The United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is dedicated to overseeing the United States Intelligence Community—the agencies and bureaus of the federal government of the United States that provide information and analysis for leaders of the executive and legislative branches. The Committee was established in 1976 by the 94th Congress.
The Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities before and after the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001, is the official name of the inquiry conducted by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence into the activities of the U.S. Intelligence Community in connection with the attacks of September 11, 2001. The investigation began in February 2002 and the final report was released in December 2002.
In the United States, Office of Inspector General (OIG) is a generic term for the oversight division of a federal or state agency aimed at preventing inefficient or unlawful operations within their parent agency. Such offices are attached to many federal executive departments, independent federal agencies, as well as state and local governments. Each office includes an inspector general and employees charged with identifying, auditing, and investigating fraud, waste, abuse, embezzlement and mismanagement of any kind within the executive department.
David Spears Addington is an American lawyer who was legal counsel (2001–2005) and chief of staff (2005–2009) to Vice President Dick Cheney. He was the vice president of domestic and economic policy studies at The Heritage Foundation from 2010 to 2016.
Mohammed Farik Bin Amin, alias Zubair Zaid, is a Malaysian who is alleged to be a senior member of Jemaah Islamiyah and al Qaeda. He is currently in American custody in the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. He is one of the 14 detainees who had previously been held for years at CIA black sites. He is currently awaiting trial in a military commission. In the ODNI biographies of those 14, Amin is described as a direct subordinate of Hambali. Farik Amin is also a cousin of well-known Malaysian terrorist Zulkifli Abdhir.
John L. Helgerson is a retired career intelligence officer who spent 38 years at the Central Intelligence Agency, his final role was CIA Inspector General from 2002 until his retirement in 2009. He was responsible for investigating CIA interrogations of terror suspects, and compiled a report critical of agency practices in 2005 which was released in 2009 by the Obama administration.
The United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has been accused of involvement in drug trafficking. Books and investigations on the subject that have received general notice include works by the historian Alfred McCoy, professor and diplomat Peter Dale Scott, journalists Gary Webb and Alexander Cockburn, and writer Larry Collins. These claims have led to investigations by the United States government, including hearings and reports by the United States House of Representatives, Senate, Department of Justice, and the CIA's Inspector General.
Michael Vincent Hayden is a retired United States Air Force four-star general and former Director of the National Security Agency, Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence, and Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. He also serves as a professor at the George Mason University - Schar School of Policy and Government. Hayden currently co-chairs the Bipartisan Policy Center's Electric Grid Cyber Security Initiative. In 2017, Hayden became a national security analyst for CNN.
"Enhanced interrogation techniques" or "enhanced interrogation" was a program of systematic torture of detainees by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and various components of the U.S. Armed Forces at remote sites around the world—including Bagram, Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and Bucharest—authorized by officials of the George W. Bush administration. Methods used included beating, binding in contorted stress positions, hooding, subjection to deafening noise, sleep disruption, sleep deprivation to the point of hallucination, deprivation of food, drink, and medical care for wounds, as well as waterboarding, walling, sexual humiliation, rape, sexual assault, subjection to extreme heat or extreme cold, and confinement in small coffin-like boxes. A Guantanamo inmate's drawings of some of these tortures, to which he himself was subjected, were published in The New York Times. Some of these techniques fall under the category known as "white room torture". Several detainees endured medically unnecessary "rectal rehydration", "rectal fluid resuscitation", and "rectal feeding". In addition to brutalizing detainees, there were threats to their families such as threats to harm children, and threats to sexually abuse or to cut the throat of detainees' mothers.
United States Intelligence Community Oversight duties are shared by both the executive and legislative branches of the government. Oversight, in this case, is the supervision of intelligence agencies, and making them accountable for their actions. Generally oversight bodies look at the following general issues: following policymaker needs, the quality of analysis, operations, and legality of actions.
Robert Fuller is an agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation who has worked in counter-terrorism. He has questioned suspected terrorists, been a handler of informants in the U.S., and testified in both federal court and Guantanamo military commission trials.
The CIA publishes organizational charts of its agency. Here are a few examples.
There have been various arrangements to handle the Central Intelligence Agency's relationship with the United States Congress.
The President's Surveillance Program (PSP) is a collection of secret intelligence activities authorized by the President of the United States George W. Bush after the September 11 attacks in 2001 as part of the War on Terrorism. Information collected under this program was protected within a Sensitive Compartmented Information security compartment codenamed STELLARWIND.
James Elmer Mitchell is an American psychologist and former member of the United States Air Force. From 2002, after his retirement from the military, to 2009, his company Mitchell Jessen and Associates received $81 million on contract from the CIA to carry out the torture of detainees, referred to as "enhanced interrogation techniques" that resulted in little credible information.
John Anthony Rizzo was an American attorney who worked as a lawyer in the Central Intelligence Agency for 34 years. He was the deputy counsel or acting general counsel of the CIA for the first nine years of the War on Terror, during which the CIA held dozens of detainees in black site prisons around the globe.
Robert Joseph "Bob" Eatinger was Deputy General Counsel for Operations for the Central Intelligence Agency, serving as Acting General Counsel of the CIA from 2009 to March 2014. He has served as a lawyer in various capacities, in the CIA and Navy during the U.S. War on Terror, during which the CIA held dozens of detainees in black site prisons around the globe.
The Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency's Detention and Interrogation Program is a report compiled by the bipartisan United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) about the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)'s Detention and Interrogation Program and its use of torture during interrogation in U.S. government communiqués on detainees in CIA custody. The report covers CIA activities before, during, and after the "War on Terror". The initial report was approved on December 13, 2012, by a vote of 9–6, with seven Democrats, one Independent, and one Republican voting in favor of the report and six Republicans voting in opposition.
CIA black sites refer to the black sites that are controlled by the CIA and used by the U.S. government in its War on Terror to detain enemy combatants.
