Brennan saying that if he sees" the CIA erroneously killing civilians "he would publicly acknowledge it," Wyden told Danger Room. "That was the kind of statement you make when you try to address the checks and balances."

The committee isn't through with Brennan. It's going to grill him on Tuesday in a closed-door session.