On Tuesday, US Senator Dianne Feinstein delivered a passionate speech about her distaste on the Central Intelligence Agency's way of handling a panel investigation she led regarding the interrogation and detention program following the September 11, 2001 attacks. The program, said Reuters, was conducted by the federal agency to interrogate terrorism suspects that could shed light to the large-scale attacks brought on the US. The news agency said the CIA-initiated program was only made public in 2006.
Addressing the Senate floor, Feinstein said, "I have grave concerns that the CIA's search may well have violated the separation of powers principles embodied in the Constitution. Besides the constitutional implications, the CIA's search may also have violated the Fourth Amendment, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, as well as Executive Order 12333, which prohibits the CIA from conducting domestic searches or surveillance."
Reuters said the feud between Feinstein's committee and the CIA started when the latter allegedly searched the former's computers to determine how Feinstein's staff was able to obtain a more critical internal review as compared to the official report the federal agency had made known. The news agency said Feinstein's the Senate Intelligence Committee has in its possession a 6,300-page report that reviewed some of the harsh interrogation measures that the CIA had used on terrorist suspects and that Feinstein is pushing to publish the report. Feinstein claimed that some of the concerns in the committee's report mirrored the ones in the internal report as opposed to the CIA's official report.
CIA head John Brennan had since denied all the allegations made against his office, Reuters said.
Feinstein also said in her speech that the CIA had been moving to block the committee's attempts to declassify the report, and even stated that the committee did not resort to hacking to obtain information required for their assessment.
"I view the acting general counsel's referral as a potential effort to intimidate this staff - and I am not taking it lightly. The committee clearly did not hack into CIA computers to obtain these documents, as has been suggested in the press," Feinstein stated.
