Eugene Robinson: The CIA Is Out of Line - Truthdig

Eugene Robinson: The CIA Is Out of Line - Truthdig

We now have even more proof that our burgeoning intelligence
agencies, which were given unprecedented latitude to wage war against
terrorists, are dangerously out of control.

Not that further evidence was needed: Months of stunning revelations
about the National Security Agency’s massive domestic surveillance,
thanks to fugitive whistle-blower Edward Snowden, should have been more
than enough. But this week, one of the intelligence community’s
staunchest defenders in Congress took to the Senate floor to announce
that even she has had it up to here.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., who heads the Senate intelligence
committee, trained her fury on the CIA, which has waged a five-year
campaign of bureaucratic guerrilla warfare to keep the committee from
doing a crucial job: fully investigating the torture, secret detention
and other appalling excesses committed under George W. Bush and Dick
Cheney.

Feinstein accused the CIA of improperly searching computers that
intelligence committee staff members were using to review CIA documents
about “enhanced interrogation techniques” such as waterboarding—in plain
language, torture.

“The CIA just went and searched the committee’s computers,” Feinstein
said. “I have grave concerns that the CIA’s search may well have
violated the separation-of-powers principle embodied in the United
States Constitution.” She said she believed the agency might also have
violated the Fourth Amendment, a federal law and a presidential
executive order.