**DONOTDELETE**
09-17-2001, 10:59 PM
Sen. Torricelli Played Key Role in Closing Down CIA Ops
Wes Vernon, NewsMax.com
Tuesday, Sept. 18, 2001
WASHINGTON - Sen. Robert Torricelli, D-N.J., led congressional efforts in the mid-1990s that handcuffed the CIA's abilities to recruit spies - a key policy that helped allow the attacks of Sept. 11 to take place with no intelligence warnings.
Current and former CIA operatives say that Clinton administration policies, which forbade the CIA from recruiting known terrorists and other criminals, left the U.S. government bereft of all intelligence about such terrorist groups.
In 1995, then-Rep. Robert Torricelli, D-N.J., made secrets public at the behest of left-wing activist Bianca Jagger, his girlfriend at the time, according to Newark Star-Ledger columnist Paul Mulshine in the January/February issue of Heterodoxy.
The secrets suggested that the CIA had on its payroll one or more unsavory characters who had been involved in murder.
Torricelli gave away secrets he obtained through his membership on the House Intelligence Committee.
This so outraged then-Speaker Newt Gingrich that he tried to have the New Jersey Democrat kicked off the panel.
Later, Torricelli was criticized in a committee report for having compromised American intelligence-gathering abilities around the world, adding that numerous CIA sources had decided to stop giving information for fear they would be outed by a congressman.
At the time, Torricelli's activities and leaks against the CIA garnered a large amount of press attention.
Mulshine’s article showed how Torricelli’s action in giving away the name of a CIA source in Guatemala was based not on fact, but on a conspiracy theory of "the loony left,” as Heterodoxy later characterized it.
The lawmaker was accused of having leaped to a number of inaccurate conclusions about the CIA’s role in the deaths of an American hotel owner named Michael DeVine and a Guatemalan guerilla named Efrain Bamaca Velazquez.
In its 1997 report, the House Intelligence Committee had this to say about the antics of Torricelli, by then a senator:
"None of the allegations raised by Rep. Torricelli in the March 22, 1995 letter to the president [Clinton] or subsequent public statements concerning the involvement of the CIA in the DeVine and Bamaca deaths in Guatemala have proved true.”
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2001/9/17/162056.shtml
Wes Vernon, NewsMax.com
Tuesday, Sept. 18, 2001
WASHINGTON - Sen. Robert Torricelli, D-N.J., led congressional efforts in the mid-1990s that handcuffed the CIA's abilities to recruit spies - a key policy that helped allow the attacks of Sept. 11 to take place with no intelligence warnings.
Current and former CIA operatives say that Clinton administration policies, which forbade the CIA from recruiting known terrorists and other criminals, left the U.S. government bereft of all intelligence about such terrorist groups.
In 1995, then-Rep. Robert Torricelli, D-N.J., made secrets public at the behest of left-wing activist Bianca Jagger, his girlfriend at the time, according to Newark Star-Ledger columnist Paul Mulshine in the January/February issue of Heterodoxy.
The secrets suggested that the CIA had on its payroll one or more unsavory characters who had been involved in murder.
Torricelli gave away secrets he obtained through his membership on the House Intelligence Committee.
This so outraged then-Speaker Newt Gingrich that he tried to have the New Jersey Democrat kicked off the panel.
Later, Torricelli was criticized in a committee report for having compromised American intelligence-gathering abilities around the world, adding that numerous CIA sources had decided to stop giving information for fear they would be outed by a congressman.
At the time, Torricelli's activities and leaks against the CIA garnered a large amount of press attention.
Mulshine’s article showed how Torricelli’s action in giving away the name of a CIA source in Guatemala was based not on fact, but on a conspiracy theory of "the loony left,” as Heterodoxy later characterized it.
The lawmaker was accused of having leaped to a number of inaccurate conclusions about the CIA’s role in the deaths of an American hotel owner named Michael DeVine and a Guatemalan guerilla named Efrain Bamaca Velazquez.
In its 1997 report, the House Intelligence Committee had this to say about the antics of Torricelli, by then a senator:
"None of the allegations raised by Rep. Torricelli in the March 22, 1995 letter to the president [Clinton] or subsequent public statements concerning the involvement of the CIA in the DeVine and Bamaca deaths in Guatemala have proved true.”
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2001/9/17/162056.shtml