Lawmaker says CIA director ended secret program

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Lawmaker says CIA director ended secret program

By PAMELA HESS

WASHINGTON (AP) — CIA Director Leon Panetta has terminated a "very serious" covert program the spy agency kept secret from Congress for eight years, Rep. Jan Schakowsky, a House Intelligence subcommittee chairwoman, said Friday.

Schakowsky is pressing for an immediate committee investigation of the classified program, which has not been described publicly. Rep. Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, has said he is considering an investigation.

"The program is a very, very serious program and certainly deserved a serious debate at the time and through the years," Schakowsky told The Associated Press in an interview. "But now it's over."

Democrats revealed late Tuesday that CIA Director Leon Panetta had informed members of the House Intelligence Committee on June 24 that the spy agency had been withholding important information about a secret intelligence program begun after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Schakowsky described Panetta as "stunned" that he had not been informed of the program until nearly five months into his tenure as director.

Panetta had learned of the program only the day before informing the lawmakers, according to a U.S. intelligence official. The official spoke on condition of anonymity Friday because he was not authorized to discuss the program publicly.

Panetta has launched an internal probe at the CIA to determine why Congress was not told about the program. Exactly what the classified program entailed is still unclear.

The intelligence official said the program was "on-again/off-again" and that it was never fully operational, but he would not provide details.

Schakowsky, D-Ill., said Friday that the CIA and Bush administration consciously decided not to tell Congress.

"It's not as if this was an oversight and over the years it just got buried. There was a decision under several directors of the CIA and administration not to tell the Congress," she said.

Schakowsky, who chairs the Intelligence subcommittee on oversight and investigations, said in a Thursday letter to Reyes that the CIA's lying was systematic and inexcusable. The letter was obtained by The Associated Press on Friday.

She said Reyes indicated to her the committee would conduct a probe into whether the CIA violated the National Security Act, which requires, with rare exceptions, that Congress be informed of covert activities. She told AP she hopes to conduct at least part of the investigation for the committee.

She said this is the fourth time that she knows of that the CIA has misled Congress or not informed it in a timely manner since she began serving on the Intelligence Committee two and half years ago.

In 2008, the CIA inspector general revealed that the CIA had lied to Congress about the accidental shoot down of American missionaries over Peru in 2001. In 2007, news reports disclosed that the CIA had secretly destroyed videotapes of interrogations of a terrorist suspect.

She would not describe the other incident.

Schakowsky said she thinks Panetta is changing the CIA for the better, adding that the failure to inform Congress was indicative of "contempt" the Bush administration and intelligence agencies under him held for Congress.

"Many times I felt it was an annoyance to them to have to come to us and answer our questions," she said. "There was an impatience and a contempt for the Congress."

The House is expected to take up the 2010 intelligence authorization bill next week. It includes a provision that would require the White House to inform the entire committee about upcoming covert operations rather than just the "Gang of Eight"_ the senior members from both parties on the House and Senate Intelligence Committees and the Democratic and Republican leaders in both houses.

The White House this week threatened to veto the final version of the bill if it includes that provision.

Democratic aides said the language may be softened in negotiations with the Senate to address the White House's concern.

But Schakowsky said the wider briefings are the best remedy to avoiding future notification abuses.

Republicans charge that Democratic outrage about the Panetta revelation is just an attempt to provide political cover to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who in May accused the CIA of lying to her in 2002 about its use of waterboarding.

What Pelosi knew about the CIA's interrogation program and when she knew it — and why she did not object to it sooner — is expected to be emphasized by Republicans during debate over the intelligence bill.

Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

The Associated Press: Lawmaker says CIA director ended secret program

 

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CIA faces hostile scrutiny as details of 'dark' programmes are revealed

Congressional calls for formal investigation mount
• Agency officials believe they're caught up in political war

* Chris McGreal in Washington
* guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 14 July 2009 18.59 BST





For a while everyone thought it would be enough to blame Dick Cheney.

President Obama assured the CIA that no one in the agency would be held accountable for the years of torture, abductions and killings, along with the mass serveillance of Americans, conducted under dubious legal authorisations.

America's intelligence community breathed a sigh of relief at what it took to be a commitment that if anyone was to be brought to book it would be the politicians who the agency enthusiastically served as it slipped the leash of legal restraint, particularly the former vice-president who fronted the Bush administration's war on terror. Most doubted that anyone would be held accountable.

But in recent days the ground has shifted dramatically, as a slew of revelations about the CIA's activities has left the agency facing its most hostile scrutiny since the 1970s, when congressional hearings revealed that it was pursuing its own, often illegal, agenda including numerous failed attempts to kill Fidel Castro.

Amid growing calls from within Congress for formal investigations and special prosecutors, former CIA officers say embittered agency officials believe they are caught up in a political war as the Democrats wield their newly acquired power to hit back at old foes in the Bush administration, particularly Cheney.

