After a year in which the National Security Agency faced global condemnation, the Central Intelligence Agency has now taken over as the US intelligence body most firmly in the midst of a full-blown crisis. The CIA has dug itself into a morass the NSA has firmly avoided: antagonizing its congressional overseers.



It is a crisis redolent with ironies. A White House that labored intently to move past the CIA’s post-9/11 torture legacy, disappointing many supporters, must now resolve a row stemming directly from it.

A CIA director who first missed out on his job over fears he was soft on agency torture is now in the crosshairs of what his Senate overseers considers a cover-up.

A Senate committee chairwoman who has fiercely defended the NSA’s abilities to collect data on every American phone call is furious that the CIA monitored the network usage of her staff, calling the alleged infraction a potential subversion of the Senate’s constitutionally mandated oversight responsibilities.

A Justice Department that limited and ultimately dropped a criminal inquiry into CIA torture without bringing charges now has to consider potential criminal liability against Senate staff conducting their own inquiry; and for CIA officials who allegedly attempted to thwart it.

Senate staffers, notorious in Washington for selectively leaking classified information, kept silent for years on a bombshell investigation into the use of torture by the CIA. Now they find themselves potentially at criminal liability for accessing CIA documents that the agency itself provided, according to the account provided by the committee chairwoman, Dianne Feinstein, on the Senate floor on Tuesday.

The tensions between the Senate intelligence committee and the CIA over the torture investigation, simmering for years, finally boiled over into public view Tuesday morning when chairwoman Feinstein of California took to the Senate floor to “reluctantly” detail years’ worth of internal battles to investigate the agency’s “un-American, brutal program of detention and interrogation”.

All of those battles started in November 2005, when former senior CIA official Jose Rodriguez ordered the destruction of nearly 100 videotapes detailing those interrogations. (Rodriguez, who got a well-publicized book deal out of the affair, told a New Yorker interviewer in 2012, “I really resent you using the word ‘torture’ time and time again” to describe what the videotapes documented.)

After former NSA and CIA director Michael Hayden assured the committee that Rodriguez’s actions did not amount to destruction of evidence, Hayden agreed to provide his Senate overseers with mountains of internal memoranda detailing what went on.

For more than a year, senators on the committee have vaguely alluded to the CIA “misleading” the panel and executive branch policymakers about what the CIA’s torture program actually entailed. Not only did the agency use “stress positions” as a sleep deprivation tactic and subject admitted 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to 183 simulated drownings in a single month, it revved electric drills near detainees’ heads if they did not co-operate with their questioners.

Not only has the Senate panel inquiry, members said, not found evidence that such brutal behavior provided significant terrorism intelligence, but the Justice Department has avoided bringing charges against either the CIA officers who implemented such torture or the policymakers who ordered it.

In a statement infamous to many of his liberal supporters, Obama said before taking his 2009 oath of office that he would “look forward as opposed to looking backwards” at the CIA, the beginning of a detente with an agency skeptical of his liberal record and which was crucial in delivering him his presidency’s greatest foreign success: the killing of Osama bin Laden.

In between, and apparently without significant relation, the CIA not only tortured detainees, but fought strenuously to avoid the Senate inquiry report into its practices, Feinstein charged. Corroborating a remark made by her committee colleague Mark Udall last week, Feinstein said the White House had been aware of the obstruction since 2010, but did not approve of it.

Staffers were given access to documents at contractor-run CIA facilities, which were not indexed and ran to “millions” of pages, Feinstein said. On at least two occasions, one of which occurred in January, the agency abruptly withdrew CIA documents – including one Feinstein said corroborated her report’s key findings – and charged the committee staff with improperly accessing material Feinstein said the CIA itself provided.

Brennan, Feinstein said, told the committee in January that unspecified officials at the CIA not only searched through committee computers at the agency’s facility in Virginia, but it trawled through “walled-off” committee networks, giving it access to the panel’s work product.

Denying any wrongdoing by her staff, Feinstein publicly accused the CIA of potentially violating “the fourth amendment, the computer fraud and abuse act, as well as executive order 12333, which prohibits the CIA from conducting domestic searches or surveillance”.

To lose the confidence of the Senate intelligence committee, the Senate’s proxy for inquiries into secret and highly sensitive intelligence matters, could doom Brennan’s tenure, barely a year into it. Senators who may not particularly object to torture still zealously guard their legislative prerogatives.

The CIA has much more at stake than torture. Feinstein has publicly defended the CIA’s much-criticised drone strikes, publicly vouching for their discretion in avoiding civilian casualties – a premise disputed by independent observers – even as she has blasted the CIA for lying to her about torture.

Feinstein has been the Senate’s staunchest defender of the NSA’s mass collection of domestic phone data. The NSA has been extraordinarily careful not to lose her support, even as she has bristled against its spying on foreign leaders and tamped down internal committee challenges to the NSA. For Feinstein to express outrage at the CIA for spying on her staff but not at the NSA for spying on US phone records is to invite criticism from her own liberal constituents and even California lawmakers.

But the White House is now in perhaps the most uncomfortable position of all.

Feinstein, seemingly with her committee firmly behind her, announced on Tuesday she will redouble her efforts to finish all torture inquiry updates “this month” and pass it on to the White House for declassification of its key “findings, conclusions and the executive summary”.

The White House did not have immediate reaction to Feinstein’s floor statement, but last week, National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden told the Guardian that “for some time,” the White House “has made clear to the chairman of the Senate select committee on intelligence that a summary of the findings and conclusions of the final report should be declassified, with any appropriate redactions necessary to protect national security.”

But releasing a report outlining what Feinstein called the “horrible details of a CIA program that never, never, never should have existed” will immediately raise the question of why Obama and attorney general Eric Holder opted in 2009 to spare responsible CIA officials from legal ramifications of actions Obama barred by executive order – an order that, critics note, can be rescinded by any future president at any time.

It may also cost Obama his close aide, Brennan, whom Feinstein implied authorized the search of her committee’s computer networks, unless he can find a way to repair the breach – doubly thorny for Brennan, whom must maintain the confidence of his CIA workforce.

And the timeline Feinstein outlined for finishing the report’s updates will place the decision for declassification on Obama’s desk at the end of the month, right as the president faces a deadline for overhauling the NSA’s own bulk domestic call records collection program – an overhaul for which he will need Feinstein’s support, whatever form it should take.

Only this week, even as the NSA auditions its next director before the Senate, it is no longer the US intelligence agency at greatest risk of congressional wrath. Even after the global shock caused by Edward Snowden’s revelations, the CIA – reaping the bitter harvest of 12 years of brutality and subsequent cover-up –now has that distinction.