Wtf is with people? America is so Hung up On Reality TV they can't see what is really happening here.
WASHINGTON, May 31 — The Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday questioned the continuing value of the Central Intelligence Agency’s secret interrogation program for terrorism suspects, suggesting that international condemnation and the obstacles it has created to criminal prosecution may outweigh its worth in gathering information.
The committee rejected by one vote a Democratic proposal that would essentially have cut money for the program by banning harsh interrogation techniques except in dire emergencies, a committee report revealed.
“More than five years after the decision to start the program,” the report said, “the committee believes that consideration should be given to whether it is the best means to obtain a full and reliable intelligence debriefing of a detainee.”
It added: “Both the Congress and the administration must continue to evaluate whether having a separate C.I.A. detention program that operates under different interrogation rules than those applicable to military and law enforcement officers is necessary, lawful and in the best interests of the United States.”
The sweeping report, which accompanies the annual bill authorizing the activities of all of the spy agencies, reflects a striking reassertion of aggressive oversight since Democrats took control of Congress this year. Some Republicans joined in the skeptical language about several spying programs, and the report as a whole was approved 12 to 3, with the backing of all eight Democrats and four of the seven Republicans.
The committee declared that it would block changes sought by the Bush administration in the law governing domestic eavesdropping by the National Security Agency unless it received long-sought administration documents on the secret surveillance program, including orders signed by President Bush.
The report criticized the intelligence agencies’ ballooning use of contractors, saying the outsourcing had created conflicts of interest because some major purchasing programs are themselves run by contractors, some of which have ties to vendors. It said a government employee cost taxpayers $126,500 a year on average, or half the $250,000 price tag for a worker supplied by a contracting company.
“People are leaving the intelligence agencies for more lucrative job offers with contractors, who send them back to the agencies at far higher cost,” said Andy Johnson, the committee’s staff director.
The committee said half of space-related programs, mostly involving spy satellites, had shown cost overruns of 50 percent or more. Such overruns do “severe damage” to the intelligence effort, the committee said, and its proposed bill would require that the president personally certify the necessity of such programs when costs grow more than 40 percent above original estimates.
But the most novel element of the report is the assessment of the C.I.A. detention program, which the committee has rarely discussed in public. While only the chairman and the vice chairman were briefed on the program during the first five years after it was created following the 2001 terrorist attacks, all committee members have now been briefed for the first time, the report said.
The report acknowledged that the secret detention program “has led to the identification of terrorists and the disruption of terrorist plots.” But it says that achievement must now “be weighed against both the complications it causes to any ultimate prosecution of these terrorists, and the damage the program does to the image of the United States abroad.”
Mr. Johnson, the staff director, said the committee’s chairman, Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, Democrat of West Virginia, was concerned that the program might be hurting the battle against terrorism by “alienating moderate Muslim and Arab communities around the world.”
Elisa C. Massimino, Washington director of Human Rights First and a longtime critic of the C.I.A. program, said the panel’s statement showed that Congress “is no longer willing to blindly accept the assertion that the C.I.A. secret interrogation program using unlawful techniques serves the national interests of this country.”
But the committee stopped short of using its budget authority to shut down the program. In a closed session on May 23, two Democrats, Senators Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and Dianne Feinstein of California, proposed barring spending on interrogation techniques that go beyond the Army Field Manual, which bans physical pressure or pain. Under their proposal, the only exception would have been when the president determined “that an individual has information about a specific and imminent threat.”
The amendment failed when Senator Bill Nelson, Democrat of Florida, joined all the Republicans in voting no.
A C.I.A. spokesman, Paul Gimigliano, said the program “has helped our country and others disrupt plots and save lives” and has been “conducted lawfully,” with the approval of “multiple elements of our government, not just the C.I.A.”
No comments:
Post a Comment