The Senate’s recently released report on the CIA’s extreme interrogations in the years after the Sept. 11 attacks is still reverberating in Washington, and this time the fallout could impact the career of one of the report’s authors.
The Obama administration quietly nominated Alissa Starzak for a high-level legal position at the Pentagon while Democrats still retained majority control of the Senate in early December, Fox News reported Wednesday.
Starzak was a senior staffer on the Senate Intelligence Committee who spent years investigating the CIA’s interrogation techniques and secret prisons during the Bush administration.
A former assistant general counsel for the CIA who more recently went on to become a deputy general counsel for legislative affairs at the Defense Department, Starzak also is facing accusations that she was one of two Intelligence panel staffers who Republicans on the committee accuse of stealing a classified study of the agency’s detainee treatment prepared by former CIA Director Leon Panetta.
Known as the “Panetta Review,” the document provided the Democratic-controlled Intelligence Committee with a detailed outline of an internal CIA review of interrogation practices. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and other Democrats have denied that Starzak or any other staffer did anything wrong in removing the document from a location in which the CIA set up for the panel to conduct its investigation and search agency documents.
The CIA, now led by John Brennan, has waged a seven-year battle with Feinstein and the Intelligence Committee to block the release of its report on the extreme interrogation tactics and once-secret international rendition sites where they took place. Feinstein and Brennan, along with agency lawyers, spent months this year wrangling over redactions when Feinstein pressed forward with her push to release the report.
The Armed Services panel approved Starzak’s nomination by voice vote Dec. 9, Fox News reported. The nomination never made it to the Senate floor, expired a week later and now must be re-submitted to the panel in the next session of Congress.
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who strongly supported the release of the Senate’s report on CIA interrogation practices, labeling what took place “torture,” will chair the Armed Services Committee panel next year, and it is unclear whether he will resubmit Starzak’s nomination.
A spokesperson for McCain told Fox News the senators could not be reached for comment on the matter Wednesday. The office did not respond to a follow-up inquiry from the Washington Examiner.
