Jason Leopold had an important update on the torture report that — because he’s doing rolling updates — hasn’t gotten sufficient attention.
Leopold obtained the contracting documents of the company, Centra, that drove up costs for the report by reviewing every document turned over to the Senate Intelligence Committee. But after he posted those documents, the CIA’s story about how much Centra got paid for those specific tasks changed. After 7 months of public claims that the then-unnamed contractor had gotten paid $40 million, the CIA all of a sudden changed its mind.
CIA spokesman Ryan Trapani disputed VICE News’ “interpretation” of the Centra contract.
“A significant portion of the contract cost pertained to services completely distinct from, and wholly unrelated to, the Senate Intelligence Committee review,” Trapani said, backtracking on the agency’s statement last year that the $40 million the agency spent was due entirely to “the committee’s demands of CIA in this investigation.” “In terms of the services performed in support of the committee review, CIA dedicated substantial resources to provide the committee unprecedented access to millions of pages of documents as expeditiously as possible, consistent with the security requirements for such highly classified, sensitive documents.”
That’s troubling because it runs counter to what everyone on SSCI believed, including then Chair Dianne Feinstein, who has been rebutting claims that the committee itself spent the money ever since it became public last year.
The overwhelming majority of the $40 million cost was incurred by the CIA and was caused by the CIA’s own unprecedented demands to keep documents away from the committee. Rather than provide documents for the committee to review in its own secure Senate office—as is standard practice—the CIA insisted on establishing a separate leased facility and a “stand-alone” computer network for committee use.
Which raises the question of where the claim that the entirety of that $40 million was spent on the torture report came from — which Leopold notes in an update came from this footnote in the Republican views on the report (and by association, a 2012 letter from CIA’s then number 3, Sue Bromley).
Not only was Bromley CIA’s number 3 when she wrote the letter, but in the years in question, she cycled through as Deputy Director of the Counterterrorism Center.
V. Sue Bromley, an Agency veteran of 28 years, will become our new Associate Deputy Director. Sue has served as our Chief Financial Officer since June 2009. As a former OMB director, I can attest to her exceptional skill and diligence in managing one of the most complex budgets in government.
Before that, Sue helped lead our analytic effort for two years as Deputy Director for Intelligence. She has made vital contributions to the fight against al-Qa’ida and its violent allies, both as Deputy Director of the Counterterrorism Center and as Chief of the Operations and Management Staff in the National Clandestine Service, where she helped plan, justify, and distribute a large increase in funding for counterterrorism operations after the September 11th attacks.
Now, it’s possible that the Republicans just took her letter out of context and no one on the Democratic side checked their math. There are a lot of references in the minority report (heh) that don’t make sense.
But Bromley is a money gal. She shouldn’t be making mistakes about contracts, and certainly not to the scale that appears to have happened — all in such a way as to serve the pro-torture narrative which in turn serves to protect … the counterterrorism center.
At least according to the story the CIA is currently telling, everyone on the CIA’s oversight committee grossly misunderstood a $40 million expenditure.
Why?