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mark udall
Secret CIA Torture Report Outed by Senator
Senate Intelligence Committe and CIA squabble over information sharing, public is left in dark about Bush era torture regime
Dec 18, 2013
The CIA must release a previously unknown and classified internal study that is said to detail torture and secret detentions conducted by the agency, Senator Mark Udall urged Tuesday at a confirmation hearing for Caroline Krass, a nominee for the CIA's general counsel.
Leading the charge among members on the committee calling for more transparency and better cooperation from the clandestine agency, Udall said he would not support Krass' nomination until the internal report--which has so far been kept even from members of the Senate Intelligence Committee--is released.
According to a statement put out by Udall's office, the senator's understanding is that the CIA's internal report, initiated by former CIA Director Leon Panetta, reached similar conclusions to those in the committee's 6,300-page study, which was approved and sent to the CIA in December 2012.
In order to put pressure on the CIA, Udall used Thursday's hearings to push the issue. As Reuters reports:
Udall asked Krass to ensure that the CIA provided the committee a copy of the internal review [...] of the agency's detention and interrogation program.
"It appears that this review ... is consistent with the Intelligence Committee's report, but, amazingly, it conflicts with the official CIA response to the committee's report," Udall said.
"If this is true, it raises fundamental questions about why a review the CIA conducted internally years ago and never provided to the committee is so different from the CIA's formal written response to the committee's study," he added.
The report's existence was not public knowledge until Udall questioned Krass during the hearing.
Udall said that the committee have "requested a copy of the internal review, but the CIA has yet to provide it."
The Senate's own investigation, which has also been classified, is said to document the brutality of the CIA torture's program, but calls to make that report public have so far been resisted by the both the CIA and the White House.
Udall says he has pressed for a public statement from the White House "committing to the fullest possible declassification" of the committee's own study, in addition to the CIA's response.
As The Guardian's Spencer Ackerman reports, "It is unclear if the committee will reject Krass's nomination. But the two-hour exchange highlighted the difficulties the intelligence committees can face in getting basic factual information from the intelligence agencies they are tasked with overseeing."
Reports Ackerman:
Asked directly and repeatedly if the Senate panel was entitled to the memos, which several senators claimed were crucial for performing their oversight functions, Krass replied: "I do not think so, as a general matter."
Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who chairs the committee, suggested that Krass placed her nomination as CIA general counsel in jeopardy. "You are going to encounter some heat in that regard," Feinstein said.
The Senate intelligence committee, whose public hearings are increasingly rare, is usually a bastion of support for the CIA and its sister intelligence agencies. The exception is the committee's prolonged fight with the CIA over a 6,300-page report on the agency's torture of terrorism detainees in its custody since 9/11.
The committee has prepared its report for years; the former chairman, Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, said the classified version contains 50,000 footnotes. For a year, the panel has sought to release a public version that multiple members of the panel say documents both the brutality of CIA torture and what they have called "lies" told by the CIA to the oversight committees in Congress and the rest of the executive branch concerning its torture practices.
CIA director John Brennan, who was a senior CIA official during the years scrutinised by the committee, is resisting release of the report. The CIA has told reporters that the report contains numerous factual errors, which Senator Mark Udall, a Colorado Democrat on the panel, said on Tuesday was a "misleading" and self-serving description of differences of "interpretation" between the agency and the committee. "I'm more confident than ever in the factual accuracy" of the torture report, Udall said.
Watch a portion of Udall's exchange below:
Udall Presses CIA Nominee on Brutal Detention, Interrogation ProgramMark Udall, who serves on the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, pressed for a full and transparent accounting of the ...
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NSA Chief: 'Yes' - Our Desire Is To Collect All US Communications
'The truth always manages to come out,' Sen. Wyden promises during hearing on dragnet domestic spying
Sep 27, 2013
Asked whether the National Security Agency should collect all communications of U.S. residents at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Thursday, NSA Director General Keith Alexander replied, "I believe it is in the nation's best interest to put all the phone records into a lockbox - yes."
Alexander, who was joined by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and Deputy Attorney General James Cole, went on to maintain the the NSA's collect-it-all approach to communications surveillance in the U.S. and around the world is necessary--urging Senators not to be moved by the rising tide of public discontent that has surged since NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed a trove of incriminating evidence through several newspapers, exposing the agency's unconstitutional surveillance practices.
Alexander blamed "sensational headlines," not the actual dragnet surveillance practices revealed in the media, for public anger--a notion that seemed to be shared by most of the Senators at the hearing, who are supposed to be in charge of NSA congressional oversight.
