National Security State Unravelling?

When the head of the CIA looks straight into the camera and says, "We wouldn't do that," is there anyone on the planet who doesn't interpret that to mean, "We did it; what do you think you can do about it?"

Admission: I never voted for Dianne Feinstein for anything-- not for San Francisco City Council, not for mayor and not, ever, for the U.S. Senate. When Jello Biafra ran against her for mayor, I was an enthusiastic backer. She won though… she won all her races. And she's usually a voice for Establishment conservative liberalism. She's also been one of the Senate's major apologists for the excesses of the National Security State. And then they went too far-- into her own backyard. Her case against them is good but in some ways it's also laughable. As The Guardian explained in an editorial, The CIA: The Double Life Of Dianna Feinstein last night, she may be missing the core issues that make the national security state such an outrage against democracy.

The exasperation with Ms Feinstein is that she directs her sense of outrage only at the CIA. It seems restricted to issues that impact on her. She is outraged when the CIA allegedly hacked into her committee's computers. She is upset over the alleged intrusion into the privacy of her own staff. And yet this is the same senator who could not empathise with Americans upset at the revelations in the Snowden documents of millions of citizens whose personal data has been accessed by the NSA. It is the same senator who could not share American anger over the revelation of the co-operation in surveillance of the giant tech companies, whether wittingly or unwittingly.

Ms Feinstein not only failed to investigate the NSA with a smidgen of the aggression she has shown towards the CIA but has gone out of her way to be the NSA's most prominent defender. The day after Edward Snowden revealed himself as a whistleblower last June, she was among the first to brand him a traitor. In the face of revelation after revelation, she praised the professionalism of the NSA. She defended mass data collection as a necessity, arguing that the NSA had to have access to the whole "haystack" to find the one needle, the terrorist. All this dismayed many of her Democratic supporters in liberal California and elsewhere in the US. She proposed a bill supposedly aimed at NSA reform, but it was a spoiler, one that in fact would have done little to curb the agency's powers. The one time she wobbled was in the autumn after the disclosure of US spying on German chancellor Angela Merkel. But this proved to be only brief.

It is about time Ms Feinstein used her powers as the democratically elected head of the intelligence committee to question the NSA with the same vigour-- or even a small part of  it-- that she is displaying towards the CIA. That would, indeed, be a defining moment for the oversight of the US intelligence community: all of it.

As Chris Hayes explains above, "this fight is not about spying. It's about torture. It's ably the 6,000 page torture report does not want you to see." Is Feinstein (and Obama?) really ready to force the CIA to admit that the Bush-Cheney regime were running a gulag on Guantánamo that had crossed the line into overt war crimes? (Side note, Steve Israel has recruited an ex-comandant of Guantánamo to run for Congress, Jerry Cannon, in Michigan. He has virtually no chance to win but the DCCC will still spend as much as a million dollars to try to win him the seat.) Back to Hayes for a minute… let's give him the last word: "For far too long, the Senate Intelligence Committee and the CIA have functioned, basically, as partners, colluding to withhold information about the activities of the Agency from the American people. Maybe now that they've declared war on each other, we'll actually learn what's been happening in our name."