Senate sets up departure of top CIA lawyer by lifting block on successor

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/14/senate-departure-top-cia-lawyer-successor

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The top CIA lawyer at the heart of a clash between the agency and its political overseers has been replaced, after senators lifted a block on confirming his successor.

Senator Mark Udall, a Colorado Democrat, said on Thursday that he released a procedural obstacle he had placed on the CIA’s nominee for its next general counsel, Caroline Krass, setting up the departure of its acting senior attorney, Robert Eatinger.

Krass had already cleared the Senate committee, but Udall put her on hold to gain leverage for the committee in its struggle for access to CIA documents relevant to its extensive study of the agency’s post-9/11 interrogation, rendition and detention program, which involved torture.

The Senate voted Thursday to confirm Krass, sending her to Langley at a time when relations between the CIA and the Senate have reached a nadir. While Eatinger was never going to be the agency’s permanent general counsel, he is now the first explicit casualty in the row between the CIA and its Senate overseers.

Eatinger, a longtime agency lawyer with counter-terrorism experience, was cited on Monday by the panel’s chairwoman, Dianne Feinstein of California, in her seminal speech lashing out at the CIA. Without naming him, Feinstein indicated he was instrumental in the agency’s now-abandoned torture practices, and had been cited over 1,600 times in the classified Senate torture investigation.

Feinstein said Eatinger, whom senators have taken care not to name, had alerted the Justice Department to her staff’s removal of a CIA document from a classified facility – which both Feinstein and Udall cite as a conflict of interest.

Ahead of Krass’s arrival at the CIA, Udall called on Eatinger to immediately recuse himself from any internal matters related to either the torture inquiry or the Senate panel generally. “We need to correct the record on the CIA’s coercive detention and interrogation program and declassify the Senate intelligence committee’s exhaustive study of it. I released my hold on Caroline Krass’s nomination today and voted for her to help change the direction of the agency,” Udall said in a statement on Thursday.

In a statement, CIA director John Brennan said was “extremely pleased” that the Senate had confirmed Krass, and praised Eatinger as “an exemplary public servant who has demonstrated throughout his career exceptional competence and integrity”.

At Krass’s confirmation hearing in December, Udall publicly disclosed the existence of a document that has proved to be crucial to the committee’s fight with the CIA: a document the committee calls the “internal Panetta review,” prepared for former CIA director Leon Panetta and listing internal memoranda and other materials the agency provided to the committee’s inquiry.

Committee staff had gained access to the document seemingly by accident, in a Virginia facility the CIA set up for the committee. According to Feinstein, the review document conceded many points in the committee review of the torture program that the agency contested, and, citing a history of CIA destruction of evidence, surreptitiously took a printout of the classified document to the committee’s safe in the Hart Senate office building.

In her speech on Tuesday, Feinstein said the CIA had conducted potentially unconstitutional and illegal searches of computers of congressional staffers investigating the agency’s interrogation and detention program.

She called the dispute “a defining moment for the oversight role of our intelligence committee”, while another veteran Democrat, senator Patrick Leahy, later described her speech as the most important any senator had made to the house.

For its part, the CIA has accused Senate staffers of conducting potential criminal activity, and the Department of Justice is conducting an investigation into all the claims.