Barring questions posed by NSA critics Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.), most of the hearing consisted of 'soft balls' lobbed at the intelligence chiefs sitting in the not-so-hot seat. As Matt Sledge at The Huffington Postputs it:
[Sen. Dianne] Feinstein and Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.), the committee's ranking Republican who called Snowden "a hero to our enemies," peppered their remarks with references to the Sept. 11 attacks and the recent assault on the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya. Other senators, including Dan Coats (R-Ind.), said that they had no questions for the nation's top spies despite months of revelations about the NSA's highly controversial actions.
And as Glenn Greenwald, the reporter who helped break the Snowden leaks, writes Friday:
The Senate Intelligence Committee yesterday held a hearing, ostensibly to investigate various issues raised about the NSA's activities. What the hearing primarily achieved instead was to underscore what a farce the notion of Congressional oversight over the NSA is.
And as Kevin Gosztola at FireDogLakereports, "Multiple senators used their time to express the opinion that the media was to blame for sensationalizing what Snowden had exposed when there was nothing corrupt going on at the NSA and oversight was occurring properly." He adds, "It was a sham of a hearing."
Feinstein and Chambliss also proposed an NSA reform bill at the hearing but the bill "broadly echoes the small tweaks the intelligence establishment says it will consider, but does not go further," The Guardian reports.
However, Wyden and Udall, who on Wednesday proposed a separate NSA reform bill that was hailed by civil liberties experts as a positive step towards curbing the agency's abusive practices, managed to squeeze in a few legitimate questions within the strict time limit imposed by Feinstein, who entirely cut off a second round of questioning.
Asked in a series of questions posed by Udall whether the NSA sought to collect the records of all Americans, Alexander replied: "yes" and there is "no upper limit," but continued to refuse to release any extensive details of the program.
When asked by Wyden, "Has the NSA ever collected or ever made any plans to collect Americans' cell site information?" Alexander refused to answer, citing classified information.
"The leadership of your agencies built an intelligence collection system that repeatedly deceived the American people," Wyden said in a more heated moment with Alexander, in reference to recent misleading statements made by Alexander and Clapper to Congress about the NSA.
"You talk about the damage that has been done by disclosures, but any government official who thought this would never be disclosed was ignoring history," Wyden said. "The truth always manages to come out."
"Now that these secret interpretations of the law and violations of the constitutional rights of Americans have become public, your agencies face terrible consequences that were not planned for," Wyden added.
Watch Wyden's exchange with the intelligence heads in the video below:
Wyden Statement at Finance Committee Hearing on IRS Budget and Filing SeasonApril 19, 2023 - Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.)
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If Obama Wanted an 'Open Debate' on NSA Spying, Why Thwart One for so Long?
The president asks us to trust him on government surveillance, yet his administration constantly denigrates critics as unpatriotic
Aug 14, 2013
Tim Cushing made one of my favorite points of [last] week in his Tuesday post "Former NSA boss calls Snowden's supporters internet shut-ins; equates transparency activists with al-Qaida", when he explained that "some of the most ardent defenders of our nation's surveillance programs" - much like proponents of overreaching cyber-legislation, like Sopa - have a habit of "belittling" their opponents as a loose confederation of basement-dwelling loners. I think it's worth pointing out that General Michael Hayden's actual rhetoric is even more inflammatory than Cushing's. Not only did the former NSA director call us "nihilists, anarchists, activists, Lulzsec, Anonymous, twentysomethings who haven't talked to the opposite sex in five or six years", he equates transparency groups like the ACLU with al-Qaida.
I appreciated this post for two reasons.
First of all, it does a great job of illustrating a point that I've long made when asked for advice on communicating tech issues, which is that the online community is as diverse and varied as the larger world we live in. Of course, we are more likely to come across the marginal opinions of twentysomethings with social anxiety online because, unlike the larger world, the internet gives those twentysomethings just as much of an opportunity to be heard as a Harvard scholar, a dissident protesting for democracy or General Hayden himself.
Sure, it can be infuriating to read scathingly hostile comments written by troubled individuals who clearly didn't take the time to read the post you spent countless hours carefully writing (not that that has ever happened to me), but isn't one of the things that makes the internet so darn special its unwavering reminder that free speech includes speech we don't appreciate? Of course, that's a point that tends to get lost on folks - like General Hayden - who don't seem to understand that equating the entirety of the online world with terrorists is a lot like posting a scathing comment to a story without reading it. You can't expect someone to treat you or your opinion with respect - online or anywhere else - when you're being disrespectful. And I can imagine no greater disrespect for the concepts of transparency and oversight than to equate them with the threats posed by terrorist groups like al-Qaida.
