Thursday, May 21, 2020

Inquiry by C.I.A. Affirms It Spied on Senate Panel (FLASHBACK July 31, 2014)

July 31, 2014.WASHINGTON - An internal investigation by the C.I.A. has found that its officers penetrated a computer network used by the Senate Intelligence Committee in preparing its damning report on the C.I.A.'s detention and interrogation program.

The inspector general's account of how the C.I.A. secretly monitored a congressional committee charged with supervising its activities touched off angry criticism from members of the Senate and amounted to vindication for Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, the committee's Democratic chairwoman, who excoriated the C.I.A. in March when the agency's monitoring of committee investigators became public.

A statement issued Thursday morning by a C.I.A. spokesman said that John O. Brennan, the agency's director, had apologized to Ms. Feinstein and the committee's ranking Republican, Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, and would set up an internal accountability board to review the issue.

Committee Democrats have spent more than five years working on a report about the C.I.A.'s detention and interrogation program during the Bush administration, which employed brutal interrogation methods like waterboarding.

According to David B. Buckley, the C.I.A. inspector general, three of the agency's information technology officers and two of its lawyers "improperly accessed or caused access" to a computer network designated for members of the committee's staff working on the report to sift through millions of documents at a C.I.A. site in Northern Virginia.

The C.I.A. officials penetrated the computer network when they came to suspect that the committee's staff had gained unauthorized access to an internal C.I.A. review of the detention program that the spy agency never intended to give to Congress.

A C.I.A. lawyer then referred the agency's suspicions to the Justice Department to determine whether the committee staff broke the law when it obtained that document.

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/01/world/senate-intelligence-commitee-cia-interrogation-report.html

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