The CIA's critics say that it is coming under belated scrutiny over its submission to a highly political and possibly illegal agenda that its officials embraced with enthusiasm in the febrile atmosphere after the 9/11 attacks, when the Bush administration thought it could throw out the rule book by declaring the Geneva conventions out of date and redefining long established parameters for torture.

Even where questionable practices were declared legal by the administration, they remained of dubious morality such as the practice of kidnapping suspected terrorists and flying them half way around the world to be tortured and interrogated, known as rendition.

Some former CIA officers, including the former counter-terrorism chief of operations, Vincent Cannistraro, say the agency involved itself in suspect practices as it rode roughshod over long established restraints.

"There were things the agency was involved with after 9/11 which were basically over the edge because of 9/11. There were some very unsavoury things going on. Now they are a problem for the CIA," he said. "There is a lot of pressure on the CIA now and it's going to handicap future activities."

The CIA made two mistakes. The first was to think that it could keep it all hidden.

There is much that will never be made public, it was perhaps inevitable that something damaging would come out. As it happens, a slew of revelations have emerged with shocking speed.

In recent days, the agency has admitted hiding from Congress - probably illegally - a covert anti-terrorism programme. Numerous leaks have revealed it to be an operation to kill al-Qaida operatives, sometimes in friendly countries. The leaks have not been denied by the CIA or members of Congress since informed about the programme.

That revelation came days after five federal inspectors general released a report in to the role of the CIA and the National Security Agency in to warrantless wiretaps and other surveillance at the behest of the White House.

The CIA was just reeling from that blow when the attorney general, Eric Holder, said he wants a probe in to whether the agency was using waterboarding and other tortures even before the administration gave dubious legal opinions which cleared the way and swept aside years of precedent.

Few doubt that there will be more revelations to come, particularly if an increasingly agitated Congress decides to dig deeper.

Peter Bergen, an expert on intelligence at the New America Foundation, said that the CIA is not likely to be put through the wringer in quite the way it was in the 1970s when senator Frank Church's committee laid bare an array of illegal activities. But the agency will have to account for recent actions.

"The abuses by the CIA that Church revealed were worse than anything likely to come out of this. There were eight separate attempts to assassinate Castro. But the steady drip drip of revelations that's coming out now is very damaging to the CIA," he said. "The cumulative effect is a very large amount of dirty laundry will be aired and it will have an effect on the CIA, a very damaging effect."

Shortly after he assumed the presidency Obama reassured CIA officers that they would not be held to account for the abuses of the Bush years. Some took that to mean that the slate was wiped clean and that if there was to be any accounting at all it would be of a narrow group of political leaders.

Obama was keen not to lose the support of the security establishment, particularly as he faced down Republicans and some of his own party over the dismantling of the Guantanamo prison and the release of its inmates.

But Bergen said that the recent revelations have undercut Obama's assurances and encouraged Congress to wade in.

"All these things contribute to create the possibility to have a special prosecutor without being accused of a witch hunt," said Bergen.

There are many in the CIA who remain convinced that the agency is caught up in a political vendetta in part aimed at clearing the speaker of the house, Nancy Pelosi, of accusations she lied when she said the CIA hid waterboarding from her at intelligence briefings.

Cannistraro said the fact that there was a leak after the CIA director, Leon Panetta, recently admitted to the intelligence committee about the secret assassination programme has reinforced the perception that Congress is unreliable and the agency is caught in a political web.

"There's concern at the agency that they brought it to Congress's attention and it promptly leaked," he said.

But Cannistraro said that there is also a recognition within the CIA that the ground has shifted.

"The impulse for revealing this [secret programme] came from far below Panetta's office. It's part of the process to protect the hind quarters of the agency itself because there are things they recognise were over the edge," he said.

Cannistraro said that scrutiny of the CIA will require further examination of the politicians involved, and that it won't stop with the former vice-president.

"They keep specifying Cheney, but what Cheney did was endorsed by the president and Bush's office. This was not a one-man operation," he said.

The CIA's second, and perhaps greater mistake, was that all of the dark programmes appear to have been largely for nothing.

There is now ample evidence that interrogators learned most of what al-Qaida detainees had to tell before they were repeatedly water boarded.
Rendition, torture and Guantánamo are likely to have done more to have enhanced terrorism than curb it.

The inspector general of the justice department said of the secret surveillance programme that most of its leads "were determined not to have any connection to terrorism".

"There are plenty of people who view that the ends justifies the means," said Bergen. "The problem with Cheney is there were not ends. The waterboarding derived intelligence of no great value. I think it'll become clear these extreme measures were counterproductive and above all didn't find anything. That is going to be a very damning judgement for the CIA."