(Reuters) – A bitter dispute between the CIA and the U.S. Senate committee that oversees it burst into the open yesterday when the committee chairwoman accused the agency of spying on Congress and possibly breaking the law.
Veteran Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein said the CIA had searched computers used by committee staffers examining CIA documents when researching the agency’s counter-terrorism operations and its use of harsh interrogation methods such as simulated drowning or “waterboarding.”
Speaking on the Senate floor, Feinstein condemned how the CIA had handled the committee’s investigation into the agency’s detention and interrogation program started under President George W. Bush after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. Human rights advocates condemn the interrogation practices as torture.
“I have grave concerns that the CIA’s search (of committee computers) may well have violated the separation of powers principles embodied in the Constitution,” said Feinstein, who is normally a strong ally of U.S. intelligence agencies.
She disclosed that the Justice Department had been asked by two different CIA offices to investigate whether committee officials or the agency itself might have violated the law.
Her accusations of CIA-led computer searches were denied by CIA Director John Brennan. They brought into the open a simmering row between the committee and the agency that had been brewing for months and disrupted the committee’s work.
The committee investigation, which resulted in 6,000 pages of findings which remain highly classified, was meant to comprehensively document what the agency did and assess the effectiveness of its methods.
Sources familiar with the findings say they condemn the CIA’s aggressive interrogations and question whether they produced significant intelligence information. The CIA has given the committee a classified rebuttal to the report.
Feinstein said that in January, the CIA’s Brennan requested an emergency meeting with her and the committee’s top Republican, Senator Saxby Chambliss.
She said he informed them that agency personnel, without notifying the committee or seeking its approval, had conducted a “search” of computers that committee investigators were using to review documents related to the CIA program.
CIA SEARCHES
She charged that the search may have violated the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and an executive order that prohibits the CIA from conducting domestic searches or surveillance.
Brennan denied any charge of computer hacking. “Nothing could be further from the truth. We wouldn’t do that,” he said in a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations think tank.
He said the agency was not trying to thwart the release of the panel’s report. “We are not trying at all to prevent its release,” he said.
Feinstein has been pushing to make the report’s findings public but infighting with the CIA had meant the formal process to declassify the document had not even begun. Feinstein said she hoped declassification could begin before the end of March.
A key dispute is over how the committee acquired what Feinstein and others describe as the CIA’s own internal review of its interrogation tactics and secret prisons, and its use of “rendition,” a practice in which prisoners are transferred between countries without formal judicial process.
Feinstein and committee sources say they had found the review in the computer system the CIA set up for their use and at some point their staff printed out a copy and took it to their offices on Capitol Hill.
