Why Is The Justice Department Gunning For The CIA?

Photo from The Guardian

Stalking The CIA: Justice Lawyers At Daggers Drawn With The ­Intelligence Community. -- Weekly Standard

Last week, Bill Gertz of the Washington Times broke news of a fight between the Central Intelligence Agency and the Department of Justice. The CIA wants Justice to investigate aggressively whether any laws were broken by attorneys working for the John Adams Project, a joint initiative of the ACLU and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. The lawyers reportedly provided photographs of CIA interrogators to defense attorneys, who then showed them to al Qaeda terrorists held at Guantánamo Bay.

Why would lawyers do that? Gertz says it was done “in an attempt to have the terrorism suspects identify the interrogators in order to call them as witnesses in future trials.” The John Adams Project’s lawyers wanted to use court proceedings intended to try mass-murdering terrorists for another purpose: to put the Bush administration and the CIA on trial.

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My Comment: Indeed why .... why is the Justice Department after the CIA, but accommodating to mass murderers. Something screwy is going on here .... and this misplaced sense of priorities has the potential to blow up in our faces.

As for morale in the CIA .... I am sure it is at rock bottom right now .... which was probably the intent of these lawyers in the Justice Department to begin with.

Will The Justice Department Now Help The CIA? -- A Commentary

CIA Turns to Justice Department for Help -- Commentary Magazine

Eli Lake and Sara Carter at the Washington Times have uncovered another development concerning the embattled CIA. This comes on the heels, of course, of the string of humiliations and intra-administration struggles lost by Leon Panetta’s agency (e.g., release of the enhanced interrogation memos, re-investigation of CIA operatives, loss of responsibility for high-value target interrogations). Chief among these has been the nonstop attacks from the Democrats in Congress, who have accused the CIA of “lying” to them.

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My Comment: I agree with the above skepticism. This Justice Department has become polarized to the extent that it makes the past Bush Justice Department neutral and compliant to the constitution to the extreme.

Secrets and people have been endangered by leaks, and legal actions against CIA officers (real or imagined) will have a detrimental impact on America's Intelligence Agencies.

The Justice Department may not be helpful now .... but there will be a day of reckoning one day, and if it is not through this administration, it will be through the next one.