Mike Levin: “very briefly, on the question of the independent commission, my good friend from Virginia rattled off a bunch of…”

“very briefly, on the question of the independent commission, my good friend from Virginia rattled off a bunch of statistics as to how many investigations have taken place, how many hearings have been held, how many witnesses have been interviewed, with something like 12 major investigations. We have had 40 closed hearings, I think he said, 30 open hearings, and 16,000 pages of documents have been obtained. As I thought was going to happen, those kinds of numbers were going to be utilized. The problem is, they are not particularly relevant to the point which this commission amendment seeks to address, which is there are huge gaps in these investigations. There could be 20 hearings or 50 hearings or 100 hearings, but these investigations have not gotten to 5 major points, such as, What is the role of the intelligence community? The people who have done the investigating have said they have not gotten to that point, they have not reached that issue. The CIA has not cooperated with them. So we have that huge gap in the investigations that have taken place so far. Are there secret prisons around the world being maintained? What about the ghost detainees? There is not a week that goes by that we are not reading about an issue that relates to the intelligence community, particularly the CIA's role in terms of interrogating detainees. Yet that is an almost complete blank slate.…”