Rand Paul: U.S. intel community drunk with power
Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., speaks during the Berkeley Forum on the UC Berkeley campus on March 19, 2014 in Berkeley, California. Justin Sullivan, Getty Images
Railing against government surveillance practices, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., lit up a crowd at the famously liberal University of California, Berekley, on Wednesday.
Paul, among the intelligence community's most persistent critics since several far-reaching surveillance programs were thrust into the spotlight last June, said he's deeply troubled by recent charges that the CIA spied on Congress
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Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein accused the Central Intelligence Agency of hacking Congressional computers, but CIA dir...
Last week, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., took to the Senate floor to deliver a blistering rebuke of the CIA, which she accused of illegally spying on members and staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee as that panel was probing the agency's controversial use of enhanced interrogation techniques.
Since Feinstein's speech, Paul said, "I look into the eyes of senators and I think I see real fear...I think I perceive fear of an intelligence community drunk with power, unrepentant and uninclined to relinquish power."
Paul called for the formation of a "bipartisan, independent" select committee with full investigative authority to probe Feinstein's accusation and other potential spying abuses.
Paul also said he finds it "ironic" that President Obama, America's first black president, would be comfortable overseeing such a vast surveillance apparatus, given the government's history of spying on civil rights leaders.
Citing former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's surveillance of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., during the height of the civil disobedience of the 1960s, Paul said, "If President Obama were here, he would say he's not J. Edgar Hoover, which is certainly true. But power must be restrained because no one knows who will next hold that power."
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