A small detail in todays NYTimes summary report on the CIA/Senate imbroglio caught my eye, but first a small summary: The CIA did not provide the Senate committee that oversees it with all the key information requested on its torture and black site program in the Bush years. (Shock, shock!) When the Senate Intelligence Committee nonetheless got its hands on a secret (and evidently scathing) CIA internal report, the Agency began to spy on the committee to find out how it did so. Oversight of the overseers, you might say grimly. It then charged the committee with spying on the Agency. Now, according to the Times, the Justice Department is playing the uneasy role of arbitrator in the bitter dispute. As a mere citizen, of course, I imagined that the Justice Departments role was to charge those who had committed them with crimes, but evidently no longer when it comes to the national security state where it is now merely an arbitrator. But here was the mind-boggling detail that caught my eye. See if it strikes you, too: But a deal was struck between Leon E. Panetta, the director of the C.I.A., and Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, the intelligence committee’s Democratic chairwoman, to make millions of documents available to the committee at a C.I.A. facility near the agency’s headquarters in Langley, Va. Millions of documents? Is that truly possible? That there are millions (!) of documents in the possession of the CIA that relate to its torture, interrogation, and black sites program? Could one agency around one (admittedly global) program really generate so many documents? Is the secret world really documenting its own crimes in this kind of stupefying detail? If true, there is no way to take that in (and pity the poor future historians who will have to deal with such bureaucratic idiocy). Tom nytimes/2014/03/08/us/politics/behind-clash-between-cia-and-congress-a-secret-report-on-interrogations.html
Posted on: Sat, 08 Mar 2014 16:06:59 +0000
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