Feinstein Under Fire

In a swipe at their chief Democratic counterpart in the Senate, Republican members of the House Intelligence Committee have asked the Obama administration to conduct an inquiry into recent comments by Sen. Dianne Feinstein that appeared to confirm the existence of a secret U.S. facility inside Pakistan used to stage missile strikes against Al Qaeda targets.

The unusual request by the Republicans seeks a "damage assessment" into the remarks by Feinstein, the new chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. The request was made in a secret letter to Dennis Blair, Obama's new director of national intelligence, sent recently by Rep. Pete Hoekstra and other Republicans on the House intel panel, according to several congressional sources who were aware of the letter but declined to discuss it publicly because it discussed classified issues.

The request was quickly derided by Senate Democrats as an exercise in partisan mischief making intended to embarrass Feinstein. But the move underscored the extreme sensitivity surrounding CIA missile attacks inside Pakistan, which President George W. Bush sharply escalated last year and which President Obama has continued. The missile attacks have been credited by U.S. intelligence officials with killing as many as 80 Qaeda fighters over the past year. But the strikes have also stirred widespread protests inside Pakistan because of civilian casualties and have raised fresh concerns that they may even be destabilizing the Pakistani government.

At a public hearing Feb. 13, Feinstein told Blair she was surprised that there was such opposition in Pakistan to the surge in missile strikes, launched by the CIA using remote-controlled drones called Predators. "As I understand it, these are flown out of a Pakistani base," Feinstein said. Blair's response was noncommittal: he said that Pakistan was still "sorting out" how it worked with the United States on counterterrorism issues.

Feinstein's remarks immediately caused a stir in both Islamabad and Washington, where officials for years have steadfastly refused to comment publicly about Predator-related operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Officially, U.S. government spokesmen maintain, the U.S. does not have forces or equipment based in Pakistan. Questions about alleged Predator attacks inside Pakistan are met with denials in both Washington and Islamabad.

Still, some U.S. officials have at times acknowledged that there are one or more secret U.S. Predator bases in Pakistan, and their existence has been reported more than once in the media—both in Pakistan and by major U.S. publications, including The New York Times and The Washington Post. But as chairman of the Senate intel panel (who receives highly classified briefings on U.S. intelligence operations), Feinstein was the first American intelligence insider to talk publicly about the flights.

Phil LaVelle, a spokesman for Feinstein, maintained that the senator's remarks about the Predator base in Pakistan were simply a reference to information previously published by the media—not to anything she had learned in classified intelligence briefings. LaVelle specifically cited a story published on March 27, 2008, on the front page of The Washington Post. The story reported on a purported increase in the rate of Predator-related attacks and alleged that Predators were being launched "from bases near Islamabad and Jacobabad in Pakistan."