October 27, 2009 / by emptywheel

 

The CIA’s Five Lies

As a number of you have pointed out, the House Intelligence Committee have revealed preliminary results of its investigations into the CIA’s lies and found–wait for it–the CIA lies.

In a hearing of the House Intelligence committee this afternoon, Reps. Anna Eshoo and Jan Schakowsky, both Democrats, pointed to at least five instances going back to at least 2001 in which the C.I.A. withheld information from or lied to Congress.

Those five lies are:

  1. Lies about torture (to Pelosi)
  2. The assassination program that started this probe
  3. The Peruvian plane shoot-down that got Crazy Pete Hoekstra on board
  4. The destruction of the torture tapes
  5. ???

So, first of all, I’m wondering where number 5 is–I’ll follow up tomorrow on that. Was this hearing designed to let CIA know that HPSCI was going to reveal number 5, or did they do so today?

But I’m interested in the inclusion of the torture tape destruction. Is HPSCI asserting that CIA lied about the desruction of the tapes … which would imply that the Committee asked about it in the first place? (I’ll remind you that when the tapes were destroyed, Jane Harman was still on the committee making a stink about the CIA’s other lies about torture)? Or is the Committee just including the torture tape destruction as one misrepresentation among others?

Update: Here’s how The Hill describes it (and they, too, list just four lies).

In addition, the CIA may have failed to properly notify Congress about the 2005 destruction of videotapes recording the interrogation of al Qaeda operatives by intelligence officials, Eshoo and Schakowsky said.

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Originally Posted @ https://www.emptywheel.net/2009/10/27/the-cias-lies/