Thoughts on the CIA's Senate spying booboo: Does anyone have any idea wtf is going on here?

Remember when 2001: A Space Odyssey astronauts Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood) and Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) thought they had evaded HAL's all-watchful eye so they could talk about their suddenly glitchy computer's, er, problems? But HAL wasn't to be messed with so easily! Kind of like our own CIA, maybe?

"The inspector general’s account of how the C.I.A. secretly monitored a congressional committee charged with supervising its activities touched off angry criticism from members of the Senate and amounted to vindication for Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, the committee’s Democratic chairwoman, who excoriated the C.I.A. in March when the agency’s monitoring of committee investigators became public."

-- from "Inquiry by C.I.A. Affirms It Spied on Senate Panel,"
by the NYT's Mark Mazzetti and Carl Hulse (7/31)

by Ken

It's not that Howie hasn't already covered the matter of the CIA's big "oopsie" moment (in "Obama Hasn't Fired John Brennan Yet -- Let Alone Had Him Arrested" and a follow-up piece), when the agency fessed up last week -- a half-step ahead of a CIA inspector general's report that was going to blow the whistle -- that Director John Brennan may have misspoken last March when he called Sen. Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, a crazy old coot (or words to that effect) for daring to suggest that the CIA had hacked and eavesdropped on her committee in the course of its work on a report, five years in the making, on CIA screwing up.

In March, you'll recall, Director Brennan spoke so derisively of Senator Feinstein, voicing indignation that anyone could dare suggest something so idiotic, that one had to feel sympathy for her -- which is pretty remarkable in itself. So it was pretty awkward for Director Brennan to have to own up to the discovered truth, which is that not only was the senator right but she may not have known the half of it.

Which nevertheless was apparently considerably more than Director Brennan knew. (Unless he was just kidding in March.) Now, however, he has apologized to both Senator Feinstein and, rather remarkably, to the Intelligence Committee's ranking member, retiring Sen. Saxby Chambliss. The apology to Senator Chambliss is one of my favorite touches. Am I misremembering that he sat by chuckling quietly while Senator Feinstein was being ridiculed? Is there any reason to suppose he would have cared if he had known that the CIA was spying on the committee? Hadn't the committee Republicans long since dissociated themselves from, and denounced, the CIA report-in-progress?

At the same time, when you put yourself in the position of owing Saxby Chambliss an apology, you have to know you've sunk pretty low.

Now all of this, as I say, Howie has already covered. And naturally he took proper note of the ironies involved: first, that the CIA had managed to find itself in a feud with Senator Feinstein, who has hardly ever been known to utter an unkind word over anything that comes stamped "National Security," and second that the now-"vindicated" members of the Intelligence Committee, reveling in their unaccustomed role as Wronged Avengers, don't seem terribly concerned about government intelligence overstepping except insofar as they themselves are the oversteppees.

Again, already duly noted in this space. So why have I been nursing this sense that the subject needs to be revisited?

Maybe it's all the focus on Director Brennan. Maybe it's just me, but when I first heard the latest installment of this story reported, I hardly thought about him at all. Well, that's not quite right. I thought quite a lot about his role for his really vicious March assault on Senator Feinstein, and the deliciousness of his now having to eat every one of those astonishing words. So I was thinking of him as an important player in this little DC comedy-drama, but I didn't find myself thinking of him as anything more -- not the drama's writer or director or producer or even dramaturg, just the guy who spoke those silly speeches in March and now has to make silly apologies in August.

But that so much outrage and animosity should be directed at Director Brennan? What is he, like in charge of the CIA or something? Okay, technically. However, I think it's a lot more important that we find out what his -- and everybody else at the CIA's -- role was in this astonishing sequence of events. After all, it's not as if there was some little slip-up. You know, where after Senator Feinstein did her wicked-witch comedy routine in March, somebody discovered that oops, a switch had inadvertently been left on and a bunch of committee phone calls had been recorded, isn't that a riot?

No, what we've learned about the pending IG report is that there was some serious surveillance of the committee, or at least the committee Democrats, the ones who were doing the investigating. And I think it's pretty important that we find out what the hell was going on, and what the hell else might have been and might still be going on.

I think Senator Feinstein's own reaction, or rather reactions, is/are interesting. This is from the July 31 Mazzetti-Hulse NYT report:

When the C.I.A.’s monitoring of the committee became public in March, after months of private meetings and growing bitterness, Ms. Feinstein took to the Senate floor to deliver a blistering speech accusing the agency of infringing on the committee’s role as overseer.

Calling it a “defining moment” in the committee’s history, Ms. Feinstein said that how the matter was 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.”

Last week, however, as the Times-men reported, Senator Feinstein "called Mr. Brennan's apology and decision to set up an accountability board 'positive first steps,' and said the inspector general report 'corrects the record.' " And you know, I think the senator has this about right. We just need to know what the second and third and fourth steps are going to be.

Not that what we know so far is encouraging. In addition to the pending release of the CIA IG's report, there is an investigation in progress by the Senate sergeant-at-arms. I suppose it's possible that some light may shed on what the fuck was going on here. Then of course there's this "internal accountability board" that Director Brennan has impaneled, which could go so far as to suggest "potential disciplinary measures" and "steps to address systemic issues."

