CIA Spied on Its US Investigators

Aside from spying on foreign politicians, it looks like the CIA was also snooping on members of the Senate Intelligence Committee who had been sent to investigate its own antics. As a result, the Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein became furious and accused the CIA of breaking laws and breaching constitutional principles. She claimed the CIA undermined her multi-year investigation of a controversial torture program.

Dianne Feinstein claimed that the agency secretly removed documents, searched PCs used by the committee and tried to intimidate congressional investigators by forcing the FBI to arrest them.All this is happening after the Senate Intelligence Committee nears completion of a 6,000-page report expected to become a scathing historical record of the CIA use of waterboarding and other brutal interrogation methods on terrorism suspects after the 9/11.

Dianne Feinstein promised to soon deliver the report to the White House and push for declassification of a document which would lay bare the horrible details of the CIA program. In the meantime, the agency and the Committee are at odds over the conclusions about the effectiveness of the program and the way the investigation was handled.

So, the CIA set up a secret facility with computers where Committee investigators were offered unhampered access to operational cables, executive memos and other data on the interrogation program.But there was a row over whether CIA or Committee sabotaged the latter’s efforts from the outset, loading a massive amount of files on PCs with no index, structure or ability to search.

It took years for investigators to pore over 6.2 million classified records furnished by the CIA, but the agency suddenly claimed the Committee somehow gained access to data that the CIA never intended to share – in other words, they managed to hack the CIA.

In response, the Committee was careful not to say precisely how those documents were obtained – by the CIA or by a whistle-blower. As a result, the CIA seems very upset that its plan to hamper the investigation by dumping lots of paperwork on the Committee failed thank to some whistle-blower,who simply revealed important information. So, the CIA referred the matter to the Department of Justice and accused the Committee of spying on the US. Surveillance is all around.