Last week it became clear that the head of the CIA, John Brennan lied when he said: “As far as the allegations of CIA hacking into Senate computers, nothing could be further from the truth. We wouldn’t do that. I mean, that’s just beyond the scope of reason.”

Yes, it is beyond the scope of reason, but it turns out that in fact the CIA was spying on the staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Last year, James Clapper, the head of the NSA, responded falsely to a question from Sen. Ron Wyden when he claimed that the NSA did not spy on Americans. Sen. Ron Wyden asked whether the National Security Agency “collected data on millions of Americans.” Clapper testified falsely, saying: “No sir, not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertently, perhaps, collect but not wittingly.” Documents leaked by Edward Snowden showed his statement to be false and in fact Americans are subjected to dragnet surveillance by the NSA.

President Obama has expressed his full support for both men, the Department of Justice has taken no action to investigate or prosecute either.

These are not minor lies. The separation of powers that gives Congress the power to be a check on the executive branch is foundational to the U.S. Constitution. We are supposed to have three equal branches in order to prevent abuse. How can there be any check on the intelligence community if they spy on Congress and then lie about it in congressional testimony? Already intelligence oversight is too weak and allows intelligence abuse, this practice will surely intimidate Congress and create an even weaker check on intelligence agencies.

And, the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution which was clearly designed to prevent law enforcement searches of Americans unless there is a warrant based on probable cause loses all its meaning if an intelligence agency can conduct dragnet surveillance of the American people as the NSA is doing. The Fourth Amendment has been weakened over the years by courts interpreting it to allow searches based on less than probable cause, without warrants or based on warrants justified by anonymous sources; but the NSA went further to decimate it of all meaning.

President Obama who advertised himself as a constitutional scholar has put an imprimatur of approval on the actions by the leaders of the CIA and NSA by not demanding their resignation. His actions are an affront to the Constitution and to every American. Does he really see these lies as minor offenses that do not require action to hold Clapper and Brennan responsible? Is President Obama, for some reason, afraid of the intelligence agencies?

Surely there must be some people in the field of U.S. intelligence who could replace these men and bring some integrity to these agencies. What message is President Obama sending to the people who work in the CIA and NSA about the need to respond honestly when testifying before Congress? Or, the necessity of telling the truth to the American people? The failure to demand accountability ensures these practices will grow.

U.S. intelligence agencies are in a crisis. Their role in foreign affairs has included supporting coups of democratic governments, spying on foreign leaders, taking leadership in illegal actions such as torture and drone murders as well as other unethical actions. The massive intelligence complex, closely intertwined with corporate security and intelligence actions, put the privacy of all Americans at risk. We cannot have leaders who have shown deep ethical failures. It is time for Clapper and Brennan to go. This makes it even more important for Obama to demand the resignations of the heads of the CIA and FBI.

Meanwhile, Trevor Timm reported in The Guardian:

As reports emerged that an internal investigation by the Central Intelligence Agency’s inspector general found that the CIA “improperly” spied on U.S. Senate staffers when researching the CIA’s dark history of torture, it was hard to conclude anything but the obvious: John Brennan blatantly lied to the American public. Again.

“The facts will come out,” Brennan told NBC News in March after Senator Dianne Feinstein issued a blistering condemnation of the CIA on the Senate floor, accusing his agency of hacking into the computers used by her intelligence committee’s staffers. “Let me assure you the CIA was in no way spying on [the committee] or the Senate,” he said.

After the CIA inspector general’s report completely contradicted Brennan’s statements, it now appears Brennan was forced to privately apologize to intelligence committee chairs in a “tense” meeting earlier this week. Other Senators on Thursday pushed for Brennan to publicly apologize and called for an independent investigation.

But the director of the CIA – and the architect of America’s drone program, who will be all but defending torture for the next several weeks – should do more than that. Apologies aren’t enough: John Brennan should resign.

The latest row isn’t the lone CIA-spying-on-the-Senate scandal on Brennan’s watch. In a little noticed story last week, McClatchy reportedthat the CIA has also been spying on emails from whistleblower officials and Congress:

The CIA got hold of the legally protected email and other unspecified communications between whistleblower officials and lawmakers this spring, people familiar with the matter told McClatchy. It’s unclear how the agency obtained the material.

That spying scandal, as well as the one Brennan has actually owned up to, both spawn from the Senate’s damning 6,000-page report on CIA torture, part of which is supposed to be publicly released any day now. The document will serve as yet another reminder that Brennan, when he worked in the CIA during the Bush years, supported many of the barbaric techniques used on prisoners after 9/11, which the Obama administration claims to oppose.

Brennan’s one-time torture endorsement made a newly elected President Obama pass him over when the CIA director job was open in 2009. But failing upwards has been a Langley specialty over the past decade. As the Associated Press has documented, many agency officials involved in the CIA’s worst human rights abuses and intelligence disasters have not only be shielded from punishment, but promoted. In 2013, after a signature drone strike-filled stint as Obama’s top counterterrorism advisor, Brennan was successfully confirmed as CIA director.

Almost immediately, members of the Senate intelligence committee started accusing Brennan of dragging his feet and stalling on the CIA’s response to the torture report behind closed doors, even as he told them in public he was doing everything he could to move it right along. Just this week, the New York Times reported how Brennan’s been colluding with his close friend and former CIA director George Tenet, all the while keeping him closely apprised of the redaction process of the report’s release (which, bizarrely, the CIA has been allowed to lead).

Lest we forget, Brennan’s most recent false statement is not his first James Clapper-esque experiment in misinformation. The nation’s top spy is, in fact, a proficient and skilled liar. As Obama’s top counterterrorism advisor for his entire first term in the White House, Brennan built, oversaw, executed and excused America’s robotic assassination program. During a speech in 2011, the keeper of the kill list said there had not been “a single collateral death” from U.S. drone strikes because of their “exceptional proficiency [and] precision”. But as the Bureau of Investigative Journalism reported:

[J]ust three months beforehand, a major U.S. drone strike had killed 42 Pakistanis, most of them civilians. As well as being widely reported by the media at the time, Islamabad’s concerns regarding those deaths were also directly conveyed to the ‘highest levels of the Administration’ by Washington’s then-ambassador to Pakistan, it has been confirmed to the Bureau.

Internal intelligence documents leaked to McClatchy later confirmed Brennan to have lied at the time, not to mention the countless media reports before and since documenting other cases of U.S. drone strikes killing civilians. During his confirmations hearings, Brennan promised to be “as open as possible with these programs”; we know almost nothing. What we do know, has been pried from the CIA by lawsuits and court orders.

When Brennan was approved by the Senate, many of his friends told the media he wanted to get the CIA out of the drone business and hand operations over to the Pentagon, but of course once he assumed his office, he seems to have reversed course and kept the drone program under CIA control.

Brennan also fed the public wildly inaccurate details about the Osama bin Laden raid in 2011, and despite condemning leaks of classified information from others, he has often leaks classified information himself to suit his own needs. This is not the type of guy who is going to resign because of some report he doesn’t like; this is the type of spy who apologizes even though he’s not sorry, who lies because he doesn’t like to tell the truth.

The National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency have been allowed to lie brazenly to Congress, the courts and the public for far too long. It’s far past time for the Obama administration to bring a little accountability to the intelligence community. It’s time for Barack Obama to fire John Brennan.

Originally published by Popular Resistance