. . . a few bad apples, whose exceptional performance has been recognized and rewarded as they advanced in the organization, and now comprise our executive leadership.
--[Redacted], Inc., Annual Report, 2011Gotta love a Senator's oratory at an inflection point of grave public significance (when there's a podium but no forum for Q and A).
Senator Feinstein, Chairman of the Intelligence Committee, who has appeared over most of the past year consistently carrying water for the NSA, insisting time and again, against all evidence, the views of her peers and constituents, and the explicit statements, in interviews and declassified opinions, of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court's judges, that oversight -- specifically, her committee's oversight of intelligence activities reported to her committee by executives of those agencies whose activities her committee nominally oversees (just as in the case of the FISC) -- of intelligence activities is vibrant and effective, seems to have had enough. It looks like she's entertaining notions parallel to those FISC judges' assertions that oversight is laughably ineffective.
Now it is a constitutional crisis.
(As chair of the Intelligence Committee she has greater standing to articulate and assert the ongoing rampant and widespread constitutional crisis that until now she has called adequate oversight, than do most of we, the people, and most of our advocacy organizations, so often subject to surveillance and more).
In all seriousness, it is good to read the Senator's account, if not for the chilling tale and high dudgeon, then for the sake of comparison with the many pundits' soundbites and journalists' gists.
In fairness, she addresses certain specific efforts of specific CIA personnel to mislead, undermine and intimidate committee staff investigating the CIA's Detention and Interrogation Program, rather than those many known and bemoaned surveillances of normal folk by another agency, but in doing so she reveals the pattern of behavior of a thoroughly corrupt organization, breaking laws today in a continuing effort to never be accountable for some of its torture and disappearance programs undertaken a decade or more ago.
She has not spoken of other agencies.
I'm doing that, looking at the institutional disregard for rules set into motion by the executive leadership thirteen years ago (it is not clear to this author that current leadership are significantly nobler, they just didn't arrive with the surplus, the agenda and the playbook), and the principle of management whereby the ethos of an organization flows from the top: The current executives of all agencies thrived and excelled as the Executive department's abuses and unaccountability gained momentum, and were propelled to the top of their uniquely sensitive, secretive and powerful organizations under those conditions, as those organizations enacted programs skirting laws or, later requiring laws to be rewritten. In many cases the very infrastructure of the agencies was specifically reorganized to better fit the views and designs of unaccountable leadership. Now, they are relied upon to brief the qualified senators and judges concerning intelligence activities, even when they make assertions concerning how, previously, they had misled. (It is not clear to this author that the trajectory for success in national politics, say, Congress, is any less fraught with fostering festering corruption. . . hence the epigraph.)
And if the fruit of the tree is rotten . . .
Anyway, if one Senator could change the tide, it is the Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee turning on a dime. I briefly looked for opportunistic haiku, but the pithy bits were far too long and I quickly gave up to be a better audience. A bit of pith and vinegar:
This is important: Some of these important parts [of the Senate Intelligence Committee study of CIA Detention and Interrogation Program] that that CIA now disputes in our committee study are clearly acknowledged in the CIA's own Internal Panetta Review. . . .
If the Senate can declassify this report, we will be able to ensure that an un-American, brutal program of detention and interrogation will never again be considered or permitted.
How Congress responds and how this is resolved will show whether the Intelligence Committee can be effective in monitoring and investigating our nation's intelligence activities, or whether our work can be thwarted by those we oversee.