The CIA's at It Again

What's going on inside the intelligence community these days? They certainly seem possessed of something to keep coming up with material that damages or undermines the Prez's "War on Terror." First we discover Iran doesn't really have an active nuclear arms program, and now it turns out that the CIA has destroyed videotapes of the interrogation of terrorist suspects. Admittedly, the CIA has only come clean about this because The New York TImes had the goods on them and was going to publish their story on Friday morning no matter what. Better they admit it first-hand than get caught with their hand in the cookie jar. Upon hearing this news, my first assumption was these Candid Camera moments caught CIA officers in the act of being themselves torturing the suspects, and in fact the Times story says as much. It refers to "severe interrogation techniques," which is administration code for activity that may cross the line into torture but that no one is quite paying enough attention to, so who can say, really?

Most anyone who should've been overseeing the situation has denied any knowledge of any sort. Representative Pete Hoekstra was head of the House Intelligence Committee in the term before the Democrats took over, and he claims he was unaware any tapes were destroyed. While that could well be true, it's odd the Representative Jane Harmon, the ranking Democrat on that committee at the same time, argued to the CIA that the tapes should not be destroyed. Surely Hoekstra was aware of the tapes and the controversy over whether they should be eliminated or not. If nobody ever bothered to tell him what happened, I'm sure that was so he could maintain willful ignorance. Jumping full bore into my suggestion last night that we ask what didn't the President know and when didn't he know it, the Prez went into complete Sgt. Schulz mode, claiming he never heard anything about any of it until Thursday.

The Democrats have seemed eager to start some investigations, and why shouldn't they, to find out what's really going on. Congress needs to dig deeper into its oversight responsibilities, and this might be just the thing to jumpstart the House and the Senate into starting to get into some sort of parity with the executive branch. Needless to say, further developments will bear watching.