Senate Intelligence Committee
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The Senate Intelligence Committee, formally the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI), is the CIA's designated congressional overseer, and in John Kiriakou's telling both the author of the most important document of the torture era and a case study in oversight failure.

The torture report's method

Kiriakou defends the Senate torture report's conclusions on the strength of its sourcing: the committee used six million primary-source documents, live, real-time cables that CIA officers wrote from the field to headquarters as the interrogations happened. "We know firsthand that the torture did not work." Those documents also recorded officers who, ordered to begin torturing, said "wait a minute, I didn't sign on for this", in at least a couple of cases insisting on coming home rather than remain in the field and torture prisoners.

He gives Dianne Feinstein her due on this one: long known as an unusually friendly chairwoman to the agency, which made the ferocity of her torture-report fight the more striking. The eventual McCain-Feinstein legislation formally, officially, and permanently banning torture is the achievement Kiriakou likes to think he played some role in.

"Cheerleaders for the CIA"

Kiriakou's structural judgment is harsher: since the middle 1980s, Congress has proven little more than cheerleaders for the CIA. Feinstein, as chairman, "did nothing to stop CIA malfeasance" in all her years heading the committee, and the same has held under Republican leadership, members of both the SSCI and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence see their job as supporting CIA operations. "We don't need any outside bodies to be supporting CIA operations... we need an organization that can find the truth."

The committee also anchors his critique of the official whistleblower channel: boss, Inspector General, General Counsel, then the oversight committees. Thanks to the Tom Drake case at NSA and the Jeffrey Sterling case at CIA, he says, "we know that simply does not work." He notes the committee credentials of others when it suits the argument, if Bob Graham, a highly respected SSCI member, believes there was official Saudi involvement in 9/11, that is to be taken seriously.

See also

- Senate torture report
- Dianne Feinstein
- McCain-Feinstein amendment
- Tom Drake
- Jeffrey Sterling
