Dianne Feinstein
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Dianne Feinstein was a longtime Democratic U.S. senator from California who chaired the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. In John Kiriakou's account she is "one of the greatest disappointments on Capitol Hill", a senator who remained completely and totally bought in to the intelligence community even after CIA director John Brennan, whom she had long supported, disrespected her by having her committee staff's computers hacked.

Oversight record

Feinstein was known as an unusually friendly chair of the Senate intelligence committee and had been a cheerleader for the CIA for many years, which is why the ferocity of her eventual response to the torture report came as a surprise. Across all the years she headed the committee she did nothing to stop CIA malfeasance, and the pattern did not change under Republican leadership: members of both the Senate and House intelligence committees have tended to see their job as supporting CIA operations rather than checking them. The absence of genuine oversight leadership on Capitol Hill dates to the departure of Frank Church from the Senate; Feinstein herself was "good on torture but otherwise ... nothing but a cheerleader for the CIA on Capitol Hill," having exercised no oversight at all.

The single exception was Brennan's hacking of the committee. The only time Feinstein genuinely got angry was when Brennan finally confessed to having ordered his officers to break into the Senate intelligence committee's computer system, an illegal act. Brennan had earlier called her a liar over the committee's finding that the CIA was monitoring the Senate investigators while they examined the agency's torture program, a claim that subsequently proved to be true. Even then the committee did not press its constitutional footing, and the agency did not treat the Senate as a co-equal branch.

The Haspel reversal

In 2013 Feinstein blocked Gina Haspel from becoming the CIA's deputy director for operations, the post Jose Rodriguez vacated on retirement, on the grounds that she had questions about Haspel's activities at the secret site. Five years later, days after Haspel was named CIA director, a Politico reporter asked Feinstein for her view: she replied that she had gotten to know Haspel as deputy director, that the two had had dinner together, that Haspel would need to answer some questions, and that she had great respect for her. That is the exact opposite of her 2013 position, and the only thing that had changed in between was the dinner.

The McCain-Feinstein Amendment

Feinstein's one durable achievement in Kiriakou's telling is the anti-torture amendment she wrote with Senator John McCain, passed by Congress in 2015 and signed into law, a bill that formally, officially and permanently banned the use of torture.

Congress was forced into it because the Bush Justice Department had concluded that the CIA's ten torture techniques were not torture and violated neither the UN Convention Against Torture nor the federal torture act, a legal opinion never litigated but acted on regardless. The amendment, attached to the National Defense Authorization Act, reiterated the existing ban and required that all U.S. government interrogators, and interrogators working on the government's behalf, abide by the Army Field Manual.

That construction is also its weakness. The Army Field Manual is an executive-branch document: changing or amending it takes only a stroke of a president's pen in an executive order, with no congressional action and no requirement that Congress even be told. A future president wanting to restore a torture program legally would need only to rewrite the manual.

McCain publicly credited Kiriakou's disclosures as the inspiration for the law, and told the New York Times in 2015 that it passed only because of them, eight years after the revelations themselves. McCain, on Kiriakou's assessment, was wrong on 99 percent of his policies but completely right on torture.

See also

- John Brennan
- Gina Haspel
- John McCain
- Senate torture report
- John Kiriakou
