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Whadda you know! The CIA misled everyone

Now, what a surprise!    A piece in The Washington Post tells us that the CIA misled both the government and the public about its activities.   One then has to wonder why someone like Edward Snowden ought not be elevated to hero for revealing all the nefarious activities of the NSA and others - the latest details of which were published in Der Spiegel just now.

"A report by the Senate Intelligence Committee concludes that the CIA misled the government and the public about aspects of its brutal interrogation program for years - concealing details about the severity of its methods, overstating the significance of plots and prisoners, and taking credit for critical pieces of intelligence that detainees had in fact surrendered before they were subjected to harsh techniques.

The report, built around detailed chronologies of dozens of CIA detainees, documents a long-standing pattern of unsubstantiated claims as agency officials sought permission to use - and later tried to defend - excruciating interrogation methods that yielded little, if any, significant intelligence, according to US officials who have reviewed the document.

"The CIA described [its program] repeatedly both to the Department of Justice and eventually to Congress as getting unique, otherwise unobtainable intelligence that helped disrupt terrorist plots and save thousands of lives," said one official briefed on the report. "Was that actually true? The answer is no."

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