The CIA has been lying to Congress about somethingoranother for years now, sources tell NYT.
The director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Leon E. Panetta, has told the House Intelligence Committee in closed-door testimony that the C.I.A. concealed “significant actions” from Congress from 2001 until late last month, seven Democratic committee members said.
In a June 26 letter to Mr. Panetta discussing his testimony, Democrats said that the agency had “misled members” of Congress for eight years about the classified matters, which the letter did not disclose. “This is similar to other deceptions of which we are aware from other recent periods,” said the letter, made public late Wednesday by Representative Rush D. Holt, Democrat of New Jersey, one of the signers.
In an interview, Mr. Holt declined to reveal the nature of the C.I.A.’s alleged deceptions,. But he said, “We wouldn’t be doing this over a trivial matter.”
The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Representative Silvestre Reyes, Democrat of Texas, referred to Mr. Panetta’s disclosure in a letter to the committee’s ranking Republican, Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, Congressional Quarterly reported on Wednesday. Mr. Reyes wrote that the committee “has been misled, has not been provided full and complete notifications, and (in at least one occasion) was affirmatively lied to.”
Via Twitter, Teresa Kopek is asking me to speculate on the subject matter but, honestly, I haven’t a clue. Presumably, given that waterboarding ended years ago under the Bush administration and has been decried by the Obama administration, it’s not about interrogation techniques. Otherwise, though, who knows?
And, in the remarkably long series of ways in which Obama is like Bush, we have this entry:
In a related development, President Obama threatened to veto the pending Intelligence Authorization Bill if it included a provision that would allow information about covert actions to be given to the entire House and Senate Intelligence Committees, rather than the so-called Gang of Eight — the Democratic and Republican leaders of both houses of Congress and the two Intelligence Committees.
Obama, like Bush, is right. You can’t conduct intelligence activities without safeguarding the most sensitive secrets. One could argue for sharing beyond committee chairmen and ranking members, certainly, but there’s no logical rationale that a member of, say, the agriculture committee has a need to know.
