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What do the CIA and the lowliest bureaucrats have in common?

This morning I perused this post at Rolling Stone, highlighting 11 “Jaw-Dropping” lines from the recent speech by the loathsome Dianne Feinstein. You know the speech; the one in which she condemned CIA spying in the strongest terms, those terms operative only when they are spying on her. As for the rest of us, her advice to the CIA: go to it.

Anyway, I was struck by this jawdropper:

  1. When the Intelligence Committee launched a full-fledged investigation into what Senator Feinstein describes as the “the horrible details of a CIA program that never, never, never should have existed,” the CIA unleashed documents as if it were trying to bury needles in a haystack.

The number of pages ran quickly to the thousands, tens of thousands, the hundreds of thousands, and then into the millions. The documents that were provided came without any index, without organizational structure. It was a true “document dump” that our committee staff had to go through and make sense of.

via Rolling Stone

This is a great example of the phenomenon I mentioned in a recent post:

If you've ever been on a Town Council, Board of Education or other governmental body, you know it is not unusual for town officials to send board members giant packages of written materials shortly before a meeting. One can hardly complain about getting all relevant information, but the fact is that the members, most of whom have jobs and lives, don't have the time to read through what they're given to find the hidden gems the bureaucrats don't want them to notice.

So, it looks like the CIA is on to the same tricks as Groton's Town Manager, except apparently the Senate Staff has more time on their collective hands than the typical town council member, and they found some of the hidden gems, which were then promptly stolen back by the CIA.

Now, on another, but related, note: What are the odds of someone in the media to whom Feinstein will make herself available asking her about her monumental hypocrisy?

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