The senior senator from Colorado, Democrat Mark Udall, got it right last week in calling for the resignation of CIA Director John Brennan. Bad things happened on his watch – bad enough to require both public acknowledgement and equally public atonement.
More to the point, the agency itself seems in need of a thorough housecleaning, and that probably requires an outside hand. The director himself does not seem like a bad guy, and it appears President Obama has confidence in him, but the American people need to see the CIA cleaned up and put back on track. Again.
The proximate reason for Udall’s demand was a classified briefing he received on a report from the CIA’s inspector general on the agency’s snooping into Senate staffers’ computers. After the briefing, Udall, who sits on the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said, “The CIA unconstitutionally spied on Congress by hacking into Senate Intelligence Committee computers. This grave misconduct not only is illegal, but it violates the U. S. Constitution’s requirement of separation of powers.”
He concluded his remarks by saying, “An internal CIA accountability report isn’t enough.”
And he is right.
The CIA, and most vocally Brennan, had insisted for months that it had not spied on the Senate. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., accused the CIA of spying on the Senate in March, at which point Brennan forcefully denied the allegation, saying such activity was “beyond the scope of reason.”
Confronted with his own in-house report, the agency had indeed done what Feinstein alleged, Brennan apologized to the senator and her Intelligence Committee colleagues. But that Brennan acted honorably does not change the fact that what his agency did was illegal and wrong. For one thing, he only fessed up after the CIA was caught. For another, he was in essence copping to a misdemeanor when felony charges were coming around the corner.
A Senate report on CIA interrogations in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks – which has yet to be made public but is known to exist – put the president of the United States in the position of having to admit that, as he said, “We tortured some folks. We did some things that are contrary to our values.”
When the president said “we,” he was referring to the United States and the federal government in particular. He was not in office at the time and, as such, not personally involved. Brennan, however, while not CIA director, was with the agency.
But he is hardly alone. George Tenet headed up the CIA from 1997 to 2004. Including his tenure and Brennan’s, the agency has had four directors in the years since the Sept. 11 attacks.
None of the CIA’s misdeeds can be laid at the foot of any one person. These are not personal flaws or individual blunders. They represent continuing evidence of a recurring pattern of institutional misbehavior going back decades – see the Church Committee’s revelations in the 1970s.
The torture described in the Senate report happened under George W. Bush. Spying on the Senate happened during the Obama administration. The person or the party in the White House seems to matter less than how long it has been since anyone got in trouble at the CIA.
Some people should be in trouble now. Brennan should fall on his sword, but Sen. Udall and his colleagues should insist that not be the end of it. President Obama should set in motion a thorough shake-up at the CIA, starting at the top.
A free country cannot tolerate a clandestine agency that sees itself as above the law.