But my main reason for singling out Tim's post this week is that Hayden's remark goes to the heart of what I continue to find most offensive about the administration's handling of the NSA surveillance programs, which is their repeated insinuation that anyone who raises concerns about national security programs doesn't care about national security. As Tim explains:
[This] attitude fosters the 'us v them' antagonism so prevalent in these agencies dealings with the public. The NSA (along with the FBI, DEA and CIA) continually declares the law is on its side and portrays its opponents as ridiculous dreamers who believe safety doesn't come with a price.
To understand why I find this remark so offensive, I should probably tell you a little about myself. Although the most identifying aspect of my resume is probably the six years I spent as US Senator Ron Wyden's communications director and later deputy chief of staff, I started college at the US Naval Academy and spent two years interning for the National Security Council. I had a top secret SCI clearance when I was 21 years old, and had it not been for an unusual confluence of events nearly 15 years ago - including a chance conversation with a patron of the bar I tended in college - I might be working for the NSA today. I care very deeply about national security.
Moreover - and this is what the Obama administration and other proponents of these programs fail to understand - I was angry at the administration for its handling of these programs long before I knew what the NSA was doing. That had a lot to do with the other thing you should probably know about me: during my tenure in Wyden's office, I probably spent in upwards of 1,000 hours trying to help my boss raise concerns about programs that he couldn't even tell me about.
Which brings me to my next favorite Techdirt post of the week, Mike's Friday post entitled "Don't insult our intelligence, Mr President: this debate wouldn't be happening without Ed Snowden", which is a much less profane way of summing up my feelings about the president's "claim that he had already started this process prior to the Ed Snowden leaks and that it's likely we would [have] ended up in the same place" without Snowden's disclosure. Obama said:
What makes us different from other countries is not simply our ability to secure our nation. It's the way we do it, with open debate and democratic process.
I hope you won't mind if I take a moment to respond to that.
Really, Mr President? Do you really expect me to believe that you give a damn about open debate and the democratic process? Because it seems to me, if your administration was really committed to those things, your administration wouldn't have blocked every effort to have an open debate on these issues each time the laws that your administration claims authorizes these programs came up for reauthorization, which - correct me if I am wrong - is when the democratic process recommends as the ideal time for these debates.
For example, in June 2009, six months before Congress would have to vote to reauthorize Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which the Obama administration claims gives the NSA the authority to collect records on basically every American citizen - whether they have ever or will ever come in contact with a terrorist - Senators Wyden, Feingold and Durbin sent Attorney General Eric Holder a classified letter "requesting the declassification of information which [they] argued was critical for a productive debate on reauthorization of the USA Patriot Act".
In November 2009, they sent an unclassified letter reiterating the request, stating:
The Patriot Act was passed in a rush after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. Sunsets were attached to the act's most controversial provisions, to permit better-informed, more deliberative consideration of them at a later time. Now is the time for that deliberative consideration, but informed discussion is not possible when most members of Congress - and nearly all of the American public - lack important information about the issue.
Did President Obama jump at the opportunity to embrace the democratic process and have an open debate then? No. Congress voted the following month to reauthorize the Patriot Act without debate.
In May 2011, before the Senate was, again, scheduled to vote to reauthorize the Patriot Act, Senators Wyden and Udall, again, called for the declassification of the administration's secret interpretation of Section 215. This time, in a Huffington Post op-ed entitled "How Can Congress Debate a Secret Law?", they wrote:
Members of Congress are about to vote to extend the most controversial provisions of the USA Patriot Act for four more years, even though few of them understand how those provisions are being interpreted and applied.
As members of the Senate intelligence committee we have been provided with the executive branch's classified interpretation of those provisions and can tell you that we believe there is a significant discrepancy between what most people - including many Members of Congress - think the Patriot Act allows the government to do and what government officials secretly believe the Patriot Act allows them to do.
Legal scholars, law professors, advocacy groups and the Congressional Research Service have all written interpretations of the Patriot Act and Americans can read any of these interpretations and decide whether they support or agree with them. But by far the most important interpretation of what the law means is the official interpretation used by the US government and this interpretation is - stunningly - classified.
What does this mean? It means that Congress and the public are prevented from having an informed, open debate on the Patriot Act because the official meaning of the law itself is secret. Most members of Congress have not even seen the secret legal interpretations that the executive branch is currently relying on and do not have any staff who are cleared to read them. Even if these members come down to the intelligence committee and read these interpretations themselves, they cannot openly debate them on the floor without violating classification rules.
