Well to be fair it is quite likely that the CIA was doing this legally which just goes to show the uselessness of the laws and the oversight provided by this particular committee. I think the CIA used to be prevented from operating domestically but that this has changed at least for terrorism.
And this was clearly a case of terrorism because that report makes the US look bad and it could be used within terrorist propaganda.[0]
[0] I wish I was being sarcastic but I think this is actually reality now [1]
I personally don't care about how good or bad the politics are. The CIA clearly broke the law and anyone directly involved needs to be held accountable to the fullest extent possible. At the very least Director Brennan needs to be brought up on charges of perjury. Between him and Director Clapper the precedent is being set that its OK to lie to congress especially if you're a member of the Intelligence community.
We simply can NOT have bodies with the power of the CIA and NSA spying on our own government or people. There's no way that ends well for us as a nation.
Is there some sort of incompetence charge? That way later when he claims not to have direct knowledge he must be dismissed immediately on the basis that anyone who is the executive of the CIA and doesn't know that the CIA spied on the Senate Intel cmte, isn't fit to run the CIA.
This is worth parsing. Is it really incompetence? Or is it actually a very high level of foresight? As a general rule, the only thing people are evered fired for is breaking the law. While there are exceptions to this, in an organization like the CIA, such would be aking to admitting terminal liability at the next level within the organization.
(This seems to be why companies like GM never admit to an engineering flaw; or why wall street firms are never prosecuted criminally to the full extent of the law.)
I believe that if a CIA director were actually oblivious to such a flagrant violation of law/ethics/trust/separation of powers, whatever you want to call it; then that would be incompetence. If after faced with the facts, he refused to immediately produce the perpetrators, that makes it malevolent, he is now a co-conspirator.
Of course, I don't really believe it is incompetence, but rather, as you say the result of careful planning, or very competent crisis handling.
If we can't prevent guys like Brennan from playing the "I didn't know... honest!" gambit, then at least that could trigger the "incompetence response" which would be immediate dismissal, and hopefully change the rules of the game a bit, even if it allowed the criminal a comparably graceful exit.
Plausible deniability is a term coined by the CIA in the early 1960s to describe the withholding of information from senior officials in order to protect them from repercussions in the event that illegal or unpopular activities by the CIA became public knowledge.
You are dealing with purposeful behaviour. One mans 'obliviousness' is another man's 'innocence'. In other words, it helps to not mis-understand this situation as the work of the ill-informed or 'incompetent'. It sort of does a dis-service to the complexity of the problem, here.
(And I'm certainly not arguing about the existence of a problem).
> One mans 'obliviousness' is another man's 'innocence'. In other words, it helps to not mis-understand this situation as the work of the ill-informed or 'incompetent'.
What do you propose? Just because some people understand it as a deception or a possible deception, that understanding is not universal. Plenty of people accept these "ignorance" claims making it so that executives are able to effectively use the plausible deniability gambit. How else can we work around it?
And this was clearly a case of terrorism because that report makes the US look bad and it could be used within terrorist propaganda.[0]
[0] I wish I was being sarcastic but I think this is actually reality now [1]
[1] See David Miranda detention at Heathrow.