Bear in mind, after all, that it was Director Brennan who turned the matter over to the CIA IG's office in March. It's true that at the time the director opined that “when the facts come out on this, I think a lot of people who are claiming that there has been this tremendous sort of spying and monitoring and hacking will be proved wrong." As the Times-men reported last week, "Mr. Brennan said at the time that he had referred the matter to the agency's inspector general 'to make sure that he was able to look honestly and objectively at what the C.I.A. did.' "

Well, Director B, surprise!

And maybe -- assuming he's still around when it reports -- this board will surprise him too! After all, it's to be led by no less august a personage than, um, former Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh! Who's kind of Dianne Feinstein in reverse-drag. About the most you can say in his behalf is that he's not likely to be accused of being a rock-the-boat type anti-CIA crusader.

Okay, that kind of leadership does suggest that what we're in for is kind of bureaucratic call for an investigation whose primary purpose is to create a "cooling off" period -- long enough, it's hoped, for most everyone to have moved on to other matters, pretty well ensuring that nobody will even read the report except the unfortunate media drones whose assignment editors make them produce sure-to-be-ignored reports about the report.

Unless Senator Bayh's accountability board unaccountably produces the kind of blistering report that none of us expect it will. Oh, in that case yes, you can assume that Republicans, starting with the Senate Intelligence Committee lapdogs, will undoubtedly dismiss it as partisan nattering.

SO WHAT AM I GETTING AT HERE?
WHAT IS DIRECTOR BRENNAN'S ROLE?

I guess what I'm suggesting is that Director Brennan may not have much of a role, or his successor either. I imagine he shows up at the office occasionally, and has a heavy speech-giving schedule. But I for one am perfectly prepared to believe that he really didn't know about the Intelligence Committee surveillance, and it may not necessarily even be because he wouldn't have cared. I'm just not sure that knowing what the CIA is doing is in the current CIA director's job description.

Which is a little bit ironic. You remember that until 2005 the title of the person who was in charge of the CIA was "director of Central Intelligence," which merely included the CIA. The title sounded a lot fancier than it actually was, since the charge excluded an intelligence behemoth like the Defense Intelligence Agency, not to mention a host of other federal intelligence entities, and in general outside the CIA the DCI mostly did "coordinating" -- among agencies that would sooner be called sissified wimps than be coordinated. Still, in 2005 it was understood that this was way too large a brief for one mere mortal, and the job was split into a "director of national intelligence" and a director of the CIA.

Maybe it had already happened (does anyone believe that, say, George H.W. Bush was firmly at the controls as DCI?), or maybe it was at that point that the "CIA director" turned into somebody who's just on the job without actually having much of a job to do, as the CIA just goes its merry way doing whatever the heck it thinks it does. From news accounts, it seems clear that the Obama administration has turned to it for active activity on a series of specific issues, and gotten decent enough work to justify White House press secretary Josh Earnest's widely derided presidential vote of confidence in Director Brennan's leadership, as the account manager who coordinates his intelligence consulting firm's services with its principal client, the president of the United States.

The image of the CIA that I'm harboring, however, possibly under the influence of having only just seen 2001: A Space Odyssey for the first time in a long while in a lovely 70mm print at the Museum of the Moving Image, is like HAL the computer: an entity that knows its mission, believes unflinchingly in the importance of its mission, and does whatever it feels it has to do to protect that mission. Against that certainty and that kind of control, in the end all poor astronaut Dave can do, after HAL has disposed of astronaut Frank, is to disconnect the damned thing.

Can we disconnect the CIA? I don't think so.

As to what "mission" it might be pursuing HAL-like, I'm afraid I have to refer back once again to the great 2010 Washington Post investigative series on the National Security establishment that has come into existence in recent decades as a sort of public-private partnership -- with an accent on the "private," there being a minimum of coherent public oversight -- that now controls a significant chunk of the U.S. economy and more or less directs its own political ship, as long as it can keep its share of the federal budget flowing in. It's a mission so crucial, at least to the people who are in on it, that it would be worth a suitably heroic computer's dying for.

I know I should dig out a link to the Post series, as I've done a couple of times before, but really, what's the point? [Nevertheless, see the 'Postscript' below. -- Ed.] The series got so much (utterly deserved) attention as it was rolling out, only to suffer almost immediately the fate that was, well, fated for it: oblivion. Partly, of course, for the very good reason that the series made pretty clear that there isn't a damned thing we can do about it.

Still, one thing we can't say is that we weren't warned.

AS FOR SENATOR FEINSTEIN'S ORIGINAL CONCERN --

You know, about this "defining moment" that "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." Come on now, was there ever really any question about this?


POSTSCRIPT: Okay, I dug up a link for the 2010
WaPo series "Top Secret America" -- happy now?

The link is to my January 2011 follow-up post, "Say, whatever did happen to 'Top Secret America'?," which along with some blowing off of steam contains all the relevant links. You gonna do something about it? Huh? Huh?

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