© Gary Cameron/Reuters
That's what Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D) of California charged Tuesday in an extraordinary Senate floor speech. The CIA has denied wrongdoing and has its own questions about how Intelligence Committee staffers turned up a sensitive internal report on the agency's past use of harsh interrogation techniques.
Here are nine questions and answers about a complex story that starts with waterboarding and ends in a secret CIA facility in northern Virginia.
1. What's the background?
The CIA began using so-called enhanced interrogation techniques on terror suspects at black sites around the world in 2002. These included use of waterboarding to simulate drowning, stress positions, and sleep deprivation.
Following a series of news reports detailing this activity, the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2009 authorized a comprehensive review of the program. While panel lawmakers had been informed of the program by agency briefers, a preliminary staff inquiry showed that the interrogations were harsher than they had been described, according to Senator Feinstein, the committee chairman. The panel was also concerned about the CIA's destruction of some videotapes of interrogations, seeing it as possible destruction of evidence.
2. How do you investigate a spy agency?
Very carefully. The CIA agreed to provide Intelligence Committee staffers with documents regarding the program, but only at a secure CIA facility near agency headquarters in Langley, Va., not in the Senate itself.
The agency set up a sparsely furnished work area for the staffers, complete with its own computer network. These computers were isolated from CIA networks. The only agency employees permitted to access them were information technology workers, according to an agreement reached between Feinstein and the CIA. Agency higher-ups were supposed to keep their hands off the inquiry.
3. Did the CIA cooperate?
Yes, in the sense of providing raw information. Eventually the agency turned over 6.2 million pages of documents dealing with the enhanced interrogation program.
The sheer flood of information was difficult for committee staffers to deal with. They asked for an electronic searching tool from the CIA, which provided it. They also began making paper copies of key reports.
4. What was the first sign of trouble?
In 2010, Senate staffers figured out that some documents they had already seen had been deleted from their special computer system. The CIA denied this at first, but eventually discovered that in fact more than 900 documents, or pages of documents, had been withdrawn in violation of the agreement between the agency and the Intelligence panel. In May 2010, the CIA's congressional liaison apologized and said it would not happen again.
5. Did staff find any extra-sensitive stuff?
Sometime in 2010, according to Feinstein, the staffers working within the CIA safe room came across what is now called the "Panetta report." It was a summary of most of the important documents provided by the CIA to the Senate, with added commentary and analysis as to the importance of the information - prepared for then-Director of the CIA Leon Panetta.
How the staffers found this paper is at the heart of the current dispute. Anonymous administration sources have alleged that the staffers may have discovered it by breaching a firewall separating their computer system from the CIA's own networks, or otherwise hacking into a place they weren't authorized to go. Feinstein on Tuesday denied this in strenuous terms. She said the searching tool provided by the CIA produced the Panetta report after certain parameters were entered.
6. Why is the Panetta report so special?
It's important because it contradicts some of the CIA's other statements on enhanced interrogation, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee chairman.
Eventually the Senate panel produced a mammoth, 6,300-page report on the interrogation program. It is scathing, reportedly. It's still classified. Staffers submitted it to the CIA for the agency's response at the end of 2012, setting off months of acrimony between the two sides as the agency responded to what it says are factual and analytical inaccuracies.
But the CIA's official response to the report is belied by Panetta report contents, Feinstein said Tuesday.
"Some of these important parts that the CIA now disputes in our committee study are clearly acknowledged in the CIA's own internal Panetta review. To say the least, this is puzzling. How can the CIA's official response to our study stand factually in conflict with its own internal review?" Feinstein said on the Senate floor.
7. When did the fighting start?
In late 2013, Feinstein requested that the CIA hand over a full copy of the Panetta report. It declined, saying among other things that it was an internal work review product, not a final document. Then in January of this year, CIA Director John Brennan informed top Intelligence panel lawmakers that the CIA had conducted a search of the committee's computer network at its CIA workroom - to determine if staffers had already seen the sensitive Panetta report and, if so, how they got it.
Yet the CIA has not asked the committee directly if it has had access to this review, according to Feinstein.
"In place of asking any questions, the CIA's unauthorized search of the committee computers was followed by an allegation, which we have now seen repeated anonymously in the press, that the committee staff had somehow obtained the document through unauthorized or criminal means," Feinstein said.
8. Who's in trouble now?
The CIA has referred the case to the Department of Justice, presumably to see if Senate staff members can be prosecuted for their actions. Feinstein claims that this is an attempt to intimidate her committee and that the CIA is in turn liable to charges that it has violated the Fourth Amendment through an illegal search of the committee's computers.
Feinstein pointedly noted that the acting CIA chief counsel, identified in the press as Robert Eatinger, was the chief lawyer for the interrogation effort and is mentioned by name in the Senate report more than 1,600 times. Mr. Eatinger and other CIA officials provided false information to the Intelligence Committee regarding the interrogations, Feinstein alleged.
"And now this individual is sending a crimes report to the Department of Justice on the actions of congressional staff," Feinstein said.
9. Whose side is the White House on?
Presidential spokesman Jay Carney on Tuesday said the White House can't comment on the specific allegations since there are ongoing Justice Department and inspector general investigations into the matter. He said President Obama supports the Senate Intelligence Committee's longstanding probe into the Bush-era interrogation practices and would like to see the panel's report declassified, eventually.
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