During the debate itself, Wyden and Udall offered an amendment to declassify the administration's legal interpretation of its Patriot Act surveillance authorities and, in a 20-minute speech on the Senate floor, Wyden warned that the American people would one day be outraged to learn that the government was engaged in surveillance activities that many Americans would assume were illegal, just as they were every other time the national security committee has tried to hide its questionable activities from the American people.
Wyden Warns of Potential Public Backlash From Allowing Secret LawSpeaking on the floor of the U.S Senate during the truncated debate on the reauthorization of the PATRIOT ACT for another four ...
Fun aside: as you can see in the video, to underscore the point that hiding programs from the American people rarely goes well for the administration, I had my staff make a poster of the famous image of Oliver North testifying before Congress during the Iran-Contra hearing. I really wanted to replace North's face with the words "insert your photo here", but we didn't have the time.
Did President Obama welcome an open debate at that time?
No. Congress voted to reauthorize the Patriot Act for four more years and the only point we - as critics - could raise that might be confused with debate was a hypothetical argument illustrated with a 20-year-old picture of Oliver North. And, again, Senator Wyden couldn't even tell me what he was so concerned about. In strategy meetings with me and his intelligence committee staffer, I had to repeatedly leave the room when the conversation strayed toward details they couldn't share with me because I no longer had an active security clearance. "You know, it would be a lot easier if you could just tell me what I can't say?" I'd vent in frustration. They agreed, but still asked me to leave the room.
And that was just the Patriot Act. Did the president - who now claims to welcome open debate of his administration's surveillance authorities - jump at the opportunity to have such a debate when the Fisa Amendments Act came up for reauthorization?
No. Not only did the administration repeatedly decline Senator Wyden's request for a "ballpark figure" of the number of Americans whose information was being collected by the NSA last year, just a month after the Patriot Act reauthorization, the Senate intelligence committee attempted to quietly pass a four-year reauthorization of the controversial surveillance law by spinning it as an effort to "synchronize the various sunset dates included in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 to 1 June 2015." So, I guess if this was part of the administration's plan to publicly debate the NSA's surveillance authorities, the plan was for the debate to take place in 2015?
And, as I explained in an interview with Brian Beutler earlier this summer, that is just a fraction of the ways the Obama administration and the intelligence communities ignored and even thwarted our attempts to consult the public on these surveillance programs before they were reauthorized. In fact, after the Senate intelligence committee hearing in which Wyden attempted to close the FAA's Section 702 loophole, which another important Techdirt post this week explains, "gives the NSA 'authority' to run searches on Americans without any kind of warrant", I - as Wyden's spokesperson - was specifically barred from explaining the senator's opposition to the legislation to the reporters. In fact, the exact response I was allowed to give reporters was:
We've been told by Senator Feinstein's staff that under the SSCI's committee rule 9.3, members and staff are prohibited from discussing the markup or describing the contents of the bill until the official committee report is released. The fact that they've already put out a press release does not lift this prohibition.
That's right, supporters of a full-scale reauthorization of the Fisa Amendments Act put out a press release explaining why this was a good thing, while explicitly barring the senator who voted against the legislation from explaining his concerns.
Months later, the Fisa Amendments Act, which the administration contends authorizes its PRISM program, passed without the open debate that the president now contends he wanted all along. And again, I'm only touching on a fraction of the efforts just Senator Wyden made to compel the administration to engage the American people in a democratic debate. I, obviously, haven't mentioned the director of National Intelligence's decision to lie when Wyden "asked whether the NSA had collected 'any type of data at all on millions of Americans'". (By the way, given that Wyden shared his question with the ODNI the day before the hearing, I am highly skeptical that Clapper's decision to lie was made unilaterally.) Or the fact that the Obama administration repeatedly fought lawsuits and FOIA requests for, again - not sources and methods - but the Section 215 legal interpretation that the administration claims authorizes its surveillance authorities.
The below is an excerpt from a March 2012 letter that Wyden and Udall sent the Obama administration urging them to respect the democratic process:
The Justice Department's motion to dismiss these Freedom of Information Act lawsuits argues that it is the responsibility of the executive branch to determine the best way to protect the secrecy of intelligence sources and methods. Although this is indeed a determination for the executive branch to make, we are concerned that the executive branch has developed a practice of bypassing traditional checks and balances and treating these determinations as dispositive in all cases. In other words, when intelligence officials argue that something should stay secret, policy makers often seem to defer to them without carefully considering the issue themselves. We have great respect for our nation's intelligence officers, the vast majority of whom are hard-working and dedicated professionals. But intelligence officials are specialists - it is their job to determine how to collect as much information as possible, but it is not their job to balance the need for secrecy with the public's right to know how the law is being interpreted. That responsibility rests with policy makers, and we believe that responsibility should not be delegated lightly.
