See no evil overseers
by digby
I wrote a piece for Salon today about Senator Richard Burr the new Intelligence Committee chairman who is charged with “overseeing” the CIA. I’m sure you’ll be surprised to find out that he thinks they can do no wrong:
[I]t’s an understatement to say that Sen. Burr is a very curious choice to be an “overseer” for the CIA if the Republican Party is now our greatest champion of civil liberties. He’s never seen a CIA program he didn’t think was just ducky. And it looks as though he’s not just going to continue to turn a blind eye to CIA perfidy, he may have a plan in place to ensure that the torture report is thrown into the memory hole never to be seen again.
Katherine Hawkins of OpenTheGovernment.org explains that going all the way back to December of last year Burr was making an arcane argument that the classified report is part of the congressional record and therefore exempt from request under the Freedom of Information Act and Guantánamo defense attorneys (an argument supported by the administration as well). Through a series of letters from Dianne Feinstein and the White House and subsequent letters by Sen. Burr, those who wish to deep-six the torture report have engaged in various actions that will challenge the ability of any judge or any government official who wants to release the full report. Hawkins believes this will not work, although she is less sanguine about other gambits having to do with the so-called Panetta Review that would likewise shine a light on the full scope of the torture regime. This is also based on some very byzantine reading of the law in which Burr and his allies in the administration assert that the Congress should have never seen the report in the first place, so it should go back to the CIA where they will presumably burn it in the same bins in which they burned the tapes of the CIA torture sessions.
This is what we call “congressional oversight.” It works so well, everyone is clamoring for more of it.
If you thought Dianne Feinstein was a pushover for the intelligence community, get ready. We’ll be lucky if Burr even bothers to call a meeting of the committee.
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