Not lying, unless it's absolutely necessary

Scott Shane has an article in The New York Times about the CIA:

The Central Intelligence Agency is conducting an internal review of how it briefs Congress on secret programs, intelligence officials said on Thursday, as Democrats and Republicans traded barbs over an admission by the agency’s director that the CIA failed for eight years to inform the Intelligence Committees of one unidentified program. The agency’s director, Leon Panetta, assigned a senior CIA officer “to take a look at what happened and to explore what the CIA can do to improve its reporting to Congress,” said an official familiar with the instructions, speaking on the condition of anonymity. The review began late last month after Mr. Panetta, who took the helm of the agency in February, was told for the first time about the unidentified program by CIA subordinates, officials said. He ordered the program ended, requested the review of briefing practices and arranged to meet the Senate and House Intelligence Committees in closed-door sessions on 24 June to inform them of the program. The nature of the program was the subject of speculation in Washington on Thursday but remained a mystery. Officials said it did not involve interrogation but declined to describe it further, saying the matter was highly sensitive and legitimately classified.
Several members of Congress said the program, begun in the immediate aftermath of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks, involved creating a capability that was never used. “There was talk, planning, maybe a little training,” said Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, the House committee’s ranking Republican. “But it was never executed.”
Mr. Panetta “put a stake in the heart of it so that it would never come back,” Mr. Hoekstra said. Mr. Hoekstra said he believed Congress would not have approved of executing the plan. “Maybe on 12 September,” he said, but not later, when the fear of a wave of additional terrorist attacks began to diminish.
The question of what the CIA tells Congress has sharply divided lawmakers along party lines since May, when Speaker Nancy Pelosi accused the agency of having failed to inform her in a September 2002 briefing that it was using the simulated drowning technique called waterboarding during the interrogation of a man suspected of being a terrorist.
The CIA asserted that Ms. Pelosi had been told about the waterboarding, and Republicans have accused her of attacking the integrity of American intelligence officers. Ms. Pelosi has played down the issue, and on Thursday she distanced herself from the furor over Mr. Panetta’s revelations, saying the Intelligence Committees would handle it. “I’m sure they will be pursuing this in their regular committee process,” Ms. Pelosi said. “And that’s the way it will go.”
In a letter to Mr. Hoekstra this week, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Representative Silvestre Reyes, Democrat of Texas, said Mr. Panetta’s 24 June briefing “led me to conclude that this committee has been misled, has not been provided full and complete notifications, and (in at least one case) was affirmatively lied to.”
Seven other Democratic members of the House committee gave a similar account in a letter sent on 26 June to Mr. Panetta. The letter was originally classified but was declassified and released this week after Mr. Reyes’s letter was made public, said Representative Anna Eshoo, Democrat of California, who drafted the letter and was among its signers.
Republicans largely played down Mr. Panetta’s disclosure, saying the failure to brief the committees was unfortunate but not a major lapse because the program in question never got beyond the planning stage. “If they’d done this thing and hadn’t told us about it, I’d be screaming from the tallest building in Washington,” Mr. Hoekstra said. “But it was on-again, off-again and never happened.”
Ms. Eshoo strongly disagreed with that assessment. She said that whatever the status of the program over the eight years of the Bush administration, the failure to brief Congress may have violated the law requiring that Congress be kept informed of intelligence activities.
“The whole committee was stunned” by what Mr. Panetta disclosed at the 24 June briefing, Ms. Eshoo said. “I think this is as serious as it gets.” Ms. Eshoo said she would urge the entire committee to investigate the matter.“We have to know who ordered the program, where did the money come from and who gave the order not to inform Congress,” she said.
The intelligence briefing rules have caused division among Democrats, too, with President Obama this week threatening to veto the intelligence authorization bill if Congress passed new briefing rules in the House version. The House proposal would allow leaders of the Intelligence Committees to inform all committee members of covert action programs, rather than limiting such secrets to the so-called Gang of Eight— the Democratic and Republican leaders of both houses and of the Intelligence Committees— as under current law.
Many Democrats in Congress believe the Gang of Eight provisions were abused during the Bush administration to hide programs from most Intelligence Committee members. But in light of the veto threat, Congressional staff members said Thursday that Mr. Reyes would work toward a compromise on the briefing rules.