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Lawmaker: CIA may have broken law by lying to Congress

By Daniel Tencer

Published: July 10, 2009
Updated 4 months ago




The CIA may have intentionally violated the National Security Act — the law that created the CIA — by keeping a program secret from Congress for at least six years, a House Intelligence Committee member told the press Friday.

“The systematic deception by the CIA is a possible violation of the National Security Act and, at a minimum, a blatant disregard of this committee’s oversight authority,” Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) wrote in a letter, obtained by AP, to House Intelligence Committee Chair Silvestre Reyes (D-TX).

On Wednesday, RAW STORY reported that CIA Director Leon Panetta admitted to the House Intelligence Committee that the agency had misled Congress for years about a secret program that had been in place since 2001.

On Friday, RAW STORY reported that the program in question may have been a secret CIA assassination squad run out of the office of then-Vice President Dick Cheney. For national security reasons, members of Congress’s intelligence committees would not confirm or deny the reports.

In an interview with AP, Rep. Schakowsky said: “It’s not as if this was an oversight and over the years it just got buried. There was a decision under several directors of the CIA and [the Bush] administration not to tell the Congress.”

That decision “is worthy of an investigation in and of itself,” Schakowsky told Politico. “I think it’s a fundamental question whether or not it is widely understood by the intelligence committee and the administration what there is a law that they have to tell…members of Congress about programs like this.”

CIA chief Panetta, an Obama appointee, only found out about the program four months into his tenure, and convened a meeting with the House Intelligence Committee the next day — June 24 — to inform Congressional leaders of the program, the Washington Post reported Friday.

The Post also poured some water on the assassination-ring theory, citing unnamed “current and former administration officials familiar with the program” who said it was an “intelligence-collection activity run by the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center … It was not a covert action, which by law would have required a presidential finding and a report to Congress.”

Both Politico and the Washington Post cite an anonymous “Bush administration official” who described the program as being “on-again, off-again” and never fully implemented. Yet Schakowsky’s description of the CIA program as a “very serious” covert initiative seems to indicate something more controversial than a data-collection initiative suffering from false starts.

As RAW STORY reported, New Yorker investigative reporter Seymour Hersh first mentioned the alleged existence of a Cheney-run CIA assassination ring during a speech in March.

“Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us,” Hersh told an audience at the University of Minnesota.





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