CIA turns on the Senate

After years of fighting with the CIA for access and accuracy, and brawling over accusations of criminality, Jones’s new brief was to argue for rolling back the redactions. In 2010, when the CIA removed documents from the Senate side of RDINet, both sides turned to the White House to mediate the dispute. Now, the Senate negotiators were across the table from the CIA and the White House together. guardian

Trapani called the declassification discussions “designed to preserve the committee’s narrative of the CIA program for the public, while also protecting critical national security interests – including the safety and security of US personnel and ongoing intelligence operations.”

“There’s two arguments. You would put the lives of the CIA officers at risk, the lives of their families at risk. And then, the latter one, which always seemed to be the real reason because the other stuff just didn’t hold any water, was that this will really hurt morale at the CIA, this is a morale issue. And they would openly say that, as if that was a reasonable response to making something classified,”

The committee had learned that some CIA interrogators had records of violent acts in their personal lives – to include domestic abuse and even sexual assault. Even without listing names or pseudonyms, Langley refused to let that fact become public, no matter how tenuously connected to US national security it was.

Page 470 of the report, long after the narrative had ended, referred to “a number of personnel whose backgrounds include notable derogatory information calling into question their eligibility for employment, their access to classified information, and their participation in CIA interrogation activities.”