The entire National Security Apparatus (not just the C.I.A. but the N.S.A., Armed Services Intelligence, N.R.O., F.B.I., etc.) operates on the "National Security Interpretation of Need to Know".

The National Security Interpretation of Need to Know:

The problems identified by the National Security Apparatus are threats to National Security and the plans developed by the National Security Apparatus to combat these threats are vital plans that must not be compromised.

All such plans are vetted for sensitivity to publication and are only acknowledged to the extent such admission will not affect the success of their execution.

Consequently it is an act of treason to confess, acknowledge or even hint of the existence of a plan to any official who would oppose its implementation.

The Congressional Record in twenty-years-after post-mortem reveals that officials barred from knowledge of various National Security plans regularly included the President, the Director of the C.I.A., and Congress. Even at the local level, individual teams will not report plans to their manager which they believe their manager will oppose.

It is a fundamental belief of the Apparatus that:

National Security is a paramount concern. Anything else--the Constitution, the will of the President, Congress--is secondary.

For the most part they act as if the Congress is in on the joke; when the public catches them at something Congress passes some new laws, but: Congress doesn't really mean them! It's only to calm the (enraged by the socialist media) public.

"It will also test their willingness to clash with the Obama administration, which has so far been appallingly content to continue Bush-Cheney secrecy on torture and interrogation and to stonewall investigation and prosecution of those who broke the law."

Joan,

That's exactly the difference between upstanding true journalist like you and the right wing hacks who blindly supported all transgressions on our civil liberties and constitution by the DEcider. You called Obama and Democrat in Congress on this important issue is really refreshing and commendable.

Pls. keep the pressure on them, especially Speaker Pelosi, until she approves a Church like Committee to dig and purge all the dirt on Bush/Cheney years. Don’t count on Obama or Holder to do it, they wouldn’t.

Verbatim (as mutated in small ways by OCR):

• Legal issues were clearly not a primary consideration-if they were a consideration at all-in many of the programs and techniques of the intelligence community. When the former head of the FBI’s Racial Intelligence Section was asked whether anybody in the FBI at any time during the 15-year course of COINTELPRO discussed its constitutionality or legal authority. for example, he replied : “No, we never gave it a thought.”
• William C. Sullivan, who participated in the drafting of the Huston Plan and served on the United States Intelligence Board and as FBI Assistant Director for Intelligence for 10 years, stated that in his entire experience in the intelligence community he never heard legal issues raised at all:

  We never gave any thought to this realm of reasoning, because we were just naturally pragmatists. The one thing we were concerned about was this: Will this course of action work, will it get us what we want, will we reach the objective that we desire to reach? As far as legality is concerned, morals, or ethics, [it] was never raised by myself or anybody else . . . I think this suggests really in government that we are amoral. In government–I am not speaking for everybody–the general atmosphere is one of amorality.

• Perhaps the most novel reason for advocating illegal action was proffered by Tom Charles Huston. Huston explained that he believed the real threat to internal security was potential repression by right-wing forces within the United States. He argued that the “New Left” was capable of producing a climate of fear that would bring forth every repressive demagogue in the country. Huston believed that the intelligence professionals, if given the chance, could protect the people from the latent forces of repression by monitoring the New Left, including by illegal means. Illegal action directed against the New Left, in other words. should be used by the Government to forestall potential repression by the Right.

Here's what would surprise me; that our government--elected officials and civil servants both--behaved ethically. That would startle the hell out of me.

The only thing more surprising would be if voters stopped reelecting these people.

This is a representative democracy; we have the representatives we deserve.

I know it's impossible to trust our government, but every time I read about something like this it just depresses me more. Especially since we have a Democrat in office who has no interest in doing anything about it. Obama doesn't want to look back because he wants to keep all of the powers that Bush-Cheney claimed for the Unitary Executive. And the large Democratic majority in Congress won't do anything to reclaim their power. Republicans should be concerned because they won't have ANY power unless Congress asserts itself.

The remaining liberal and ethical Democrats in Congress will try to investigate, but the leadership and blue dogs will make sure that doesn't happen because, well, they'll think up some excuse. They clearly have something to hide. And the DOJ won't do anything because it's just a tool of Obama, just like it was for Bush. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

Panetta already stopped the program.

This was in the blogs a couple of years ago. Pelosi, Reid, and other Dem leaders are up to their eyeballs in the illegal spying just as they are implicated in the illegal torture. Joan Walsh is the last person in the country to know this, apparently.

They won't do a goddam thing, of course!

Panetta has assigned a Senior CIA official to explore how CIA can improve it's reporting to Congress. It seems rather hopeless to have the CIA explore it's own problems, especially his this senior official is left over from the Bush adminstration.

The congress has constitutional powers the CIA does not. The congress should be doing the exploring.