By Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)
September 16, 2016
VIPS describes how a constitutional crisis emerged when President Barack Obama tried to help CIA Director John Brennan scuttle a comprehensive Senate Intelligence Committee report, based on original CIA banality-of-evil cables, revealing the grotesque, heinous torture techniques used by the CIA after 9/11. For the first time in recent memory, Congress faced the President down. Committee chairman Dianne Feinstein rose to the occasion and refused to throw her intrepid investigators under the bus.
It is a truly gripping story, about which few details have been available –UNTIL NOW. The Guardian’s Spencer Ackerman has interviewed the Senate Intelligence Committee’s top investigator, Daniel Johns, who took major risks to put an unvarnished report together and get it published. Sen. Feinstein had to face both the CIA AND its powerful apologist, President Obama, to get the report published before Republicans took over the Senate.
The VIPS Memorandum thanking Sen. Feinstein, and asking her to see that the Guardian interviews of Daniel Jones get some play in U.S. media (there has been some kind of embargo so far), gives just a small taste for this fascinating inside story. But it is not just “inside baseball,” so to speak. Rather it has much wider relevance. Perhaps most interesting are two things they reveal in gory detail: (1) Obama’s strong support of Brennan’s attempts to deep-six the report; and (2) Sen. Feinstein’s determination to prevent that from happening.