But, as Mike's last post on Friday explains:
President Obama flat out admitted that this was about appeasing a public that doesn't trust the administration, not about reducing the surveillance.
Mike's insight continues:
Even more to the point, his comments represent a fundamental misunderstanding of why the public doesn't trust the government. That's because he keeps insisting that the program isn't being abused and that all of this collection is legal. But, really, that's not what the concern is about. Even though we actually know that the NSA has a history of abuse (and other parts of the intelligence community before that), a major concern is that scooping up so much data is considered legal in the first place.
I'd go even further than that and argue that a big part of the reason the American people are having a hard time trusting their government is that the public's trust in government is harmed every time the American people learn that their government is secretly doing something they not only assumed was illegal, but that government officials specifically told them they weren't doing. Hint: when the American people learn that you lied to them, they trust you less.
I think it's hard for the American people to trust their president when he says he respects democratic principles, when his actions over the course of nearly five years demonstrate very little respect for democratic principles.
I think the American people would be more likely to trust the president when he says these programs include safeguards that protect their privacy, if he - or anyone else in his administration - seemed to care about privacy rights or demonstrated an understanding of how the information being collected could be abused. Seriously, how are we supposed to trust safeguards devised by people who don't believe there is anything to safeguard against?
I think it's understandably hard for the American people to trust the president when he says his administration has the legal authority to conduct these surveillance programs, when one of the few things that remains classified about these programs is the legal argument that the administration says gives the NSA the authority to conduct these programs. This is the document that explains why the administration believes the word "relevant" gives them the authority to collect everything. It's also the document I'd most like to see, since it's the document my former boss has been requesting be declassified for more than half a decade.
A reporter recently asked me why I think the administration won't just declassify the legal opinion, given that the sources and methods it relates to have already been made public. "I think that's pretty obvious", I said. "I believe it will be much harder for the administration to claim that these programs are legal, if people can see their legal argument."
I think it's hard for the American people to trust the president when his administration has repeatedly gone out of its way to silence critics and, again, treat oversight as a threat on par with al-Qaida. As another great Techdirt post this week - US releases redacted document twice ... with different redactions - illustrates, many of the intelligence community's classification decisions seem to be based more on a desire to avoid criticism than clear national security interests. And as Senator Wyden said back in 2007, when then CIA Director Hayden (yes, the same guy who thinks we're all losers who can't get laid) attempted to undermine oversight over his agency by launching an investigation into the CIA's inspector general:
People who know that they're doing the right thing aren't afraid of oversight.
Which reminds me of the Techdirt post this week that probably haunted me the most: "Ed Snowden's email provider, Lavabit, shuts down to fight US gov't intrusion". Mike uses the post to explain that Ladar Levison, the owner and operator of Labavit - the secure email service that provided Edward Snowden's email account - decided to shut down his email service this week.
Not much more information is given, other than announced plans to fight against the government in court. Reading between the lines, it seems rather obvious that Lavabit has been ordered to either disclose private information or grant access to its secure email accounts, and the company is taking a stand and shutting down the service while continuing the legal fight. It's also clear that the court has a gag order on Levison, limiting what can be said.
The part that haunted me, though, was a line Levison included in his email informing customers of his decision:
I feel you deserve to know what's going on. The first amendment is supposed to guarantee me the freedom to speak out in situations like this.
He's right, isn't he? If these aren't the moments the first amendment was meant for, what are? Moreover, if the administration is so convinced that its requests of Labavit are just, why are they afraid to hold them up to public scrutiny?
In his book, Secrecy: The American Experience, former Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan included a quote from a 1960 report issued by the House committee on operations, which I believe provides a far better response than anything I could write on my own:
Secrecy - the first refuge of incompetents - must be at a bare minimum in a democratic society for a fully-informed public is the basis of self-government. Those elected or appointed to positions of executive authority must recognize that government, in a democracy, cannot be wiser than its people.
Which brings me to my final point (at least for now): I think it's awfully hard for the American people to trust the president and his administration when their best response to the concerns Americans are raising is to denigrate the Americans raising those concerns. Because, you see, I have a hard time understanding why my wanting to stand up for democratic principles makes me unpatriotic, while the ones calling themselves patriots seem to think so little of the people and the principles that comprise the country they purport to love.
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