Oregon’s radically Democrat Senator Ron Wyden teamed up with his equally progressive colleague from New Mexico, Senator Martin Heinrich, to write a poison pen letter to CIA Director William J. Burns. Classified at the “burn before reading” level, enough bits and pieces came through from underneath the magic marker lines to learn that Agency spooks were “collecting data in bulk in a secret program that could impact Americans’ privacy.” Dirty bleepards.
CIA secret data net
You know things are bad when the Democrats bother to complain about CIA surveillance overreach. Wyden and Heinrich are demanding that the chief of the spooky spy agency, Director William J. Burns and his clandestine co-worker, National Intelligence Director Avril D. Haines, cough up “more information on the program.” Declassified this time.
Since they’re the top-dog Democrat senators on the Intelligence Committee, they can get away with demanding that.
In response, on Thursday, February 10, the CIA declassified the senators’ nastygram along with “a portion of recommendations from a report.” Not just any report but one “compiled by a watchdog, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board.”
PCLOB started barking and howling about the secret program. Even declassified, “significant portions of both the letter and the recommendations were redacted. The rest of the report remains fully classified.”
Wyden and Heinrich are convinced that the undercover CIA shadow-op “has operated outside of laws passed and reformed by Congress but under the authority of Executive Order 12333.”
That’s the one, Associated Press explains, “signed by former President Ronald Reagan in 1981 that governs intelligence community activity.” The agency “has secretly conducted its own bulk program,” the Democrats write, then mysteriously, “with the rest of the line being redacted.” They know what they wrote.
No oversight at all
The Democrat senators were shocked to discover what Republicans have been screaming about all along. The CIA seems to be running their very own Deep State shadow government, doing what they please, when they please to who they please. Anyone questioning that might just end up a target of illegal surveillance.
“It has done so entirely outside the statutory framework that Congress and the public believe govern this collection, and without any of the judicial, congressional or even executive branch oversight that comes with FISA collection.”
FISA is the same Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court which dragged patriotic American and deplorable Donald Trump supporter Carter Page into the Obamagate net of deceit and evil attempts to overthrow the Republic. “This basic fact has been kept from the public and from Congress.”
The CIA hid it from everyone, even progressives. “Until the PCLOB report was delivered last month, the nature and full extent of the CIA’s collection was withheld even from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.”
It’s time, the senators write, for the Central Intelligence Agency to come clean and “release information on the nature of the agency’s ‘relationship with sources and the legal framework for the collection‘ as well as the kind of records being collected and how much of Americans’ data was being maintained.”
Whatever it was is way too much. The agency basically dares them to send in Gina Haspel and water-board them. They have cyanide caps. “CIA is committed to transparency consistent with our obligation to protect intelligence sources and methods.“
