McClatchy:
The CIA Inspector General’s Office has asked the Justice Department to investigate allegations of malfeasance at the spy agency in connection with a yet-to-be released Senate Intelligence Committee report into the CIA’s secret detention and interrogation program, McClatchy has learned.
The criminal referral may be related to what several knowledgeable people said was CIA monitoring of computers used by Senate aides to prepare the study. The monitoring may have violated an agreement between the committee and the agency.
CIA breaking agreements to not monitor the people tasked with their oversight? Shocked I am! Ok, not really.. but this is a pretty BFD. The:
6,300-page report on the agency’s use of waterboarding and harsh interrogation techniques on suspected terrorists held in secret overseas prisons. The report is said to be a searing indictment of the program
During the Bush years there were huge efforts to destroy, classify or cover-up documents related to torture and its ineffectiveness. Sadly, in the 'most transparent administration ever', this continues despite the CIA misleading them as well:
But they haven’t directly intervened, perhaps because they are embroiled in their own feud with the committee, resisting surrendering top-secret documents that the CIA asserted were covered by executive privilege and sent to the White House.
...
In question now is whether any part of the committee’s report, which took some four years to compose and cost $40 million, will ever see the light of day.
The report details how the CIA misled the Bush administration and Congress about the use of interrogation techniques that many experts consider torture, according to public statements by committee members
One of the reasons for that 40 million dollar pricetag is noted in
this diary:
The Senate’s investigation into the C.I.A. program took four years to complete and cost more than $40 million, in part because the C.I.A. insisted that committee staff members be allowed to review classified cables only at a secure facility in Northern Virginia. And only after a group of outside contractors had reviewed the documents first.
Despite allowing 'outside contractors' to review these documents, the CIA still seems to have decided to 'monitor' the oversight of these documents by Congress.
Marcy Wheeler has also posted about Mark Udall's 'cryptic letter' to Obama declaring 'unprecedented action' against the SSCI:
I’m particularly interested in this oblique comment:
As you are aware, the CIA has recently taken unprecedented action against the Committee in relation to the internal CIA review, and I find those actions to be incredibly troubling for the Committee’s oversight responsibilities and for our democracy. It is essential that the Committee be able to do its oversight work — consistent with our constitutional principle of the separation of powers — without the CIA posing impediments or obstacles as it is today.
“Unprecedented” is a pretty strong word.
10:44 AM PT: Update: The Guardian has more:
McClatchy and the New York Times reported Wednesday that the CIA had secretly monitored computers used by committee staffers preparing the inquiry report, which is said to be scathing not only about the brutality and ineffectiveness of the agency’s interrogation techniques but deception by the CIA to Congress and policymakers about it. ...
In February, the CIA confirmed to the Guardian that it is subject to the Federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which makes it a crime to access government computer networks without authorization